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Censorship

+ - Internet Blackout delivers serious blow to SOPA an->

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "Following the highly successful "Internet Blackout" Lamar Smith has issued a statement on the indefinite postponement of PIPA, which comes just days after the shelving of SOPA earlier in the week.

With both of these controversial bills now in a holding pattern, the community needs to turn it's attention to supporting new legislation which combats Internet piracy while preserving Internet freedoms, like the "OPEN Act"."
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Education

+ - College Campus Network Still Infected by a Compute->

Submitted by wjousts
wjousts writes "From IEEE Spectrum, computers at the City College of San Francisco (CCSF) may still be infected with several viruses, the oldest from 1999!

As of Friday, the viruses were still active. The Chronicle says that CCSF administrators are telling students and employees to "change computer passwords, avoid using school computers for banking or purchases, and to check home computers for viruses" since the viruses have, the college's Chief Technology Officer warned, infected servers and desktops "across administrative, instructional and wireless networks."

"
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Biotech

+ - Human Stomach Microbe Unlocks Seaweed Biofuel->

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "Researchers at the Bio Architecture Lab and the University of Washington in Seattle have genetically modified a microbe commonly found in the human stomach to enable it to break down the very exotic sugars found in seaweed. The development could signify a biofuel breakthrough, since seaweed doesn’t take up space that crops could use, it doesn’t contain the hard to break down substance lignin, and it needs absolutely no fertilizers to grow. The newly found process also doesn’t require high temperatures, which means that turning seaweed into biofuel would require very little electricity."
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Chrome

+ - The real reason Firefox lost to Chrome: Firefox 4->

Submitted by edxwelch
edxwelch writes "In November last year Chrome overtook Firefox in market share for the first time. What people don’t realise is that the release of Firefox 4 caused a large part of the decline.
Firefox 4 was a major new release and came with a brand new Javascript engine and HTML5 parser. Unfortunately, these new features came with major memory leaks and performance bugs. The result was that if you used Firefox 4 for an extended period of time the browser would eventually become unresponsive, making it virtually unusable."
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+ - Building a Modern Web Stack for the Real-time Web->

Submitted by igrigorik
igrigorik writes "After a few years of iteration the WebSockets spec is finally here (RFC 6455), and as of late 2011 both Chrome and Firefox are SPDY capable. These additions are much more than just "enhancing AJAX", as we now have true real-time communication in the browser: stream multiplexing, flow control, framing, and significant latency and performance improvements. Now, we just need to drag our "back office" — our web frontends, app servers, and everything in between into this century to enable us to take advantage of these new capabilities."
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Mozilla

+ - Mozilla Minefield The Fastest Browser on Earth->

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla Minefield is the FASTEST BROWSER on the planet with JavaScript rendering speeds 10% faster than Google Chrome.Mozilla Minefield available for Mac OS X, Linux, and of course Windows. But given the extraordinary browser is still in alpha stage, the developer does not guarantee the stability of the browser. Maybe you will find the bugs are annoying during browsing on the internet. You can send feedback to the developers of browsers to improve performance and stability of this browser."
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+ - Increase in Sales for Japanese Robot Manufacturers

Submitted by RobotWorx
RobotWorx writes "Despite the most devastating disaster in Japan since WWII, industrial robot manufacturers based in Japan saw their sales increase in the first three quarters of 2011.

Boosting the jump in industrial robot sales were the orders for semiconductors used in smartphones and computers. Robots in these industries typically perform different material handling and assembly tasks. Industrial robots used in automotive lines and vacuum environments to perform welding, painting, and material handling applications also added to the increase in orders and sales in these Japanese based industrial robot manufacturers.

Learn more about this story."
Security

+ - Project Basecamp: A SCADA Security Bloodbath->

Submitted by chicksdaddy
chicksdaddy writes "A no-holds barred presentation at the S4 Conference in Miami on Thursday laid bare the woeful state of security for many SCADA and industrial control systems (ICS) that power the world's critical infrastructure.
The talk discussed "Project Basecamp," a volunteer-led security audit of leading programmable logic controllers (PLCs). Decrepit hardware, buggy software and pitiful or nonexistent security features make thousands of PLCs vulnerable to trivial attacks, researchers found.
"It's a blood bath mostly," said Reid Wightman of the consulting firm Digital Bond. "Many of these devices lack basic security features."
In an effort to mimic the success of the FireSheep plugin in forcing better security for common Web applications, the organizers also worked with the security firms Rapid 7 and Tenable to integrate modules into the MetaSploit Framework and Nessus scanner to spot vulnerable PLCs. Threatpost has the story."
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The Internet

+ - Is cutting-edge car tech befuddling US watchdogs? ->

Submitted by
coondoggie
coondoggie writes "The often complex, interconnected electronics systems now proliferating across most cars and truck will require the US government that watches over auto safety — the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) — to revamp the way it handles and researches problems."
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Security

+ - Researchers Find Slew of Flaws in SCADA Hardware, ->

Submitted by Trailrunner7
Trailrunner7 writes "At the S4 security conference this week, "Project Basecamp," a volunteer-led security audit of leading programmable logic controllers (PLCs), performed by a team of top researchers found that decrepit hardware, buggy software and pitiful or nonexistent security features make thousands of PLCs vulnerable to trivial attacks by external hackers that could cause PLC devices to crash or run malicious code.

"We were looking for a firesheep moment in PLC security," Peterson told the audience of ICS security experts.

They got one. "It's a blood bath mostly," said Wightman of Digital Bond. "Many of these devices lack basic security features."

While the results of analysis of the various PLCs varied, the researchers found significant security issues with every system they tested, with some PLCs too brittle and insecure to even tolerate security scans and probing."
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Cloud

+ - What happens to your files when a cloud service sh-> 2

Submitted by
MrSeb
MrSeb writes "Megaupload's shutdown poses an interesting question: What happens to all the files that were stored on the servers? XDA-Developers, for example, has more than 200,000 links to Megaupload — and this morning, they're all broken, with very little hope of them returning. What happens if a similar service, like Dropbox, gets shut down — either through bankruptcy, or federal take-down? Will you be given a chance to download your files, or helped to migrate them to another similar service? What about data stored on enterprise services like Azure or AWS — are they more safe?"
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