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Comment Re:I'm calling BS (Score 1) 374

by TheCoop1984 (#27784617) Attached to: Forensics Tool Finds Headerless Encrypted Files
There is a problem with this - it forces a hole in the 'plausible deniability' defence. Really, how many people keep bits of /dev/random data lying around on the filesystem? Having this tool 'officially' point out that it is random data means the police can ask you, however impolitely, for the encryption keys (UK encryption key laws...). And you don't really have a defence for that, as what are the chances of it _actually_ being completely random data?
Science

Some Large Dinosaurs Survived the K-T Extinction 269

Posted by kdawson from the hid-under-a-rock dept.
mmmscience sends along coverage from the Examiner on evidence that some dinosaurs survived the extinction event(s) at the end of the Cretaceous period. Here is the original journal article. "A US paleontologist is challenging one of the field's greatest theories: the mass extinction of dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous period. Jim Fassett, a paleontologist who holds an emeritus position at the US Geological Survey, recently published a paper in Palaeontologia Electronica with evidence that points to a pocket of dinosaurs that somehow survived in remote parts New Mexico and Colorado for up to half a million years past the end of the Cretaceous period. If this theory holds up, these dinosaurs would be the only ones that made it to the Paleocene Age."
Privacy

Submission + - Phorm colluded with UK Home Office

Submitted by
TheCoop1984
TheCoop1984 writes: "The BBC reveals how, since August 2007, officials at the Home Office sent draft guidance to Phorm for comments before it was released to the public. Some of the documents were even edited by Phorm before being sent back. The government may have just lost what little integrity it had left...how long has the UK government been colluding with Phorm and other commercial companies about guidance issued by the government?"
Worms

Conficker Worm Asks For Instructions, Gets Update 285

Posted by CmdrTaco from the wormed-its-way-into-my-heart dept.
KingofGnG writes "Conficker/Downup/Downadup/Kido malware, that according to Symantec 'is, to date, one of the most complex worms in the history of malicious code,' has been updated and this time for real. The new variant, dubbed W32.Downadup.C, adds new features to malware code and makes the threat even more dangerous and worrisome than before."

Comment Discworld (Score 1) 1397

by TheCoop1984 (#26701913) Attached to: Why Do We Name Servers the Way We Do?
Mine are named after discworld characters:

Main desktop - vetinari
Laptop - vimes
Shell account/web/mail server - lipwig (of course)
eeePC - rincewind (lots of travelling, see)?

It's even better if the character and computer role match up :D
Transportation

Flying Car Ready To Take Off 315

Posted by timothy from the fill-up-on-windshield-fluid-please dept.
ChazeFroy writes "The first flying automobile, equally at home in the sky or on the road, is scheduled to take to the air next month. If it survives its first test flight, the Terrafugia Transition, which can transform itself from a two-seater road car to a plane in 15 seconds, is expected to land in showrooms in about 18 months' time. Terrafugia claims it will be able to fly up to 500 miles on a single tank of unleaded petrol at a cruising speed of 115mph. Even at $200,000 per automobile, they have already received 40 orders."
Programming

Linux Kernel 2.4 Or 2.6 In Embedded System? 178

Posted by kdawson from the comfort-on-the-trailing-edge dept.
snikulin writes "My 6-year-old embedded software happily runs on kernel v2.4 on an XScale CPU. The software gets a bunch (tens of megabytes) of data from an FPGA over a PCI-X bus and pushes it out over GigE to data-processing equipment. The tool chain is based on the somewhat outdated gcc v2.95. Now, for certain technical reasons we want to jump from the ARM-based custom board to an Atom-based COM Express module. This implies that I'll need to re-create a Linux RAM disk from scratch along with the tool chain. The functionality of the software will be essentially the same. My question: is it worth it to jump to kernel 2.6, or better to stick with the old and proven 2.4? What will I gain and what will I lose if I stay at 2.4 (besides the modern gcc compiler and the other related dev tools)?"
Encryption

Using Lasers To Generate Random Numbers Faster 149

Posted by timothy from the just-think-what-a-faster-laser-could-do dept.
Pranav writes "Using semiconductor lasers, scientists from Takushoku University, Saitama University, and NTT Corporation achieved random number rates of up to 1.7 gigabits per second, which is about 10 times higher than the second-best rate, produced using a physical phenomenon. Future work may center on devising laser schemes that can achieving rates as high as 10 Gbps."

Comment Functional programming language first (Score 1) 452

by TheCoop1984 (#25342397) Attached to: How Should I Teach a Basic Programming Course?
At my university, we started off on ML (the functional programming language). This very quickly introduced the concept of a function as a repeatable series of instructions that could be called several times - for a functional programming language, it is almost essential to call the same function several times. This also introduced recursion and types (as part of the compiler type inference) very quickly, something which is probably quite hard for people to grasp.

The only other courses in the first term was digital electronics and pure mathmatics courses. Only in the second term was Java introduced as the perennial OOP/procedural language. I think we've got one of the lowest dropout rates in the country (but don't quote me on that).
Media

MediaDefender's Parent Company Joins P2P Market 40

Posted by Soulskill from the playing-both-sides dept.
An anonymous reader writes with news that ArtistDirect, the company who acquired MediaDefender, has launched another company called PiCast for the purpose of P2P video distribution. The reader says: "This is a strange twist for a company which last year set up a video-sharing site called Miivi in an attempt to entrap users uploading copyrighted content, and was caught launching a DoS attack against Revision3, which we discussed earlier this year."
AMD

Intel Viiv vs. AMD LIVE! 115

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the boxing-match dept.
Searching4Sasquatch writes "Hot Hardware has tested two nearly identical HP systems in an effort to determine the best solution between Intel's Viiv and AMD's LIVE! campaigns. Priced around $999, these general purpose systems are tested straight out of the box with no tweaking or refinement to illustrate how "Joe Consumer" would fare in using one of these platforms."

Why Email is a Bad Collaboration Tool 245

Posted by Hemos from the the-best-tool-to-use dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Isaac Garcia follows up his popular "The Good in Email" article with "The Bad in Email or (Why Steve Ballmer is the CTO of Microsoft)": "In spite of email's universal success (as a collaboration tool), and in spite of its many good traits, email contains deep, inherent flaws that force users and markets to seek alternatives to collaborating via email."

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