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Submission + - Animal Behaviour Specialists Map Out The Social Networks of Cows

Submitted by KentuckyFC
KentuckyFC writes: In a classic The Far Side cartoon by Gary Larson, a group of cows stand on two legs chatting by the side of a road when a lookout shouts “car”. The cows immediately drop to a four-legged stance as the car passes by and return to their usual position and continue chatting when it has gone. Now a team of animal behaviour specialists have discovered that the social lives of cattle are more complex than biologists had ever imagined (although not quite into Larson territory). These guys attached RFID tags to 70 Holstein-Fresian calves kept in three pens. They then monitored the position of each cow for a week to see which other animals they tended to have contact with. This allowed them to construct the social network for the cows with unprecedented detail. It turns out these social networks have many of the properties of human social networks. Cows have preferred partners who they tend to spend more time with and 60 per cent of their contacts occur during feeding which amounts to only 6 per cent of their time. The work has important applications. It should help biologists more accurately model how disease spreads through herds of cattle and therefore better understand how to tackle epidemics. Udderly fascinating (cough).

Submission + - Malaysian passenger plane reportedly shot down over Ukraine (theverge.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Russian newswire service Interfax is reporting that a Malaysian passenger plane carrying 295 people was shot down with a Buk ground-to-air missile over Ukraine near the Russian border. The Associated Press cites an adviser to Ukraine's Interior Minister as the source.

First reports are that it was mistaken for a Ukrainian AN-26.

Submission + - Defeating UEFI's SecureBoot (net-security.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: UEFI is ment to replace the BIOS firmware interface. But is it secure enough? Or, at least, more resilient than BIOS? Corey Kallenberg, Security Researcher for the MITRE Corporation explains how he and his team have been able to circumvent that protection on roughly half of the computers that have it enabled, in order to install a malicious bootkit, and what this means for the future of UEFI.

Submission + - Staffers at Nuclear Regulatory Commission Report Backlash After Dissent (govexec.com)

Submitted by mdsolar
mdsolar writes: "Seventy-five percent of Nuclear Regulatory Commission employees who participated in an internal survey said they received poor performance reviews after registering formal objections to agency decisions, a report made public Wednesday says.

For employees that object to policy, technical or administrative statements contained in agency documents working their way up the NRC management chain for approval, the agency has a formal "non-concurrence" process meant to ensure that the concerns of those staffers are heard.

According to the survey, which was conducted last year by the NRC Office of Enforcement, many of those surveyed about their own experience submitting formal objections through the program believed there had been negative consequences to doing so.

In addition to the three quarters of survey participants who reported poor performance reviews after raising objections, 63 percent felt they were excluded from work activities and 25 percent thought they were passed over for promotions.

Meanwhile, 25 percent said they were verbally abused by their supervisors or colleagues after submitting a formal objection, and only 32 percent said their views were fully considered before a decision was made."

Submission + - Open Source Robot OS Finds Niches From Farms To Space (itworld.com) 1

Submitted by jfruh
jfruh writes: Blue River Technology built a robot named LettuceBot that uses computer vision to kill unwanted lettuce plants in a field. Rather than build their creation from scratch, they built off of the Robot Operating System, an open source OS that, in the words of one engineer, 'allowed only a few engineers to write an entire system and receive our first check for service in only a few months.' With ROS robots starting to appear everywhere, including the International Space Station, it looks like open source may be making huge strides in this area.

Submission + - NSA knew about heartbleed two years ago

Submitted by Ric Aubern
Ric Aubern writes: So what we guessed was the case seems like it actually was according to this Bloomberg story. Can you say "separation of powers"? Very interesting is the article's bias against open source by describing the Internet's integrity as depending "on a small number of underfunded researchers who devote their energies to the projects."

Submission + - Bloomberg News: NSA has been using HeartBleed for years (bloomberg.com)

Submitted by jasonla
jasonla writes: We all knew this was coming, right? From the article:

"The U.S. National Security Agency knew for at least two years about a flaw in the way that many websites send sensitive information, now dubbed the Heartbleed bug, and regularly used it to gather critical intelligence, two people familiar with the matter said."

Submission + - The US nuclear weapons complex in disarray, disrepair, and perhaps dissolution (thebulletin.org)

Submitted by Lasrick
Lasrick writes: Kennette Benedict on the severe problems that plague the US nuclear weapons labs (Sandia, Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore, Oak Ridge, etc.). A main issue is the privatization of these labs. As NNSA director Bruce Held put it, 'I don’t think we need national laboratories to aspire to be the low-cost producer of widgets. I don’t think that’s why national laboratories exist...What we need national laboratories for is to take on really hard technical challenges that are facing our nation and our national policymakers—take on high-risk, hard problems that involve too much risk for the private sector to honestly support.' Good read.

Submission + - US takes out gang that used Zeus malware to steal millions (networkworld.com)

Submitted by coondoggie
coondoggie writes: The US Department of Justice today charged nine members of a group that used Zeus malware to infect thousands of business computers with Zeus malware and illegally siphon-off millions of dollars into over-seas bank accounts. The DoJ said an indictment was unsealed in connection with the arraignment this week at the federal courthouse in Lincoln, Neb., of two Ukrainian nationals, Yuriy Konovalenko, 31, and Yevhen Kulibaba, 36. Konovalenko and Kulibaba were recently extradited from the United Kingdom.

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