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China

Submission + - Washington Post: We Were Also Hacked by the Chinese (washingtonpost.com)

Submitted by tsu doh nimh
tsu doh nimh writes: A sophisticated cyberattack targeted The Washington Post in an operation that resembled intrusions against other major American news organizations and that company officials suspect was the work of Chinese hackers, the publication acknowledged on Friday. The disclosure came just hours after a former Post employee shared information about the break-in with ex-Postie reporter Brian Krebs, and caps a week marked by similar stories from The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. Krebs cites a former Post tech worker saying that the publication gave one of its hacked servers to the National Security Agency for analysis, a claim that the Post's leadership denies. The story also notes that the Post relied on software from Symantec, the same security software that failed to detect intrusions at The New York Times for many months.
Google

Submission + - Details of Google's Project Glass revealed in FCC report (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by Flozzin
Flozzin writes: New details of Google's forthcoming augmented reality headset have emerged in documents published by a US regulator.
A test report describes video playing on the device alongside audio running to a "vibrating element". The description tallies with a patent filing suggesting it plays sound via "bone-conduction" tech rather than earbuds. Developers are due to receive a test edition of the headset later this year.

Submission + - Startup kick-starting a high-bandwidth Software Defined Radio (SDR) peripheral 2

Submitted by TwineLogic
TwineLogic writes: Many Slashdot readers have been enjoying the availability of $20 USB radios which can tune in the range of 50MHz-2GHz. These devices, while cheap, have limited bandwidth (about 2MHz) and minimal resolution (8-bit).

Nuand, a new start-up from Santa Clara, wants to improve on that. Their Kickstarter proposal for bladeRF, a Software Defined Radio transceiver, will support 20MHz bandwidth and 12-bit samples. The frequency range to be covered is planned as 300MHz-3.6Ghz. In addition to the extended spectrum coverage, higher bandwidth, and increased resolution, the bladeRF will have an on-board FPGA capable of performing signal processing and an Altera processor as well.

SDR hobbyists have been using the inexpensive receivers to decode airplane data transmission giving locations and mechanical condition, GPS signals, and many other digital signals travelling through the air around us. This new device would extend the range of inexpensive SDRs beyond the spectrum of 2.4GHz Wi-Fi. In addition, the peripheral includes a low-power transmitter which the experimenter can use without needing a "Ham" license.
Security

Submission + - #Hacked

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Earlier this week, hackers gained access to Twitter's internal systems and stole information, compromising 250,000 Twitter accounts before the breach was stopped. Reporting the incident on the company's official blog, Twitter's manager of network did security not specify the method by which hackers penetrated its system, but mentioned vulnerabilities related to Java in Safari and Firefox, and echoed Homeland Security's advisory that users disable Java in their browsers. Sure, blame everything on Larry Ellison. Looks like bad things do happen in threes — Twitter's report comes on the heels of disclosures of hacking attacks on the WSJ and NY Times.
Government

Submission + - CIA whacks at Hollywood spy agency myths (networkworld.com) 2

Submitted by
coondoggie
coondoggie writes: "The CIA had a few problems with the agency's portrayal in the recently released "Zero Dark Thirty" movie about the successful hunt for Usama Bin Ladin, so much so the acting director issued a statement about the film and the organization wrote up an interesting top "Hollywood Myths vs. the Real CIA" list."
Ubuntu

Submission + - Ubuntu: So close, you can almost touch it (ubuntu.com)

Submitted by skade88
skade88 writes: The Ubuntu website has a large banner with the words "So close, you can almost touch it." Along with a count down timer that will hit zero at noon central on Jan 2, 2013(that's today!). This could be the long awaited touch screen version of Ubuntu for tablets. Can you imagine Ubuntu taking Steam onto tablets? Linux would be the only tablet platform to support Steam if that ends up happening! Year of the Linux tablet anyone?
Earth

Submission + - Scientists Say Life on Land May Not Have Evolved From the Sea 1

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Conventional wisdom has it that complex life evolved in the sea and then crawled up onto land but NPR reports that a provocative new study published in Nature suggests that the earliest large life forms may have appeared on land long before the oceans filled with creatures that swam and crawled and burrowed in the mud. Paleontologists have found fossil evidence for a scattering of animals called Ediacarans that predate the Cambrian explosion, about 530 million years ago when complex life suddenly burst forth and filled the seas with a panoply of life forms. Many scientists have assumed Ediacarans were predecessors of jellyfish, worms and other invertebrates but palaeontologist Greg Retallack has been building the case that Ediacarans weren't in fact animals, but actually more like fungi or lichens and that Ediacarans weren't even living in the sea, as everyone has assumed. "What I'm saying for the Ediacaran is that the big [life] forms were on land and life was actually quite a bit simpler in the ocean," says Retallack adding that his new theory lends credence to the idea that life actually evolved on land and then moved into the sea. Paul Knauth at Arizona State University has been pondering this same possibility. "I don't have any problem with early evolution being primarily on land," says Knauth. "I think you can make a pretty good argument for that, and that it came into the sea later. It's kind of a radical idea, but the fact is we don't know." Knauth says it could help explain why the Cambrian explosion appears to be so rapid. It's possible these many life forms gradually evolved on the land and then made a quick dash to the sea. "That means that the Earth was not a barren land surface until about 500 million years ago, as a lot of people have speculated.""
Graphics

Submission + - Vector vengeance: British claim they can kill the pixel within five years (extremetech.com)

Submitted by
MrSeb
MrSeb writes: "The humble pixel — the 2D picture element that has formed the foundation of just about every kind of digital media for the last 50 years — may soon meet its maker. Believe it or not, if a team of British are to be believed, the pixel, within five short years, will be replaced with vectors. If you know about computer graphics, or if you’ve ever edited or drawn an image on your computer, you know that there are two primary ways of storing image data: As a bitmap, or as vectors. A bitmap is quite simply a giant grid of pixels, with the arrangement and color of the pixels dictating what the image looks like. Vectors are an entirely different beast: In vector graphics, the image is described as a series of mathematical equations. To draw a bitmap shape you just color in a block of pixels; with vector graphics, you would describe the shape in terms of height, width, radius, and so on. At the moment, bitmaps are used almost exclusively in the realm of digital media — but that isn't to say they don't have their flaws. As display (and camera and cinema) resolution increases, so does the number of pixels. The obvious problem with this is that larger bitmaps are computationally more expensive to process, resulting in a slower (or more expensive) workflow. Pixel bitmaps don’t scale very gracefully; reduction is okay, but enlargement is a no-no. There is always the issue of a master format, too: With pixel bitmaps, conversions from one format to another, or changing frame rates, is messy, lossy business. Which finally leads us back to the innovation at hand: Philip Willis and John Patterson of the University of Bath in England have devised a video codec that replaces pixel bitmaps with vectors."
Security

Submission + - IT Pros Get Rowdiest At Company Holiday Parties? (channelweb.co.uk)

Submitted by ericatcw
ericatcw writes: According to ChannelWeb UK, IT guys (and gals) are the most likely "to embarrass themselves" at Christmas and holiday parties this season. Nearly 40% of the 2,000 workers surveyed by Avaya — admittedly, in the UK — admitted to drinking too much while 27% said they "snogged" (kissed) their boss during holiday gatherings.
Space

Submission + - Earth Avoids Collisions with Pair of Asteroids

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Science Recorder reports that according to NASA a pair of asteroids — one just over three mile wide — passed Earth Tuesday and early Wednesday avoiding a potentially cataclysmic impact with our home planet. 2012 XE5, estimated at between 50-165 feet across, was discovered just days earlier, missing our planet by only 139,500 miles or slightly more than half the distance to the moon. 4179 Toutatis, just over three miles wide, put on an amazing show for astronomers early Wednesday missing Earth by 18 lunar lengths, while allowing scientists to observe the massive asteroid in detail. Asteroid Toutatis is well known to astronomers. It passes by Earth’s orbit every four years and astronomers say its unique orbit means it is unlikely to impact Earth for at least 600 years. It is one of the largest known potentially hazardous asteroids (PHAs), and its orbit is inclined less than half-a-degree from Earth’s. “We already know that Toutatis will not hit Earth for hundreds of years,” says Lance Benner of NASA’s Near Earth Object Program. “These new observations will allow us to predict the asteroid’s trajectory even farther into the future.” Toutatis would inflict devastating damage if it slammed into Earth, perhaps extinguishing human civilization. The asteroid thought to have killed off the dinosaurs 65 million years ago was about 6 miles wide, researchers say.The fact that 2012 XE5 was discovered only a few days before the encounter prompted Minnesota Public Radio to poll its listeners with the following question: If an asteroid were to strike Earth within an hour, would you want to know?"
Power

Submission + - Is it worth investing in a high-efficiency power supply? (extremetech.com)

Submitted by
MrSeb
MrSeb writes: "If you’ve gone shopping for a power supply any time over the last few years, you’ve probably noticed the explosive proliferation of various 80 Plus ratings. As initially conceived, an 80 Plus certification was a way for PSU manufacturers to validate that their power supply units were at least 80% efficient at 25%, 50%, 75%, and 100% of full load. In the pre-80 Plus days, PSU prices normally clustered around a given wattage output. The advent of the various 80 Plus levels has created a second variable that can have a significant impact on unit price. This leads us to three important questions: How much power can you save by moving to a higher-efficiency supply, what’s the premium of doing so, and how long does it take to make back your initial investment? ExtremeTech investigates."

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