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Submission + - Can You Solder?

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Over at EE Times, Max Maxfield is horrified to learn that some new electronics engineers cannot solder. "What do they teach electronics students at college these days?" Maxfield asks. "Isn't soldering one of the core skills one is expected to know? In my day — when dinosaurs roamed the Earth — all the students on my university course already knew how to solder before they'd even set foot on the campus." So, throw down your breadboard crutches, kids — Maxfield advises you get with the soldering program (or book), pronto!

Submission + - Feds aren't 'knowingly' weakening encryption, says U.S. official (computerworld.com)

Submitted by dcblogs
dcblogs writes: A U.S. official Tuesday defended the government's encryption efforts in response to disclosures that the National Security Agency (NSA) has the ability to crack encryption protections. Patrick Gallagher, undersecretary of commerce for standards and technology and director of NIST, said that the leaks "would appear to attack our integrity." Gallagher, speaking at an Amazon Web Services Public Sector Summit here, said that NIST's role "is to support a technical understanding of the strongest, most secure computer security, including encryption that we can. We are not deliberately, knowingly, working to undermine or weaken encryption technologies," said Gallagher.

Submission + - The NSA's next move: silencing university professors? (theguardian.com) 2

Submitted by wabrandsma
wabrandsma writes: From the Guardian:

A Johns Hopkins computer science professor blogs on the NSA and is asked to take it down.

A professor in the computer science department at Johns Hopkins, a leading American university, had written a post on his blog, hosted on the university's servers, focused on his area of expertise, which is cryptography. The post was highly critical of the government, specifically the National Security Agency, whose reckless behavior in attacking online security astonished him.

On Monday, he gets a note from the acting dean of the engineering school asking him to take the post down and stop using the NSA logo as clip art in his posts. The email also informs him that if he resists he will need a lawyer.

Why would an academic dean cave under pressure and send the takedown request without careful review, which would have easily discovered, for example, that the classified documents to which the blog post linked were widely available in the public domain?

Submission + - Spider Silk Turned Into Electrical Wire Lead To 'Green' Electronics

Submitted by ewolfson
ewolfson writes: Florida State University scientists have crafted microscopic wires out of spider silk that can conduct electricity.

The goal is to create new electronics that are as tough as they are eco-friendly. Spider silk is supposedly as strong as steel and as "impenetrable as Kevlar" — but now it can also conduct electricity. To give the spider silk this effect, the scientists coated each silk thread with carbon nanotubes.

The results are super strong conductors that are also fully biodegradable.

Submission + - "Oddball" asteroid is really a comet (networkworld.com)

Submitted by coondoggie
coondoggie writes: An international team of scientist s today said a the third largest near-Earth object-believed for 30 years to be an asteroid, is actually a comet. Using the Spitzer Space Telescope operated by the NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the team — led by Michael Mommert of Northern Arizona University and Joshua Emery, assistant professor of Earth and planetary sciences at the University of Tennessee — looked at images of the rocky object known as 3552 Don Quixote taken in 2009 when it was in orbit closest to the Sun and found it had a coma and a faint tail.

Submission + - Linux health given the reveletion of NSA crypto-subverting attacks? 4

Submitted by deepdive
deepdive writes: I have a basic question. What is the privacy/security health of the Linux kernel (and indeed other FOSS OS's) given all the recent stories about the NSA going in and deliberately subverting various parts of the privacy/security sub-systems. Basically, can one still sleep soundly thinking that the most recent latest/greatest ubuntu/opensuse/what-have-you distro she/he downloaded is still pretty safe. Or do people need to get a little worried and start burning some extra night oil over this?

Submission + - Why Not Replace SSL Certificates With PGP Keys? 9

Submitted by vik
vik writes: The whole SSL process has been infiltrated by the NSA, GCSB and other n'er-do-wells. If governments want a man-in-the-middle certificate they simply issue a secret gagging order to the CA to make them issue one. Consequently "certified" SSL certificates can no longer be trusted. Ironically self-issued certificates are more secure, but not easily verified.

However, PGP/GPG keys can be trusted and independently verified. They are as secure as we can get for now. Why not replace the broken SSL CA system with GPG/PGP encryption keys? Make the NSA-infiltrated stuff obsolete, and rely on a real-world web of trust?

Submission + - Top Factor In Successful IT Projects: Speed (itworld.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: There's a new trend in CIO circles: The need for speed. Whether they achieve that speed by adopting Agile development, cloud computing, or predictive analytics, the fact is that, increasingly, the only way for IT to deliver business advantage is to be faster than the competition. Or maybe it's just that IT is finally realizing that in business it's better to be fast than to be perfect. As my piano teacher used to say, 'if you can't play it right, play it loud.'

Submission + - Court Bars Apple From Making Industry-Wide E-book Deals (itworld.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: The federal judge presiding over the U.S. electronic books case against Apple has barred the company from striking deals that would ensure that it could undercut prices of other retailers in the e-book market and also prohibited Apple from letting any one publisher know what deals the company is striking up with other publishers. For its part, Apple said it plans to appeal the ruling, denying that it conspired to fix ebook pricing. Meanwhile, Amazon is alerting customers of their potential payout, which could be as much as $3.82 for every eligible Kindle book.

Submission + - Beijing Says That 400 Million Chinese Cannot Speak Mandarin (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by dryriver
dryriver writes: China's Education Ministry says that about 400 million people — or 30% of the population — cannot speak the country's national language. Of the 70% of the population who can speak Mandarin, many do not do it well enough, a ministry spokeswoman told Xinhua news agency on Thursday. The admission from officials came as the government launched another push for linguistic unity in China. China is home to thousands of dialects and several minority languages. These include Cantonese and Hokkien, which enjoy strong regional support. Mandarin — formally called Putonghua in China, meaning "common tongue" — is one of the most widely-spoken languages in the world. The Education Ministry spokeswoman said the push would be focusing on the countryside and areas with ethnic minorities. For decades, the ruling Communist Party has promoted Mandarin in an attempt to unite the most populous nation in the world. But government efforts have been hampered by the sheer size of the country and a lack of investment in education, particularly the rural areas, says the BBC's Martin Patience in Beijing.

Submission + - Genetic Evidence Found That Humans Choose Friends With Similar DNA (medium.com)

Submitted by KentuckyFC
KentuckyFC writes: The study of social networks has long shown that people tend to pick friends who are similar to them--birds of a feather stick together (pdf). Now a study of the genomes of almost 2000 Americans has found that those who are friends also share remarkable genetic similarities. “Pairs of friends are, on average, as genetically similar to one another as fourth cousins,” the study concludes. By contrast, strangers share few genetic similarities. The result seems to confirm a 30 year old theory that a person’s genes causes them to seek out circumstances that are compatible with their phenotype. If that’s the case, then people with similar genes should end up in similar environments and so be more likely to become friends.

Submission + - Would you tell people how to crack your software? (strategiccyber.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Fed up with piracy and the availability of cracked versions of his software, Cobalt Strike developer Raphael Mudge wrote a blog post telling people how to crack his software. Some gifts are poisoned and Raphael goes into deep detail about how to backdoor his software and use it to distribute malware. Will this increase piracy of his software or will it discourage would-be pirates from downloading cracked versions?

Submission + - 'Half' of Extreme Weather Impacted by Climate Change (sciencemag.org) 2

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: 2012 was a year of extreme weather: Superstorm Sandy, drought and heat waves in the United States; record rainfall in the United Kingdom; unusually heavy rains in Kenya, Somalia, Japan, and Australia; drought in Spain; floods in China. One of the first questions asked in the wake of such an extreme weather is: “Is this due to climate change?”

In a report published online today, NOAA scientists tackled this question head-on. The overall message of the report: It varies. “About half of the events reveal compelling evidence that human-caused change was a [contributing] factor,” said NOAA National Climatic Data Center Director Thomas Karl. In addition, climate scientist Peter Stott of the U.K. Met Office noted that these studies show that in many cases, human influence on climate has increased the risks associated with extreme events.

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