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Firefox

Submission + - Firefox devs mull dumping Java to stop BEAST attac (theregister.co.uk)

Submitted by rastos1
rastos1 writes: In a demonstration last Friday, it took less than two minutes for researchers Thai Duong and Juliano Rizzo to wield the exploit to recover an encrypted authentication cookie used to access a PayPal user account. The researchers settled on a Java applet as their means to bypass SOP, leading Firefox developers to discuss blocking the framework in a future version of the browser.
“I recommend that we blocklist all versions of the Java Plugin,” Firefox developer Brian Smith wrote on Tuesday in a discussion on Mozilla's online bug forum. “My understanding is that Oracle may or may not be aware of the details of the same-origin exploit. As of now, we have no ETA for a fix for the Java plugin.”
Network

Submission + - Large ISPs Profit From BitTorrent Traffic (torrentfreak.com)

Submitted by
kijitah
kijitah writes: "Ernesto at TorrentFreak writes: 'A new report published by Northwestern University and Telefónica Research discovered some BitTorrent trends worth sharing. During a 2-year period the researchers monitored an unprecedented sample of 500,000 people in 169 countries. Aside from showing that BitTorrent users download more and more data, the report also finds that large ISPs including Comcast are actually making money off BitTorrent traffic.'

Check out the presentation slides or paper!"

Submission + - Boeing to Deliver First 787 (cnn.com)

Submitted by
mosb1000
mosb1000 writes: "Boeing will be delivering their first 787 to All Nippon Airways next month. The 787 is the first commercial airliner to be made from carbon fiber composites, and has been delayed for years because if Boeing's extensive outsourcing of the project."
Space

Submission + - Astronomers Find Largest Reservoir of Water (nasa.gov)

Submitted by gerddie
gerddie writes: Two teams of astronomers have discovered the largest and farthest reservoir of water ever detected in the universe. The water, equivalent to 140 trillion times all the water in the world's ocean, surrounds a huge, feeding black hole, called a quasar, more than 12 billion light-years away.

One team, lead by Matt Bradford, made their observations starting in 2008, using an instrument called "Z-Spec" at the California Institute of Technology’s Submillimeter Observatory, a 33-foot (10-meter) telescope near the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii. Follow-up observations were made with the Combined Array for Research in Millimeter-Wave Astronomy (CARMA), an array of radio dishes in the Inyo Mountains of Southern California.

The second group led, by Dariusz Lisused, used the Plateau de Bure Interferometer in the French Alps to find water. In 2010, this team serendipitously detected water in APM 8279+5255, observing one spectral signature. Bradford's team was able to get more information about the water, including its enormous mass, because they detected several spectral signatures of the water.
Books

Submission + - Amazon Math Trick "Doubles" Kindle Battery Life (cnet.com) 2

Submitted by destinyland
destinyland writes: Amazon just doubled the reported battery life for their Kindle digital readers — but they did it by cutting the estimated daily usage in half! Monday Amazon's competitor, Barnes and Noble, had released a new touch-screen version of their Nook reader, and C|Net notes that apparently Amazon "took issue with how its competitor was calculating and presenting its battery life numbers." When Barnes and Noble claimed that the Nook's charge lasted twice as long based on a half hour a day of usage, Amazon simply recalculated the Kindle's battery life using the same formula. By Wednesday, Barnes and Noble was insisting that the Nook's charge still lasted twice as long as the Kindle's, "If that’s true, then Barnes and Noble mangled the launch of their touch-screen Nook," reports one Kindle blog, "by botching their description of one of its main selling points."
Firefox

Submission + - Firefox Gets Faster Builds - To Be Fast As Windows (digitizor.com)

Submitted by dkd903
dkd903 writes: Mozilla's Mike Hommey has announced on his blog that his team at Mozilla has finally managed to get the Linux builds of Firefox to use GCC 4.5 with aggressive optimization and profile guided optimization enabled. All this simply means that we can now expect a faster and less sluggish Firefox browser on Linux (both 32 bit and 64 bit systems).
Space

Submission + - Earth Has a Stalker (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Don't panic, but Earth has a celestial stalker. An asteroid discovered last fall moves in roughly the same orbit as Earth does. However, there's no need for a restraining order. Computer models indicate that for the foreseeable future, the object will stay at least 19 million kilometers away from our planet and, therefore, doesn't threaten a collision. Simulations suggest that unlike the paths followed by three other known asteroids in such orbits, the newly-discovered asteroid's orbit has been stable for at least 250,000 years and will likely remain so for at least 200,000 years into the future.
Space

Submission + - Star falls into black hole (tgdaily.com)

Submitted by thodelu
thodelu writes: Astronomers are poring over data from what they say is one of the most puzzling cosmic blasts ever observed. Since Sunday, April 3, it has brightened by more than five times. The astronomers initial theory is that the unusual blast likely arose when a star wandered too close to its galaxy's central black hole.
NASA

Submission + - Discovery heads into retirement (spaceflightnow.com)

Submitted by dweezil-n0xad
dweezil-n0xad writes: Technicians in bay No. 2 of Kennedy Space Center's Orbiter Processing Facility remove shuttle Discovery's forward reaction control system (FRCS) on March 22 as part of the ship's transition and retirement processing. The FRCS will be completely cleaned of all toxic fuel and oxidizer chemicals, which are used for the steering jet system while a shuttle is in orbit. NASA says the FRCS will then be put back into Discovery to help prepare the shuttle for future public display.
Space

Submission + - Two Planets Found Sharing One Orbit (newscientist.com)

Submitted by dweezil-n0xad
dweezil-n0xad writes: Buried in the flood of data from the Kepler telescope is a planetary system unlike any seen before. Two of its apparent planets share the same orbit around their star. If the discovery is confirmed, it would bolster a theory that Earth once shared its orbit with a Mars-sized body that later crashed into it, resulting in the moon's formation.
Microsoft

Submission + - Is Qt dead in the water? (zdnet.com)

Submitted by anandrajan
anandrajan writes: Now that Nokia has announced a broad partnership with Microsoft to bring Windows Mobile 7 to their devices, what does this mean for Qt (since Symbian/Meego relied heavily on Qt)?

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