Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Sci-Fi

Michael Crichton Dead At 66 388

Posted by samzenpus from the velociraptors-confirm-it dept.
Many readers have submitted stories about the death of Michael Crichton. The 66-year-old author of Jurassic Park and The Andromeda Strain died unexpectedly Tuesday "after a courageous and private battle against cancer," a press release said. In addition to writing, he also directed such sci-fi classics as Westworld and Runaway. Crichton was married five times and had one child.

Feed Wired: Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement: Fact or Fiction? (wired.com)

From feed by wiredfeed
Dozens of public interest groups are urging the trade representatives from several nations, including the United States and European Union, to divulge the contents of a proposed treaty to strengthen intellectual property rights. The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement is said to criminalize peer-to-peer file sharing, allow iPods to be searched at borders and require internet service companies to monitor customers' online activities.
The Courts

Indian Woman Convicted of Murder By Brain Scan 453

Posted by CmdrTaco from the 1984-came-a-few-years-late dept.
Kaseijin writes "Neuroscientist Champadi Raman Mukundan claims his Brain Electrical Oscillations Signature test is so accurate, it can tell whether a person committed or only witnessed an act. In June, an Indian judge agreed, using BEOS to find a woman guilty of killing her former fiancé. Scientific experts are calling the decision 'ridiculous' and 'unconscionable,' protesting that Mukundan's work has not even been peer reviewed. How reliable should a test have to be, when eyewitnesses are notoriously fallible? Does a person have a right to privacy over their own memories, or should society's interest in holding criminals accountable come first?"
The Courts

Submission + - Indian Woman Convicted of Murder by Brain Scan (iht.com)

Submitted by
Kaseijin
Kaseijin writes: "Neuroscientist Champadi Raman Mukundan claims his Brain Electrical Oscillations Signature test is so accurate, it can tell whether a person committed or only witnessed an act. In June, an Indian judge agreed, using BEOS to find a woman guilty of killing her former fiancé. Scientific experts are calling the decision "ridiculous" and "unconscionable", protesting that Mukundan's work has not even been peer reviewed. How reliable should a test have to be, when eyewitnesses are notoriously fallible? Does a person have a right to privacy over their own memories, or should society's interest in holding criminals accountable come first?"

Feed Schneier: BlackBerry Giving Encryption Keys to Indian Government (schneier.com)

From feed by bsfeed
RIM encrypts e-mail between BlackBerry devices and the server the server with 236-bit AES encryption. The Indian government doesn't like this at all; they want to snoop on the data. RIM's response was basically: that's not possible. The Indian government's counter was: Then we'll ban BlackBerries. After months of threats, it looks like RIM is giving in to Indian demands...
Space

Submission + - Schoolboy Incorrect on Correcting NASA

Submitted by Aziabel
Aziabel writes: The Register reports: "Widespread media reports claim that a German schoolboy has recalculated the likelihood of a deadly planet-smasher asteroid hitting the Earth, and found the catastrophe is enormously more likely than NASA thought. The boy's sums were said to have been checked by both NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA), and found to be correct.
There's only one problem with the story: the kid's sums are in fact wrong, NASA's are right, and the ESA swear blind they never said any different. An ESA spokesman in Germany told the Reg this morning: "A small boy did do these calculations, but he made a mistake... NASA's figures are correct."
And NASA says: [The asteroid will pass] within the distance of Earth's geosynchronous satellites. However, because Apophis will pass interior to the positions of these satellites at closest approach, in a plane inclined at 40 degrees to the Earth's equator and passing outside the equatorial geosynchronous zone when crossing the equatorial plane, it does not threaten the satellites in that heavily populated region."
The Internet

Submission + - SPAM: Study: ISPs meddled with customers' Web traffic

Submitted by alphadogg
alphadogg writes: About one percent of the Web pages being delivered on the Internet are being changed in transit, sometimes in a harmful way, according to researchers at the University of Washington. In a paper, set to be delivered Wednesday, the researchers document some troubling practices. In July and August they tested data sent to about 50,000 computers and discovered that a small number of Internet service providers (ISPs) were injecting ads into Web pages on their networks.
Link to Original Source
Security

Submission + - Malicious microprocessor opens doors for attack (networkworld.com)

Submitted by BobB-nw
BobB-nw writes: For years, hackers have focused on finding bugs in computer software that give them unauthorized access to computer systems, but now there's another way to break in: Hack the microprocessor. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign researchers this week have demonstrated how they altered a computer chip to grant attackers back-door access to a computer. It would take a lot of work to make this attack succeed in the real world, but it would be virtually undetectable.
Technology (Apple)

Submission + - The iPhone SDK and free software: not a match

Submitted by kookjr
kookjr writes: Are you planning to develop software for the iPhone? If you want to develop Free Software, linux.com has a good review of the conflicts between Apple's Registered iPhone Developer Agreement and licenses like the GPL. This is important for people who may not read all the agreements they click Agree to.
Transportation

Submission + - BMW engines absorb and burn ambient air pollution (motorauthority.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: BMW has unveiled a new internal combustion engine design that not only produces near zero emissions, but also absorbs and burns ambient air pollutants. The ultra-clean engine debuts in the new mono-fuel Hydrogen 7 saloon and is on display at this week's World Congress meeting in Detroit. Based on the original BMW Hydrogen 7 bi-fuel version (petrol and hydrogen), the new mono-fuel vehicle's internal combustion engine is optimized to run solely on hydrogen and delivers the same performance, comfort, and safety as a regular production BMW 7 Series plus better mileage than its predecessor.
Security

Submission + - Adobe Flash Vulnerable To New Exploit Class (matasano.com)

Submitted by spikedLemur
spikedLemur writes: Security guru Mark Dowd of TAoSSA has figured out how to turn a class of DoS bugs into a code execution attack. He wrote a detailed PDF explaining how he used a NULL pointer dereference in Flash to create a 100% reliable cross-browser/platform exploit. The guys at Matasano have already discussed the technique in two detailed writeups, which I highly recommend for the casual reader. Since the root problem is an ignored malloc failure (a very common mistake) we can expect to see this bug class popping up in lot of software in the near future. You might also want to make sure your Flash installation has the most current patch, since almost everybody is vulnerable to this one.

Slashdot Top Deals

Top Ten Things Overheard At The ANSI C Draft Committee Meetings: (5) All right, who's the wiseguy who stuck this trigraph stuff in here?

Close