Follow Slashdot blog updates by subscribing to our blog RSS feed

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Submission + - US researchers test new algorithm for clearing space debris

Submitted by stephendavion
stephendavion writes: Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US have come up with a new algorithm that could aid in analysing the rotation of objects in space, which will help in cleaning up debris in the geosynchronous orbit. The algorithm was tested using two small satellites deployed to the International Space Station (ISS) through MIT's SPHERES project. One of the SPHERES satellite rotated in place, while the other captured photographs of the spinning satellite.

Submission + - 'Solid light' could compute previously unsolvable problems (scienceblog.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Researchers at Princeton University have begun crystallizing light as part of an effort to answer fundamental questions about the physics of matter. The researchers are not shining light through crystal – they are transforming light into crystal. As part of an effort to develop exotic materials such as room-temperature superconductors, the researchers have locked together photons, the basic element of light, so that they become fixed in place. “It’s something that we have never seen before,” said Andrew Houck, one of the researchers. “This is a new behavior for light.”

Submission + - Microsoft Agrees to Contempt Order So It Can Appeal Email Privacy Case

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Microsoft made news some weeks ago for refusing to hand over customer emails stored on its Dublin, Ireland, servers to the US government. The district judge presiding over the case agreed with the government and ordered Microsoft to comply with its demands. On Monday, Microsoft struck a deal with the US government in which the company would be held on contempt charges but would not be penalized for it until after the outcome of an appeal. The district judge endorsed the agreement on Thursday.

Submission + - 700k New Zealand Internet Users Suffer Outage From Fake Celebrity Nudes Malware (techgeek.com.au)

Submitted by cold fjord
cold fjord writes: techgeek reports, "Spark New Zealand – the country’s largest internet service provider – suffered a massive outage lasting nearly thirty hours from last Friday. The outage saw its nearly 700,000 customer base having slow or no internet connectivity on their mobile phones or computers – all because some users on their network wanted to see nude pics of celebrities. According to local media, some users clicked on a link that claimed to contain images from the recent dump of nude photos of several high profile female celebrities like Jennifer Lawrence and Ariana Grande. However, the link lead them to a page telling them they had to download a piece of software to view them – which was malware. ... Spark told the New Zealand Herald that it was a denial of service attack linked to some of its customers downloading malware was the reason why its network went down, and has taken steps to remedy the problem." — NBC News reports both phishing and malware attacks associated with the stolen photographs.

Submission + - Bill Gates Want to Remake the Way History is Taught. Should We Let Him?

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: With his Big History Project, the NY Times' Andrew Ross Sorkin reports that Bill Gates wants to remake the way history is taught (intro video). Last month, the Univ. of California system announced that a version of the Big History Project course could be counted in place of a more traditional World History class, paving the way for the state's 1,300 high schools to offer it. Still, not everyone's keen on the idea. "Is this Bill Gates's history?" asks NYU's Diane Ravitch. "And should it be labeled 'Bill Gates's History'? Because Bill Gates's history would be very different from somebody else's who wasn't worth $50-60 billion." Of the opposition to Gates, Scott L. Thomas of Claremont Graduate University explains, 'Frankly, in the eyes of the critics, he's really not an expert. He just happens to be a guy that watched a DVD and thought it was a good idea and had a bunch of money to fund it."

Submission + - Is there a creativity deficit in science? (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by nerdyalien
nerdyalien writes: From the article: "There is no more important time for science to leverage its most creative minds in attempting to solve our global challenges. Although there have been massive increases in funding over the last few decades, the ideas and researchers that have been rewarded by the current peer-review system have tended to be safer, incremental, and established. If we want science to be its most innovative, it’s not about finding brilliant, passionate creative scientists; it’s about supporting the ones we already have."

Submission + - Linux Systems Infiltrated And Controlled In A DDoS Botnet

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Akamai Technologies is alerting enterprises to a high-risk threat of IptabLes and IptabLex infections on Linux systems. Malicious actors may use infected Linux systems to launch DDoS attacks against the entertainment industry and other verticals. The mass infestation of IptabLes and IptabLex seems to have been driven by a large number of Linux-based web servers being compromised, mainly by exploits of Apache Struts, Tomcat and Elasticsearch vulnerabilities. Attackers have used the Linux vulnerabilities on unmaintained servers to gain access, escalate privileges to allow remote control of the machine, and then drop malicious code into the system and run it. As a result, a system could then be controlled remotely as part of a DDoS botnet.

Submission + - In Maryland, a Soviet-Style Punishment for a Novelist (theatlantic.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A 23-year-old teacher at a Cambridge, Md. middle school has been placed on leave and—in the words of a local news report—"taken in for an emergency medical evaluation" for publishing, under a pseudonym, a novel about a school shooting. The novelist, Patrick McLaw, an eighth-grade language-arts teacher at the Mace's Lane Middle School, was placed on leave by the Dorchester County Board of Education, and is being investigated by the Dorchester County Sheriff's Office, according to news reports from Maryland's Eastern Shore. The novel, by the way, is set 900 years in the future.

Submission + - John Walker Dead at 77 (ap.org) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The mastermind behind one of America’s most damaging spy rings has reportedly died. John A. Walker Jr., 77, was sentenced in 1986 to two life terms plus 10 years for selling U.S. secrets to the Soviets as a cryptologist in the Navy and after he retired.

Victor IIIs are unofficially known to the US Navy as the Walker class, since many of the improvements in quieting the boats and in providing them with more effective sensors were the product of the activities of the Walker spy ring.

Submission + - Creative Email Fail (techsquib.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A tech project manager from a large IT company uses the power of creative communicating to solve a problem and gets fired in the process.

Submission + - Canada tops list of most science-literate countries (theglobeandmail.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A recent survey of scientific education and attitudes showed the Canadian population to have the highest level of scientific literacy in the world, as well as the fewest reservations about the direction of scientific progress (full report). A key factor is a high level of scientific knowledge among the general population (despite comparatively low numbers of people employed in STEM fields). Another is a higher level of comfort with choosing rationality over religious belief — only 25% of Canadians surveyed agreed with the statement "We depend too much on science and not enough on faith", as opposed to 55% in the U.S. and 38% in the E.U.

I also wonder if the vaunted Canadian healthcare system plays a role. When advances in medical science are something you automatically expect to benefit from personally if you need them, they look a lot better than when you have to scramble just to cover your bills for what we have now.

Submission + - Formerly Respected Medical Journal Publishes Junk for Profit (ottawacitizen.com)

Submitted by geekmansworld
geekmansworld writes: The Ottawa Citizen reports that "Experimental & Clinical Cardiology", a formerly respected Canadian medical journal that was sold to offshore owners last year, is now printing junk science, provided that authors are willing to pay. What's worse, the junk articles are trading on the (previously) good name of the journal.

Submission + - Youth Arrested for "Killing Pet Dinosaur"

Submitted by Rambo Tribble
Rambo Tribble writes: In South Carolina a 16-year old boy, Alex Stone, was arrested and charged with creating a disturbance at his school, as well as suspended, for choosing to write: "I killed my neighbor's pet dinosaur. I bought the gun to take care of the business," in response to a class writing assignment. The story has attracted international attention.

Submission + - Scientists Email Brainwaves for the First Time

Submitted by Jason Koebler
Jason Koebler writes: Researchers have successfully communicated words from one brain to another over the internet.
An international team of researchers was able to use electroencephalography (EEG) to convert the words “hola” and “ciao” from a person's brain waves into binary. That data was transmitted from a subject in India to another subject in France, where the process was successfully reversed. In other words, the researchers say they've created a brain-to-brain communication system.

Submission + - Companies That Don't Understand Engineers Don't Respect Engineers (techcrunch.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Following up on a recent experiment into the status of software engineers versus managers, Jon Evans writes that the easiest way to find out which companies don't respect their engineers is to figure out which companies simply don't understand them. "Engineers are treated as less-than-equal because we are often viewed as idiot savants. We may speak the magic language of machines, the thinking goes, but we aren't business people, so we aren't qualified to make the most important decisions. ... Whereas in fact any engineer worth her salt will tell you that she makes business decisions daily–albeit on the micro not macro level–because she has to in order to get the job done. Exactly how long should this database field be? And of what datatype? How and where should it be validated? How do we handle all of the edge cases? These are in fact business decisions, and we make them, because we’re at the proverbial coal face, and it would take forever to run every single one of them by the product peopleand sometimes they wouldn’t even understand the technical factors involved. ... It might have made some sense to treat them as separate-but-slightly-inferior when technology was not at the heart of almost every business, but not any more."

Slashdot Top Deals

This file will self-destruct in five minutes.

Close