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United States

Submission + - Abaondoned Mine chosen for Deep Underground Lab

Submitted by lukej
lukej writes: The abandoned Homestake Gold Mine has been chosen as the prefered site for a NSF deep underground laboratory. Google News has plenty of AP coverage, and the local paper has a nice 3d graphic. While the NSF rounds up funding for large astrophysics and biology experiments, the announcement has released millions of dollars in funding for preparatory work. One of the first tasks will be pumping out 3000 feet of water to access the 8000 foot level.
Movies

Submission + - John Knoll on CGI, Tron and 25 years of change (computerworld.com)

Submitted by
kgagne
kgagne writes: "July 9th marked the 25th anniversary of the theatrical release of the Disney movie Tron. To commemorate the event, Computerworld.com has an interview with John Knoll, ILM's visual effects supervisor for the Star Wars prequels and the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy, on Tron's pioneering techniques and impact on the industry:

"It was something new and different, and there were a lot of things that were really cool about it: the imagery, the design. Given the lack of sophistication of some of the tools they had to work with, there was a very clever design done to work within the capabilities. The Light Cycles, the Tanks, and the Recognizers were very clever designs. They're super-minimal, but just they're really nice, distinctive, and there were really great art direction choices made about color and camera angles. [Tron] opened everyone's eyes to something they should be watching because it had a lot of potential."
"
Security

Submission + - Secretly monopolizing the CPU without being root

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: This year's Usenix security symposium includes a paper that implements a "cheat" utility, which allows any non-privileged user to run his/her program, e.g., like so

cheat 99% program

thereby insuring that the programs would get 99% of the CPU cycles, regardless of the presence of any other applications in the system, and in some cases (like Linux), in a way that keeps the program invisible from CPU monitoring tools (like 'top'). The utility exclusively uses standard interfaces and can be trivially implemented by any beginner non-privileged programmer. Recent efforts to improve the support for multimedia applications make systems more susceptible to the attack. All prevalent operating systems but Mac OS X are vulnerable, though by this kerneltrap story, it appears that the new CFS Linux scheduler attempts to address the problem that were raised by the paper.
The Internet

Vertical Search Engines and Copyright 62

Posted by kdawson from the in-the-aggregate dept.
An anonymous reader writes "I am a big fan of Oodle, the online classifieds aggregator. I was disheartened when Craigslist announced that they would block Oodle from their site in late 2005 (old link), as I find their service very handy. I came across this page at the site of an aggregator of freelance job openings that summarizes the arguments around the legality of meta search engines and mashup-like sites and I found myself wondering if Oodle could have avoided the ban. There is an interesting argument there that seems to undermine copyright claims of user-generated content compilations. Are mashups legal? How does this affect sites like Digg or YouTube?"
Mars

Submission + - New Mars rover of NASA to analyze underground (nasa.gov)

Submitted by KeepQuiet
KeepQuiet writes: NASA is about to launch a new rover,Phoenix, to Mars. Being "an initiative for smaller, lower-cost, competed spacecraft", Phoenix will continue the search for water on Mars. It is planned to land on the icy northern pole of Mars. The rover will use its robotic arm and dig into the layers of water ice. The samples will be analyzed by the 'portable laboratory' on the rover.
Security

Submission + - Phrack is back!

Submitted by alewar
alewar writes: Nice surprise, it turns out that Phrack is back with issue 64 since 27th may!
Communications

FCC Head Wants New Wireless Devices Unlocked 221

Posted by kdawson from the maybe-in-a-few-years-innovation dept.
[TheBORG] writes with news that FCC chairman Kevin Martin wants 700-MHz wireless devices and services to be unlocked. Spectrum auctions for the 700-MHz airwaves, being opened up for fixed and mobile broadband, are scheduled for early next year. "The proposed rules would apply only to the spectrum being auctioned, not the rest of the wireless business, which still makes most of its revenue from voice calls. But Martin's proposal, if adopted by the FCC, could reverberate through a U.S. wireless industry that has tightly controlled access to devices and services... Like most devices sold in the USA, the iPhone ... allows only features and applications that Apple and AT&T provide and works only with an AT&T contract. The FCC chairman said he has grown increasingly concerned that the current practices 'hamper innovations' dreamed up by outside developers. One example:... 'Internationally, Wi-Fi handsets have been available for some time,' Martin noted. 'But they are just beginning to roll out here.'"
Security

Submission + - Spammers haven't solved CAPTCHA after all

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: According to New Scientist's Technology blog, spammers probably haven't figured out how to defeat CAPTCHAs at all, despite recent reports suggesting they had. It seems that the Trojan program credited with creates free email accounts by 'overcoming' CAPTCAs actually just copies each CAPTCHA and sends it off somewhere else for processing. The CAPTCHA is indeed solved, but the process may well be done done manually. And at least one CAPTCHA expert things the speed with which it works — 500 accounts an hour — suggests a person is doing it.
Space

Submission + - Atlantis launched without incident (forkforge.org)

Submitted by
forkazoo
forkazoo writes: "Space.com is reporting the successful launch of the space shuttle Atlantis. There were no major incidents or problems during the launch, except that there was some concern about the weather at the two European abort landing sites. The weather cleared up and the launch was pretty much perfect. I watched on the live NASA TV stream."
Power

Submission + - MIT team demonstrates wireless power transfer (mit.edu)

Submitted by
tuomas_kaikkonen
tuomas_kaikkonen writes: "MIT team demonstrated the wireless electricity based on using coupled resonant objects. Two resonant objects of the same resonant frequency tend to exchange energy efficiently, while interacting weakly with extraneous off-resonant objects. They were able to light a 60W light bulb from a power source seven feet (more than two meters) away; there was no physical connection between the source and the appliance. The work has been reported in the June 7 issue of Science Express, the advance online publication of the journal Science."
Security

Submission + - Google, Microsoft and Yahoo DNS records hacked (thecoils.com)

Submitted by
Yaron Orenstein
Yaron Orenstein writes: "I wanted to point your attention to a very interesting story we have found two days ago and just published. The DNS records of three of the top world Internet companies Google, Microsoft and Yahoo has been hacked. I have published the whole story in English here: http://www.thecoils.com/2007/06/08/google_microsof t_yahoo_dns_hack/"
Hardware Hacking

Submission + - Interview with hardware modder Ben Heck (gamealmighty.com)

Submitted by
Jaklar
Jaklar writes: "Posted an interview with hardware modder extraordinaire Benjamin Heckendorn, best known for his portable Xbox 360. Interview covers his inspirations, how he got started, dream projects, favorite inventor and more. Your readers should find it interesting.
http://www.gamealmighty.com/story-individual/story /Interview_with_Modding_Genius_Ben_Heck/"
Mars

Submission + - Liquid Puddles on Mars? (newscientist.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: It seems hard to believe, but physicist Ron Levin claims that the Opportunity rover found puddles on Mars filled with a clear substance (possibly water or ice). That is to say, he is suggesting that water CURRENTLY exists on the surface of Mars. Could this possibly be consistent with the laws of physics, previous Mars survey mission photos, or previous Matrian spectroscopy? Is this just totally crazy? Judge for yourself. Details here.

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