An anonymous reader writes "A new paper argues that China's cyber-warfare capability is actually pretty poor. '[China has] evinced little proficiency with more sophisticated hacking techniques. The viruses and Trojan Horses they have used have been fairly easy to detect and remove before any damage has been done or data stolen. There is no evidence that China's cyber-warriors can penetrate highly secure networks or covertly steal or falsify critical data,' the paper reads (PDF). 'They would be unable to systematically cripple selected command and control, air defense and intelligence networks and databases of advanced adversaries, or to conduct deception operations by secretly manipulating the data in these networks.'"

A military research facility outside Boston has come up two new super foods for MREs (Meal, Ready to Eat). Soon soldiers will able to stay awake during guard duty thanks to caffeinated meat sticks. They'll have the energy for extended patrols from a "super-charged" applesauce. From the article: "'There is a lot of science that goes into this,' said David Accetta, a spokesman for the Natick Soldier Research, Development & Engineering Center, where every item put into an MRE is tested and tasted. 'And that’s what a lot of people don’t realize. It’s not just a bunch of cooks in the kitchen making up recipes.'”

Hitting the front page for the first time, rippeltippel writes "The Economist recently published an article about HP quitting the tablet market. Nothing new I said, until I read 'the announcement showed that the firm had finally seen the light about the tablet market — namely, that there is no such thing.' But are the games closed with the iPad as a clear winner? Possibly not: 'hackers have embraced the Nook, "rooting" its underlying Linux software ... so it can run many more applications from Google's online app store and elsewhere.' A review on Amazon's Kindle tablet page reads: 'They've cracked it — this is the future.' Can it possibly be read as 'Crackable tablets are the future of tablets?'" Smartphone vendors seem to have gotten the message: users want to control the software on their phones. It is a shame that Palm/HP, who were one of the only vendors open from the start, more or less lost the game. Unfortunately it seems that tablet and ebook reader vendors have yet to get the message.

decora writes "Several years ago, writer Du Daobin posted several essays on the internet, protesting such things as unfair taxes and the corruption of the media. He was then charged with 'inciting subversion of state power,' arrested, and after many legal twists and turns, tortured in prison. Daobin, along with several other dissidents with similar stories, decided to sue Cisco Systems (PDF) earlier this year under the legal theory that it aided and abetted China's violation of the Torture Victim Protection Act of 1991. As the case moves forward, the Chinese Ministry of Public Security has stepped up its surveillance, harassment, and interrogation of Daobin and the others. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has now joined the Laogai Research Foundation to draw attention to the case. As part of its opening move, it has asked Cisco to make public statements in support of human rights, hoping that the company's influence with the Chinese government will provide some modicum of protection for the threatened dissidents."

swandives writes "LinkedIn will make changes to a 'social advertising' feature that has been criticized for using members' names and photographs in advertisements on its website. Amid mounting criticism, the social networking service says it has been 'listening' to its users and 'could have communicated' its intentions with the new ad feature more clearly. As a result, it said, it will change how the advertisements appear. If a LinkedIn user 'follows' a company or service on LinkedIn, the ad feature can display the user's name and photo in advertisements for that company. LinkedIn said its goal was to deliver more useful ads, but some LinkedIn users complained it was a privacy violation, particularly because they have to opt out of the feature rather than opt in. It will be interesting to see whether the changes affect stocks, especially since the network's IPO in May, when shares closed at more than double the initial price, prompting concerns over another dot-com bubble."

coondoggie writes "The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is taking to the sky again, this time to run what it says will be the second and final test of its hypersonic Falcon aircraft, which is capable of hitting speeds up to Mach 20, or about 13,000MPH. The Falcon Hypersonic Technology Vehicle 2 is scheduled to launch Wednesday between 7:00am — 1:00 pm PDT from Vandenberg AFB, Calif., aboard an Air Force Minotaur IV rocket. The rocket delivers the Falcon to a starting point high in the atmosphere, where its engine ignite, and, if all goes well, it will blast through the air for about a half hour, DARPA says."

jfruhlinger writes "McAfee yesterday outlined what it calls Operation Shady RAT, a five-year campaign of cyberespionage launched by a national government against international organizations and private corporations. That government was almost certainly China's, so the question becomes: why are the Western nations silent about it? One fact revealed by the raids is that, predictions of cyberpunk novels nonwithstanding, private companies are still quite weak in the face of national governments — and it's those national governments that must act against such intrusions."

siliconbits writes "A new worrying phenomenon has cropped up in China and Apple has been its first victim; meet the first fake Apple Stores, entire buildings that have been designed to look like the real ones. Chinese companies have long been known for being master copiers but this takes the concept of plagiarism and copying to a whole new level. As expected, everything, from the architecture of the building, the colour of the paint, to the products, the T-shirt worn by the staff down to the logo and the badge design come from Cupertino."

An anonymous reader writes "52-year-old Walter Powell wanted revenge when he was fired from his position as an IT manager at Baltimore Substance Abuse System Inc. So, he hacked into their systems — installing keyloggers to steal passwords. Then, when his CEO was giving a presentation to the board of directors he replaced the slides with pornographic images. Powell has now been given a 2 year suspended sentence, and 100 hours community service."

Hugh Pickens writes "The Seattle Post Intelligencer reports that an effort to outlaw the undercover recording of animal abuse in livestock operations appears to have stalled in Iowa after previously failing in Minnesota, Florida and New York, with the pushback coming from citizens and activists complaining that the proposals were aimed at protecting an industry that doesn't exhibit enough concern for farm animal welfare. A bill introduced earlier this year to criminalize the actions of activists who make unauthorized hidden videos of animal abuse appeared to be headed for approval in the Iowa Legislature, with proposed penalties including fines of up to $7,500 and up to five years in prison. 'I feel it is wrong to absolutely lie to get a job to try to defame the employer,' says Iowa representative Annette Sweeney, a farmer and Republican legislator who sponsored the bill. But District Attorney James R. Horton, who filed animal cruelty charges against employees and the owner of a large-scale calf-raising farm, says he probably 'wouldn't have a case' if not for covert video provided by an animal protection group, and that 'we wouldn't have anything' in terms of evidence against the suspects in the beating deaths of dairy calves at E6 Cattle Co."

penciling_in writes "A group of DNS heavyweights have released a paper detailing serious concerns over the proposed DNS filtering requirements included as part of the bill recently introduced in the US Senate named Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act of 2011 (PROTECT IP Act). The group which includes Paul Vixie, Dan Kaminsky, Steve Crocker, David Dagon and Danny McPherson, have detailed several serious technical and security concerns in the event that the mandated DNS filtering is enacted into law. Dan Kaminsky says: 'There are efforts afoot to manipulate the DNS on a remarkably large scale. The American PROTECT IP act contains several reasonable and well targeted remedies to copyright infringement. One of these remedies, however, is to leverage the millions of recursive DNS servers that act as accelerators for Internet traffic, and convert them into censors for domain names in an effort to block content.'"

An anonymous reader writes with an editorial from ConceivableTech "Since Google's move to enable users to hide the URL bar, we have seen what could be the beginning of the end of one of the key features of the web browser. Mozilla has its own thoughts, but there is little doubt that Mozilla is reconsidering the purpose of the URL bar in future versions of its browsers. In a Mozilla Labs post today, David Regev suggests that the location bar should be replaced with a tool to support more than just one command."

eldavojohn writes "A new paper presented at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland shows the rapid heating of the atmosphere directly above the fault days before the devastating earthquake hit. This is theorized to be the Lithosphere-Atmosphere-Ionosphere Coupling mechanism that occurs when large amounts of radon are released due to massive stress in the fault right before the quake. This can be detected with satellites analyzing infrared waves: 'The radioactivity from this gas ionizes the air on a large scale and this has a number of knock on effects. Since water molecules are attracted to ions in the air, ionization triggers the large scale condensation of water. But the process of condensation also releases heat and it is this that causes infrared emissions.' This is a shift from the Haiti earthquake where DEMETER was used to monitor ultra low frequencies. The presence of radon could also possibly explain erratic wildlife behavior prior to an earthquake."