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Submission + - SC13: GPUs would make terrific network monitors (networkworld.com)

Submitted by alphadogg
alphadogg writes: A network researcher at the U.S. Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory has found a potential new use for graphics processing units — capturing data about network traffic in real time. GPU-based network monitors could be uniquely qualified to keep pace with all the traffic flowing through networks running at 10Gbps or more, said Fermilab's Wenji Wu. Wenji presented his work as part of a poster series of new research at the SC 2013 supercomputing conference this week in Denver.

Submission + - First usage, now cell phone calling on US Airlines (wsj.com)

Submitted by aitikin
aitikin writes: The Federal Communications Commission will propose allowing passengers to use their cellphones on airplanes, people familiar with the matter said.

While phone use would still be restricted during takeoff and landing, the proposal would lift an FCC ban on airborne calls and cellular data use by passengers once a flight reaches 10,000 feet, an FCC official said.

Submission + - Samsung Ordered To Pay Apple $290M In Patent Case (itworld.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: After 3 days of deliberations, a jury has ordered Samsung to pay $290 million to Apple for infringement of several of its patents in multiple Samsung smartphones and tablets. The verdict is the second victory for Apple in its multiyear patent fight against Samsung in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. Last year a jury in the same San Jose courtroom ruled Samsung should pay just over $1 billion for infringement of five Apple patents in multiple Samsung phones and tablets. But afterward, Judge Lucy Koh ordered a new trial to reconsider $450 million of the damages after finding the previous jury had applied an "impermissible legal theory" to its calculations. Thursday's verdict is the result of that new trial.

Submission + - Scientists Say They Have Found a Way to Outsmart Rain (vice.com) 1

Submitted by Daniel_Stuckey
Daniel_Stuckey writes: A team of MIT engineers say they’ve discovered the most waterproof material ever, and it has the potential to bring about a drier future, free from the personal nuisance and industrial disadvantages of precipitation. If you're thinking, right, heard that one before, you're not alone. Remember NeverWet?... This is different—and au naturel, researchers say. Until now, waterproofing sprays relied on chemicals to repel the moisture. But the MIT team, led by Prof Kripa Varanasi, has discovered an approach that takes a cue from nature. The engineers found a way to cut the amount of time by half that a water droplet is in contact with the hydrophobic surface it’s being repelled from. The time it takes a drop of water to bounce off the surface after it hits is a limitation scientists previously tried to work around, rather than eliminate. The new technique reduces the bounce time by 40 percent, researchers say.

Submission + - How Long Can You Reasonably Expect Your Hard Drive To Last? (vice.com)

Submitted by Daniel_Stuckey
Daniel_Stuckey writes: According to Backblaze, about one in 20 hard drives fails in the first 18 months. The failure rate drops to just 1.4 percent after this initial break-in period, before jumping up to 11.8 percent annually after 3 years. Beyond that time period, though, Backblaze doesn’t have much data—they’ve only been around and collecting this data for four years. Still the fact that 74 percent of hard drives that they buy last longer than 4 years strikes me as pretty surprising. It also makes perfect sense that, as Backblaze points out, most available hard drive warranties are either 12 or 36 months. As an online backup service, Backblaze keeps 25,000 disk drives spinning along, which add up to 75 petabytes of storage. Over the life of their company they recorded when hard disks needed to be replaced, producing a formidable sample size, even if there are caveats when comparing a hard drive in a home computer with one in a rack in a data center running 24 hours a day.

Submission + - Chrome Solves the Curse of the Banshee Tab 1

Submitted by Hugh Pickens DOT Com
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: Imagine this. You're sitting in the library using your laptop while your favorite professor—the one whose admiration you most desire—is leading a small, silent reading group in a corner of the room. Suddenly from your computer comes a blaring, a whining, a siren, a yowl. You have opened a YouTube page in the background, and now, in some hidden tab, it plays, brays, blats, and bellows an ungodly cacophony across the solemn stacks. Your blood pressure spikes, your face turns red, and your fingers become clumsy as you scramble to find and kill the tab that betrayed you. Where is it? What is it? Where is that ungodly sound coming from? Now Robinson Meyer writes in the Atlantic that Google has found a solution. The next version of the company’s browser, Google Chrome, will tell you which tab is the source of the din. If a tab plays music or a video, a small icon of a speaker will appear in the tab itself. So instead of hunting through tabs, with click after agonized click, when a tab contains an element that is making noise, the browser will pop up an indicator showing where that noise is coming from. Thank you Google.

Submission + - NASA Will Use 3D Printers In Space As Stand-In For Replicator (space.com)

Submitted by cold fjord
cold fjord writes: Space.com reports, "Starting next fall, astronauts on the International Space Station won't have to wait months for replacement parts to be launched from Earth. Instead, they can use a newly arrived 3D printer to fabricate the tools and materials they need. "The 3D printer that we're going to fly on space station will actually be the first-ever 3D printer in space," ... "It is the first step toward [the 'Star Trek' replicator]," Werkheiser added, referring to the machine in the science-fiction franchise capable of creating meals and spare parts. "

Submission + - Microsoft Warns Customers Away From RC4 and SHA-1

Submitted by Trailrunner7
Trailrunner7 writes: The RC4 and SHA-1 algorithms have taken a lot of hits in recent years, with new attacks popping up on a regular basis. Many security experts and cryptographers have been recommending that vendors begin phasing the two out, and Microsoft on Tuesday said that is now recommending to developers that they deprecate RC4 and stop using the SHA-1 hash algorithm.

RC4 is among the older stream cipher suites in use today, and there have been a number of practical attacks against it, including plaintext-recovery attacks. The improvements in computing power have made many of these attacks more feasible for attackers, and so Microsoft is telling developers to drop RC4 from their applications.

The company also said that as of January 2016 it no longer will validate any code signing or root certificate that uses SHA-1.

Submission + - Vt. Yankee discovers flood seals are missing (recorder.com)

Submitted by mdsolar
mdsolar writes: "For the third time in 18 months, inspectors have uncovered missing flood seals at the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant, a problem which could compromise the plant’s ability to operate electrical safety systems.

Inspecting for flood seals has been a Nuclear Regulatory Commission priority since the nuclear disaster in Fukushima, when flood water from a tsunami inundated several nuclear plants similar in design to Vermont Yankee.

The most recent problem was discovered Wednesday during an annual inspection of the manholes at the Vernon plant, according to NRC spokesman Neil Sheehan.

In last Wednesday’s instance, Entergy Nuclear failed to correct missing and faulty flood seals that were discovered last spring in underground pipes, Sheehan said."

Submission + - Tea Party's Green Faction Fights for Solar in Red States (bloomberg.com)

Submitted by mdsolar
mdsolar writes: "Here’s a riddle to vex the Washington political class: When do Tea Party Republicans stand together with Sierra Club environmentalists?

The answer is on their support for solar energy against the monopoly power of traditional utilities in some of the most conservative U.S. states.

A Georgia splinter group known as the Green Tea Coalition, which is part of the broader anti-big-government movement, is reviving the Republican link with the Sierra Club that dates back more than a century to President Theodore Roosevelt’s work to protect the environment. Its influence is being felt in other states, from Arizona in the West to North Carolina on the East Coast.

“Some people have called this an unholy alliance,” said Debbie Dooley, founder of the coalition and a co-founder of the Atlanta Tea Party Patriots. She’s working with the Sierra Club to fight for solar and against nuclear power in Georgia. “We agree on the need to develop clean energy, but not much else.”

The alliance is a danger for utilities such as Southern Co.’s Georgia Power unit and Pinnacle West Capital Corp.’s Arizona Public Service, which are resisting the spread of solar energy as a threat to their business model. It may help solar developers such as SolarCity Corp. and panel manufacturers including SunPower Corp. of San Jose, California.

What’s uniting the environmental and Republican groups is the view that plunging prices for solar panels may mean consumers don’t need to buy all their electricity from utilities and their giant centralized generation plants."

Submission + - Pentagon Readies Contingency Plans Due To BlackBerry's Uncertain Future (nextgov.com)

Submitted by cold fjord
cold fjord writes: Nextgov reports, "The Defense Department, owner of 470,000 BlackBerrys, is distancing itself from the struggling vendor while moving ahead with construction of a departmentwide app store and a system for securing all mobile devices, including the latest iPhones, iPads, and Samsung smartphones and tablets. Just two months ago, when BlackBerry announced the company would radically curtail commercial sales, Pentagon officials said their business partnership remained unaffected. ... A 2012 strategy to transition personnel from PCs to smartphones and tablets did not favor any one device maker ... "This multi-vendor, device-agnostic approach minimizes the impact of [a] single vendor to our current operations," Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. Damien Pickart said. Implementation of the strategy centers on a "mobile device management" system to track handhelds that touch military networks so that they do not compromise military information or corrupt Defense systems. "DoD's mobility strategy and commercial mobile device implementation plan includes reliance on multiple vendors to support its mobile communications needs," Pickart said. ... The Pentagon anticipates connecting 300,000 approved government-issued consumer devices by 2016."

Submission + - No, Space Station Is Not Infected With Stuxnet Worm (discovery.com)

Submitted by astroengine
astroengine writes: After antivirus expert Eugene Kaspersky gave a talk last week about the threat of cyber espionage and malicious software infecting critical networks, citing the International Space Station as one such vulnerable isolated network, some news outlets ran with the story that the Stuxnet worm — a virus responsible for causing chaos in Iranian nuclear refineries and now, potentially, a Russian nuclear power station — had been uploaded to the orbiting outpost. This, however, is not the case. In fact, it's not clear if there are any current malware or virus threats on the space station; Kaspersky was just using the ISS as an example. That's not to say that the space station hasn't been infected in the past, however. “I was talking to Russian space guys and they said ‘yes, from time to time there are virus epidemics in the space station,’” said Kaspersky vaguely, possibly referring to the 2008 W32.Gammima.AG infection that was likely delivered to the space station via a flash drive.

Submission + - CyanogenMod Installer exits beta, now available in Google Play Store (muktware.com)

Submitted by sfcrazy
sfcrazy writes: CyanogenMod Installer is exiting beta stage and is now available for general purpose from the Google Play Store. CM supports quite a lot of devices and there is a very comprehensive list of supported device which is available here. With this release the team is also giving the Download Portal some design makeover to make it easier for user to find the builds for their devices.

Submission + - Does Your Salad Know What Time It Is?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Does your salad know what time it is? It may be healthier for you if it does, according to new research from Rice University and the University of California at Davis.

"Vegetables and fruits don't die the moment they are harvested," said Rice biologist Janet Braam, the lead researcher on a new study this week in Current Biology. "They respond to their environment for days, and we found we could use light to coax them to make more cancer-fighting antioxidants at certain times of day." Braam is professor and chair of Rice's Department of Biochemistry and Cell Biology.

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