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Hardware Hacking

Scientists Hack Cellphone To Detect Diseases 100

Posted by kdawson from the blue-blood dept.
Dave Bullock (eecue) plugs his piece up at Wired on a cellphone modded into a portable blood tester. This could become a significant piece of medical technology. "A new MacGyver-esque cellphone hack could bring cheap, on-the-spot disease detection to even the most remote villages on the planet. Using only an LED, plastic light filter, and some wires, scientists at UCLA have modded a cellphone into a portable blood tester capable of detecting HIV, malaria, and other illnesses. Blood tests today require either refrigerator-sized machines that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars or a trained technician who manually identifies and counts cells under a microscope. These systems are slow, expensive and require dedicated labs to function. And soon they could be a thing of the past."
Security

Reliable, Free Anti-Virus Software? 586

Posted by timothy from the when's-it-positively-gotta-be-windows dept.
oahazmatt writes "Some time ago my wife was having severe issues on her laptop. (A Dell Inspiron, if that helps.) I eventually found the cause to be McAfee, which took about an hour to remove fully. I installed AVG on her system to replace McAfee, but we have since found that AVG is causing problems with her laptop's connection to our wireless network. She's not thrilled about a wired connection as the router is on the other end of the house. We're looking for some good, open-source or free personal editions of anti-virus software. So, who on Slashdot trusts what?" When school required a Windows laptop, I used Clam AV, and the machine seemed to do as well as most classmates'. What have you found that works?
Security

Can You Trust Anti-Virus Rankings? 258

Posted by CmdrTaco from the of-course-not dept.
Slatterz writes "It seems nobody can agree on a universal set of tests for rating anti-virus software, with Eugene Kaspersky the latest to weigh in on the topic, criticizing the well-known Virus Bulletin 100. Kaspersky is one of several big anti-virus brands to fall foul of the VB100 tests, reportedly failing to pass a recent test of security software on Windows Server 2008, along with F-Secure and Computer Associates. At Kaspersky, bloggers have pointed out that they don't focus on detecting PoCs, calling it a 'dead end,' and saying their anti-virus database focuses on 'real threats and exploits.' 'I don't want to say it's rubbish,' Kaspersky told PC Authority. 'But the security experts don't pay attention to these tests. It doesn't reflect the real level of protection.'"
Data Storage

Build a Cheap Media-Reading PC? 255

Posted by kdawson from the chewing-gum-memory-sticks dept.
tsm_sf writes "A recent Slashdot article got me thinking about dead and dying media. I'd like to build a cheap PC with the goal of being able to read as many old formats as possible. Size and power consumption would be design considerations; priority of media formats would be primary. How would you approach such a project?"
Programming

Getting Hired As an Entry-Level Programmer? 540

Posted by kdawson from the foot-in-door dept.
An anonymous reader writes "I received a state university degree in Computer Science. After graduation, I immediately took jobs in QA to pay the bills while waiting for other opportunities, which of course turned out to be as naive as it sounds. I've been working QA for several years now and my resume does not show the right kind of work experience for programming. On the whole I'm probably no better as a a candidate than a CS graduate fresh out of college. But all of the job postings out in the real world are looking for people with 2-5 years of programming work experience. How do you build up those first 2 years of experience? What kinds of companies hire programmers with no prior experience?"
Earth

Tsunami Invisibility Cloak 172

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the just-deflect-those-waves-to-the-poor-town-next-door dept.
BuzzSkyline writes "New Scientist is reporting on a lab-scale experiment that may lead to a tsunami invisibility cloak, which could protect islands, open-ocean platforms and even coastlines from dangerous waves by effectively making them invisible to tsunamis. The technology is based on the same sorts of negative index of refraction ideas that some physicists are exploring as they try to make an optical invisibility cloak, except that it works with water instead of light."
Operating Systems

How the LSB Keeps Linux One Big Happy Family 171

Posted by Soulskill from the behave-or-i'll-turn-this-distro-around-right-now dept.
blackbearnh writes "The Linux Standard Base is the grand attempt to create a binary-level interface that application developers can use to create software which will run on any distribution of Linux. Theodore Tso, who helps maintain the LSB, talked recently with O'Reilly News about what the LSB does behind the scenes, how it benefits ISVs and end users, and what the greatest challenges left on the plate are. 'One of the most vexing problems has been on the desktop where the Open Source community has been developing new desktop libraries faster than we can standardize them. And also ISVs want to use those latest desktop libraries even though they may not be stable yet and in some ways that's sort of us being a victim of our own success. The LSB desktop has been getting better and better and despite all the jokes that for every year since I don't know probably five years ago, every year has been promoted as the year of the Linux desktop. The fact of the matter is the Linux desktop has been making gains very, very quickly but sometimes as a result of that some of the bleeding edge interfaces for the Linux desktop haven't been as stable as say the C library. And so it's been challenging for ISVs because they want to actually ship products that will work across a wide range of Linux distributions and this is one of the places where the Linux upstream sources haven't stabilized themselves.'"
Space

Hubble Finds Unidentified Object In Space 716

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the cosmic-dust-on-the-lens dept.
Gizmodo is reporting that the Hubble space telescope has found a new unidentified object in the middle of nowhere. Some are even suggesting that this could be a new class of object. Of course, without actually understanding more about it, the speculation seems a bit wild. "The object also appeared out of nowhere. It just wasn't there before. In fact, they don't even know where it is exactly located because it didn't behave like anything they know. Apparently, it can't be closer than 130 light-years but it can be as far as 11 billion light-years away. It's not in any known galaxy either. And they have ruled out a supernova too. It's something that they have never encountered before. In other words: they don't have a single clue about where or what the heck this thing is."
The Military

Advanced Surveillance Tech for Unmanned Drones Credited In Iraq 283

Posted by Soulskill from the eye-in-the-sky dept.
mathoda writes "Investigative reporter Bob Woodward states that America has developed secret capabilities 'to locate, target and kill key individuals in groups such as al-Qaeda in Iraq, the Sunni insurgency and renegade Shia militias, or so-called special groups. The operations incorporated some of the most highly classified techniques and information in the US government.' The LA Times now reports, 'As part of an escalating offensive against extremist targets in Pakistan, the United States is deploying Predator aircraft equipped with sophisticated new surveillance systems that were instrumental in crippling the insurgency in Iraq, according to US military and intelligence officials.' Part of the capabilities appear to be that the unmanned flying drones can track targets even inside of buildings." Update by J : Bruce Schneier's readers have some thoughts.
Image

Welcome To Detroit Screenshot-sm 1

Posted by samzenpus from the here's-your-gun dept.
Downtown isn't so bad a long as you have a fast car and some covering fire.
Businesses

Changing Customers Password Without Consent 435

Posted by samzenpus from the leave-my-words-alone dept.
risinganger writes "BBC News is reporting that a customer had his password changed without his knowledge. After some less than satisfactory service the customer in question changed his password to 'Llyods is pants.' At some point after that, a member of staff changed the password to 'no it's not.' Requests to change it back to 'Llyods is pants,' 'Barclays is better,' or 'censorship' were met with refusal. Personally I found the original change funny, like the customer did. After all, god forbid a sense of humour rears its ugly head in business. What isn't acceptable is the refusal to change it per the customer's requests after that."
Patents

The Death of Nearly All Software Patents? 731

Posted by kdawson from the we-can-only-hope dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The Patent and Trademark Office has now made clear that its newly developed position on patentable subject matter will invalidate many and perhaps most software patents, including pioneering patent claims to such innovators as Google, Inc. In a series of cases including In re Nuijten, In re Comiskey and In re Bilski, the Patent and Trademark Office has argued in favor of imposing new restrictions on the scope of patentable subject matter set forth by Congress in article 101 of the Patent Act. In the most recent of these three — the currently pending en banc Bilski appeal — the Office takes the position that process inventions generally are unpatentable unless they 'result in a physical transformation of an article' or are 'tied to a particular machine.'"
Input Devices

Computer Mouse Heading For Extinction 625

Posted by timothy from the how-much-would-you-like-to-bet dept.
slatterz writes "The computer mouse is set to die out in the next five years and will be usurped by touch screens and facial recognition, analysts believe. Steven Prentice, vice president and Gartner Fellow, told the BBC that devices such as Nintendo's MotionPlus for the Wii and Apple's iPhone point the way to the future, offering greater accuracy in motion detection."
The Internet

Photonic Switching to Boost Internet Speeds 207

Posted by samzenpus from the greased-lightning dept.
Da Massive writes "Researchers at the University of Sydney have developed technology that could boost the throughput of existing networks 100-fold without costing the consumer any more, and it's all thanks to a scratch on a piece of glass. After four years of development, University of Sydney scientists say the Internet is set to become, on average, 60 times faster than existing networks. According to the Centre for Ultra-high bandwidth Devices for Optical Systems (CUDOS) at the University's School of Physics, the scratch will mean almost instantaneous, error-free and unlimited access to the Internet anywhere in the world."

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