AdamWill writes "Mandriva is proud to announce the release of Mandriva Linux 2007 Spring. Download the hybrid live / install One or the purely free / open source software Free. Mandriva Linux 2007 Spring includes the latest software (KDE 3.5.6, GNOME 2.18, Firefox and Thunderbird 2.0) and several major new features: Metisse, the most innovative accelerated 3D desktop technology; open source telephony with WengoPhone; Google desktop applications including Picasa and Earth; updates and improvements to many of the Mandriva configuration tools, and the brand new drakvirt for configuring virtualization; significantly improved hardware support, including greatly improved graphics card detection and support for several common laptop memory card readers; and a brand new desktop theme. Mandriva Linux 2007 Spring is available in the full range of editions, including the freely downloadable One and Free, as well as the commercial Discovery, Powerpack and Powerpack+. For more information see the Spring product page and the Wiki page, where you can find download and installation instructions, the Release Tour, the Release Notes and the Errata."

SuperMog2002 writes "Apple Insider has the sad news that Mac OS X Leopard has been delayed until October. Apparantly software engineers and QA had to be reassigned to the iPhone in order to get it out on time, costing Leopard its release at WWDC. For now the original press release from Apple can be found on the 'Hot News' part of their site, though Apple did not provide a permanent link to the story. 'While Leopard's features will be complete by June, the Cupertino-based company said it cannot deliver the quality release expected by its customers within that time. Apple now plans to show its developers a near final version of Leopard at the conference, give them a beta copy to take home so they can do their final testing, and ship the software in October.'"

collin.m writes in with news of results out of Darmstadt. Erik Tews and others there have demonstrated how to recover a 104-bit WEP key in under a minute, requiring the capture of fewer than 10% the number of packets the previous best method called for. The paper is here (PDF). Quoting: "We were able to extend Klein's attack and optimize it for usage against WEP. Using our version, it is possible to recover a 104 bit WEP key with probability 50% using just 40,000 captured packets... for 85,000 data packets [the success probability is] about 95%... 40,000 packets can be captured in less than one minute under good condition. The actual computation takes about 3 seconds and 3 MB main memory on a Pentium-M 1.7 GHz..."

jcatcw writes "Computerworld's Scot Finnie says that Microsoft should be afraid because Apple has gotten smarter about how it competes. He says that it's the Parallels Desktop software that has been truly transformational for the Mac. Finnie did a simple three-month trial of the Mac last in the fall and realized four months later that he wasn't going back. Since then he's received hundreds of messages from readers who've also made the switch. 'In the end, this is about perception. It isn't about Apple's market share or even its quarterly sales numbers. (Apple's notebook computer sales for the fourth quarter were 4.1% of all portable computer sales, according to DisplaySearch.) What this is about is that Apple is reaching the right people with its product, winning new converts, Windows user by Windows user -- and creating buzz. How do you measure buzz? You don't. It's something that experienced people in this industry can just feel. And that's the condition Microsoft should fear. Because buzz can turn into something much harder to combat than sheer numbers.'"

daftna writes in with a story from Nature about a pair of twins who are neither identical nor fraternal: they are semi-identical. Researchers discovered twins who share all of their mother's DNA but only half of their father's. Both children are chimeras — their cells are not genetically uniform, but include a mix of genes from two separate sperm cells that fertilized a single egg. This is, apparently, not as rare as one might think; but the resulting fetus is rarely viable. This report marks the first known incidence of two half-identical twins resulting from a double fertilization.

pradeepe writes "Sony's Grouper, a video sharing site, has sent Searchles, a social search engine, a cease and desist letter over Grouper videos being streamed through Searchles TV, "the Internet's first video player that empowers users to mashup videos back-to-back with one player using multiple sources like MySpace, YouTube, Google Video, Blip.tv or Grouper." Grouper claims that Searchles has "effectively stripped away Grouper's extensive copyright protection system, including the 'Flag as Inappropriate' button and the link that appears on every single page of the Grouper website to allow copyright owners to report allegedly infringing material, in accordance with the terms of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act." It's interesting to note that Grouper itself is being sued for copyright infringement."

mlimber writes "The New York Times Magazine has a lengthy article on dark matter and dark energy, discussing the past, present, and future. 'Astronomers now realize that dark matter probably involves matter that is nonbaryonic ["meaning that it doesn't consist of the protons and neutrons of 'normal' matter"]. And whatever it is that dark energy involves, we know it's not 'normal,' either. In that case, maybe this next round of evidence will have to be not only beyond anything we know but also beyond anything we know how to know.'"

Forrest Kyle writes "A former professor of climatology at the University of Winnipeg has received multiple death threats for questioning the extent to which human activities are driving global warming. '"Western governments have pumped billions of dollars into careers and institutes and they feel threatened," said the professor. "I can tolerate being called a skeptic because all scientists should be skeptics, but then they started calling us deniers, with all the connotations of the Holocaust. That is an obscenity. It has got really nasty and personal." Richard Lindzen, the professor of Atmospheric Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology [...] recently claimed: "Scientists who dissent from the alarmism have seen their funds disappear, their work derided, and themselves labelled as industry stooges. Consequently, lies about climate change gain credence even when they fly in the face of the science."'"

eldavojohn writes "The BBC is taking a look at how atomic physicists are developing cancer treatments. A step past radiotherapy, the CERN institute is publishing interesting results: 'Cancer cells were successfully targeted with anti-matter subatomic particles, causing intense biological damage leading to cell death.' The press release from last year is finally sparking interest in the medical community."

dws90 writes "The cloak worn by Sir Alec Guinness when he played Obi-Wan Kenobi in the Star Wars original trilogy has been sold at a TV and Cinema auction. The cloak sold for £54,000, which is about $103,923 according to Google calculator. According to the article, the cloak was missing for nearly 30 years, during which it was rented out to a number of other films, including the Mummy. It was found two years ago, and has been part of a film memorabilia exhibition in London since then. The cloak sold for more than any of the other movie costumes the article listed, beating out Sean Connery's dinner jacket from Thunderball and a helmet worn by Terry Jones in Monty Python and the Holy Grail."

QuantumCrypto writes "Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have created 'the world's first material that reflects virtually no light.' This anti-reflection technology is based on nanomaterial and could lead to the development of more efficient solar cells, brighter LEDs, and 'smarter' light sources. In theory, if a room were to be coated with this material, switching on the lights would only illuminate the items in the room and not the walls, giving a sense of floating free in infinite space."

justelite writes "John C. Dvorak from PC Magazine has up an article looking at the new strategy of American cell-phone-service companies. From article: 'There is mounting evidence that the cellular service companies are going to do whatever they can to kill Wi-Fi. After all, it is a huge long-term threat to them. We've seen that the route to success in America today is via public gullibility and general ignorance. And these cell-phone-service companies are no dummies.'"

logube writes "BBC has up an article about the trap of installing Vista in your existing desktop. Written by Tim Weber, a self-confessed 'sucker for technology,' this article is a good introduction to the pain and extra money required to get going with the newest version of Windows. See how you can spend an extra 130 british pounds, and still have no working webcam! Says Weber, 'It took me one day to get online. The detail is tedious and highly technical: reinstalling drivers and router firmware didn't work, but after many trial and error tweaks to Vista's TCP/IP settings, I had internet access. Once online, Creative's website told me that my sound card was a write-off. No Vista support would be forthcoming.'"

Nurgled writes "On Sunday John Panzer announced that AOL now has experimental OpenID server support. This means that every AOL user now has an OpenID identifier. OpenID is a decentralized cross-site authentication system which has been growing in popularity over the last few months. AOL is the first large provider to offer OpenID services, and though they do not currently accept logins to their services with OpenID identifiers from elsewhere, they are apparently working on it. The next big challenge for OpenID proponents is teaching AOL's userbase how to make use of this new technology."

prostoalex writes "It's a big victory for Richard Stallman in North America, as Cuba decided to adopt open source software on the national level. Both Cuba and Venezuela are currently working on switching the entire government infrastructure to GNU/Linux operating system and applications, the Associated Press reports from Havana: 'Both governments say they are trying to wean state agencies from Microsoft's proprietary Windows to the open-source Linux operating system, which is developed by a global community of programmers who freely share their code.' The AP article doesn't mention the distro used for government workers, but says that the students are working on a Gentoo-based distro."