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Submission + - Robin Williams Will Be Honored In 'World Of Warcraft,' One Of His Favorite Games (businessinsider.com)

Submitted by redletterdave
redletterdave writes: Thousands of fans quickly responded to a petition asking game developer Activision-Blizzard to insert Robin Williams into one of his favorite video games, 'World of Warcraft.' In less than 16 hours, organizer Jacob Holgate found 10,000+ fans to sign his petition, and the company responded in kind: “World of Warcraft” technical game designer Chadd Nervig responded to Holgate on Twitter: 'Yes. We're taking care of it.' Many have expressed a Robin Williams NPC to perform some of the late comedian's best jokes within the Worlds End Tavern, 'so that he may continue making us smile long after his passing.'

Submission + - Giant Greek tomb discovered (telegraph.co.uk)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Archeologists have uncovered the largest tomb ever discovered in Greece and think it is linked to the reign of Alexander the Great.

The tomb, dating to around 300 BC, may have held the body of one of Alexander’s generals or a member of his family. It was found beneath a huge burial mound near the ancient site of Amphipolis in northern Greece. Antonis Samaras, Greece’s prime minister, visited the dig on Tuesday and described the discovery as “clearly extremely significant”.

A broad, five-yard wide road led up to the tomb, the entrance of which was flanked by two carved sphinxes. It was encircled by a 500 yard long marble outer wall. Experts believe a 16ft tall lion sculpture previously discovered nearby once stood on top of the tomb.

The excavations began in 2012, and by this month hope to identify who actually was buried there.

Submission + - Multipath TCP Introduces Security Blind Spot (threatpost.com)

Submitted by msm1267
msm1267 writes: If multipath TCP is the next big thing to bring resilience and efficiency to networking, then there are some serious security issues to address before it goes mainstream. An expert at next week's Black Hat conference is expected to explain how the TCP extension exposes leaves network security gear blind to traffic moving over multiple network streams. Today's IDS and IPS, for example, cannot correlate and re-assemble traffic as it's split over multiple paths. While such attacks are not entirely practical today, as multipath TCP becomes a fixture on popular networking gear and mobile devices, the risks will escalate.

“[Multipath TCP] solves big problems we have today in an elegant fashion,” said Catherine Pearce, security consultant and one of the presenters, along with Patrick Thomas. “You don’t have to replace hardware or software; it handles all that stuff behind the scenes. But security tools are naïve [to MPTCP], and make assumptions that are no longer valid that were valid in the past.”

Submission + - Nokia Buys a Chunk of Panasonic

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: Nokia's future as a company focused on providing network solutions, rather than mobile phones, looks to be bright. The company made big profits in the second quarter of 2014 after selling its mobile devices unit — the cornerstone of Nokia's rise in the 1990s — to Microsoft. Meanwhile Nokia has been buying up other businesses such as the Chicago-based SAC Wireless. Now Nokia is acquiring part of Panasonic's network business in an effort to boost its presence in Japan. The deal announced Thursday will give the Finnish firm control of roughly one third of Japan's mobile network market.

Submission + - Google notifies police of child pornography in email, suspect arrested (khou.com)

Submitted by SpaceGhost
SpaceGhost writes: KHOU, the CBS affiliate in Houston, Texas reports that after Google detected an explicit image of a young girl in a users email they reported it to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which led to his arrest. Google did not respond to questions the reporter asked about this use of their technology, and the article does not make clear if it was a gmail account.

Submission + - French fight the death of OpenVMS (computerworld.com) 1

Submitted by dcblogs
dcblogs writes: An OpenVMS user group in France has posted an "open letter" to Hewlett-Packard CEO Meg Whitman urging her to reconsider HP's decision to begin pulling support for the operating system. The letter, written by OpenVMS consultant Gerard Calliet on behalf of user group HP-Interex France, explains the important role OpenVMS plays in running transportation systems, health services and even nuclear power plants in France. "These software products are the result of decades of precise programming, inscribed in precise coding imperative for such functional necessities," Calliet wrote. "A majority of them use functions specific to OpenVMS and still run on OpenVMS, as these custom features are hard to find elsewhere." The user group accuses HP of being unclear about its direction and creating confusion. In 2013, HP said it would not be validating OpenVMS on its latest Itanium-based systems.

Submission + - Study Suggests Probiotic to Prevent Obesity Possible (gizmag.com)

Submitted by Zothecula
Zothecula writes: Researchers at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee have raised hopes for the possibility of developing of a probiotic to treat obesity and other chronic diseases. The team inhibited weight gain, insulin resistance and various other negative health effects of a high-fat diet in mice by modifying bacteria to produce a therapeutic compound in the gut.

Submission + - sel4- World's most secure OS kernel now open source (sel4.systems)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: sel4 — the world's first operating-system kernel with an end-to-end proof of implementation correctness and security enforcement has just been released as open source.
sel4 is a general purpose mircokernel with an object capability security architecture. It was designed with security and reliability foremost in mind for use across the board from military control systems to medical devices.

Submission + - Did the politicians do all the math on solar energy? (telegraph.co.uk)

Submitted by gadget junkie
gadget junkie writes: Funnily enough, Northern European countries have put the most solar panels in place. in this story on the Daily Telegraph, some of the foreseable problems seem to emerge: grid bottleneck, wide differences between peak output and average output. The suggested solution is mindboggling to an economic analyst like me: install them at an angle which would cause them to generate the most energy in the afternoon (namely: face west, and all will be fine). This adds to the cost obviously, since it is less efficient. Why is it practically impossible to get an unbiased economic study on alternative energy?

Submission + - Philip K Dick's "The Man in the High Castle" to be produced by Ridley Scott 1

Submitted by hawkinspeter
hawkinspeter writes: Amazon has given the green light to produce the Hugo award-winning "The Man in the High Castle". This is after the four-hour mini-series was rejected by Syfy and afterwards by the BBC.

Philip K Dick's novel takes place in an alternate universe where the Axis Powers won the Second World War. It's one of his most successful works, probably due to him actually spending the time to do some editing on it (most of his fiction was produced rapidly in order to get some money). Ridley Scott has previously adapted PKD's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" as the film "Blade Runner", so it will be interesting to see how close he keeps to the source material this time.

This news has been picked up by a few sites: International Business Times; The Register and Deadline.

So, are any PKD fans excited about this and is this story already Godwinned?

Submission + - China Conducts 3rd Anti-Satellite Missile Test

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Diplomat reports that the U.S. is accusing China of secretly conducting an anti-satellite (ASAT) missile test last week.

China originally claimed that it had conducted a ballistic missile defense test but the State Department says it was actually a non-destructive ASAT missile test. Both use hit-to-kill technologies but China has previously differentiated between them. Washington also called on Beijing to refrain from further tests.

Submission + - Police placing anti-piracy warning ads on illegal sites 1

Submitted by mrspoonsi
mrspoonsi writes: The City of London police has started placing banner advertisements on websites believed to be offering pirated content illegally. The messages, which will appear instead of paid-for ads, will ask users to close their web browsers. The move comes as part of a continuing effort to stop piracy sites from earning money through advertising. Police said the ads would make it harder for piracy site owners to make their pages look authentic. "When adverts from well known brands appear on illegal websites, they lend them a look of legitimacy and inadvertently fool consumers into thinking the site is authentic," said Detective Chief Inspector Andy Fyfe from the City of London Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit (Pipcu). "This new initiative is another step forward for the unit in tackling IP crime and disrupting criminal profits. "Copyright infringing websites are making huge sums of money though advert placement, therefore disrupting advertising on these sites is crucial and this is why it is an integral part of Operation Creative."

Submission + - How The Emerging Revolution In Neural Wiring Diagrams Is About To Change Biology

Submitted by KentuckyFC
KentuckyFC writes: One of the great challenges in neurobiology is to work out the entire wiring diagram of the human brain, a structure known as the human connectome. That’s going to be tricky. Researchers have successfully constructed the connectome of only one creature, the nematode worm C. elegans with a grand total of 302 neurons and 8000 connections between them. By contrast, the human cerebral cortex contains 10^10 neurons linked by 10^14 synaptic connections. One reason why progress has been slow is that the neurons have to be imaged using electronmicroscopy and the resulting images stacked and aligned so that every part of each neuron can be mapped by hand. In this way, the C. elegans connectome took 50 person-years to assemble. So biologists are racing to develop faster techniques that automate the mapping process. But that creates another problem. The wiring diagram and its spatial layout do not uniquely specify the function of a neural system. To gain a full understanding of what’s going on, biologists need to know the types of cells involved and how they connect to each other in microcircuits. That helps distinguish, for example, the function of circuitry involved in retinal tissue from that in brain tissue. Now researchers have developed an algorithmic technique that uses the spatial wiring diagram from an organism as an input and then uses it to automatically identify cell types, the circuits they form and hence the function of these neural systems. They have tested it on the connectome of C. elegans and say it reproduces the work of many years in just a few hours. They have even used it to work out the type of circuits in the 6502 microprocessor from the Apple II computer using only its ‘connectome’ as an input. This tool and others for automating the mapping of connectomes look set to revolutionise neurobiology. In particular it should allow the comparison of cell types across animals and species. That will be particularly important when different cell types emerge because of the stimuli they receive rather than the biomolecular properties of the cells themselves. So it looks as if connectomics is finally about to be revolutionised by bio informatics, jesters gene finding algorithms revolutionised molecular biology and computational phylogenetics revolutionised evolutionary biology.

Submission + - Celebrating 50 Years of Saving Lives with MedicAlert (medicalert.org.uk)

Submitted by MedicAlert UK
MedicAlert UK writes: This year MedicAlert proudly celebrate our 50th anniversary in the UK and Ireland. For 50 years we have been helping to save lives by highlighting our members’ hidden medical conditions and allergies with our functional and stylish medical I.D. jewellery. The charity was founded in 1953 in Turlock, California in 1953 when a 14 year old girl went into near fatal anaphylactic shock when she was given a skin test for a dose of tetanus antitoxin. MedicAlert has grown, reaching Canada, Malaysia, Australia and the UK amongst other countries. The UK head quarters alone has provided support for over 300,000 members in over 50 countries.

Submission + - World's largest amphibious aircraft goes into production

Submitted by stephendavion
stephendavion writes: Chinese aircraft manufacturer China Aviation Industry General Aircraft (CAIGA) has started trial production of its TA600 amphibious aircraft, claimed to be the world's largest of its kind. With an expected maiden flight late next year, the Chinese plane would replace Japan's ShinMaywa US-2 short takeoff and landing (STOL) aircraft as the largest of its kind globally.

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