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Comment Re:woo (Score 5, Informative) 232

by Nibbler999 (#29758599) Attached to: 12M Digit Prime Number Sets Record, Nets $100,000

The money does not come from regular donations.

http://www.eff.org/awards/coop

(Prize money comes from a special donation provided by an individual EFF supporter, earmarked specifically for this project. Prize money does NOT come from EFF membership dues, corporate or foundation grants, or other general EFF funds.)
Linux Business

Linux Reaches 1% Usage Share 414

Posted by kdawson from the hitslink-confirms-it dept.
je ne sais quoi writes "The April data is out for the Net Applications 'market share' survey of operating systems (more accurately referred to as a usage share). For the first time, Linux has reached 1%. This past month the Linux share increased by 0.12% which is well above the average monthly increase of 0.02%. Historically, the Net Applications estimate of market share has been lower than that of other organizations who measure this, but the abnormally large increase reported this month brings it closer to the median estimate of 1.11%. For other operating systems, Windows XP continued its slow decline by 0.64% to 62.21%, whereas Vista use is still increasing to 23.90%, but its rate of adoption is slowing. That is, this month's increase of 0.48% is well below the 12-month average increase of 0.78% and down from the peak rate of increase of 1.00% per month on average in January-February 2008. The total Windows share dropped to 87.90%. Mac OS use decreased slightly to 9.73% from 9.77%, but usage share of the iPhone and iPod Touch combined increased by 0.1%."
Worms

Conficker Worm Asks For Instructions, Gets Update 285

Posted by CmdrTaco from the wormed-its-way-into-my-heart dept.
KingofGnG writes "Conficker/Downup/Downadup/Kido malware, that according to Symantec 'is, to date, one of the most complex worms in the history of malicious code,' has been updated and this time for real. The new variant, dubbed W32.Downadup.C, adds new features to malware code and makes the threat even more dangerous and worrisome than before."
Security

Downadup Worm — When Will the Next Shoe Drop? 295

Posted by timothy from the it-looks-like-you're-using-windows dept.
alphadogg writes "The Downadup worm — also called Conflicker — has now infected an estimated 10 million PCs worldwide, and security experts say they expect to see a dangerous second-stage payload dropped soon. 'It has the potential to infect about 30% of Windows systems online, a potential 300 to 350 million PCs,' says Don Jackson, director of threat intelligence in the counter threat unit at SecureWorks. The worm, first identified in November and suspected to have originated in the Ukraine, is quickly ramping up, and while Downadup today is not malicious in the sense of destroying files — its main trick is to block users from accessing antivirus sites to obtain updates to protect against it — the worm is capable of downloading second-stage code for darker purposes."
Space

Simulations Predict Where We Can Find Dark Matter 61

Posted by Soulskill from the check-under-the-sofa dept.
p1234 writes with this excerpt from the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics: "Simulations by the Virgo team show how the Milky Way's halo grew through a series of violent collisions and mergers from millions of much smaller clumps that emerged from the Big Bang. ... If Fermi does detect the predicted emission from the Milky Way's smooth inner halo, then it may, if we are lucky, also see gamma-rays from small (and otherwise invisible) clumps of dark matter which happen to lie particularly close to the Sun. ... The largest simulation took 3.5 million processor hours to complete. Volker Springel was responsible for shepherding the calculation through the machine and said: 'At times I thought it would never finish.' Max Planck Director, Professor Simon White, remarked that 'These calculations finally allow us to see what the dark matter distribution should look like near the Sun where we might stand a chance of detecting it.'" We discussed a related simulation a few months ago.
The Almighty Buck

Cash Lifeline For Bletchley Park 63

Posted by CmdrTaco from the hanging-on-by-a-thread dept.
Smivs writes "Bletchley Park, the home to the allied codebreakers during WWII, and a major computing heritage centre, has been given a financial lifeline, reports the BBC. The grant of £330,000 will be used to undertake urgent roof works as the rooms of the Grade II-listed mansion, replete with painted ceilings, timber panelling, and ornate plasterwork, are at risk because the roof has been patched rather than renovated so many times during the 130 years of the mansion's history. The donation follows efforts to highlight the dilapidated state of the huts and other buildings at Bletchley. Discussions are also in progress on a further three-year, £600,000 funding programme for the historic site. 'Bletchley Park played a fundamental role in the Allies winning the Second World War and is of great importance to the history of Europe,' said Dr Simon Thurley, chief executive of English Heritage."
Space

Lunar Spacecraft Compete For $2 Million NASA Prize 48

Posted by Soulskill from the turbo-cratermaker-9000XL dept.
coondoggie writes "Nine rocket-powered vehicles will compete for NASA's $2 million, 2008 Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge, Oct. 24-25. The goal is to accelerate development of commercial Lunar Landers capable of bringing payloads or humans back and forth between lunar orbit and the lunar surface. NASA of course would expect to use some of the technology developed at the Challenge. To win the prize, teams must demonstrate a rocket-propelled vehicle and payload that takes off vertically, climbs to a defined altitude, flies for a pre-determined amount of time, and then land vertically on a target that is a fixed distance from the launch pad. After landing, the vehicle must take off again within a pre-determined time, fly for a certain amount of time and then land back on its original launch pad." Details about the teams involved with the competition are available at the X-Prize website. The event will be broadcast live via webcast next weekend.
OS X

OS X On the MSI Wind 219

Posted by timothy from the os-x-doesn't-make-it-a-mac dept.
Ruler of Planets writes "PlanetX64 has just published an article on loading OS X on an MSI Wind, effectively creating a machine that is smaller and lighter than a Macbook Air. The exercise was done solely for academic purposes and doing so voids all kinds of warranties, but hey, now you can slip a Mac into a lab coat pocket!"
Communications

Australian ISPs Claim Net Neutrality Is an 'American Problem' 363

Posted by Soulskill from the rabbit-neutality-is-all-you,-though dept.
RATLSNAKE writes "The heads of some of the most popular Australian ISPs were all interviewed over at ZDNet about Net Neutrality. For once, they all seem to agree, and they say it's a problem with the US business model, or the lack thereof. They discuss why they don't think it's an issue in Australia. Simon Hackett, the managing director of Adelaide-based ISP Internode, had this to say: 'The [Net neutrality] problem isn't about running out of capacity. It's a business model that's about to explode due to stress. ... The idea that the entire population can subsidize a minority with an extremely high download quantity actually isn't necessarily the only way to live.' Of course, this also explains why we Australians do not have truly unlimited plans."
Government

Submission + - Unauthorized uses of the Prime Minister's email (pco.gc.ca)

Submitted by
Vrejakti
Vrejakti writes: "September 21st at 2:34PM and 5:34PM CST two unauthorized messages were sent to subscribers of the Prime Ministers Office mailing list. The PMO confirmed these were unauthorized uses in an email sent at 11:31PM. As of writing this (12:15AM), the PMO website appears to be offline. Both messages were politically motivated against Prime Minister Stephen Harper's conservative government. Canada is holding a general election on October 14th, 2008."
Government

Terror Watchlist "Crippled By Technical Flaws" 324

Posted by kdawson from the little-bobby-datas-we-call-him dept.
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "The database used by the government to generate lists like the No-Fly List is 'crippled by technical flaws,' according to the chairman of a House technology oversight subcommittee. And the upgrade may be worse than the original. Rep. Brad Miller (D-NC) says that 'if actually deployed, [the upgrade] will leave our country more vulnerable than the existing yet flawed system in operation today.' It seems that the current database doesn't have any easy way to do plain-text matching, forcing users to enter SQL queries. That might not sound so bad until you learn that the database contains 463 poorly indexed tables. How long until there's a terrorist named Robert'); DROP DATABASE; —?"
Bug

Dublin Air Traffic Control Brought Down By Faulty NIC 203

Posted by timothy from the can-go-wrong-can-go-wrong-nothing-can dept.
Not so very long ago after passengers were left hanging by a similar glitch at LAX, Gilby4mPuck writes with another story of NIC failure leading to a disruption of air traffic, this time in Ireland, excerpting: "Data showing the location, height and speed of approaching planes disappeared from screens for 10 minutes each time. ... Thales ATM stated that in 10 similar air traffic control Centres worldwide with over 500,000 flight hours (50 years), this is the first time an incident of this type has been reported. ... '[They] confirmed the root cause of the hardware system malfunction as an intermittent malfunctioning network card which consequently overcame the built-in system redundancy,' said an IAA spokeswoman."
Medicine

What Is the Best Way To Disinfect Your Laptop? 545

Posted by timothy from the use-a-nice-strong-antivirus dept.
akutz writes "I've had the flu since Tuesday afternoon. My wife picked me up from work with a temperature of 103.6 and it finally broke at 98.7 around 3am this morning. Yay. The problem is that I used my laptop during my periods of feverish deliriousness, contaminating my shiny 15" MacBook Pro with the icky influenza virus. I am asking my fellow Slashdotters if they have ever sought out a good way of disinfecting their lucky laptops after an illness. Do you use soap? A light acid bath? Just get the family dog to lick it until it looks clean?"
Red Hat Software

Submission + - Fedora 9 released

Submitted by
Psychor
Psychor writes: "The latest version of Fedora Linux (9.0) was released today, and the torrent is available for download. It's one of the first major distributions to include KDE 4 (for the KDE spin) and also ships with Firefox 3 (beta 5).

The release also features some other major improvements such as ext4 support, partition resizing in the Anaconda installer, PackageKit (replacing Pirut) and "One Second X"."

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