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Japan

Fukushima Nuclear Worker Accidentally Toggles Off Cooling Pumps 190

An anonymous reader writes "A Tepco employee carelessly pressed a button shutting off cooling pumps that serve the spent fuel pool in reactor #4 — thankfully a backup kicked in before any critical consequences resulted. The question remains just how vulnerable to simple mistakes (such as a single button push) are these spent fuel pools, filled nearly to capacity as they are with over 12,000 spent fuel rods? From the article: 'The latest incident is another reminder of the precarious state of the Fukushima plant, which has suffered a series of mishaps and accidents this year. Earlier this year, Tepco lost power to cool spent uranium fuel rods at the Fukushima Daiichi plant after a rat tripped an electrical wire.'"
Privacy

Google Speeding Up New Encryption Project After Latest Snowden Leaks 248

coolnumbr12 writes "In a new leak published by the Guardian, New York Times and ProPublica, Edward Snowden revealed new secret programs by the NSA and GCHQ to decrypt programs designed to keep information private online. In response to NSA's Bullrun and GCHQ's Edgehill, Google said it has accelerated efforts to build new encryption software that is impenetrable to the government agencies. Google has not provided details on its new encryption efforts, but did say it would be 'end-to-end,' meaning that all servers and fiber-optic lines involved in delivering information will be encrypted."

Comment Re:The point? (Score 2) 138

While we should be able to assume that the hashes were salted, there have been other breaches in the past year in which the exposed password hashes were not salted. A quick web search turned up drupal.org and LinkedIn. Also, many other companies, like Sony, specified when they disclosed their breach that the password hashes were salted. As Ubisoft did not opt to specify and have not responded to the question anywhere as of yet, I am operating under the assumption that they did not, in fact, salt their password hashes. In 2013, any DBA should understand the importance of salting password hashes and insist on always doing so. In my opinion, any company over a certain size that not only fails to secure the contents of their account table against an attack and weren't even bothering to salt their passwords should be subject to fines and/or civil liabilities.
Operating Systems

Mozilla Teams Up With Foxconn; Tablet On the Way? 54

The Register is one of several outlets reporting (based on a Reuters report) that Mozilla is working with Foxconn on a mobile device and "plans to unveil it at an event next week." Firefox OS is already running on other makers' phones; CNET speculates that this new device may be a tablet, which matches the Register's "insider" information.
Cloud

Xbox One: Cloud Will Quadruple the Power, Says Microsoft 400

New submitter geirlk writes "Toms Hardware reports that 'Group program manager of Xbox Incubation & Prototyping Jeff Henshaw recently told OXM that for every console Microsoft builds, it will provision the CPU and storage equivalent of three Xbox One consoles in the cloud. This allows developers to assume that there's roughly three times the resources immediately available to their game. Thus, developers can build bigger, persistent levels that are more inclusive for players.'"
Government

UN Says: Why Not Eat More Insects? 626

PolygamousRanchKid writes in with news about a U.N. plan to get more bugs in your belly. "The U.N. has new weapons to fight hunger, boost nutrition and reduce pollution, and they might be crawling or flying near you right now: edible insects. The Food and Agriculture Organization on Monday hailed the likes of grasshoppers, ants and other members of the insect world as an underutilized food for people, livestock and pets. Insects are 'extremely efficient' in converting feed into edible meat, the agency said. Most insects are likely to produce fewer environmentally harmful greenhouse gases, and also feed on human and food waste, compost and animal slurry, with the products being used for agricultural feed, the agency said. 'Insects are everywhere and they reproduce quickly,' the agency said, adding they leave a 'low environmental footprint.' The agency noted that its Edible Insect Program is also examining the potential of arachnids, such as spiders and scorpions."

Comment Re:Military-Industrial Complex makes the world wor (Score 4, Informative) 405

As an aside - and please don't take this as a personal attack, because it isn't - whenever I hear the phrase "Military-Industrial Complex" I always hear it in some hippie's voice and add a "DUDE!" or "MAN!" onto the end.

One such hippie: former Republican president of the U.S., General Dwight D. Eisenhower. From his farewell address:

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

Sources:
YouTube
Transcript

Comment Re:Clippy:Do you want to really say that and be su (Score 1) 109

My company archives all email after 90days and deletes it after 1 year. Then they gave us a "chat client" for the majority of the company and an internal IRC channel for the IS department.

That sounds absolutely terrible for productivity, consistency, and internal accountability. Not being able to search for (or needing to meticulously save and organize mysefl) things like instructions, contacts, and details sent in past emails would seriously hinder my ability to do my job. I am very glad that I do not work for that kind of company.

Comment Re:Equal rights (Score 2) 832

You are correct, and this pattern continues to make it difficult for women to achieve parity in the most powerful positions; it is assumed that women of childbearing age will take more time off. In fact, countries that offer more maternal leave and more paid maternal leave have, on average, greater employment disparities in advanced positions.

I have heard of one interesting idea. Certain countries, such as Sweden, have programs in which a certain amount of parental leave is guaranteed, but at least some portion of it must be taken by each parent. I understand that it has had some success in decreasing the disparity in terms of leave time taken, although there is certainly still an imbalance.

Comment Re:Talk about forgetting your password! (Score 2) 104

I don't think that would be a concern, on account of the fact that they are probably relying mainly upon information that is not really "brain waves".

The headset supposedly uses both EEG (brain waves) and EMG (electrical activity from muscle firing). However, measuring the electrical activity of neurons (very small and very weak) with any kind of specificity by using electrodes placed on the other side of the skull and other protective tissue is... let us just call it "nontrivial". EMG signals are much stronger.

From the paper:

"In particular, personalized mental tasks (e.g., sing their favorite song silently, focus on their personal pass-thought) do not produce higher signal similarity or authentication accuracy over mental tasks that are common to all subjects (e.g., close eyes and focus on breathing)."

Similarly, this discussion includes a comment by someone who claims to have developed for the platform, "IMHO, the NeuroSky devices which are currently on the market exist mostly to record EMG from the forehead."

The paper does not mention EMG. Perhaps they are are specifically avoiding making use of EMG information from the headset, although they do not mention any such technique in the paper. Personally, I would wager that unless you have significant changes to the musculature of your face and scalp or suffer new large-scale brain damage or other abnormalities, your "password" would not be terribly likely to change.

Comment Re:This is bullshit (Score 1) 173

While I'm not a physicist of any variety, the following text from the article also caused me to call its reliability into question:

"As the moniker suggests, dark matter is dark; it doesn’t interact with electromagnetic radiation."

Isn't one theory that dark matter is normal baryonic matter, just not baryonic matter that is concentrated or luminous enough to have a measurable effect on any light getting to us?

Comment Robo Rally (Score 2) 246

A fun board game, and excellent for teaching the basic mental skills used in queuing up a list of instructions and then having them all execute in the order that you specified.

http://www.amazon.com/Wizards-of-the-Coast-217580000WOC/dp/B0009HLSP0/ref=sr_1_1?s=toys-and-games&ie=UTF8&qid=1350385716&sr=1-1&keywords=robo+rally

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