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Encryption

Submission + - Quantum Encryption Implementation Broken (events.ccc.de)

Submitted by
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes: "Professor Johannes Skaar's Quantum Hacking group at NTNU have found a new way to break quantum encryption. Even though quantum encryption is theoretically perfect, real hardware isn't, and they exploit these flaws. Their technique relies on a particular way of blinding the single photon detectors so that they're able to perform an intercept-resend attack and get a copy of the secret key without giving away the fact that someone is listening. This attack is not merely theoretical, either. They have built an eavesdropping device and successfully attacked their own quantum encryption hardware. More details can be found in their conference presentation."

Comment Re:Bought My Kids A Telescope For Christmas (Score 1) 91

by z4ns4stu (#30460202) Attached to: Herschel's First Science Results, Eagle Nebula
I still remember going to Yosemite as a kid and my uncle dragging out his telescope. We set it up in what is probably one of the darkest spots in the US and he showed my cousin and me the moon, the rings of Saturn, and the moons of Jupiter. We also looked at Venus and could see its phases, and at Mars and could see great detail.

Submission + - Class-action lawsuit against Heartland dismissed

Submitted by z4ns4stu
z4ns4stu writes:

A U.S. District Court judge in New Jersey has tossed out a class-action lawsuit filed by shareholders against Heartland Payment Systems, the credit card processor announced Wednesday. Judge Anne Thompson granted Heartland's motion to dismiss the action, which was filed in the wake of Heartland's massive breach that was reported earlier this year, according to a company statement. The suit, filed against Heartland, Heartland's Chairman and CEO Bob Carr and its President and Chief Financial Officer Robert Baldwin Jr., was dismissed "with prejudice," which means it cannot be brought back to the courts.

This is only one of the three class-action lawsuits against Heartland Payment Systems stemming from their security two years ago this month. The suits brought by the affected cardholders and the banks have yet to be heard. Articles are on SC Magazine and PC World.

Comment More to come (Score 2, Informative) 88

by z4ns4stu (#30404468) Attached to: Big Dipper "Star" Actually a Sextuplet System
From TFA:

Mamajek is continuing his efforts to find planets around nearby stars, but his attention is not completely off Alcor and Mizar. "You see how the disk of Alcor B doesn't seem perfectly round?" says Mamajek, pointing toward an image of Alcor and its new companion. "Some of us have a feeling that Alcor might actually have another surprise in store for us.

It just goes to show you that there's always something more to learn.
Space

Big Dipper "Star" Actually a Sextuplet System 88

Posted by kdawson from the toil-and-trouble dept.
Theosis sends word that an astronomer at the University of Rochester and his colleagues have made the surprise discovery that Alcor, one of the brightest stars in the Big Dipper, is actually two stars; and it is apparently gravitationally bound to the four-star Mizar system, making the whole group a sextuplet. This would make the Mizar-Alcor sextuplet the second-nearest such system known. The discovery is especially surprising because Alcor is one of the most studied stars in the sky. The Mizar-Alcor system has been involved in many "firsts" in the history of astronomy: "Benedetto Castelli, Galileo's protege and collaborator, first observed with a telescope that Mizar was not a single star in 1617, and Galileo observed it a week after hearing about this from Castelli, and noted it in his notebooks... Those two stars, called Mizar A and Mizar B, together with Alcor, in 1857 became the first binary stars ever photographed through a telescope. In 1890, Mizar A was discovered to itself be a binary, being the first binary to be discovered using spectroscopy. In 1908, spectroscopy revealed that Mizar B was also a pair of stars, making the group the first-known quintuple star system."
Space

Submission + - What if the Earth had rings like Saturn? (youtube.com)

Submitted by westtxfun
westtxfun writes: If you've ever wondered what our sky would look like if the Earth had rings, here is a 3D Studio Max animation showing the rings as a backdrop for iconic buildings and skylines around the world.
Science

Submission + - LHC reaches record energy (web.cern.ch)

Submitted by toruonu
toruonu writes: Yesterday evening the Large Hadron Collider at CERN accelerated for the first time protons in both directions of the ring to 1.18 TeV. Even though the 1 TeV barrier per beam was first broken a week ago, this marks the first time that the beam was in the machine in both directions at the same time allowing possibly for collisions at a center of mass energy of 2.36 TeV. Although the test lasted only mere minutes it was enough to have detectors record the very first events at 2.36 TeV, for an example event see http://atlas.web.cern.ch/Atlas/public/EVTDISPLAY/events.html.

With this LHC passes Tevatron (the particle collider at Fermilab that operates at 1.96 TeV) and becomes the highest energy particle collider in the world (so far it was effectively just the highest energy storage ring...)

Submission + - Gigantic spiral of light observed over Norway (dailymail.co.uk) 6

Submitted by Ch_Omega
Ch_Omega writes: A mysterious light display appearing over Norway last night has left thousands of residents in the north of the country baffled. Witnesses from Trøndelag to Finnmark compared the amazing display to anything from a Russian rocket to a meteor to a shock wave — although no one appears to have mentioned UFOs yet. The phenomenon began when what appeared to be a blue light seemed to soar up from behind a mountain. It stopped mid-air, then began to circulate. Within seconds a giant spiral had covered the entire sky. Then a green-blue beam of light shot out from its centre — lasting for ten to twelve minutes before disappearing completely.

The Norwegian Meteorological Institute was flooded with telephone calls after the light storm — which astronomers have said did not appear to have been connected to the aurora, or Northern Lights, so common in that area of the world."

Article in English here: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1234430/Mystery-spiral-blue-light-display-hovers-Norway.html
More pictures here(in Norwegian): http://www.nrk.no/nyheter/distrikt/troms_og_finnmark/1.6902392?index=false

Comment Re:Nope. (Score 1) 241

by z4ns4stu (#30310298) Attached to: Windows 7 Under Fire For Patent Infringement
I think what you meant to say is someone who owns a lot of Congressmen and women needs to lose for there to be reform. It doesn't matter what the "average Joe" thinks about patent reform, to really get change, you have to get to the below-average people who make the laws.

Submission + - Anti-Piracy Group Refuses Bait, DRM Breaker Goes T (torrentfreak.com)

Submitted by coaxial
coaxial writes: In Denmark, it's legal to make copies of commercial videos for backup or other private purposes. It's also illegal to break the DRM that restricts copying of DVDs. Deciding to find out which law mattered, Henrik Anderson reported himself for 100 violations of the DRM-breaking law (he ripped his DVD collection to his computer) and demanded that the Danish anti-piracy Antipiratgruppen do something about. They promised him a response, then didn't respond. So now he's reporting himself to the police. He wants a trial, so that the legality of the DRM-breaking law can be tested in court.

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