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Submission + - Data Center Operators Double as Energy Brokers (nytimes.com)

Submitted by mattOzan
mattOzan writes: When data centers first opened in the 1990s, the tenants paid for space to plug in their servers with a proviso that electricity would be available. As computing power has soared, so has the need for electricity, turning that relationship on its head: electrical capacity is often the central element of lease agreements, and space is secondary. While lease arrangements are often written in the language of real estate, they are essentially power deals.

Submission + - Scientist Warns against Bringing Mammoths Back from the Dead (ibtimes.co.uk)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A renowned archaeologist has said people must start considering the ethical issues surrounding bringing extinct animals back to life as scientists are "on the brink" of doing so.

Dr Alice Roberts, an archaeologist and professor who has also appeared on several TV shows, says the dilemmas in bringing animals back from the dead should be "grappled with" as scientists begin to make further breakthroughs.

Comment Re:The Truth is Never Libelous (Score 1) 303

by bsharp8256 (#43510775) Attached to: British Woman's Twitter Comments Spark Expensive Libel Claims
Penicillin is bogus. It was just some fungi growing in uncleaned lab equipment. Any success it may have in treating infection is accidental.

Only quacks say chiropractic care can heal anything, and only quacks believe them. The rest of us have found that happy medium that says, "my back hurts, and this makes it feel better."

Submission + - Hackers could abuse electric car chargers to cripple the grid, researchers say (networkworld.com)

Submitted by alphadogg
alphadogg writes: Hackers could use vulnerable charging stations to prevent the charging of electric vehicles in a certain area, or possibly even use the vulnerabilities to cripple parts of the electricity grid, a security researcher said during the Hack in the Box conference in Amsterdam on Thursday. While electric cars and EV charging systems are still in their infancy, they could become a more common way to travel within the next 10 years. If that happens, it is important that the charging systems popping up in cities around the world are secure in order to prevent attackers from accessing and tempering with them, said Ofer Shezaf, of HP ArcSight. At the moment, they are not secure at all, he said.

Submission + - "Winnti" Attacks on Online Gaming Servers Dissected (slashdot.org)

Submitted by Nerval's Lobster
Nerval's Lobster writes: Kaspersky Lab has completed a detailed analysis of “Winnti,” a group of Asian hackers who target servers hosted by gaming companies, copying their source code and surreptitiously stealing money or virtual goods over time. In findings published April 10, the security firm said it had completed the latest phase of its eighteen-month investigation. A more detailed account of an actual attacks was published separately (PDF). Winnti has attacked two gaming companies in North America, two in Germany, two in Russia, and fourteen in South Korea. Although the Winnti group has been around for years, it first came to light in 2011, when Trojans began appearing on the PCs of users playing MMORPGs, online computer games which usually require a monthly subscription. Those Trojans, which included RAT (Remote Administration Tool) functionality, had been “signed” with the digital certificate of KOG, a South Korean gaming company. In the course of its investigation, Kaspersky discovered that the gaming companies (which often share resources, partner, and subcontract out work to one another) had provided an opportunity for the Winnti team to secure access to otherwise legitimate digital certificates, which could be used to sign malware. Malware signed by Japanese gaming company YNK Japan was used to attack the servers of social networks Cyworld and Nate in South Korea in 2011.

Submission + - EFF Responds to TV Stations Threatened by Exxon for Critical Ad (priceofoil.org)

Submitted by elrendermeister
elrendermeister writes: Priceofoil.org is reporting that the EFF has responded to Exxon's media intimidation at the site of the Mayflower, Arkansas tar sands oil spill, ExxonMobil has now taken to sending Cease and Desist letters to local Little Rock television stations into canceling the airing of a satirical but cutting advertisement critical of their business practices.

Submission + - 'Secretbook' Lets You Encode Hidden Messages in Your Facebook Pics

Submitted by tad001
tad001 writes: There is a story up on Wired about encoding messages into your Facebook pics. We know about the practice of concealing messages inside computer files (steganography) but hiding things in Facebook pictures is hard because they compress the image.

For now only Chrome users can a have a browser extension (released this week by 21-year-old Oxford University computer science student and former Google intern Owen-Campbell Moore) that will work.

Submission + - High-speed camera grabs first 3D shots of untouched snowflakes (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Researchers have developed a camera system that shoots untouched flakes "in the wild" as they fall from the sky. By grabbing a series of images of the tumbling crystals—its exposure time is one-40,000th of a second, compared with about one-200th in normal photography—the camera is revealing the true shape diversity of snowflakes. Besides providing beautiful real-time 3D snowflake photographs from a ski resort in Utah, the goal is to improve weather modeling. More accurate data on how fast snowflakes fall and how their shapes interacts with radar will improve predictions of when and where storms will dump snow and how much.

Submission + - FBI Pursuing Real-Time Gmail Spying Powers as "Top Priority" for 2013 (slate.com)

Submitted by Fnord666
Fnord666 writes: Despite the pervasiveness of law enforcement surveillance of digital communication, the FBI still has a difficult time monitoring Gmail, Google Voice, and Dropbox in real time. But that may change soon, because the bureau says it has made gaining more powers to wiretap all forms of Internet conversation and cloud storage a “top priority” this year.

Submission + - USPS discriminates against "Athiest" merchandise (atheistberlin.com) 3

Submitted by fish waffle
fish waffle writes: Suspecting that their strongly branded "Athiest" products may be treated differently by more religiously-oriented postal regions, Kickstarter success Athiest Shoes conducted an experiment. They sent 178 envelopes to 89 people in different parts of the US, each person receiving one envelope prominently branded as "Athiest" merchandise, and one not. The results: packages with the athiest label were nearly 10 times more likely to never be received, and took on average 3 days longer to show up when they did. Control experiments were also done in Europe and Germany---it's definitely a USPS problem.
Medicine

Submission + - Study Reveals the Smell of Obesity (counselheal.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Despite obesity being quite an obvious health complication, doctors state that not only can obesity be physically noticeable, it can also be detectable through the human breath. According to medical professionals from the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, CA, there are certain living organisms in the stomach that can help predict someone's risk of developing obesity. These microorganisms emit an odor that can help doctors prescreen patients for obesity based on a simple breath test.

Comment In my state... (Score 2) 632

by bsharp8256 (#41525485) Attached to: You Can't Print a Gun If You Have No 3D Printer
It's against federal law to make a machine gun. In Tennessee, as long as he doesn't break any federal laws, he can do whatever he wants without the federal license, but he cannot he doesn't sell what he produces. If he keeps it personally, he isn't even required to put a serial number on the receiver. If he wants to sell it at a later time, however, he's required put a serial on it, and he also may invoke the wrath of the ATF. It's said that you can sell a reasonable number of homemade firearms per year without requiring the manufacturer's license, but I believe that reasonable number is arbitrarily set by the ATF agents.

Disclaimer: I've never made my own firearm, and if I did, I certainly wouldn't sell it; between the risk of federal prison and liability if it blows up, if I had to get rid of the thing, it would be destroyed.

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