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Censorship

Submission + - The Land of the Censored (wiredforchange.com)

Submitted by
PerlJedi
PerlJedi writes: "While our government cries out against other countries censoring their people's access to the internet, it is also busy passing legislation to allow it to do just that to us. The EFF is urging people to take action by sending email to their representatives in the house and senate expressing displeasure with the bill's.
"The government would be able to force ISPs and search engines to redirect or dump users' attempts to reach certain websites' URLs"

Though its jhust "Piracy" today, its a slippery slope from "Stop Piracy" to "Stop any anti-establishment sentiment".

And if that's not bad enough, the version in the house "SOPA" could sanction any site that doesn't "take sufficient action to prevent" such unwanted activities.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protect_IP_Act
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Online_Piracy_Act"
Games

Submission + - Minecraft officially released (joystiq.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Minecraft, everyone's favorite block-bashing and building game and indie developer success story, has finally reached the 1.0 milestone and was released today by Notch during his keynote address at MineCon in Las Vegas. Unsurprisingly, the servers used to process the purchases of the game are experiencing a few difficulties under the strain.
Software

Submission + - Folding@home client can now run on supercomputers (extremetech.com)

Submitted by
MrSeb
MrSeb writes: "Earlier this week at the supercomputing SC11 conference, researchers from the long-running Folding@home project demonstrated a new distributed framework named Copernicus that's designed to allow F@h to scale across geographically-dispersed supercomputing clusters. Folding@home's primary mission is to understand each step in the protein-folding process. Copernicus, in contrast, lets the user specify the desired end results — and then the Copernicus run-time, taking into account all of the available computational resources, then breaks down the desired end results into specific, efficient task packages. "It opens the door to huge crowds of people using these methods, which have matured with Folding@home," Vijay Pande (F@h's founder) said. "This method should be able to use any supercomputer on the planet completely," Pande said. "Strong scaling to these extremes is unusual.""
The Military

Submission + - An Israeli Electronic/Cyber Strike Could End Iran, (yahoo.com)

Submitted by
MarkWhittington
MarkWhittington writes: "If and when (and it is increasingly seeming like the latter) Israel attacks Iran, the first sign will not consist of explosions rising from Iranian nuclear and missile sites. Instead the first sign of an attack will be Iran's power and communications going down.

In effect, Iran as it exists today will die, not with a bang, but with a whimper as the lights go out and as the phones go silent. Israel has developed a sophisticated electronic and cyber war force that would take down Iran's power grid and phone system in the first moments of an attack. Welcome to the 21st Century way of waging war, which in one way could be as devastating as a nuclear attack."
Encryption

Submission + - Full disk encryption is too good, says US intellig (extremetech.com) 4

Submitted by
MrSeb
MrSeb writes: "A new research paper, titled "The growing impact of full disk encryption on digital forensics," illustrates the difficulty that CSI teams have in obtaining enough digital data to build a solid case against criminals. According to the researchers, one of which is a member of US-CERT — the US government's primary defense against internet and digital threats — there are three main problems with full disk encryption (FDE): First, evidence-gathering goons can turn off the computer (for transportation) without realizing it's encrypted, and thus can't get back at the data (unless the arrestee gives up his password, which he doesn't have to do); second, if the analysis team doesn't know that the disk is encrypted, it can waste hours trying to read something that's ultimately unreadable; and finally, in the case of hardware-level disk encryption, tampering with the device can trigger self-destruction of the data. The paper does go on to suggest some ways to ameliorate these issues, but ultimately the researchers aren't hopeful: "Research is needed to develop new techniques and technology for breaking or bypassing full disk encryption.""

Submission + - Naked Mole Rats from Outer Space (slate.com)

Submitted by Maximum Prophet
Maximum Prophet writes: Apparently, Naked Mole Rats don't get cancer, get when zapped with Gamma Rays or fed 50 times the carcinogens that would kill a mouse. (or us)
Android

Submission + - Dual-Core Android PC now comes on a USB Stick (fxitech.com)

Submitted by absolut.evil
absolut.evil writes: FXI has taken a dual core smartphone-esque computer and put it into a little USB stick.. neat. So now you can literally plug into anything with a screen and play angry birds. There's a cloud-sharing component as well so It's not all just for games.. interesting!
Hardware

Submission + - Inside Newegg's east coast distribution center (extremetech.com)

Submitted by
MrSeb
MrSeb writes: "Did you know that Newegg is the second largest e-tailer in the US, after Amazon? Perhaps building your own computer isn't dead yet! ExtremeTech's Matthew Murray was recently invited to take a tour of the Newegg east coast distribution center, and the facts that he dug up — and the pictures he shot — make for perfect curiosity-sating, Friday afternoon surfing fodder for any American build-it-yourself computer geek."
Space

Submission + - Atom Smashers Get an Antimatter Surprise (io9.com)

Submitted by suraj.sun
suraj.sun writes: The Large Hadron Collider is constantly on the hunt for "new physics" — discoveries that confound and expand our current understanding of the universe... and it may have found one in the decay patterns of a subatomic particle and its antimatter counterpart.

Specifically, particles called D-mesons appear to decay in a slightly different way than their antiparticles, and this seemingly small finding could explain why the early universe became dominated by matter instead of antimatter. According to project physicist Matthew Charles, the results have a statistical certainty of 3.5 sigma — meaning there's a 99.95% chance that these results will hold up, but still short of the 5 sigma level needed to declare this a formal discovery.

However, the team still has a huge amount of data still to work through, so there's an excellent chance that we'll know one way or the other about this result in the near future.

http://io9.com/5859845/the-large-hadron-collider-may-have-discovered-why-we-dont-live-in-a-universe-of-antimatter
Android

Submission + - B&N Pummels Microsoft Patent Claims with Prior (itworld.com) 1

Submitted by
itwbennett
itwbennett writes: "As Slashdot readers will recall, Barnes & Noble is being particularly noisy about the patents Microsoft is leveraging against the Nook. Now the bookseller has filed a supplemental notice of prior art that contains a 43-page list of examples it believes counters Microsoft's claim that Nook violates five of Microsoft's patents. 'The list of prior art for the five patents that Microsoft claims the Nook infringes is very much a walk down memory lane,' says blogger Brian Proffitt. 'The first group of prior art evidence presented by Barnes & Noble for U.S. Patent No. 5,778,372 alone lists 172 pieces of prior art' and 'made reference to a lot of technology and people from the early days of the public Internet... like Mosaic, the NCSA, and (I kid you not) the Arena web browser. The list was like old home week for the early World Wide Web.'"

Submission + - The Light Stuff (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by ackthpt
ackthpt writes: A team of engineers claims to have created the world's lightest material. Made from a lattice of hollow metallic tubes, the material is less dense than aerogels and metallic foams, yet retains strength due to the small size of the lattice structure. Projected as useful for insullation, batteries electrodes, sound dampening.
Science

Submission + - US Army Has First Test Flight of Mach 6 Weapon (defense.gov) 2

Submitted by
Stirling Newberry
Stirling Newberry writes: "In a terse press release the US Department of Defense announced the first test of the the AHW, which uses rockets to launch and then glides to its target, in a manner similar to the Space Shuttle's re-entry. Earlier ABC News posted a story with animation video of the concept. Over at DefenseTech they argue that the trajectory being different from an ICBM is meant to show that it is not a first strike, but even the comments don't think that explanation flies.

More likely it is the speed of deployment, the ability to strike targets without going high enough to be seen by many advance warning radars, and without using nuclear warheads makes it a precision surprise attack weapon, a kind of super cruise missile for surprise asymetric attacks."

Submission + - Quantum wavefunction is a real physical object aft (nature.com)

Submitted by cekerr
cekerr writes: Nature reports:
  Quantum theorem shakes foundations
The wavefunction is a real physical object after all, say researchers.

"... the new paper, by a trio of physicists led by Matthew Pusey at Imperial College London, presents a theorem showing that if a quantum wavefunction were purely a statistical tool, then even quantum states that are unconnected across space and time would be able to communicate with each other. As that seems very unlikely to be true, the researchers conclude that the wavefunction must be physically real after all.

David Wallace, a philosopher of physics at the University of Oxford, UK, says that the theorem is the most important result in the foundations of quantum mechanics that he has seen in his 15-year professional career. “This strips away obscurity and shows you can’t have an interpretation of a quantum state as probabilistic,” he says.

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