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The Internet

Inside the Rise of the Domain Name System 74

Posted by CmdrTaco from the it-sucked-back-then-too dept.
Greg Huang writes "Looking back, it's almost impossible to believe that for most of the 1990s, a single company, Network Solutions, had a government-issued monopoly on registering domain names on the Internet. And considering how central the company was to the growth of the Web, it's surprising how little of the company's back story — how it got into the domain name business, or who owned it — has been told. Xconomy has an in-depth interview with two former executives from SAIC, the secretive San Diego defense contractor that bought Network Solutions in 1995 for $5 million and sold off the domain registration business in 2000 for billions of dollars."
Google

Google Warns About Search-Spammer Site Hacking 59

Posted by CmdrTaco from the secure-your-borders dept.
Al writes "The head of Google's Web-spam-fighting team, Matt Cutts, warned last week that spammers are hacking more and more poorly secured websites in order to 'game' search-engine results. At a conference on information retrieval, held in Boston, Cutts also discussed how Google deals with the growing problem of search spam. 'I've talked to some spammers who have large databases of websites with security holes,' Cutts said. 'You definitely see more Web pages getting linked from hacked sites these days. The trend has been going on for at least a year or so, and I do believe we'll see more of this [...] As operating systems become more secure and users become savvier in protecting their home machines, I would expect the hacking to shift to poorly secured Web servers.' Garth Bruen, creator of the Knujon software that keeps track of reported search spam, added that some campaigns involve creating up to 10,000 unique domain names."
Earth

Painting The World's Roofs White Could Slow Climate Change 712

Posted by timothy from the why-do-you-think-they-paint-ice-white? dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "Dr. Steven Chu, the Nobel prize-winning physicist appointed by President Obama as Energy Secretary, wants to paint the world white. Chu said at the opening of the St James's Palace Nobel Laureate Symposium that by lightening paved surfaces and roofs to the color of cement, it would be possible to cut carbon emissions by as much as taking all the world's cars off the roads for 11 years. Pale surfaces reflect up to 80 percent of the sunlight that falls on them, compared with about 20 percent for dark ones, which is why roofs and walls in hot countries are often whitewashed." (Continues, below.)
Biotech

13,000 Volunteer To Put Personal Genomes Online 126

Posted by CmdrTaco from the will-c0de-for-f00d dept.
Lucas123 writes "The Personal Genome Project, which opened itself up to the public on April 25, has to date signed up 13,000 of the target 100,000 volunteers needed to create the world's first publicly accessible genome database. Volunteers will go through a battery of written tests and then offer DNA samples from which their genetic code will be derived and then published to help scientists discover links between genes and hereditary traits. While the Personal Genome Project won't publish names, just about everything else will be made public, including photos and complete medical histories. Scientists hope to some day have millions of genomes in the database."

Comment Re:May I be the first to say (Score 2, Insightful) 198

by lawaetf1 (#27865459) Attached to: Virgin American In-Flight Internet Review, From In-Flight

Amen. Can you imagine an 8-hour flight with everyone yapping around you? Hideous.

"yeah.. no that's what I said!.. oh he always acts like that HAHAHA... hey are you going to that thing on saturday?....... yeah but Jim will be there!..... oh this flight is taking for-EVER... geez promise you'll come visit me!.... oh hang on, he's calling, I'll call you right back!.. no, it's ok, we don't land for another four hours.. mmkay, bye--kisses!.... hey honey!"

Comment Re:Weren't the earlier betas much faster? (Score 4, Informative) 821

by lawaetf1 (#27862415) Attached to: Windows 7 "Not Much Faster" Than Vista

Vista is not at all a "bad OS." The upgrade path from XP to Vista may involve a hardware refresh but the OS itself is solid, attractive, and pretty user friendly. I've been running it for about a year and it has yet to full-on crash on me. In fact its ability to isolate faulting apps is excellent.

My Fedora10 system, by contrast, has way more quirks. Yes, it's apples to oranges when comparing the two for all the reasons we know about.

While I don't usually stand up for Msft, this "it's a bad OS" conclusion is not fair. Which isn't to say Msft didn't fumble in so far as not doing enough to get drivers rewritten or having awful, awful marketing (The Seinfeld ad was enough to turn anyone off the OS).

What really sucks is that XP is a just-fine OS as well.. but if you try to config a system on Dell now with XP it is an EXTRA $150 (!!).
Networking

European Union Asks US To Free ICANN 503

Posted by Soulskill from the icann-see-why dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Viviane Reding, Information Society Commissioner of the European Union, is calling for the United States to hand over control of ICANN (Internet Corporation For Assigned Names and Numbers). She said that the organization running ICANN needs be free of control by a single nation, and rather controlled by a private entity and governed by multiple nations. ICANN, headquartered in Marina Del Rey, California, was created in 1998 to oversee a number of Internet related tasks. Reding said, 'In the long run, it is not defendable that the government department of only one country has oversight of an internet function which is used by hundreds of millions of people in countries all over the world.'"
The Internet

eBay Fakes Devalue the Craft of Tomb Robbing 153

Posted by kdawson from the disintermediation-of-the-illicit dept.
James McP writes "According to an article on Archaeology, fake artifacts being sold on eBay have caused the bottom to drop out of the low-end artifact market. This outcome is exactly opposite to what archeologists feared would happen when eBay came on the scene. A side effect of more and more forgers getting in on the act has been a dramatic increase in high-quality fakes that can fool experts and illicit collectors alike, lowering the price for high-end artifacts as well. It's a lot less cost-effective to go tomb raiding than to make your own fakes, especially since selling fake artifacts isn't really illegal."
Biotech

"Miraculous" Stem Cell Progress Reported In China 429

Posted by kdawson from the we-can-cure-it-for-you-wholesale dept.
destinyland writes "In China's Guangdong Province there's been 'almost miraculous' progress in actually using stem cells to treat diseases such as brain injury, cerebral palsy, ataxia and other optic nerve damage, lower limb ischemia, autism, spinal muscular atrophy, and multiple sclerosis. One Chinese biotech company, Beike, is now building a 21,500 square foot stem cell storage facility and hiring professors from American universities such as Stanford. Two California families even flew their children to China for a cerebral palsy treatment that isn't available in the US. The founder of Beike is so enthusiastic, he says his company is exploring the concept of using stem cells to extend longevity beyond 120 years."
Medicine

WHO Raises Swine Flu Threat Level 557

Posted by samzenpus from the everybody-panic dept.
Solarch writes "Late in the afternoon on Wednesday, the WHO raised the pandemic threat level for H1N1 "swine flu" to 5. Global media outlets(such as CNN, Fox News, and the BBC) preempted normal broadcast coverage and immediately published stories on their websites. To clarify, the WHO's elevation is mainly a sign to governments that the virus is spreading quickly and that steps should be taken on a governmental level to stage supplies and medicines to combat a possible pandemic. Unfortunately, broadcast coverage focused on phrases like 'pandemic imminent' (CNN marquee). In other news, patient zero, the medical term for the initial human vector of a disease, has been tentatively identified in Mexico."

Comment Re:Of course we don't need running shoes (Score 1) 776

by lawaetf1 (#27659903) Attached to: Do We Need Running Shoes To Run?

While that wealth - "societal fitness" correlation sounds plausible, it is not supported by any evidence I am aware of.

There is no smarts - riches connection .

More succinctly, the Chinese have a saying -- "wealth does not last three generations." Someone is going to blow it, invest poorly, etc. That would suggest no genetic component worthy of mating with someone.

Comment Re:Of course we don't need running shoes (Score 1) 776

by lawaetf1 (#27659831) Attached to: Do We Need Running Shoes To Run?

Regrettably I can't cite a source for this but I believe it was from something authoritative.. National Geographic or thereabouts.

At any rate, the bushmen of Africa do indeed perform marathon-like feats in order to catch game. Doubtful they do it in the blazing sun but I imagine there is a temperature zone where our lack of fur and sweat-cooled exertion is superior to the systems of an animal.

Comment Re:Why? (Score 1) 330

by lawaetf1 (#27659653) Attached to: Computer Spies Breach $300B Fighter-Jet Project

Which assumes there is a open wifi connection in the area. That alone is unacceptable for any building/office that houses even "sensitive" data. 802.11b/g/n should all be jammed as well as the walls/windows lined with RF blocking mesh.

The guys running the .mil networks are a bit like union folk -- not actively seeking to make things worse but not staying up late to keep the holes plugged either. They'll have some laughably lopsided security approach -- pressurized conduit piping for CAT5 but servers running NT 3.5.

Bureaucracy, bloated budgets, Friday's off, consultants/contractors everywhere, protectionist agendas..

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