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Hardware

Wikileaks Releases Early Atomic Bomb Diagram 429

An anonymous reader writes "Wikileaks has released a diagram of the first atomic weapon, as used in the Trinity test and subsequently exploded over the Japanese city of Nagasaki, together with an extremely interesting scientific analysis. Wikileaks has not been able to fault the document or find reference to it elsewhere. Given the high quality of other Wikileaks submissions, the document may be what it purports to be, or it may be a sophisticated intelligence agency fraud, designed to mislead the atomic weapons development programs of countries like Iran. The neutron initiator is particularly novel. 'When polonium is crushed onto beryllium by explosion, reaction occurs between polonium alpha emissions and beryllium leading to Carbon-12 & 1 neutron. This, in practice, would lead to a predictable neutron flux, sufficient to set off device.'"
Education

Teachers Give ERP Implementations Failing Grades 169

theodp writes "Nine months after the Los Angeles Unified School District launched SAP HR and Payroll as part of a larger $132M ERP rollout, LAUSD employees are still being overpaid, underpaid or going unpaid. In June, about 30,000 paychecks were issued with errors, falling somewhat short of the Mission Statement 'to effectively deliver services to meet the payroll needs of all District employees serving our students.' Meanwhile, a $17M PeopleSoft-based payroll implementation has been making life miserable for Chicago Public Schools teachers and staff since last April, including June retirees who were stiffed for more than $35M. It's been a bad computer year for CPS staff, who also had to contend with a new $60M system that wasn't up to the task of taking attendance."
Mars

Terabytes of Mars Pictures Released to Public 137

Riding with Robots writes "The team that runs the high-rez camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has just released more than 1,200 Mars images to the Planetary Data System, NASA's mission data archive. The team has also released 1.7 Terabytes of data to a user-friendly site that allows users to quickly home in on each image, most of which are a gigabyte-sized files measuring 20,000 by 50,000 pixels. Not all the images have been thoroughly studied yet: in the announcement, the camera's lead scientist said, 'These images must contain hundreds of important discoveries about Mars. We just need time to realize what they are.'"
Google

Submission + - Google Deletes Rogue Ads, Dangers Persist

An anonymous reader writes: Google has removed ads that appear alongside Google search results that re-directed users to malicious sites. But, according to security experts, the fix is temporary and search engine users should not assume sponsored links are all trustworthy.

http://blogs.pcworld.com/staffblog/archives/004248 .html

"Search engines are just too easy a target for bad guys," says Roger Thompson of Exploit Security Labs. On April 25, Exploit Prevention Labs reported that malware distributors were using advertisements placed via Google's automated AdWords system to infect unsuspecting end-users with spyware designed to capture bank login user names and passwords.
Supercomputing

Submission + - Mouse brain simulated on computer

philippic writes: The BBC is reporting that "US researchers have simulated half a virtual mouse brain on a supercomputer. The scientists ran a "cortical simulator" that was as big and as complex as half of a mouse brain on the BlueGene L supercomputer."
Amiga

Submission + - Fred Fish Died

just another Amiga user writes: "It seems Fred Fish (Amiga Fish disks, gcc, gdb, binutils) passed away on Friday, 20 April 2007:

http://www.diveadx.com/ documents his cruises on a Nordhavn trawler.

http://www.amiga.org/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?p ost_id=441811&topic_id=37582&forum=22, look for the comment by his wife Michelle.

http://www.nabble.com/Fred-Fish-will-be-missed-t36 49533.html, by his son.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Fish, Wiki entry."

Feed Viacom Promises To Be More Mindful Of Fair Use On YouTube (techdirt.com)

When Viacom took down 100,000 videos from YouTube claiming they were infringing, one problem was that there were a number of false positives where they forced videos offline that weren't infringing at all. In one case, the EFF and others sued over the removal of a parody of the Colbert report, and Viacom bizarrely claimed that it hadn't sent a takedown about it despite a ton of evidence that it had. Eventually Viacom admitted that it had, in fact, accidentally sent the takedown. In response, the company has convinced the EFF to drop the lawsuit after promising to manually review all videos before sending takedown notices, training those who review the videos to understand fair use and publicly stating that it has no problem with videos that are "creative, newsworthy or transformative" and are "a limited excerpt for non commercial purposes." In other words, it's basically everything the EFF wanted, and now we'll see if Viacom lives up to the promise.
United States

Submission + - Shooting at Virginia Tech leaves at least 32 dead

marcelo writes: A gunman massacred 32 people at Virginia Tech in the deadliest shooting rampage in modern U.S. history Monday, cutting down his victims in two attacks two hours apart before the university could grasp what was happening and warn students.
The Courts

Submission + - EliteTorrents Uploader Faces 5 Years in Jail

Mike writes: TorrentFreak reports: A man from Columbus, Georgia has pleaded guilty to two felonies connected to the distribution of copyright works via the EliteTorrents BitTorrent tracker, which was shut down by the FBI in 2005. As a major uploader he faces 5 years in jail plus a $250,000 fine.

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