Slashdot

eldavojohn writes "How do you identify Botnet traffic on your network? Well, the problem with current commercial technologies is that they generate too many false positives. But a new startup name Nemean Networks hopes to solve all that by building signatures of traffic at many different levels of the network stack. 'Finding the proper sensitivity threshold for NIDS sensors has always been a problem for network and security administrators. Lower the threshold and some attacks get through the signature screening; raise it too high and false positives flourish. Nemean attempts to find the proper balance by gathering traffic sent to a honeynet to build signatures based on weighted data. The numerical weights are entirely subjective and based on the creators' expertise. The data is then clustered and fed through an algorithm to determine threat levels and develop signatures.'"

Legs or wheels? Entertaining or functional? The robot world has a lot of questions to resolve.
http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9805150-7.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20

Lorraine Bolsinger, who heads a major energy-efficiency initiative at General Electric, says companies can make green while being green.
Photos: Inside GE's clean-tech labs
http://www.news.com/Stirring-GEs-Ecomagination/2008-11392_3-6215496.html?part=rss&tag=2547-1_3-0-20&subj=news

Discovery News has a nifty article on NASA's Ikhana drone. Ikhana designed for suborbital earth sciences missions, may be fitted out with a variety of sensors, the same as deployed on satellites to study atmospheric conditions up close. Wednesday, Ikhana took off from Edwards Air Force Base for a 10 hour mission to observe forest fires, scanning the terrain from 23-25,000 feet using a variety of sensors for visible and IR light. Able to remain aloft for up to 30 continuous hours without break and view during night, Ikhana serves up information in minutes, which required hours by manned aircraft observation. "The data is processed on the aircraft, up-linked to a satellite and then downloaded to a ground station. From there it's delivered to a computer server at NASA Ames. The imagery is then combined with Google Earth maps. Command center personnel can view the images on their computer screens and then delegate local firefighters accordingly." Now how cool is that?

The makers of Firefox want to break outside the browser--and challenge Adobe's AIR.
http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9805103-7.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20

The MOVE system operates on the premise that, as with subway maps, less is more and you don't need to see everything in proper scale.
http://www.news.com/2300-11389_3-6215387-1.html?part=rss&tag=6215387&subj=news

The '1,000,000 Strong for Stephen Colbert' group on Facebook, founded to support the comedian's gag presidential campaign, actually did hit a million members--within a week.
http://www.news.com/8301-13577_3-9805080-36.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20

Prominently positioned customer blog posts in the SERPs that either love you or hate you can be more powerful than product reviews for a number of reasons.
http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9804447-7.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20

Looking for a hiking partner, someone to entertain your kids, or a gambling buddy who doesn't cheat? Look no further than the RoboDevelopment confab.
http://www.news.com/2300-11394_3-6215392-1.html?part=rss&tag=6215392&subj=news

Anonymous .NET Agilist writes "Jim Newkirk, original author and maintainer of the industry standard TDD framework for .NET and more recently Microsoft employee and leader of CodePlex has released a new Framework for TDD and Unit Testing on .NET called xUnit.net. This framework will potentially compete with Microsoft's own unit testing framework as well as with NUnit and other popular frameworks like mbUnit and csUnit."
http://jamesnewkirk.typepad.com/posts/2007/09/announcing-xuni.html

angryfirelord writes "For the first time in the U.S., a company and software vendor, Monsoon Multimedia, is being taken to court for a GPL violation. Previously, alleged GPL violations have all been settled by letters from the FSF (Free Software Foundation) or other open-source organizations, pointing out the violation.

The SFLC (Software Freedom Law Center) announced on Sept. 20 that it had just filed the first ever U.S. copyright infringement lawsuit based on a violation of the GNU General Public License (GPL) on behalf of its clients. The group's clients are the two principal developers of BusyBox. BusyBox is a small-footprint application that implements a lightweight set of standard Unix utilities. It is commonly used in embedded systems, and is open-source software licensed under the GPL version 2."
http://www.linux-watch.com/news/NS3973290690.html

ackthpt writes "Avast, here be a poll suggestion for the 19th of September (Talk like a pirate day)

• Arrr!
• Shiver me timbers!
• Ahoy, maties!
• Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum!
• Avast thar ye scurvy dog!
• Prepare to walk the plank!
• Give us all yer booty!
• The map is tattooed on CowboyNeal?!?

"

ackthpt writes "It seems ages and indeed has been since I obtained an illigitmate game by a Ralph Reed called BattleMech, which ran on the Amiga. Ironically FASA, the holder to the rights of things BattleTech, MechWarrior, etc. objected to the games existance and it mysteriously vanished. Oddly, BattleMech was my gateway to FASA's BattleTech, the fiction (around 40 novels in my library,) the tabletop game and the computer games. Several years back FASA sold off the games (as FASA Interactive) to Microsoft, the tabletop games went to Wizkids FASA Interactive became FASA Studio and went through Shadowrun and MechWarrior title for Windows, Vista and XBox. Now comes news that FASA Studio is shut down. Where the game properties land is anyone's guess, though I expect them to languish. Someone needs to tell these people to turn out the lights and close the door."

ackthpt writes "An Associated Press/Google article tells of a process discovered for burning hydrogen released from seawater using radio frequencies. I've been around long enough to hear of a few perpetual motion machines and mysterious black boxes which harvest energy from Earth's magnetic fields and I'm wondering if this really is just another one of these stories. From the article: "John Kanzius happened upon the discovery accidentally when he tried to desalinate seawater with a radio-frequency generator he developed to treat cancer. He discovered that as long as the salt water was exposed to the radio frequencies, it would burn." "Rustum Roy, a Penn State University chemist, has held demonstrations at his State College lab to confirm his own observations." Sounds possible, but ultimately this means purification of seawater, the question of the machines efficiency (how much energy is put in to how much is taken out,) byproducts and, should the thing work out, will the world be overrun with vehicles and devices which consume more cheap energy?"