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Submission + - Google challenges us on the Future of Energy (ieee.org) 1

Submitted by TheRealHocusLocus
TheRealHocusLocus writes: Google's Ross Koningstein and David Fork have published a interesting article at IEE Spectrum that describes the impetus behind the REC Initiative and sobering conclusions on the most popular renewable energy sources today. It also issues a challenge: not only must we find a source that is theoretically cheaper than coal, "What’s needed, we concluded, are reliable zero-carbon energy sources so cheap that the operators of power plants and industrial facilities alike have an economic rationale for switching over soon---say, within the next 40 years."

It makes good sense, a 40 year deadline. Energy is the catalyst of our modern life, as substantial as any physical product. Cheap base load electricity delivered by grid is the running water of the industrial age. Its effect on quality of life and economic health is analogous to the effect of clean drinking water on public health. Robert Hargraves is one who has also been promoting a carbon-neutral energy source that might provide electricity cheaper than coal and provide raw process heat for making synfuels. What other game-changing ideas are out there?

Submission + - 20 years: is this the oldest blog still active? (sjgames.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Steve Jackson, over at Steve Jackson Games (you may remember them getting raided by the Secret Service back in 1990 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S..., or GURPS, Car Wars,Munchkin, etc...) has been updating their Daily Illuminator blog for 20+ years. OK, 20+1 day, but still. He makes the claim that their blog is the oldest still active and I figured Slashdot would be best suited to validate or refute this claim.

So gang, is there an older blog than this one? Is there a ranking by age somewhere that is simply overlooked?

Submission + - Activists Discover Evidence of St. Petersburg's River of Poop (globalvoicesonline.org)

Submitted by Okian Warrior
Okian Warrior writes: Two weeks ago, a group of St. Petersburg ecologists conducted a test in Novoye Devyatkino, a suburb about 12 miles outside the city, of the local sewer system. In a study they titled “Feces Travel,” the activists dropped ten miniaturized, waterproofed GPS-tracking units down the toilet of a single apartment home and began mapping the devices’ signals.

On their website, the ecologists claim the trackers spilled out directly into the open-air waterways outside the building, without encountering even the most rudimentary sewage filtration. From Novoye Devyatkino, five of the devices reached the open waters of Neva Bay, where the units’ batteries appear to have died.

Submission + - Space rock impacts not random (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: When it comes to small space rocks blowing up in Earth’s atmosphere, not all days are created equal. Scientists have found that, contrary to what they thought, such events are not random, and these explosions may occur more frequently on certain days. Rather than random occurrences, many large airbursts might result from collisions between Earth and streams of debris associated with small asteroids or comets. The new findings may help astronomers narrow their search for objects in orbits that threaten Earth, the researchers suggest.

Submission + - Intel Is Hitting The Wall On Moore's Law (itworld.com)

Submitted by jfruh
jfruh writes: Fifty years ago, Gordon Moore observed that the number of transistors engineers were managing to squeeze onto a chip was doubling every two years. Four years later, Moore co-founded Intel, a company that elevated this observation into a law and put it at the heart of its business. But now, with chip engineering reaching the point where components are measured in terms of individual molecules, Moore's Law may have reached it's limits — with dire results for Intel.

Submission + - Bidding in Government Auction of Airwaves Reaches $34 Billion

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A government auction of airwaves for use in mobile broadband has blown through presale estimates, becoming the biggest auction in the Federal Communications Commission’s history and signaling that wireless companies expect demand for Internet access by smartphones to continue to soar. And it’s not over yet. Companies bid more than $34 billion as of Friday afternoon for six blocks of airwaves, totaling 65 megahertz of the electromagnetic spectrum, being sold by the F.C.C. That total is more than three times the $10.5 billion reserve price that the commission put on the sale, the first offering of previously unavailable airwaves in six years.

Submission + - Win8.1 broken update redux - Severe problems with November Update

Submitted by BUL2294
BUL2294 writes: Microsoft's latest update for Windows 8.1, KB3000850 / November Update has been causing a myriad of problems with certain programs. The difficulties are being discussed on Microsoft Community Support, Reddit, MSFN, Neowin, and ASKVG.

Looking over the forums, this update breaks Avast Antivirus (forum discussion) and Classic Shell (forum discussion). Problems with Avast are particularly acute and may impact System Restore. Other prevalent issues include the inability to sleep or shutdown, issues with Internet Explorer and Control Panel, and inability to boot into Safe Mode to roll back the update. Some users have indicated that they need to reinstall Windows 8.1 completely. At least Microsoft learned the error of their ways after the April & August updates, and has made KB3000850 optional (for now)...

Submission + - How about paid, open-source style development...

Submitted by enbody
enbody writes: A year-old startup, Assembly, is built on the premise of creating products using open-source style development, but structured in a way that you get paid for your contributions. Open-source development is well-known in the Slashdot community, as are a variety of ways to earn a living around open-source, such as support. What is new here is being paid as part of the development, and not just for coding — your contribution might be as project manager or sales. A nice description with video showed up today on the Verge. Of course, the devil is in the details, but they have products so someone in Slashdot land may be interested. (Bias warning: I know one of these guys.)

Submission + - Critical XSS Flaws Patched in WordPress and Popular Plug-in (itworld.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: The WordPress development team on Thursday released critical security updates that address an XSS vulnerability in the comment boxes of WordPress posts and pages. An attacker could exploit this flaw to create comments with malicious JavaScript code embedded in them that would get executed by the browsers of users seeing those comments. 'In the most obvious scenario the attacker leaves a comment containing the JavaScript and some links in order to put the comment in the moderation queue,' said Jouko Pynnonen, the security researcher who found the flaw.

Submission + - Scientists Discover Virus That Makes People Stupid

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: The Sunday Times reports that scientists have found a virus that appears to infect human brains, reducing people’s thinking power including their spatial awareness and attention span. The virus, ATCV-1, seems to alter genes governing brain function. “Unexpectedly, we identified DNA sequences of ATCV-1, an algal virus not previously known to infect humans, in oropharyngeal [throat] samples from healthy adults,” said the researchers. “ATCV-1 was associated with a modest but measurable decrease in cognitive functioning.” By using modern bioinformatics analysis, the genes effected were found to be involved in pathways related to dopamine receptor signaling, cyclin-dependent kinase 5 (CDK5) signaling, antigen presentation, immune cell adhesion, and eukaryotic initiation factor 2. Note that dopamine is a central component of many psychiatric conditions.

Submission + - Book review: Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World's First

Submitted by benrothke
benrothke writes: Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the Worlds First Digital Weapon

Author: Kim Zetter

Pages: 448

Publisher: Crown

Rating: 10/10

Reviewer: Ben Rothke

ISBN: 978-0770436179

Summary: Outstanding narrative about Stuxnet — how it was developed, quarantined and debugged





A word to describe the book Takedown: The Pursuit and Capture of Americas Most Wanted Computer Outlaw was hyperbole. While the general storyline from the 1996 book was accurate, filler was written that created the legend of Kevin Mitnick. This in turn makes the book a near work of historical fiction.



Much has changed in nearly 20 years and Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the Worlds First Digital Weaponhas certainly upped the ante for accurate computer security journalism.



The book is a fascinating read and author Kim Zetters attention to detail and accuracy is superb. In the inside cover of the book, Kevin Mitnick describes this as an ambitious, comprehensive and engrossing book. The irony is not lost in that Mitnick was dogged by misrepresentations in Markoff's book.



For those that want to know the basics about Stuxnet, its Wikipediaentry will suffice. For a deeper look, the book take a detailed look at how the Stuxnet worm of 2010 came to be, how it was written, discovered and deciphered, and what it means for the future and provides nearly everything known to date about Stuxnet.



The need to create Stuxnet was the understanding that a nuclear Iran was dangerous to the world. The book notes that it just wasn't the US and Israel that wanted a nuclear free Iran; Egypt and Saudi Arabia were highly concerned about the dangers a nuclear Iran would bring to the region.



What is eminently clear is that Iran chronically lied about their nuclear intentions and actions (chapter 17 notes that former United Kingdom Prime Minister Gordon Brown told the international community that they had to do something over Iran's serial deception of many years) and that the United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is powerless to do anything, save for monitoring and writing reports.



Just last week, President Obama said a big gap remains in international nuclear negotiations with Iran and he questioned whether talks would succeed. He further said "are we going to be able to close this final gap so that (Iran) can reenter the international community, sanctions can be slowly reduced and we have verifiable, lock tight assurances that they cant develop a nuclear weapon, theres still a big gap. We may not be able to get there". It's that backdrop to which Stuxnet was written.



While some may debate if Stuxnet was indeed the worlds first digital weapon, it's undeniable that it is the first piece of known malware that could be considered a cyber-weapon. Stuxnet was unlike any other previous malware. Rather than just hijacking targeted computers or stealing information from them, it created physical destruction on centrifuges the software controlled.



At just over 400 pages, the book is a bit wordy at times, but Zetter does a wonderful job of keeping the book extremely readable and the narrative enthralling. Writing about debugging virus code, Siemens industrial programmable logic controllers (PLC) and Step7 software (which was what Stuxnet was attacking) could easily be mind-numbingly boring, save for Zetter's ability to make it a compelling read.



While a good part of the book details the research Symantec, Kaspersky Lab and others did to debug Stuxnet, the book doesn't have and software code, which makes it readable for the non-programmer. The book is technical and Zetter gets into the elementary details of how Stuxnet operated; from reverse engineering, digital certificates and certificate authorities, cryptographic hashing and much more. The non-technical reader certainly won't be overwhelmed, but at the same time might not be able to appreciate what went into designing and making Stuxnet work.



As noted earlier, the book is extremely well researched and all significant claims are referenced. The book is heavily footnoted, which makes the book much more readable than the use of endnotes. Aside from the minor error of mistakenly calling Kurt Gödel a cryptographer on page 295, he was a logician; Zetter's painstaking attention to detail is to be commended.



Whoever wrote Stuxnet counted on the Iranians not having the skills to uncover or decipher the malicious attacks on their own. But as Zetter writes, they also didn't anticipate the crowdsourced wisdom of the hive — courtesy of the global cybersecurity community that would handle the detection and analysis for them. That detection and analysis spanned continents and numerous countries.



The book concludes with chapter 19 — Digital Pandora — which departs from the details of Stuxnet and gets into the bigger picture of what cyber-warfare means and its intended and unintended consequences. There are no simple answers here and the stakes are huge.



The chapter quotes Marcus Ranum who is outspoken on the topic of cyber-warfare. At the 2014 MISTI Infosec World Conference, Ranum gave a talk on Cyberwar: Putting Civilian Infrastructure on the Front Lines, Again. Be it the topic or Marcus just being Marcus, a third of the participants left within the first 15 minutes. But they should have stayed, as Ranum, agree with him or not, provided some riveting insights on the topic.



The book leave with two unresolved questions; who did it, and how did it get into the Nantanz enrichment facility.



It is thought the US with some assistance from Israel created Stuxnet; but Zetter also writes that Germany and Great Britain may have done the work or at least provided assistance.



It's also unknown how Stuxnet got into the air-gapped facility. It was designed to spread via an infected USB flash drive. It's thought that since they couldn't get into the facility, what needed to be done was to infect computers belonging to a few outside firms that sold devices that would in turn be connected to the facility. The book identified a few of these companies, but it's still unclear if they were the ones, or the perpetrators somehow had someone on the inside.



As to zero day in the title, what was unique about Stuxnet is that it contained 5 zero day exploits. Zero day is also relevant in that Zetter describes the black and gray markets of firms that discover zero-day vulnerabilities who in turn sell them to law enforcement and intelligence agencies.



Creating Stuxnet was a huge challenge that took scores of programmers from a nation state many months to create. Writing a highly readable and engrossing book about the obscure software vulnerabilities that it exploited was also a challenge, albeit one that few authors could do efficaciously. InCountdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the Worlds First Digital Weapon, Kim Zetter has written one of the best computer security narratives; a book you will likely find quite hard to put down.





Reviewed by Ben Rothke

Submission + - Earthquake sensors track urban traffic, too (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Besides the roar of engines and honking of angry drivers, rush-hour traffic also makes underground “noise.” We can’t hear most of these ground vibrations, but seismic sensors can. With a network of 5300 geophones—devices that convert ground movements into voltage—researchers recorded 1 week’s worth of urban vibrations in a 70-km2 area of Long Beach, California. By analyzing the seismic data, they could measure how fast individual trains were moving between stations, count the number of planes landing and taking off at the airport, and calculate the average speed of vehicles on a 10-lane highway. Without GPS or cameras, seismic systems could allay privacy concerns by tracking urban activity in an anonymous way.

Submission + - The oldest star in the Universe

Submitted by StartsWithABang
StartsWithABang writes: No, we haven't found it yet. But there are good reasons that we probably never will, and that even if we did find it, we probably wouldn't be able to recognize it as such. Come learn the nuances of what we think it should look like, what our prospects for hunting them are, and what the closest is that we've come so far!

Submission + - MIT professor advocates ending Asteroid Redirect Mission to fund asteroid survey (examiner.com)

Submitted by MarkWhittington
MarkWhittington writes: Professor Richard Binzel published a commentary in the journal Nature that called for two things. He proposed that NASA cancel the Asteroid Redirect Mission currently planned for the early 2020s. Instead, he would like the asteroid survey mandated by the George E. Brown, Jr. Near-Earth Object Survey Act of 2005, part of the 2005 NASA Authorization Act, funded at $200 million a year. Currently NASA funds the survey at $20 million a year, considered inadequate to complete the identification of 90 percent of hazardous near-Earth objects 140 meters or greater by 2020 as mandated by the law.

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