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Meta bookmarking widgets

Submitted by t-ina3000
t-ina3000 writes "We all know suits want traffic! Coming back from the latest Web 2.0 conference my boss took me aside and demanded we add a bunch of links to social bookmarking services. Being the curious type, I've wondered what the implication are for loading 20+ icons and outbound links. Searching the web I've come across two widgets providing meta bookmarking, primadd and addthis. While addthis has the nicer website, primadd is configurable, has the additional requests down to a minimum (3) and the noscript version is prettier. If you had a website with 40k visitors a day, would you trust those sites to hold up to the traffic? Have any of you have any experience using those sites?"
Privacy

Stasi 2.0 - insurance debuts gps tracked insurance->

Submitted by ubersonic
ubersonic writes "While insurance companies never seem to respect the privacy of their customers, European insurer Uniqua reached a new low with the introduction of PAYD (pay as you drive) recently. Uniqa's customers who choose the PAYD-model are going to have a NaviBox called "SafeLine" installed in their cars. The small box contains a GPS receiver and a GSM unit, which forwards once daily real-time information to a central computer. The users premiums are then calculated on the base of this data. The personal data protecting organization ARGE-Daten (Arbeitsgemeinschaft Daten, Engl.: Working group "Data Protection") is deeply concerned about the fairness of the new appliance. No one knows for what else this data might be used in the future."
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Security

Al Gore's climatecrisis.net cracked->

Submitted by
ape
ape writes "Drive-by infections are common these days. Crackers use outdates blog and forum software to enter a server and install automated browser exploits frameworks, infecting visitors with trojans and adware. Earlier today reports about Al Gore's site, climatecrisis.net (source cleaned up already), being hacked surfaced. Someone managed to place stealth links on the site, linking to cracked blogs on .edu servers. These cracked blogs in turn, redirect you to a pharmacy site, but only if your referrer is Google or ask. If you type in the UTL by hand you will be greeted by a normal blog post about pharmaceuticals. Read Symantecs full report on the incident, or view a screenshot of the cracked sites source code. No one knows how long this links have been there, but according to Symantec the technique worked, placing those spam sites on top spot with Google for their respective keywords."
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Spam

An Inconvenient Truth->

Submitted by
primadd
primadd writes "Drive-by infections are common these days. Crackers use outdates blog and forum software to enter a server and install automated browser exploits frameworks, infecting visitors with trojans and adware. Earlier today reports about Al Gore's site, climatecrisis.net, being hacked surfaced. Someone managed to place stealth links on the site, linking to cracked blogs on .edu servers. Those cracked blogs in turn, redirect you to a pharmacy site, but only if your referer is google or ask. If you type in the url by hand you will be greeted by a normal blog post about pharmaceuticals. Read Symantecs full report on the incident, or view a screenshot of the cracked sites source code. No one knows how long this links have been there, but according to Symantec the technique worked, placing those spam sites on top spot with google for their respective keywords."
Link to Original Source

Comment: Re:Multi-million euro? (Score 4, Informative) 79

by Ashran (#21380201) Attached to: Potential Landing Sites for EU Mars Rover Selected
Mars Rover: According this article on space.com

The mission's total cost -- about $600 million -- may have to be deferred from NASA's budget, Weiler said, but would not cause the cancellation of any other mission at NASA. The Mars rovers are an "agency priority," he said. The second rover costs about $200 million, half of the $300 million to $450 million to build and launch the first.

Wikipedia on MER Mission

The total cost of building, launching, landing and operating the rovers on the surface for the initial 90 day primary mission was about US $820 million)

And according to the (Pathfinder site on wikipedia

Viking missions cost $935 million in 1974 or $3.5 billion in 1997 (not adjusted for inflation) Pathfinder mission $280 million, including the launch vehicle and mission operations.
Government

Eco-ruin caused the fall of Bronze Age Argaric civ->

Submitted by
kfz versicherung
kfz versicherung writes "A new study suggests that the fall of the Bronze Age Argaric people in south-east Spain, Europe's driest area, was caused by the exhaustion of precious natural resources resulting from the early civilisation. By compiling a pollen sequence to see how vegetation changed over thousands of years, the researchers obtained clues to how human settlement and climate affected ecosystems. The study revealed significant amounts of charcoal about 4,200 years ago, just after the Argaric civilisation emerged. The authors say that this is a sign that Bronze Age people were setting fires to clear the forests for mining activities and grazing."
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The Matrix

Artic seed bank starting up->

Submitted by
kfz versicherung
kfz versicherung writes "Inside a mountain in Spitsbergen, on an norwegian island more 600 miles (1000km) north of mainland norway, researchers have constructed secured vault to safeguard the world's crops from disasters, such as nuclear wars and asteroids. At 0F (-18C), seeds for important crops like wheat, barley and peas can last for up to 1,000 years. Having completed the so called "doomsday vault", researchers now have begun with the two-month long process of cooling it down for operation."
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Space

Potential landing sites for EU Mars Rover selected->

Submitted by
kfz versicherung
kfz versicherung writes "In 2013 the european equivalent of NASA, ESA will launch its mission to mars called ExoMars. The multi-million-euro mission calls for a rover weighing just over 200kg that can trundle over the martian soil in search of past and present life. Now prime landing spots have been selected, the list includes two sites at Meridiani Planum, the flat expanse near Mars' equator where Nasa's Opportunity found possible evidence for an ancient sea. Since on the early Earth, all the primordial biochemistry took place in phyllosilicates, some kind of mineral that is a good matrix for preserving organic matter. That is the best place to start looking for fossil life."
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Encryption

German amateur cracks WWII mega-code in 46 second

Submitted by
JrOldPhart
JrOldPhart writes "Another fiat for the radio/computer geek team! http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20071116/wl_nm/britain_germany_codebreaker_dc_1;_ylt=AgP7WztOUETnoN_c56IonDwE1vAI While the re-created Colossus computer ground away, "Schueth's computer program actually managed to crack the hardest part of the challenge — deciphering the code of a Lorenz SZ42 encryptor, which has approximately 16 million million million permutations — in just 46 seconds.""
Software

The OpenMoko Linux Phone

Submitted by LinucksGirl
LinucksGirl writes "This tutorial introduces the OpenEmbedded build environment used to create filesystem images for OpenMoko phones, such as the Neo 1973. The OpenMoko environment provides a completely free development environment for running application and system code on supported phone hardware, eliminating all dependency on proprietary code."
Wii

Mario Galaxy, an indepth review->

Submitted by
kfz versicherung
kfz versicherung writes "At E3, fans were promised that Super Mario Galaxy would be the "true" sequel to Mario 64, a game that many Nintendo and platforming fans speak of in hushed, respectful tones. This would likely be the only admission by Nintendo that Super Mario Sunshine wasn't exactly the game it could have been. Thus begins the extremely uninspired story: Bowser has the Princess, he has taken her to the stars, and Mario will get some new powers as he tries to rescue her. Nothing we haven't seen before, but as the crowds at the local video game store where I picked my copy up can attest, this is exactly what we want. See how ArsTechnica likes the long awaited sequel to Mario64."
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Math

Do quantum laws give rise to our classical world?->

Submitted by
kfz versicherung
kfz versicherung writes "Quantum physics forbids that quantum mechanics works on a macro level in the classical world. Now Kofler and Brukner demonstrated that the time evolution of a quantum system, no matter how macroscopic the system is, cannot be treated in a classical sense. "Just because something is big doesn't mean it can be described by classical physics." Then referring back to the case of spin, he continues: "Arbitrarily large spins can still have a quantum time evolution and violate the Leggett-Garg inequality." Next, the two realized that coarse-grained measurements are used in realistic conditions, such as situations that we are confronted with every day, as the resolution of the apparatuses usually is limited. "If you are bound to restrict yourself to coarse-grained measurements of the spin," Kofler explains, "you get the classical Newtonian laws of motion.""
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Math

Possible backdoor found in RNG standardizedby NSA-> 1

Submitted by
kfz versicherung
kfz versicherung writes "Defining algorithm for random numbers is one of the hardest fields in mathematics. We all know Microsoft failed miserably, even Linux (pdf) and SSL had their fair share of troubles. But now Bruce Schneier tells us the Strange Story of Dual_EC_DRBG, one of four random number generation algorithms standardized by the NSA (pdf). While on first look just slower than the other three, Dan Shumow and Niels Ferguson showed at Crypto 2007 that the algorithm contains a weakness that can only be described a backdoor. Their presentation showed that the constants used have a relationship with a second, secret set of numbers that can act as a kind of skeleton key. If you know the secret numbers, you can predict the output of the random-number generator after collecting just 32 bytes of its output."
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Space

Strange new space weather phenomen discovered-> 1

Submitted by
kfz versicherung
kfz versicherung writes "Something strange is happening in the atmosphere above Africa and researchers have converged on Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to discuss the phenomenon. Researchers liken the plumes to smoke billowing out of a factory smokestack — except instead of ordinary ash and dust, ion plumes are made of electrified gas floating so high above ground they come in contact with space itself. "The plumes appear during geomagnetic storms and they can interfere with satellite transmissions, airline navigation and radio communications," says Fuller-Rowell. Indeed, it is their effect on GPS signals that led to the discovery of plumes over North America just a few years ago."
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There's so much to say but your eyes keep interrupting me.