Atario - Slashdot User

Baby, We Were Born Not to Run-> 0

Submitted by

Atario

on Friday August 01 2008, @03:43PM

Atario writes "Rather watch TV than bike 50 miles? The thought of a hike sound like torture instead of fun? Well, according to two recent research papers you can stop berating yourself for being a couch potato (maybe). Researchers have identified 23 gene locations that control the activity levels of mice. "Can you be born a couch potato? In exercise physiology, we didn't used to think so, but now I would say most definitely you can," says J. Timothy Lightfoot, lead researcher on the project at the University of North Carolina."
Link to Original Source

Mantis Shrimp Can See Circular Polarization 0

Submitted by

Atario

on Saturday March 22 2008, @02:32AM

Atario writes "The skill, unknown in other animals, most likely helps the shrimp find mates. "It's the most private communication system imaginable," says Roy Caldwell of the University of California, Berkeley. "No other animal can see it.""

Strong passwords prohibited 1

Submitted by

Atario

on Wednesday February 27 2008, @06:01PM

Atario writes "This post and thread over at The Daily WTF made me realize I was not the only one experiencing a strange phenomenon: the prohibition of strong passwords by the very sites that most need them — financial institutions. A quick Google search reveals that the observation is also far from new. We're talking short maximum lengths, smashing case, disallowing special characters (really freaky ones like "!" or "."), and so on. Yet most of them seem to realize requiring both numbers and letters is a Good Thing. What is going on here?"

YouTube Caves To Pakistani Pressure 0

Submitted by

Atario

on Tuesday February 26 2008, @07:21PM

Atario writes "Well, score another one for censorship. YouTube has taken down the video that so offended Pakistan that they broke YouTube for major portions of the world, as reported here recently. The clip? Some Dutch politician criticizing Islam. Cue loads of ornery Internetters reuploading the video over and over in 5...4...3..."

Top 15 Tech Disappointments Of 2007 0

Submitted by

Atario

on Tuesday December 18 2007, @01:40AM

Atario writes "PC World Magazine has a roundup of the biggest disappointments of 2007 (someone better get to it if they're going to get another better one in before Jan 1). Guess who occupies 20% of those spots? That's right..."

eBay Still Has Login Vulnerabilities? 0

Submitted by

Atario

on Tuesday December 04 2007, @05:12AM

Atario writes "This morning I checked my email to find several apparent eBay-alike spam messages in my Inbox. This reminded me that I needed to leave feedback for something on the actual eBay. So I went there, only to find that I could no longer log in. Long story short, I realized that those "fake" eBay emails were the real thing — and were sent from my eBay account! Horrified, I contacted their help people and got my password reset, and some mass eBay emails following up to those who had been spammed, saying that I hadn't done it. Going to my account, I saw that the attackers had sent a "visit our happy and good-spirit Chinese web site and buy electronics" spam to 30 different people. (Only the first six came to me, because those used a general "contact an eBay-er" mechanism, whereas the rest used a "ask seller a question" one; apparently the latter doesn't automatically send you a copy in email automatically.) At any rate, whoever this was was able to change my password and send messages as me; this, to me, implies that they were able to crack my password and log in as me. This would mean either (1) inside job with DB access or (2) eBay is vulnerable to brute-force login-attempt attacks, which is something so easy to defeat (increasing attempt delays), they would need to be ashamed for about aleph-null years were this the case. So, what does Slashdot think: eBay is infested with Chinese spammers as employees, or they can't get security minimally right after all these years?"

NASA Open-Sources Robot Software->

Submitted by

Atario

on Wednesday June 20 2007, @03:31PM

Atario writes "CLARAty is the Coupled Layer Architecture for Robotic Autonomy. The first release of its software, version 0.10-beta, is now available publicly at http://claraty.jpl.nasa.gov."
Link to Original Source

Classified US Intel Budget Revealed Via Powerpoint

Submitted by

Atario

on Monday June 11 2007, @04:13AM

Atario writes "In a holdover from the Cold War when the number really did matter to national security, the size of the US national intelligence budget remains one of the government's most closely guarded secrets. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the highest intelligence agency in the country that oversees all federal intelligence agencies, appears to have inadvertently released the keys to that number in an unclassified PowerPoint presentation now posted on the website of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). By reverse engineering the numbers in an underlying data element embedded in the presentation, it seems that the total budget of the 16 US intelligence agencies in fiscal year 2005 was $60 billion, almost 25% higher than previously believed."

IM IN UR LOLCODE, DEVELOPIN UR SINTACKS

Submitted by

Atario

on Tuesday June 05 2007, @05:22AM

Atario writes "When I first heard of LOLCODE, I was sure it was a funny, if transient, joke. But it appears to be developing as a real language, community-consensus style, with implementations, specifications, and everything."

Simple Comm Technique Beats Quantum Crypto

Submitted by

Atario

on Saturday May 26 2007, @08:46AM

Atario writes "Spying is big business, and avoiding being spied on an even bigger one. So imagine if someone came up with a simple, cheap way of encrypting messages that is almost impossible to hack into?

American computer engineer Laszlo Kish at Texas A&M University in College Station claims to have done just that. He says the thermal properties of a simple wire can be exploited to create a secure communications channel, one that outperforms quantum cryptography keys."