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Peter Tippett, chief scientist at the ICSA and the inventor of the progam that became Norton Antivirus, had some interesting things to say Monday about the state of the security industry. In a nutshell, Tippett warned that about a third of the work that security departments do today is a waste of time. Tippett goes on to systematically blow holes in a lot of security's current best practices, including vulnerability research/patching, strong passwords, and the product evaluation process. Some of his arguments are definitely debatable, but there is a lot of truth to what he's saying as well. It definitely makes you think. http://www.darkreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=145224&WT.svl=news1_1
http://www.darkreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=145224&WT.svl=news1_1

As reported on Fox News and The New York Times, some Muslims are attempting to censor Wikipedia because of images of Muhammad contained in the article about him. So does one religion get to tell the rest of the world how they must behave because they'll be offended otherwise, or does the Internet represent all views, even when that view may be offensive to some particular minority?

piersonr writes "Congress is investigating ways of providing legislative data to the public. What are some other ways that Congress could utilize simple technological reforms to create an open, public and fully transparent institution?"
http://www.govexec.com/story_page.cfm?filepath=/dailyfed/0108/012308tdpm1.htm

Astrobiology Magazine is reporting that astronomers have announced that a mystery object orbiting the 8-million-year-old brown dwarf 2M1207 170 light-years from Earth might have formed from the collision and merger of two protoplanets. The object, known as 2M1207B, has puzzled astronomers since its discovery because it seems to fall outside the spectrum of physical possibility. Its combination of temperature, luminosity, and age do not match up with any theory. "Hot, post-collision planets might be a whole new class of objects we will see with the Giant Magellan Telescope", said Eric Mamajek of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
http://www.astrobio.net/news/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=2589&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0

_14k4 writes "From CNN: Bobby Fischer, the reclusive chess master who became a Cold War icon when he dethroned the Soviet Union's Boris Spassky as world champion in 1972, has died aged 64. Bobby Fischer became an increasingly anti-establishment figure after ending his chess career. Spokesman Gardar Sverrisson said Fischer passed away in a Reykjavik hospital on Thursday. There was no immediate word on cause of death. (wikipedia mentions kidney failure)"
http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/europe/01/18/fischer.dies.ap/index.html

Ray tracing is still thought of as the 'holy grail' for real-time imagery but because of the intense amount of calculations required it has been plagued with long frame render times. This might soon change, at least according to an article from Daniel Pohl, a researcher at Intel. With upcoming many-core processors like Intel's Larrabee he believes that real-time ray tracing for games is much closer than originally thought thanks in large part to the efficiency it allows with spatial partitioning and reflections when compared to current rasterization techniques. Titles like Valve's Portal are analyzed to see how they could benefit from ray tracing technology and the article on PC Perspective concludes with the difficulties combing the two rendering techniques as well as a video of the technology in action.
http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=506

flok writes "Currently not all hardware works under Linux. But which does? Now the site hardware4linux.info is started to automatically collect statistics about what works and what not. All you need to do is execute some script, upload the results, and tell the site what of the detected hardware works or not. Others then can easily navigate through the results (shown in nice reports with graphs) and see if that new laptop they're going to buy will work. Please help this by uploading the reports of your system!"

I just wanted to drop you folks a line to remind everyone that Saturday, January 19th 2008 will mark the 30 year countdown to the Y2K38 bug, which some 30 year loan calculation software might start having problems with over the weekend. More background is, as always, available via wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem

An anonymous reader writes "ZDNet Aus reports on a new type of Li-Ion battery that could increase battery capacity by ten times. So take the battery life of your [iPod, laptop, etc.], and with one of these batteries, multiply it by ten.

The super heavy duty battery is based on a new type of anode, which uses silicon nanowires to store charge. Regular Li-Ion battery anodes are based on graphite, but as Yi Cui, one of the researchers who created the battery at Stanford University points out, silicon has the "the highest theoretical charge capacity." However Silicon expand when charging and shrink during use, a cycle which causes the silicon to pulverize and so degrading the performance of the battery. Cui's team overcame this by growing silicon nanowires, which can sustain the expansion/shrinking cycle. The ZDNet article also contains some nice SEM images taken from the original research paper published in Nature Nanotechnology."
http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/hardware/soa/Breakthrough-promises-40-hour-laptop-batteries/0,130061702,339285142,00.htm

Malachi Constant writes "Californian bureaucrats appear likely to approve a proposal to allow utility companies to control your thermostat's temperature via radio during those nasty rolling blackout periods. The FM radio transmissions used to control temperature are described as "encrypted and encoded." I, for one, am hoping that the algorithm that protects them is another A5/1 or CSS."
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/11/us/11control.html?_r=1&sq=Thermostat&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&scp=1&adxnnlx=1200098584-lYDq1ANi+9y+7F32I8ivKw

Lucas123 writes "Reporting from CES, the Today Show revealed a new technology called "flash memory" that's poised to replace video tape. This amazing technology is a "hard wafer that stores electrical charge easily, quickly, durably and almost indefinitely" and can record up to two hours of video and is becoming cheaper all the time. What will they think of next? Cars that run on gasoline and batteries?"
http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/22565461

darthcamaro writes "Here's an interesting one. Every Red Hat, SUSE and Mandriva user uses RPM as their default package manager. As it turns out the latest version of RPM, RPM version is officially considered to be a fork by Red Hat — remember that RPM originally stood for Red Hat Package Manager.
From the article:
"It's pointless to waste the effort and the bottom line is all these people are welcome at rpm5.org anytime they want," former Red Hat employee Jeff Johnson, who had led the RPM.org development effort for a few years told InternetNews.com. "It's not going to happen because it's really important for Red Hat to re-establish and send a message to its customers that it is the Red Hat Package Manager. So I'm not going to hold my breath, a lot of this is just smoke and mirrors on the surface.""
http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3720556

StCredZero writes "In graduate school, I taught a course like this, but this stuff is a step above! The course takes you from the NAND gate, and builds up to basic logic, components like mux, memory, an ALU, cpu, then an object oriented language, an operating system, and old-school video games like Tetris and Space Invaders!

All of the steps build on top of the last one. You literally go from NAND to Tetris and every place in between. If civilization fell, someone who paid attention in this course could restart the hardware and software industry. (Especially if you saw the video on Hand Made Vaccuum Tubes) Have any holes in your CompSci education? This could be just the thing to pull it all together!

Also, all of the software is Open Source. NAND to Tetris in 12 Steps There's also a A great Google Tech Talk"
http://cs.bc.edu/announcements/schocken_talk_2005_12_12

Microsoft's Windows Vista operating system is proving far less popular with new PC buyers than Windows XP did during XP's first year on the market, if statements by company chairman Bill Gates at this week's Consumer Electronics Show are any measure. Gates boasted that Microsoft has sold more than 100 million copies of Windows Vista since the OS launched last January. Based on Gates' statement, Windows Vista was aboard just 39% of the PC's that shipped in 2007. And Vista, in terms of units shipped, only marginally outperformed first year sales of Windows XP according to Gates' numbers. Assuming Gates is using consistent measurements across time — and any failure to do so would raise questions about Microsoft's reporting tactics — first year Vista unit sales have exceeded first year XP unit sales by little more than 10%.

Researchers have discovered a new fast-acting antidote to cyanide poisoning. The antidote has potential to save lives of those who are exposed to the chemical -- namely firefighters, industrial workers and victims of terrorist attacks.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/12/071227183912.htm