283787
submission
HalcyonJedi writes:
It seems that a Pennsylvania cancer researcher has created fuel by burning salt water — he came upon the discovery accidentally when he was attempting to desalinate water using a generator. Apparently when salt water is exposed to radio waves, the contact creates a reaction which causes the hydrogen in the water to burn — at more than 3000 degrees Fahrenheit. From the article:
"Rustum Roy, a Penn State University chemist and expert in water structure, tells the Post-Gazette the guy is not just a nut bar. He says he recreated the phenomenon last week at the university's Materials Research Laboratory in State College."
The full article can be found on various news sites, and here is the link to the article on Wired.com: http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2007/09/pennsylvania-ma.html
158103
submission
SuperG writes:
It seems like every mobile phone out there has a camera on it these days. The only ones without cameras are low-end models with poor battery life, poor reception, and minimal features. And low-end means the cool factor is nonexistent as well. I often visit facilities where phones with cameras are not allowed, so I end up being incommunicado with my current camera phone.
Is there a good (in terms of battery life, call quality, build quality, and style points) phone without a camera out there in the US market?
158055
submission
Gates82 writes:
I have recently been frustrated by "added security" questions on banking and credit card websites. It seems that all of these institutions are heading towards a regular login and a second (3rd or 4th) security question to be used as a second authentication or as verification to reset your primary password. These questions seem a step backwards in security; now all that it is required to reset my password on these sites is to know my user ID and then answer a simple question (ie. place of birth, date of birth, pets names, etc) with most of the answers being quite publicly available. Personally, I normally bash on the keyboard and click continue not caring what the answer is; assuming that it will be more difficult to crack then guessing fluffy as a pet name. But to make matters more unbearable I attempted to login to a credit card website and was greeted with a second login and it was requesting an answer to one of these (hit-head-on-keyboard) questions. It took two calls to get logged in and I am now forced to use a password for each security question in place of the real answer.
This process seems like a way for companies to deal with joe blow who forgets his password every month when he goes to make a payment. But how insecure is this for the rest of us who are comfortable with our password making/remembering capabilities?
158053
submission
joeszilagyi writes:
After their passwords got cracked: At least four different Wikipedia administrators have had their weak passwords taken in the past 24 hours. They deleted the home page repeatedly, and one person even put Tubgirl on the "Site notice", which is a global header for all of en.wikipedia.org. How did it happen? Weak logon security measures — there is no CAPTCHA; crappy passwords, and on top of that, while there is an encrypted SSL logon page, it's hard to find. The scariest thing is that people with passwords of "password" are entrusted as sysops and administrators on one of the Top 10 websites on Earth. They even blocked Jimbo Wales repeatedly from his own website!
