Comment Re:Google (Score 1) 124
Wasn't this a Youtube viral vid at one point?
Comment Re:Love to play Devil's Advocate... (Score 1) 66
Should we get together a bunch of slashdotters to contribute to a community fund to purchase the documents and release them?
I'd definitely fork out some cash for this.
Why 'Cyber Crime' Should Just Be Called 'Crime' 368
netzar writes "CAUSE executive director Neil Schwartzman, in a post on CircleID, urges governments and law enforcement to treat cyber crime as what it really is: 'crime': 'When someone is mugged, harassed, kidnapped or raped on a sidewalk, we don't call it "sidewalk crime" and call for new laws to regulate sidewalks. It is crime, and those who commit crimes are subject to the full force of the law. For too long, people have referred to spam in dismissive terms: just hit delete, some say, or let the filters take care of it. Others — most of us, in fact — refer to phishing, which is the first step in theft of real money from real people and institutions, as "cyber crime." It's time for that to stop... This isn't just email. This isn't a war. This isn't "cyber." This is crime.'"
Will Wright To Make Fan-Participation TV Show 69
SmarterThanMe writes "Will Wright, creator of several famous computer games beginning with 'Sim,' is involved in the production of a new TV show called 'Bar Karma.' Viewers will be heavily involved in putting forward their own storyboards that the show will then play out. Viewers also vote on the storyboards that they most like for the next episode. In effect, the viewing public collaborates with each other to create the show."
Comment Re:OK, I'll bite. (Score 0, Redundant) 685
Ok, I'm going to be a buzz kill and respond with a non-sarcastic idea, but maybe it was a device that communicates via quantum entanglement. Technically those could communicate without regard to time as well, and entanglement communications is dirt simple compared to the massive effort of time travel.
Comment Re:OK, I'll bite. (Score 1) 685
Ok, I'm going to be a buzz kill and respond with a non-sarcastic idea, but maybe it was a device that communicates via quantum entanglement. Technically those could communicate without regard to time as well, and entanglement communications is dirt simple compared to the massive effort of time travel.
Submission + - Cyber-warfare: fact or fantasy?
smellsofbikes writes: This week's New Yorker magazine has an investigative essay by Seymour Hersh about the USA and its part in cyber-warfare that makes for interesting reading. Hersh talks about the financial incentives behind many of the people currently pushing for increased US spending on supposed solutions to network vulnerabilities and the fine and largely ignored distinction between espionage and warfare. Two quotes that particularly stood out: one interviewee said "Current Chinese officials have told me that [they're] not going to attack Wall streat, because [they] basically own it", and Whitfield Diffie, on encryption, "I'm not convinced that lack of encryption is the primary problem [of vulnerability to network attack]. The problem with the Internet is that it's meant for communication among non-friends." The article also has some interesting details on the Chinese disassembly and reverse-engineering of a Lockheed P-3 Orion filled with espionage and eavesdropping hardware that was forced to land in China after a midair collision.
Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Induction cooktop fun
fishfrys writes: Besides generating heat quickly and efficiently in ferromagnetic pans, what sorts of fun things can you do with an induction cooktop? This seems like a pretty serious piece of electromagnetic equipment — boiling water can't be the only thing it's good for. I went to youtube expecting to find all sorts of crazy videos of unsafe induction cooktop shenanigans, but only found cooking. What sort of exciting, if not stupid, physics experiments can be performed with one? Hard drive scrubber... DIY Tesla coil? There's got to be something. Thanks.
Submission + - TFETs as an alternative to MOSFTs in CMOS chips (idg.com.au)
angry tapir writes: "A number of chip manufacturers and European research institutions have banded together to figure out how redesign microprocessors so that they consume less energy when in use and leak less energy when in stand-by mode. Called Steeper, the three-year research project will explore an alternative design to the standard CMOS (complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor) designs used to build virtually all commercially available computer chips today. The new approach will use nanowire-based TFETs (tunnel field effect transistors), as an alternative to the MOSFTs (metal--oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistors) used in CMOS chips."
Submission + - China Reverse Engineered Classified NSA OS 2
Pickens writes: "Seymour M. Hersh writes in the New Yorker that China has managed to reverse-engineered a Classified NSA operating system, estimated at between thirty and fifty million lines of computer code, giving China a road map for decrypting the US Navy’s classified intelligence and operational data. The story begins after an American EP-3E Aries II reconnaissance plane on an eavesdropping mission collided with a Chinese interceptor jet over the South China Sea in 2001 and landed at a Chinese F-8 fighter base on Hainan Island, the 24 member crew were unable to completely disable the plane’s equipment and software. Hersh writes that crew of the EP-3E managed to erase the hard drive—“zeroed it out”—but did not destroy the hardware, which left data retrievable: “No one took a hammer.” The Navy’s experts didn’t believe that China was capable of reverse-engineering the plane’s NSA-supplied operating system, but over the next few years the US intelligence community began to “read the tells” that China had gotten access to sensitive traffic and in early 2009, Admiral Timothy J. Keating, then the head of the Pacific Command, brought the issue to the new Obama Administration. "If China had reverse-engineered the EP-3E’s operating system, all such systems in the Navy would have to be replaced, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars," writes Hersch. "After much discussion, several current and former officials said, this was done.""
Submission + - Boonana Trojan Cross Platform Trojan for Mac OS X (securemac.com)
An anonymous reader writes: SecureMac has discovered a new cross-platform trojan horse in the wild that affects Mac OS X, including Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6), the latest version of OS X. The trojan horse, trojan.osx.boonana.a, is spreading through social networking sites, including Facebook, disguised as a video. The trojan is currently appearing as a link in messages on social networking sites with the subject "Is this you in this video?" The advisory for boonana includes full details and analysis as well as removal instructions and tool for Mac OS X.
HP Reports Memory Resistor Breakthrough 141
andy1307 writes "Hewlett-Packard scientists on Thursday will report advances demonstrating significant progress in the design of memristors, or memory resistors. The researchers previously reported in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that they had devised a new method for storing and retrieving information from a vast three-dimensional array of memristors. The scheme could potentially free designers to stack thousands of switches on top of one another in a high-rise fashion, permitting a new class of ultra-dense computing devices even after two-dimensional scaling reaches fundamental limits."
Comment Re:Easy (Score 1) 1091
Well we could always go with the classical definition of female within most mammals (yes I know exceptions exist) in ability to bear young. She may be a sterile subject or she might be a hostile subject for such, but does she have the remote capability of doing so =naturally=
Comment Re:Easy (Score 3, Insightful) 1091
And as much as I hate defending government, a DNA sequence is probably a heck of a lot less invasive and humiliating than what she's probably going through right now.
Comment Re:Easy (Score 3, Insightful) 1091
Seriously though, we live post-Genome Project, is it REALLY that difficult to just sequence her DNA to see if there exist two X Chromosomes without a freaking political scandal?
