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Science

Fungus Fire Spores With 180,000 G Acceleration 69

Posted by timothy from the easy-at-that-size dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "Although a variety of spore discharge processes have evolved among the fungi, those with the longest ranges are powered by hydrostatic pressure and include 'squirt guns' that are most common in the Ascomycota and Zygomycota. In these fungi, fluid-filled stalks that support single spores or spore-filled sporangia, or cells called asci that contain multiple spores, are pressurized by osmosis. Because spores are discharged at such high speeds, most of the information on launch processes from previous studies has been inferred from mathematical models and is subject to a number of errors, but now Nicholas Money, an expert on fungi at Miami University, has recorded the discharges with high-speed cameras at 250,000 frames-a-second and discovered that fungi fire their spores with accelerations up to 180,000 g, calling it 'the fastest flight in nature.' Money and his students, in a justified fit of ecstasy, have created a video of the first fungus opera."
Privacy

In Soviet US, Comcast Watches YOU 404

Posted by kdawson from the you-have-none-get-over-it dept.
cayenne8 sends us to Newteevee.com for a blog posting reporting from the Digital Living Room conference earlier this week. Gerard Kunkel, Comcast's senior VP of user experience, stated that the cable company is experimenting with different camera technologies built into its devices so it can know who's in your living room. Cameras in the set-top boxes, while apparently not using facial recognition software, can still somehow figure out who is in the room, and customize user preferences for cable (favorite channels, etc.). While this sounds 'handy,' it also sounds a bit like the TV sets in 1984. I am sure, of course, that Comcast wouldn't tap into this for any reason, nor let the authorities tap into this to watch inside your home in real time without a warrant or anything."
Portables

Replacing a Thinkpad? 902

Posted by kdawson from the swimming-against-the-race-to-the-bottom dept.
An anonymous reader writes "As a very happy Thinkpad T20 user (still working after 7 years), I always planned on replacing it with another Thinkpad T-series. However, Thinkpads are now produced by Lenovo, a Chinese company, and I can't quite bear to buy Chinese while the Burmese military are shooting at monks with the Chinese Government as their biggest backer. Maybe this is silly, as whatever I buy is likely to be made (at least in part) in China... but still, what are my options for something as well built as the Thinkpad T-series?"

Comment Re:Or is it? (Score 1) 407

by PeterHammer (#20780687) Attached to: When Not to Use chroot

The keyword in the wikipedia article is "simple kind" of jail mechanism. Yes indeed it is. As others above have pointed out, if you do not run the processes as root, and do not have setuid processes in the chroot'ed env, then it is a "simple kind" of jail mechanism. However, do silly things like run daemons as root , by all accounts not something that should be considered part of the "simple" realm in Unix, and due diligence would dictate that you re-examine your simple assumptions.

All over the web, man pages, O'Reilly books, and university courses it is said that root is dangerous and must be treated with the utmost respect and care. I think it is obvious from the very philosophy of root that that warning should supersede any other information you may read on a man page of a program.

Also from Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_user

Software defects which allow a user to "gain root" (to execute with superuser privileges code supplied by that user) are a major security issue, and the fixing of such software is a major part of maintaining a secure system. One common way of gaining root is to cause a buffer overflow in a program already running with superuser privileges. This is often subsided in modern operating systems by running critical services, such as httpd, under a unique limited account.

And in the same wikipedia article referenced, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chroot, ignoring the changes from today in obvious reaction to this slashdot posting, you will read under limitations:

Only the root user can perform a chroot. This is intended to prevent users from putting a setuid program inside a specially-crafted chroot jail (for example, with a fake /etc/passwd file) that would fool it into giving out privileges.

The chroot mechanism itself is not entirely secure on all systems. On some systems, for example, chroot contexts do not stack properly and chrooted programs may perform a second chroot to break out.

This warning or some variant of it, has been part of the article on chroot since July of 2005 http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Chroot&diff=19562594&oldid=19544086

Microsoft

Ballmer Repeats Threats Against Linux 470

Posted by CmdrTaco from the this-can-only-end-badly dept.
daria42 writes "Steve Ballmer has reissued Microsoft's patent threat against Linux, warning open-source vendors that they must respect his company's intellectual property. In a no-nonsense presentation to New York financial analysts last week, Microsoft's chief executive said the company's partnership with Novell, which it signed in November 2006, "demonstrated clearly the value of intellectual property, even in the open-source world.""

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