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Science

Submission + - How to build a quantum propulsion machine (technologyreview.com)

Submitted by KentuckyFC
KentuckyFC writes: According to quantum mechanics, a vacuum will be filled with electromagnetic waves leaping in and out of existence. It turns out that these waves can have various measurable effects, such as the Casimir-Polder force which was first measured accurately in 1997. Just how to exploit this force is still not clear. Today, however, a researcher at an Israeli government lab suggests how it could be possible to generate propulsion using the quantum vacuum. The basic idea is that pushing on the electromagnetic fields in the vacuum should generate an equal and opposite force. The suggestion is that this can be done using nanoparticles that interact with the vacuum's electric and magnetic fields, generating the well known Lorentz force. In most cases, the sum of Lorentz forces adds up to zero. But today's breakthrough is the discovery of various ways to break this symmetry and so use the quantum vacuum to generate a force. The simplest of which is simply to rotate the particles. So the blueprint for a quantum propulsion machine described in the paper is an array of addressable nanoparticles that can be rotated in the required way. Although such a machine will need a source of energy, it generates propulsion without any change in mass. As the research puts it with masterful understatement, this might have practical implications.
Upgrades

Submission + - CentOS Linux 5.4 Released

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The fourth update in the CentOS Linux 5 family is released. Highlights of the new release include a kernel-based virtual machine (KVM) virtualization, alongside of Xen virtualization technology. The scalability of the virtualization solution has been incremented to support 192 CPUs and 1GB hugepages, GCC 4.4 and a new malloc(), clustered, high-availability filesystem etc. Grab a CD set from a mirror, and via BitTorrent 32bit, 64bit DVD. If you are already running CentOS-5.3 or an older CentOS-5 distro, just follow these simple instructions to upgrade over the Internet.

Submission + - Google Envisions 10 Million Servers (datacenterknowledge.com)

Submitted by miller60
miller60 writes: Google never says how many servers are running in its data centers. But a recent presentation by a Google engineer shows that the company is preparing to manage as many as 10 million servers in the future. At this month's ACM conference on large -scale computing, Google's Jeff Dean said he's working on a storage and computation system called Spanner, which will automatically allocate resources across data centers, and be designed for a scale of 1 million to 10 million machines. One goal: to dynamically shift workloads to capture cheaper bandwidth and power. Dean's presentation is online.
Power

Submission + - Sweden is Burning Biofuel Made from Bunnies (inhabitat.com)

Submitted by MikeChino
MikeChino writes: Sweden uses a pretty strange source for some of its heating fuel: rabbits. It turns out that Stockholm has an overabundance of the cotton-tailed critters, and the hungry bunnies are decimating city parks. To cut back on bunny populations and create a greener source of heating fuel for Swedes, city employees round up the rabbits, shoot them, freeze them and then ship them to a heating plant where they’re incinerated.

Submission + - SPAM: iPhone in "coma mode"

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: BBC Watchdog has a report on iphone's latest problem: coma mode! iPhone fans have been calling the problem 'coma mode' and when it happens the phone won't receive calls or emails. It becomes useless until the user puts it through a 'hard reboot', similar to shutting down and restarting a desk top computer when it crashes. But even worse, because this happens when the screen is locked, leaving it blank, the unlucky ones experiencing the problem don't know it's in 'coma mode' until they pick up the phone to check. They could go for hours without realising the phone's stopped working.
Link to Original Source
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft Plubin puts Firefox users at risk. (itworldcanada.com)

Submitted by cbiltcliffe
cbiltcliffe writes: The 'Windows Presentation Foundation' plugin that the .NET framework installs in Firefox is vulnerable to the same "browse-and-get-owned" situation that Internet Explorer is.

From the article:

"While the vulnerability is in an IE component, there is an attack vector for Firefox users as well," admitted Microsoft engineers in a post to the company's Security Research & Defense blog on Tuesday. "The reason is that .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 installs a 'Windows Presentation Foundation' plug-in in Firefox."
According to annoyances.org: "This update adds to Firefox one of the most dangerous vulnerabilities present in all versions of Internet Explorer: the ability for Web sites to easily and quietly install software on your PC," said the hints and tips site. "Since this design flaw is one of the reasons [why] you may have originally chosen to abandon IE in favor of a safer browser like Firefox, you may wish to remove this extension with all due haste."

Although Microsoft states that the MS09-054 update also patches this vulnerable component, so be sure to apply it to any machine(s) you maintain.
Security

Submission + - 2008 Web Application Security Statistics Published (webappsec.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The WASC Web Application Security Statistics Project has published it's 2008 vulnerability statistics recording more than 97554 on 12186 sites. This initiative is a collaborative industry wide effort to pool together sanitized website vulnerability data and to gain a better understanding about the web application vulnerability landscape.
Science

Submission + - Poison gas may carry a medical benefit (boston.com)

Submitted by tugfoigel
tugfoigel writes: From the Boston Globe: For more than a century, carbon monoxide has been known as a deadly toxin. In an 1839 story, Edgar Allan Poe wrote of "miraculous lustre of the eye" and "nervous agitation" in what some believe are descriptions of carbon monoxide poisoning, and today, cigarette cartons warn of its health dangers.

But a growing body of research, much of it by local scientists, is revealing a paradox: the gas often called a silent killer could also be a medical treatment.

It seems like a radical contradiction, but animal studies show that in small, extremely controlled doses the gas has benefits in everything from infections to organ transplantation.
The Internet

Submission + - The Internet has shifted under our feet (networkworld.com) 1

Submitted by carusoj
carusoj writes: The way traffic moves over the Internet has changed radically in the last five years. Arbor Networks next week will present a study that found that the bulk of Internet traffic no longer moves across Tier-1 international transit providers. Instead, the traffic is handled directly by large content providers, content delivery networks and consumer networks, and is handed off from one of these to another. You can probably guess what some of these companies are: Google, Microsoft, Facebook. Arbor says there are about 30 of these companies – which Arbor calls “hyper giants” – that generate and consume about 30% of all Internet traffic.

Submission + - Carbon Capture Works at Wisconsin Coal Plant

Submitted by pickens
pickens writes: Hugh Pickens writes:

Thomas Content writes in the Milwauke Journal Sentinel that a coal-fired power plant in southeastern Wisconsin has been successful in grabbing 90% of greenhouse gas using chilled ammonia to capture carbon dioxide from the smokestack. The technology is one of several being tested by utilities that are seeking to ways to continue burning coal from their existing fleet of coal plants even if the United States embarks on a national plan to slash emissions of greenhouse gases. "One of the biggest challenges facing our industry is the development of cost effective technology that will allow us to capture carbon from the operation of power plants around the world," says Gale Klappa, chairman and chief executive of We Energies. The next phase of testing at the Mountaineer power plant in West Virginia will go one step further by testing not only the capture but the sequestration of the carbon dioxide where the gas will be compressed, pipelined, and injected into two different saline reservoirs located approximately 8,000 feet beneath the plant site. The experiment, which the company says could begin in the next few days, is riveting the world's coal-fired electricity sector, which is under growing pressure to develop technology to capture and store carbon dioxide. The technology is certain to devour a substantial amount of the plant's energy output — optimists say 15 percent, and skeptics, 30 percent leaving less electricity available to send out to the power grid and utility customers. "Key questions around energy consumption — a key driver of cost — and other important technical issues will be addressed as larger-scale demonstrations work to fully optimize the technology."

Submission + - First Swedish CC-licensed movie hits TPB (boingboing.net)

Submitted by Hattmannen
Hattmannen writes: Cory Doctorow over at Boing Boing tells us about the first ever Creative Commons-licensed, feature-length movie to come out from Sweden. It's called Nasty Old People and premiered yesterday at The Pirate Bay.
The story:

"Member of a neo-Nazi gang, her day job is to take care of four crazy old people that all are just waiting to die. Her life becomes a journey into a burlesque fairytale, where the rules of the game are created by Mette herself. Mette is indifferent about her way of life, until she one night assaults a man, kicking him senseless. Waking up the day after, she realizes that something is wrong, and in company with the her crazy oldies she longs for respect and love. She can tell that the old folks are marginalized by the modern society, but together they create a world and a voice of their own."

Submission + - Student Faces Prison for Disrupting Oil Auctions

Submitted by pickens
pickens writes: Hugh Pickens writes:

The NY Times reports that last December Tim DeChristopher went to a federal auction of oil and gas leases offered in the Bush administration's closing days and even then the subject of protests and lawsuits — and bid on contracts that he had neither the money nor intent to actually fulfill. "My intention was to cause as much of a disruption to the auction as I could," says DeChristopher, a 27-year-old student at the University of Utah. "Making that decision — that keeping the oil in the ground was worth going to prison — that was the decision I made." DeChristopher is now charged with two felony counts of interfering with an auction and making false statements on bidding forms even as most of the specific leases DeChristopher protested — many of them near national parks or monuments — have not only been deferred or taken off the table by federal land managers in the Obama administration but also scathingly disavowed. "There was a headlong rush to leasing in the prior administration that led to the kinds of shortcuts we have demonstrated," says Obama's Interior Secretary Ken Salazar. DeChristopher praised Salazar's decision, saying it represents government taking a "serious stance in the defense of our land and climate." Federal prosecutors argue that whether DeChristopher was on some level correct in opposing the leases is irrelevant and DeChristopher now faces up to five years in prison on each of the two counts and up to $750,000 in fines. DeChristopher's attorney has asked the judge to allow a so-called necessity defense at the trial.enabling DeChristopher to argue that he faced a "choice of evils" that justified breaking the law. "Bush and the [Bureau of Land Management] should be on trial here," says DeChristopher's lawyer.
Earth

Submission + - New Type of Cloud Discovered (wired.com) 3

Submitted by phantomfive
phantomfive writes: In Iowa and Scotland there are reports of a type of cloud not yet recognized by the World Meteorological Foundation. It seems the cloud does not match any of the clouds in the International Cloud Atlas, and thus there is a campaign underway to have it included. Some have said the clouds look like armageddon has arrived. For me, writing clouds all these times makes me want to eat cotton candy.
Power

Submission + - From Turbines and Straw, Danish Self-Sufficiency (nytimes.com)

Submitted by
chrnb
chrnb writes: "Last year, Samso (pronounced SOME-suh) completed a 10-year experiment to see whether it could become energy self-sufficient. The islanders, with generous amounts of aid from mainland Denmark, busily set themselves about erecting wind turbines, installing nonpolluting straw-burning furnaces to heat their sturdy brick houses and placing panels here and there to create electricity from the island’s sparse sunshine.
By their own accounts, the islanders have met the goal. For energy experts, the crucial measurement is called energy density, or the amount of energy produced per unit of area, and it should be at least 2 watts for every square meter, or 11 square feet. “We just met it,” said Soren Hermansen, the director of the local Energy Academy, a former farmer who is a consultant to the islanders."
Politics

Submission + - Obama wins Nobel Peace Prize (reuters.com) 3

Submitted by
AbbeyRoad
AbbeyRoad writes: "OSLO (Reuters) — U.S. President Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for giving the world "hope for a better future" and striving for nuclear disarmament. ... The Norwegian Nobel Committee praised Obama for "his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.""

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