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Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft Signs Fedora's Bootloader To Work Around UEFI Restrictions (boingboing.net)

Submitted by ais523
ais523 writes: Cory Doctorow writes about the latest twist in the story of UEFI and locked-down bootloaders. Because motherboards certified for Windows 8 will need to use bootloaders signed with a key the motherboard recognises in order to load, installing a new operating system requires changing BIOS settings in order to add a new key — and even this option will be unavailable on motherboards following Microsoft's guidelines for ARM. Fedora are working around this problem by requesting Microsoft to sign their bootloader, so that computers that work out of the box with Windows will work out of the box with Fedora too. (Although they had to pay $99 for the privilege, apparently the money goes to Verisign not Microsoft, and is a one-time payment.)
Mars

Submission + - Dutch firm plans Mars Colony by 2023 (mars-one.com) 2

Submitted by
argStyopa
argStyopa writes: "Dutch firm Mars One plans for ongoing habitation on the Martian Surface by 2023, including additional crews arriving every 2 years thereafter. Intro video at http://www.youtube.com/embed/6QoEEGySGm4 is flashy, almost suggesting a pending TV show. The fact that one of their stated suppliers is SpaceX — who recently announced their Red Dragon module as a Mars-destined vehicle — might suggest that they're totally serious."
Games

Submission + - Electronic Arts Readies "Massive" Patch for Battlefield 3 (hothardware.com)

Submitted by
MojoKid
MojoKid writes: "EA noted they have an update coming for BF3 players, rolling out on June 4-5, and it's "a big one," which an understatement of epic proportion, considering the
multitude of tweaks, changes, enhancements, and fixes included within. One of the ways EA hopes to make BF3 game play better is by reducing the suppression effect, a hot topic since the last big update, in which EA cranked up the effect to the point where some players complained it was too much. There will be changes to how servers are identified, vehicle related updates, soldier and gadget updates, weapons related changes, and over a dozen added and fixed features that fall under the "miscellaneous" umbrella. All told, there are around 70 changes included in the patch."

Submission + - (SF tech) Female devs sought for Hackathon 6/8-10 (Women 2.0 & Via.Me) (xhack2012.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Hello Slashdot,
We've teamed with Women 2.0 to encourage more Bay Area females to show their programming skills at the Hack to the Future event next week in San Francisco.

San Francisco startups Via.Me and RadiumOne are awarding $5,000 to the best new app created at the hackathon June 8-10 in San Francisco.

Here's the press release.
http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/RadiumOnes-ViaMe-Hack-Future-June-8-10-San-Francisco-Challenges-App-Developers-5000-1664226.htm

Hack to the Future
Who Should Come?
Developers in the photo, video, audio, mobile and social space that want to build a cool hack.

What Should You Expect?
An awesome time. Eat, drink, hang out and HACK with the most amazing mobile and web developers and designers in the Bay Area and beyond. Compete for over $8,000 in prizes.

When & Where
June 8-10, 2012 at RadiumOne Labs
55 Second St. (between Market and Mission)
Solarium on 1st floor
San Francisco, CA 94105

Thanks Slashdot for taking a look!
Peter Brooks
http://xhack2012.com/

Submission + - In America, 46% of people hold a creationist view of human origins (gallup.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The latest Gallup poll is out and it finds that 46% of Americans hold the view that God created humans in their present form within the last 10 000 years. According to Gallup the percentage who hold this view has remained unchanged since 1982, when they first started asking the question.

Roughly 33% of Americans believe in divinely guided evolution, and 15% believe that humans evolved without any supernatural help.
Science

Submission + - When Continental Drift was considered Pseudoscience (smithsonianmag.com)

Submitted by Lasrick
Lasrick writes: Love this article in Smithsonian by Richard Conniff. One of my geology professors was in grad school when the theories for plate tectonics, seafloor spreading, etc., were introduced; he remembered how most of his professors denounced them as ridiculous. This article chronicles the introduction of continental drift theory, starting a century ago with Alfred Wegener.
A nice read.
Security

Submission + - The Cost of Crappy Security in Software Infrastructure (oreilly.com)

Submitted by blackbearnh
blackbearnh writes: Everyone these days knows that you have to double and triple check your code for security vulnerabilities, and make sure that your servers are locked down as tight as you can. But why? Because our underlying operating systems, languages, and platforms do such a crappy job protecting us from ourselves. A new article suggests that the inevitable result of clamoring for new features, rather than demanding rock-solid infrastructure, is that the developer community wastes huge amounts of time protecting their applications from exploits that should never be possible in the first place. TFA: The next time you hear about a site that gets pwned by a buffer overrun exploit, don't think "stupid developers!", think "stupid industry!"
Facebook

Submission + - Privacy Practices of the Internet's Biggest Companies (net-security.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: When you use the Internet, you entrust your thoughts, experiences, locations, and more to companies like Google, Twitter, and Facebook. But what happens when the government asks these companies to hand over your private information? Will the company stand with you? The EFF released its second annual "When the Government Comes Knocking, Who Has Your Back?" report, tracking some of the Internet's biggest service providers on their public commitments to their users' privacy and security. Increasingly, federal law enforcement agents are demanding that Internet companies provide their users' data as part of government investigations – sometimes fairly, sometimes unfairly. The EFF examined 18 companies' terms of service, privacy policies, public representations, advocacy, and courtroom track records, awarding them gold stars for best practices in categories like "tell users about government data demands" and "fight for user privacy in courts."
Crime

Submission + - Venezuela bans the commercial sale of firearms and ammunition (bbc.co.uk) 2

Submitted by
Bob the Super Hamste
Bob the Super Hamste writes: "The BBC is reporting on a new law in Venezuela that effectively bans the commercial sale of firearms and ammunition to private citizens. Previously anyone with a permit could purchase a firearm from any commercial vendor but now only the police, military, and security firms will be able to purchase firearms or ammunition from only state owned manufactures or importers. Hugo Chavez's government states that the goal is to eventually disarm the citizenry. The law which went into effect today was passed on February 29th and up to this point the government has been running an amnesty program allowing citizens to turn in their illegal firearms. Since the law was first passed 805,000 rounds of ammunition have been recovered from gun dealers. The measure is intended to curb violent crime in Venezuela where 78% of homicides are linked to firearms."

Submission + - Obama Order Sped Up Wave of Cyberattacks Against Iran (nytimes.com)

Submitted by diewlasing
diewlasing writes: WASHINGTON — From his first months in office, President Obama secretly ordered increasingly sophisticated attacks on the computer systems that run Iran’s main nuclear enrichment facilities, significantly expanding America’s first sustained use of cyberweapons, according to participants in the program.

Mr. Obama decided to accelerate the attacks — begun in the Bush administration and code-named Olympic Games — even after an element of the program accidentally became public in the summer of 2010 because of a programming error that allowed it to escape Iran’s Natanz plant and sent it around the world on the Internet. Computer security experts who began studying the worm, which had been developed by the United States and Israel, gave it a name: Stuxnet.
Android

Submission + - Gnuplot now Running on Android (kickstarter.com) 2

Submitted by MathIsTasty
MathIsTasty writes: While it looks like the previously discussed campaign to raise funds for Octave and gnuplot development for Android is quite short of its goal, it looks like the developer has forged ahead and released a decent and only slightly buggy version of gnuplot running on Android already. Though it can create 2D and 3D plots and even output to a PostScript file, it looks like there is no pinch-zoom and similar. Maybe that is one of the things the requested funds are for. I just wonder whether the only person working on the project should have spent more time on marketing as opposed to development.
Technology

Submission + - $1b Ghost town to be built in New Mexico (brisbanetimes.com.au)

Submitted by OzPeter
OzPeter writes: As reported in the Brisbane Times, construction of a $1b Ghost Town is expected to start in Lea County near Hobbs, New Mexico this year. The town is the brainchild of Pegasus Global Holdings and represents its Center for Innovation, Testing & Evaluation (CITE) and will be modeled after the real town of Rock Hill S.C. From the Brisbane times article:

The point of the town is to enable researchers to test new technologies on existing infrastructure without interfering in everyday life. For instance, while some researchers will be testing smart technologies on old grids, others might be using the streets to test self-driving cars. "The only thing we won't be doing is destructive testing, blowing things up — I hope," said Brumley (senior managing director of Pegasus Holdings).

Also from the that article:

Brumley said plans are to break ground on the town by June 30. The initial development cost is estimated at $US400 million, although Brumley estimates the overall investment in the project to top $US1 billion.

Submission + - Microsoft to bring full Internet Explorer browsing to Xbox 360 (theverge.com) 4

Submitted by Eponymous Hero
Eponymous Hero writes: Heads up, developers, you may soon have a new browser platform variation for testing your site: IE9 on the Xbox 360. No word yet on whether it will have a unique vendor CSS prefix, seeing as it is a "modified" version of the browser. It's also still unclear how developers will be able to leverage the Kinect's features with the web browsing experience.

Microsoft may be late to the game (pun intended) as far as web browsers on the console — Playstation and Wii have offered this feature for quite some time — but with game consoles taking over the living room as entertainment centers, this may mark the first time a game console becomes a target platform for testing.
Education

Submission + - The most epic scavenger hunt returns

Submitted by gotfork
gotfork writes: The world's largest scavenger hunt, covered in previous years on Slashdot, is now taking place at the University of Chicago. The competition is fierce: in 1999 one team build a working breeder reactor in the quad, but only won second place. Items on this year's list include your appendix in a jar (210), a disappearing spoon made of metal (105), a chromatic typewriter (216), an xyloexplosive (33) and a weaponized Xerox machine (83). Check out the full list here (PDF). Not bad for the school where "where fun comes to die".

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It's a naive, domestic operating system without any breeding, but I think you'll be amused by its presumption.

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