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Submission + - IE6 Finally Falls Below 5% Market Share

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The third quarter of 2013's browser war is now over. The latest market share numbers from Net Applications show Internet Explorer was the biggest winner last month, and that its most hated version finally fell below the 5 percent mark. IE7 was down 0.17 percentage points to 1.37 percent and IE6 slipped a huge 1.22 percentage points to 4.86 percent.

Submission + - Captain Cyborg is back! Kevin Warwick predicts the future.

Submitted by richi
richi writes: Kevin Warwick: His name raises extremes of opinion.

For more than a decade, this highly controversial cybernetics professor has been making waves. His high-profile experiments—and even higher-profile claim that he’s the first living cyborg—earned him column inches and unflattering nicknames.

In this Forbes interview, "Captain Cyborg" talks about exploding motorcycles, wireless power, and fish'n'chips.

Submission + - Symantec seizes part of massive botnet used for BitCoin mining and click fraud (computerworld.com.au)

Submitted by angry tapir
angry tapir writes: The cybercriminals behind ZeroAccess, one of the largest botnets in existence, have lost access to more than a quarter of the infected machines they controlled because of an operation executed by security researchers from Symantec. According to Symantec, the ZeroAccess botnet consists of more than 1.9 million infected computers and is used primarily to perform click fraud and Bitcoin mining in order to generate revenues estimated at tens of millions of dollars per year.

Submission + - Congress reaches agreement... on helium (npr.org)

Submitted by gbrumfiel
gbrumfiel writes: With just hours to go before a government shutdown, Congress has finally found something it can agree on. Unfortunately, that something isn't a budget: it's helium. the US holds vast helium reserves which it sells to scientists and private industry. According to NPR, a new law was needed to allow the helium to continue to flow. Congress passed it late last week, but only after a year-long lobbying effort and intense debate (and in the end, Senator Ted Cruz opposed the measure). Can a new bipartisanship rise out of this cooperation? Or will hot air prevail on Capitol Hill? *Insert your helium joke here*
NASA

Submission + - Vesta is a Baby Planet, Not an Asteroid (discovery.com)

Submitted by
astroengine
astroengine writes: "Vesta, the second largest object in the main asteroid belt, has an iron core, a varied surface, layers of rock and possibly a magnetic field — all signs of a planet in the making, not an asteroid. This is the conclusion of an international team of scientists treated to a virtual front row seat at Vesta for the past 10 months, courtesy of NASA's Dawn robotic probe. Their findings were presented during a NASA press conference on Thursday. As to why Vesta never made it to full planethood, scientists point to Jupiter. When the giant gas planet formed, nearby bodies such as Vesta found their orbits perturbed. "Jupiter started to act like a spoon in a pot, stirring up the asteroid belt and the asteroids started bumping into one another," Dawn lead scientist Christopher Russell, with the University of California, Los Angeles, told Discovery News. "If they're just out there gently orbiting and everything is going smoothly, then without Jupiter in the picture, they would gather mass and get bigger and bigger and bigger. But with Jupiter there, stirring the pot, then the asteroids start bumping into one another and breaking apart, so nothing grew in that region, but started to shrink.""

Submission + - The Trouble With ACTA: Geist's Analysis of Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (michaelgeist.ca)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Earlier this year, Canadian law professor Michael Geist appeared at the European Parliament's INTA Committee Workshop on ACTA and delivered a ten-minute takedown of the agreement. Geist's full report to the European Parliament has now been released. It conclues that ACTA's harm greatly exceeds its potential benefits and recommends rejecting the agreement in its current form.
Encryption

Submission + - Buyer's Guide to Full Disk Encryption (esecurityplanet.com)

Submitted by
kongshem
kongshem writes: "Hardly a week goes by without news of a security breach stemming from the loss or theft of a storage medium containing confidential yet unencrypted data. Here's one recent example: http://www.esecurityplanet.com/network-security/california-dccs-suffers-security-breach.html

It begs the question: Why don't more organizations encrypt their hard drives and other storage media? It's compatively painless to do so, as this article explains:

http://www.esecurityplanet.com/mobile-security/buyers-guide-to-full-disk-encryption.html"
Cloud

Submission + - Features in Cloud Storage for Developers

Submitted by fikicc
fikicc writes: I'm tossing around the idea of entering the already crowded marketplace of cloud storage and file sharing. The difference is that I've noticed a lack of tools that are really useful to developers in this space. So, tell me, what do you think is missing from current file hosting providers and what would make you switch from the solution you're currently using?

Submission + - Geiger Counter in an Airplane (youtube.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Borrowed a Soeks geiger counter from a friend to measure the radiation in the airplane ride from Flint Michigan (layover in Atlanta) and off from Atlanta to San Diego this past Feb. 22, shortly after the Chicago area and San Onfre (near San Diego) nuclear plants both released radioactive steam. I turned it on at 10,000 feet when the pilot announces you can turn electronic devices on. We cruised up to 32.000 feet. Radiation reached approx. 2.85 mcSv/h Microsiverts per hour. Considered Dangerous radiation.
Chrome

Submission + - How To Make Google Chrome Faster (techod.com)

Submitted by TECHOD
TECHOD writes: After I wrote a guide on making Firefox faster, I had few requests to write a tutorial on how to make Google Chrome faster, so here it is!
Chrome is already set up quite well, but there are a few things you can do to make it even faster

The first thing I’m going to cover is the advanced/hidden settings of Chrome. To access these, open a new tab and type “about:flags” into the address bar (without quotation marks).
You will see a list of settings with the word “enable” under each one. Enable the following:

Original article: How To Make Google Chrome Faster
Science

Submission + - Archaeologists Discover Lost Language (scienceworldreport.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Researchers working at Ziyaret Tepe, the probable site of the ancient Assyrian city of Tuhan, believe that the language may have been spoken by deportees originally from the Zagros Mountains, on the border of modern-day Iran and Iraq.

In keeping with a policy widely practised across the Assyrian Empire, these people may have been forcibly moved from their homeland and resettled in what is now south-east Turkey, where they would have been set to work building the new frontier city and farming its hinterland.
Privacy

Submission + - Newt Gingrich loves spam (computerworld.com) 1

Submitted by
richi
richi writes: "Newt Gingrich's Newt 2012 organization is aiding and abetting spammers. Hard to believe, I know, but it turns out his organization is offering targeted email addresses to spammers.

Now that Newt Gingrich has conceded defeat... ahem, sorry, suspended his campaign, Newt 2012 is thought to be at least $4,300,000 in the hole. So, in a bizarre twist of moral logic, it's selling its email lists to spammers."

Submission + - Univ. of Minnesota compiles database of peer-reviewed, open-acces textbooks (insidehighered.com) 1

Submitted by
BigVig209
BigVig209 writes: "Univ. of MN is cataloging open-access textbooks and enticing faculty to review the texts by offering $500 per review. Despite the author calling the open-source rather than open-access, this may be the first time a land-grant, public university makes this kind of resource available to faculty and students."

Submission + - Does Pirahã conform to Chomsky's universal grammar or not? (nature.com)

Submitted by scibri
scibri writes: Pirahã, an obscure language spoken by just 400 people in Brazil, is offering the sternest test yet of Noam Chomsky's theory that humans are hard-wired with a 'universal grammar'. Daniel Everett, a former missionary and linguistic anthropologist who has spent 30 years studying the language, says Pirahã grammar is much more rooted in culture. But another linguist, Uli Sauerland, disagrees, saying he has found evidence of the universal grammar in Pirahã. The dispute highlights the extent to which those working to preserve threatened languages are dependent on the tiny number of researchers who have actually studied them.

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