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Submission + - Super Earths discovered orbiting 61 Virginis (sciencedaily.com) 1

Submitted by likuidkewl
likuidkewl writes: Two super Earths, 5 and 7.5 times the size of our home, were found to be orbiting 61 Virginis a mere 28 light years away.

"These detections indicate that low-mass planets are quite common around nearby stars. The discovery of potentially habitable nearby worlds may be just a few years away," said Vogt, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UCSC.

And yes, it was hard not to type virgins.
Spam

Submission + - The Coming Spam Pandemic (threatpost.com)

Submitted by Trailrunner7
Trailrunner7 writes: Many spammers now have large staffs of people working on nothing but building out completely fake personas for non-existent users on social networking sites and blog networks. The spammers use these personas to create accounts on Twitter, Facebook, Blogspot and other sites that have high levels of user interaction. But these are not the easily identifiable spambots and fake profiles that have been cluttering these sites from the beginning. Instead, the personas have all of the attributes that one would expect in a real user, such as clearly defined interests, specific geographic locations, favorite bands and movies. "Their goal is to be right down the middle, not too high or too low on the radar," said Robert Hansen, a security researcher who discussed the new tactics during a webinar Wednesday put on by Black Hat and Dark Reading. Hansen, who has spoken with some of the spammers using these techniques, said that they can create as many as 500,000 to a million new personas in a single day.
Security

Submission + - Hackers Find Home in Amazon EC2 Cloud (infoworld.com)

Submitted by snydeq
snydeq writes: Security researchers have spotted the Zeus botnet running an unauthorized command and control center on Amazon's EC2 cloud computing infrastructure. This marks the first time Amazon Web Services' cloud infrastructure has been used for this type of illegal activity, according to threat researcher Don DeBolt. The hackers got onto Amazon's infrastructure by hacking into a Web site hosted on Amazon's servers and then secretly installing their command and control infrastructure.

Submission + - ACLU loses largest donor

Submitted by conspirator57
conspirator57 writes: For those of you who are big fans of civil liberties, e.g. supporters of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) eff.org, it may come as a downer to know that the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) aclu.org has lost it's single largest donor to the financial crisis and burgeoning depression. This person was responsible for about 25% of ACLU's annual budget. Please support them as you are able.

Full story from Glenn Greenwald:
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2009/12/10/aclu/index.html

Comment Privacy International (Score 1) 1359

by goltz20707 (#28559709) Attached to: Emigrating To a Freer Country?
PI (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy_International) publishes a list of countries by Privacy Index. The UK is 1.5 ("Endemic surveillance societies", just ahead of Singapore), and the US is 2.0 ("Extensive surveillance societies", between Israel and Thailand). Based on that list, your best bets are Germany (3.9) or Canada (3.6) (both in the category "Consistently upholds human rights standards").
Windows

Microsoft Discontinues Windows 3.x 384

Posted by kdawson from the an-application-has-expectedly-quit dept.
rugatero writes "The BBC reports that, as of last Saturday, Microsoft is no longer issuing licenses for the 18-year-old Windows 3.x. Many here may well be surprised to learn that anyone still has use for the antiquated software, but it seems to have found a home in a number of embedded systems — including cash registers and the in-flight entertainment systems on some long-haul passenger jets (Virgin and Qantas are cited). Considering Linux's credentials as an embedded OS, this news could very well indicate the possibility of more migrations in the pipeline."
Transportation

Tesla Motors Shaken Up, Laying Off 491

Posted by kdawson from the i-want-my-i-want-my dept.
tjstork writes "Tesla Motors, the darling of technorati for its high performance electric car, may be about to go belly up. Venture capital is cut off, layoffs are under way, and construction plans are being stretched out. Elon Musk has ousted the CEO and taken the reins, blaming the global credit crunch."

US Amazon.com Website Down For Over 1 Hour 228

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the there-goes-the-bottom-line dept.
CorporalKlinger writes "CNET News is reporting that Amazon's US website, Amazon.com, has been unreachable since 10:30 AM PDT today. As of posting, visiting www.amazon.com produces an 'Http/1.1 Service Unavailable' message. According to CNET, "Based on last quarter's revenue of $4.13 billion, a full-scale global outage would cost Amazon more than $31,000 per minute on average." Some of Amazon's international websites still appear to be working, and some pages on the US Amazon.com site load if accessed using HTTPS instead of HTTP."
Privacy

McCain Supports Warrantless Domestic Surveillance 650

Posted by timothy from the just-lookin'-just-listenin' dept.
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "While there have been shifting reports about McCain's view on warrantless wiretapping, nothing could be clearer than the latest comment by McCain adviser Doug Holtz-Eakin, who said, 'We do not know what lies ahead in our nation's fight against radical Islamic extremists, but John McCain will do everything he can to protect Americans from such threats, including asking the telecoms for appropriate assistance to collect intelligence against foreign threats to the United States as authorized by Article II of the Constitution.' Article II, of course, is what Bush has argued gives the President virtually unlimited power during war, and McCain has already voted in favor of Telecom Immunity, though he sometimes mentions, to those asking for accountability, wanting to hold hearings about what the telecoms did."
Idle

Man Denied Boarding Because of Transformers Shirt 2

Posted by samzenpus
Brad Jayakody was told he would have to change his shirt if he wanted to catch his flight to Dusseldorf, Germany. The shirt that security at Heathrow got upset about depicts the Transformers character Optimus Prime holding a gun. Brad said, "I was flabbergasted. I thought the supervisor would come over and see sense, but he didn't. After I changed he said if I changed back I would be arrested." I would understand if the guy was wearing a Megatron shirt, after all that guy turns into a gun which could be very dangerous but Prime? There is no way a semi could fit on a passenger plane it's just silly.
Data Storage

FreeBSD Begins Switch to Subversion 120

Posted by timothy from the subvert-the-dominant-paradigm dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The FreeBSD Project has begun the switch of its source code management system from CVS to Subversion. At this point in time, FreeBSD's developers are making changes to the base system in the Subversion repository. We have a replication system in place that exports our work to the legacy CVS tree on a continuous basis. People who are using our extensive CVS based distribution network (including anoncvs, CVSup, cvsweb, ftp) will not be interrupted by our work-in-progress. We are committed to maintaining the existing CVS based distribution system for at least the support lifetime of all existing 'stable' branches. Security and errata patches will continue to be made available in their usual CVS locations."
Science

New Superconductor Found "Immune To Magnetism" 201

Posted by kdawson from the north-south-it's-all-the-same-to-me dept.
Lisandro sends in news that testing of the new class of superconductors we discussed a while back (compounds of iron, lanthanum, and rare earths) has turned up a major surprise: magnetism doesn't shut off the superconducting state. Magnetic fields represent one of three factors that limit expanded applications for superconductors (the others are current density and temperature dependence.) The research will appear in Nature; here's a preprint (PDF).

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