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NASA

Shuttle Reentry Over the Continental US 139

Posted by kdawson from the boom-boom dept.
TheOtherChimeraTwin notes that the shuttle Discovery will land at Kennedy Space Center on Monday morning at 8:48 EDT. The craft will make a rare "descending node" overflight of the continental US en route to landing in Florida. Here are maps of the shuttle's path if is lands on orbit 222 as planned, or on the next orbit. Spaceweather.com says: "...it takes the shuttle about 35 minutes to traverse the path shown... Observers in the northwestern USA will see the shuttle shortly after 5 am PDT blazing like a meteoric fireball through the dawn sky. As Discovery makes its way east, it will enter daylight and fade into the bright blue background. If you can't see the shuttle, however, you might be able to hear it. The shuttle produces a sonic double-boom that reaches the ground about a minute and a half after passing overhead."
Image

Best Man Rigs Newlyweds' Bed To Tweet During Sex 272

Posted by samzenpus from the nice-feed dept.
When an UK man was asked to be the best man at a friend's wedding he agreed that he would not pull any pranks before or during the ceremony. Now the groom wishes he had extended the agreement to after the blessed occasion as well. The best man snuck into the newlyweds' house while they were away on their honeymoon and placed a pressure-sensitive device under their mattress. The device now automatically tweets when the couple have sex. The updates include the length of activity and how vigorous the act was on a scale of 1-10.
Image

Scientists Say a Dirty Child Is a Healthy Child 331

Posted by samzenpus from the snack-is-going-to-be-on-the-floor-today dept.
Researchers from the School of Medicine at the University of California have shown that the more germs a child is exposed to, the better their immune system in later life. Their study found that keeping a child's skin too clean impaired the skin's ability to heal itself. From the article: "'These germs are actually good for us,' said Professor Richard Gallo, who led the research. Common bacterial species, known as staphylococci, which can cause inflammation when under the skin, are 'good bacteria' when on the surface, where they can reduce inflammation."

Comment The whole thing is ridiculous... (Score 3, Interesting) 83

by SuperJ (#29367379) Attached to: How Wired's Hiding Writer Was Found

Where do I begin? The pretext of the competition is to vanish while staying active online? Who would ever want to do that??? I want to completely disconnect from society except I want to stay connected to everyone?? Then on top of that, they give out a $5K prize...if you're working on this for a month, that hardly motivates anyone to drop their day job. So to make it actually possible, the guy has to join the freaking facebook group of the only group of people tracking him?? The thing is so contrived it's just worthless.

Fish, Barrel, Boom.
Portables (Apple)

FOIA Documents Detail iPods Overheating, Catching Fire 314

Posted by kdawson from the is-it-hot-in-here dept.
suraj.sun passes along a report from a Seattle TV station that has been investigating reports of Apple iPods overheating and bursting into flames. "An exclusive KIRO 7 Investigation reveals an alarming number of Apple brand iPod MP3 players have suddenly burst into flames and smoke, injuring people and damaging property. It's an investigation that Apple has apparently been trying to keep out of the public eye. It took more than 7 months for KIRO 7 Consumer Investigator Amy Clancy to get her hands on documents concerning Apple's iPods from the Consumer Product Safety Commission because Apple's lawyers filed exemption after exemption. In the end, the CPSC released more than 800 pages which reveal, for the very first time, a comprehensive look that shows, on a number of occasions, iPods have suddenly burst into flames, started to smoke, and even burned their owners. ... Apple refused to comment, and refused to answer all of the other questions [the reporter] has been asking of the company since November."
Security

Adobe Chided For Insecure Acrobat Reader 179

Posted by kdawson from the old-skool-distribution dept.
The Register covers security firm Secunia calling out Adobe for its insecure distribution practices with regard to Adobe Reader. (Here is Secunia's note.) The accusation is that the way Adobe provides Reader extends the software's window of vulnerability once an exploit has begun to circulate. Version 9.1 of Reader, which is what you get when you visit the official download site, contains 10 vulnerabilities that were patched by later releases. "Adobe Systems has been taken to task for offering outdated software on its downloads page that contains dozens of security vulnerabilities, several of which are already being exploited in the wild... Visitors who obtain Adobe Reader from the company's official downloads page will find that it installs version 9.1 of the program on their computers, even though the most recent version was 9.1.2 at time of writing. That could put users at considerable peril given the number of vulnerabilities fixed in the two iterations that have come since 9.1, complains Secunia..."

Comment Re:Patterns? (Score 1) 374

by SuperJ (#27786259) Attached to: Forensics Tool Finds Headerless Encrypted Files

This seems to be what everyone missed in this post. The article is just some marketroidish stuff. By saying that they detect hidden patterns, they're just saying they look for random data. All this product is an entropy scanner. Scan the disk, find areas with high entropy, mark it as random.

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