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Technology

Submission + - Liliputian Portable Battery Promises 2 Weeks of Charging (techpp.com)

Submitted by
SmartAboutThings
SmartAboutThings writes: "So what do you do if you are on a move? Pray to find an outlet and if not be stuck without the functionalities you signed up for. From now on, an alternative will be available. After more than 11 years of working on the project and spending $90 millions in the process, Lilliputian Systems is finally ready to release to the public its butane-driven portable battery charger. The portable battery charger is said to keep your smartphone charged for up to 2 weeks!"

Comment Re:lulzsec stopping (Score 1) 412

by synaptic (#36574820) Attached to: LulzSec Announces That It Is Done

What does it say about the state of security that a bunch of basement-dwelling, misguided teenage morons are able to do so much?

If you're going to arrest Mom and Dad, be sure to arrest all of the programmers and sysadmins who also made it possible. ;)

Submission + - European e.coli superbug was bioengineered (naturalnews.com)

Submitted by Robadob
Robadob writes: This particular e.coli variation is a member of the O104 strain, and O104 strains are almost never (normally) resistant to antibiotics. In order for them to acquire this resistance, they must be repeatedly exposed to antibiotics in order to provide the "mutation pressure" that nudges them toward complete drug immunity.

So if you're curious about the origins of such a strain, you can essentially reverse engineer the genetic code of the e.coli and determine fairly accurately which antibiotics it was exposed to during its development. This step has now been done (see below), and when you look at the genetic decoding of this O104 strain now threatening food consumers across the EU, a fascinating picture emerges of how it must have come into existence.
Science

Submission + - Moving mirrors make quantum sparks (nature.com)

Submitted by
gbrumfiel
gbrumfiel writes: "The vacuum of empty space is actually a foaming sea of "virtual" quantum particles. Now researchers have managed to convert some of these virtual particles into real ones. A team based in Sweden used a superconducting circuit as a mirror that could be shaken at near the speed of light. The shaking mirror created real photons out of the void. The effect is related to the Casimir force between two metal plates separated by a very short distance."

Comment Darknet Map (Score 1) 127

by synaptic (#35507254) Attached to: In Virginia, Delivering Broadband To the Customers Big Telecom Forgot

If you are interested in building a distributed mesh, please visit this site and add your location to the map.

http://darknetmap.zone42.ca/

From the site:

Recent events related to net neutrality and censorship have us realizing that the internet is not as resistant to political attack as we had imagined. With the flick of a finger governments can seize domain names without oversight, with concealed effort Internet Service Providers are undermining the neutrality of the Internet.

We are building a mesh network that will do away with censorship, ISP conflicts-of-interest, and 'last mile' duopolies. Affordable technology to do so already exists, but the main hurdle is finding nearby individuals interested in participating.

This map solves this issue. Place a marker on the map to indicate your approximate location (for privacy reasons.) The areas will be attached to an e-mail address so that others nearby will be able to communicate with you (through an anonymous form — your address will remain secrets.)

The goal is not to build a wide-area mesh network overnight, but rather get nearby geeks to experiment with mesh technologies, in the hopes that more will join later.
Security

Submission + - Iranian cyber army strikes again -- hitting VoA (techworld.com.au)

Submitted by
angry tapir
angry tapir writes: "The pro-Iran hacktivist group that defaced the Baidu and Twitter Web sites a year ago has hit another target: the U.S. Government's Voice of America news site. Voice of America was knocked offline temporarily after hackers were able to change the organization's DNS (Domain Name System) settings, redirecting Web traffic hitting Voice of America sites to another site controlled by the hackers."
Social Networks

Submission + - The HB Gary email that should concern us all (dailykos.com) 1

Submitted by
bstender
bstender writes: "According to an embedded MS Word document found in one of the HB Gary emails, it [speaks of] creating an army of sockpuppets, with sophisticated "persona management" software that allows a small team of only a few people to appear to be many, while keeping the personas from accidentally cross-contaminating each other. Then, to top it off, the team can actually automate some functions so one persona can appear to be an entire Brooks Brothers riot online.

Persona management entails not just the deconfliction of persona artifacts such as names, email addresses, landing pages, and associated content. It also requires providing the human actors technology that takes the decision process out of the loop when using a specific persona. For this purpose we custom developed either virtual machines or thumb drives for each persona. This allowed the human actor to open a virtual machine or thumb drive with an associated persona and have all the appropriate email accounts, associations, web pages, social media accounts, etc. pre-established and configured with visual cues to remind the actor which persona he/she is using so as not to accidentally cross-contaminate personas during use.
And all of this is for the purposes of infiltration, data mining, and (here's the one that really worries me) ganging up on bloggers, commenters and otherwise "real" people to smear enemies and distort the truth."
Science

Submission + - Earth's inner core rotation slower than estimated (dailymail.co.uk)

Submitted by intellitech
intellitech writes: According to the Daily Mail, scientists at the University of Cambridge believe they have achieved the first accurate estimate of how much faster Earth's core is rotating compared to the rest of the planet. The rate—about one degree every million years—is much slower than previously thought and arises from the complex dynamic between Earth's inner and outer core, which generates Earth's geomagnetic field. Without our magnetic field, Earth's surface would not be protected from charged particles spewing from the Sun, and life would not be able to exist. The researchers' results were published in Nature Geoscience.

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