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Data Storage

Submission + - IP rights? Server hosting site hijacks content (therangerstation.org)

Submitted by
blanchae
blanchae writes: "Over at The Ranger Station (www.therangerstation.com), there is a battle over who owns the rights to the Ranger Station's online forum. The Ranger Station owner was unhappy with the service of OnlineSolutions.org and changed server hosting. Online Solutions have hijacked The Ranger Station's forums stating that they own the databases and content and started their own Ranger Station forum under www.therangerstation.org. This doesn't seem right to me and I want to know who owns the content on a hosted server?"
Databases

Submission + - Databases, Voter Registration, Democracy

Submitted by
sharkette66
sharkette66 writes: "I am writing Ask Slashdot in search of technical commentary on the Texas Election Administration Management System (TEAM). It is a centralized voter registration database being implemented by Texas for HAVA compliance. Description: "...the US$14 million system was built by IBM using an Oracle database and a Java-based registration management application from Hart InterCivic, an Austin-based elections and records-management software maker. The system runs on Solaris-based hardware from Sun Microsystems," (CSOonline). What's happening with the new system? Everything takes much longer, nobody designing the thing ever thought that cities might add new streets, counties are paying for huge overtime budgets, amongst many other things. The last Secretary of State said the system "isn't worth a darn." During August 4 -August 10, the 254 counties in Texas are going to stress-test the system by trying to simulate a full election workload. I appreciate that the new Secretary of State is trying to solve the problem, but many of us have doubts. Any questions I shouldn't miss asking when I call the State spokesperson?"
Portables

Submission + - Lenovo to sell, support SLED on ThinkPads (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Pengo
Pengo writes: Lenovo has announced that they will begin selling T-series ThinkPads with SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 preinstalled beginning sometime during the fourth quarter. In addition to supplying the hardware support, Lenovo will also handle OS support for ThinkPad customers, with Novell providing software updates. 'Unlike Dell, which has targeted its Linux offering primarily at the enthusiast community, Lenovo's SLED laptops are targeted at the enterprise. Whether they are running Ubuntu, SLED, or some other distribution, the availability of Linux preinstallation from mainstream vendors increases the visibility of the operating system and gives component makers an incentive to provide better Linux drivers and hardware support. If Lenovo is willing to collaborate with the Linux development community to improve the Linux laptop user experience, it will be a big win for all Linux users, not just the ones who buy laptops from Lenovo.'
Security

Submission + - Voting Systems in California Given Strict Security (dailynews.com)

Submitted by
filesiteguy
filesiteguy writes: "According to this story in the LA Daily News, California's secretary of state on Friday placed rigorous security conditions on voting equipment used in dozens of counties and limited the use of two of the most widely used machines.

The most affected counties will have to scramble to find alternate equipment just six months before California holds its presidential primary.

Bowen said it revealed some vulnerabilities that would allow hackers to manipulate the systems "with little chance of detection and with dire consequences.""
The Media

Submission + - The topics covered in Communications of the ACM

Submitted by
bzipitidoo
bzipitidoo writes: "The flagship publication of the Association for Computing Machinery, the professional society for Computer Scientists, is Communications of the ACM. In the 1970's CACM had many articles of technical and scientific interest. In the 1980s, CACM shifted emphasis, and today its articles are mostly about the business and management of software engineering. The next most common subject is security and military problems. The remainder tend to be mushy social science in tone, and often have a tie in to business or security. Is that all the ACM thinks Computer Science is? CACM shouldn't be an Applied CS in Business and Military Special Interest Group journal, as the flagship journal, CACM should be a general CS journal. If one never reads any other journals in CS, one could wonder whether CS is becoming "played out", with every year bringing fewer and fewer research papers about algorithms, or programming languages, or other fundamentals of CS, and that's why CACM has shifted emphasis. But then something like the June issue of Scientific American, which was a better issue on CS than any CACM issue in the last decade, comes out. Or, something big happens, such as the solving of Checkers. What's with the ACM and their main publication?"
Biotech

Submission + - A Biological Silicon Membrane (acs.org)

Submitted by
allengineering
allengineering writes: "The world of alive for a long time exploits semi permeable membranes for its operations. The channels and the ionic pumps of the lipid membranes of the neurons are one of the most known examples. In a general way, there are all kinds of operations of molecular, important filtering for the research and the industry, which would profit from the development of controllable artificial membranes imitating those of the biological systems. Jean-Pierre Leburton and his colleagues of University of Illinois have just published the results of the modeling of such a system based on the use of the semiconductors.
The idea is to imitate the operation of the nervous cells using two differently doped and thick layers of silicon of 12 nanometers each one. One bores then nonporous, in order to constitute the similar base of the channels and pumps ionic, and one subjects the whole to a potential difference electrostatic. The two layers take care then, one positively and the other negatively just like in the case of the polarization of the cellular membranes. The nonporous themselves have a form of sand glass of a diameter of 1 nanometer in the medium and 6 nanometers for the parts leading to the two sides of the artificial membrane. In an interesting way, the size of these openings is flexible using the potential difference. In nature, the semi permeable membranes make it possible to control flow and the types of ions which penetrate in a cell and thus the exchanges between the mediums will intra and extra cellular. In the case of the nervous cells for example, the ions sodium and potassium return and leave using the pumps and of the ionic channels and this is central for the propagation of the nerve impulse. Without those, the double-layered lipid one constituting the membranes would not let pass the ions Na+ and K+. According to Jean-Pierre Leburton, Maria Gracheva and Julien Vidal, the type of artificial membrane that they propose is more adaptive than the biological membranes, as well the performances as L `extended from the types of filterable molecules would be more important.
One can even imagine sequencer the ADN more quickly and at lower cost by using this process, and not only to filter proteins or to detect specific molecules. One can also quote very varied applications, like de-salting sea water or filtering the rejections CO2 to fight against the effect of greenhouse."
Announcements

Submission + - ABOCOS - New Open Source P2P Project (abocos.com)

Submitted by
ABOCOS
ABOCOS writes: "
ABOCOS is a peer-to-peer (p2p) client specification designed to facilitate basic services, such as web pages, databases, email, data distribution, and name based addressing with zero reliance on centralized servers. ABOCOS is designed to be faster, more efficient, and more resistant to cheating than bittorrent. It is designed from the ground up to provide security and privacy for users through the integration of encryption, proxying, and intrusion detection features. The data distribution algorithm and a description of the security model have been published on the website. Community review, criticism, and contribution is welcome.
abocos.com"
Security

Submission + - California Voting System Code Reviews Released (ca.gov)

Submitted by
zestyping
zestyping writes: "Today, the California Secretary of State released the reports from what is probably the most comprehensive analysis of voting system source code to date. The reports cover optical scan and touchscreen voting systems by Diebold, Hart, and Sequoia that are used in many California counties.

Whereas the "red team" reports released last Friday described specific attack scenarios, these reports offer a detailed analysis of the software architecture and source code. All three reports identify significant security weaknesses in the respective systems, including susceptibility to tampering of voting machine firmware, the possibility of viral propagation, and vulnerabilities in the central election management software.

The Secretary of State has until tomorrow, August 3, to decide whether to decertify any voting systems, because she is required to give six months' notice of decertification before the California primary election next February."
Space

Submission + - Chicago Airport UFO Report Released (dailygrail.com)

Submitted by
Belfegor99
Belfegor99 writes: "Is aviation safety being put at risk because of scientific fear of being associated with UFOs? After a long investigation, the National Aviation Reporting Center on Anomalous Phenomena (NARCAP) has released a detailed report (PDF file, 5mb/155 pages) on the Chicago O'Hare Airport UFO incident from last year, which got so much coverage in the mainstream press (setting a page hit record on the Chicago Tribune website). The NARCAP report comments "it is interesting that an incursion over one of the busiest aviation facilities in the world would receive such superficial attention" from the FAA. Especially in the 9/11 era..."
Microsoft

Submission + - Converting from XP to Ubuntu (ittoolbox.com) 1

Submitted by
madgreek
madgreek writes: "Here is a short story about my switch to Ubuntu from XP at work. I have been Microsoft free for 3 months now at a Microsoft heavy shop. Few people know I am using Open Office and Linux. I create countless documents that people open using Word, Excel, PPT and nobody can tell that they were created using Open Office. http://blogs.ittoolbox.com/eai/madgreek/archives/o pen-source-and-microsoft-free-17339"
Biotech

Submission + - Chernobyl Mushrooms Feeding on Radiation

Submitted by cowtamer
cowtamer writes: According to a National Geographic Article certain fungi can use ionizing radiation to perform "radiosynthesis" using the pigment melanin (the same one in our skin that protects us from UV radiation). It is speculated that this might be useful on long space voyages where energy from the Sun is not readily available.
Biotech

Submission + - The mystery of vitamin B12 finally solved

Submitted by
Roland Piquepaille
Roland Piquepaille writes: "You probably think that scientists know everything about the common and essential vitamin B12, the only vitamin synthesized by soil microbes. In fact, one part of this biosynthesis has puzzled researchers for at least 50 years. But now, MIT and Harvard biologists have solved this vitamin puzzle by discovering that a single enzyme known as BluB synthesizes the vitamin. So what is the next challenge for the researchers? It's to discover why the soil microorganisms synthesize the vitamin B12 at all, because neither them — nor the plants they're attached to — need it to live. Read more for additional references and a picture of BluB."
User Journal

Journal Journal: US Air Force Looks to the XBox Generation for Pilots

Journal by Alien54
The U.S. Air Force is creating a new job specialty, UAV pilots. Starting later this year, the air force will recruit people for this job. The details are still being worked out, but it will be an officer position. The army uses NCOs to pilots its UAVs, which are generally smaller than those used by the air force. The new air force program expects to attract those who had applied to be regular pilots, but had been denie
PlayStation (Games)

Submission + - PS3 Folding like crazy

Submitted by hlimethe3rd
hlimethe3rd writes: We've seen numerous articles about the Playstation 3 being a total flop as a gaming machine. But now, the machine is tearing through Folding@Home. It already accounts for almost 75% of the FLOPS for the whole project . Much in the same way as the GPU client produced amazing results, the PS3's cell architecture is ideally suited for Folding calculations. So don't buy one as a gaming console, buy one to save your grandmother.

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