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Moon

Twin Probes Crash Into the Moon 79

Posted by timothy from the as-promised dept.
SchrodingerZ writes "After their yearlong mission to map the Moon's gravitational field, twin probes Ebb and Flow crashed into the lunar surface, ending the GRAIL mission. The crashes were controlled events, each impacting 30 seconds apart from each other. The twin spacecraft were running low on maneuvering fuel and NASA, not wanting the craft to fall on historical sites such as the Apollo landing sites, redirected their flight patterns to impart the far (dark) side of the moon. Their impact sites were named after Sally Ride, the first American woman in space. 'During the news conference last week, Maria T. Zuber, the principal investigator, said the probes would be crashing into a "non-sunlit" part of the surface.' When the site becomes sunlit again in several weeks, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter will attempt to take pictures of the craters the probes undoubtedly made in the lunar soil."
Facebook

Submission + - Facebook Assists FBI in Botnet Takedown (slashdot.org)

Submitted by
Nerval's Lobster
Nerval's Lobster writes: "Facebook apparently helped the FBI take down a massive botnet, according to the agency. The Butterfly Botnet, which linked together some 11 million compromised PCs, involved malicious folks from around the world. The FBI, in conjunction with international law enforcement, arrested 10 of them in countries ranging from Croatia and Macedonia to New Zealand, Peru, and the United States. While the FBI’s official press release didn’t reveal many details about the operation, the agency shone a bright spotlight on Facebook’s security team, which apparently “provided assistance to law enforcement throughout the investigation by helping to identify the root cause, the perpetrators, and those affected by the malware.”"
Data Storage

Submission + - By 2020, There Will Be 5,200 GB of Data for Every Person on Earth (computerworld.com) 1

Submitted by Lucas123
Lucas123 writes: By the end of this decade, the amount of digital data produced will exceed 40 zettabytes, which is the equivalent of 5,200 GB of data for every man, woman and child on Earth, according to an updated Digital Universe study. Yet, only as much as about 15% of data will be maintained in a cloud by 2020, IDC said. The number of servers (virtual and physical) worldwide will grow 10-fold and the amount of information managed directly by enterprise datacenters will grow by a factor of 14, the study showed. Meanwhile, the number of IT professionals is expected to grow by less than a factor of 1.5.
Chrome

Submission + - Google Accidentally Transmits Self-Destruct Code to Army of Chrome Browsers (wired.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Google’s Gmail service went down for about 20 minutes on Monday. That was annoying, but not exactly unprecidented. These sorts of outages happen all the time. What was strange is that the Gmail outage coincided with widespread reports that Google’s Chrome browser was also crashing. Late Monday, Google engineer Tim Steele confirmed what developers had been suspecting. The crashes were affecting Chrome users who were using another Google web service known as Sync, and that Sync and other Google services — presumably Gmail too — were clobbered Monday when Google misconfigured its load-balancing servers. ... Steele wrote in a developer discussion forum, a problem with Google’s Sync servers kicked off an error on the browser, which made Chrome abruptly shut down on the desktop. 'It’s due to a backend service that sync servers depend on becoming overwhelmed, and sync servers responding to that by telling all clients to throttle all data types,' Steele said. That 'throttling' messed up things in the browser, causing it to crash.
It's funny. Laugh.

21st IOCCC Source Code Released 24

Posted by timothy from the but-you-can't-read-it dept.
First time accepted submitter johntromp writes "Source code for the 21st International Obfuscated C Code Contest was released last weekend, following announcement of the winners on Sep 30, and just over a month after the submission window closed on Sep 14, a new speed record for the judges. Happy source code browsing!"

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