+ - Ran out of ipv4 space! Time to break open the last E-class ipv4 range? 4
Submitted
by
deckardt
deckardt writes "Since RIPE announced that is had distributed it's last ipv4 block, you would think we've all ran out of ipv4 addresses. But this could not be further from the truth. RFC3300 mentions another range consisting of about 268 million ipv4 addresses, all listed as "Reserved for Future Use". This 'magic' range is the E-class subnet of 240.0.0.0/4. What is keeping the ipv4 domain gods from releasing this range? It looks like 240/4 is blocked in a lot of code already. For example in Linux it is impossible to assign an address like 241.1.2.3/24 (try it and get greeted with a SIOCSIFADDR: Invalid argument). So now I ask you dear slashdot community, is it time to break open that last ~5% of ipv4 space? Now seems like the right time."
+ - LHC Scientists Expected to Announce Higgs boson confirmation this week->
Submitted
by
DigitalSorceress
DigitalSorceress writes "According TFA, Cern scientists are 99.99% certain they've found the Higgs bosn. Peter Higgs himself has been invited to a press conference to be held this week."
Link to Original Source
Link to Original Source
Comment: It took them 5 years to create an exploit? (Score 1) 3
http://eprint.iacr.org/2006/136 describes the thing they're exploiting... Is this news?
+ - Researchers announce TLS1.0 broken-> 3
Submitted
by
ludwigf
ludwigf writes "The plaintext-recovery attack exploits a vulnerability in TLS that has long been regarded as mainly a theoretical weakness. At the moment, [their exploit] requires about two seconds to decrypt each byte of an encrypted cookie. That means authentication cookies of 1,000 to 2,000 characters long will still take a minimum of a half hour for their PayPal attack to work.
TLS 1.1 fixes the problem but: "Actually we have worked with browser and SSL vendors since early May, and every single proposed fix is incompatible with some existing SSL applications," Duong wrote. “What prevents people is that there are too many websites and browsers out there that support only SSL 3.0 and TLS 1.0. If somebody switches his websites completely over to 1.1 or 1.2, he loses a significant part of his customers and vice versa.”"
Link to Original Source
TLS 1.1 fixes the problem but: "Actually we have worked with browser and SSL vendors since early May, and every single proposed fix is incompatible with some existing SSL applications," Duong wrote. “What prevents people is that there are too many websites and browsers out there that support only SSL 3.0 and TLS 1.0. If somebody switches his websites completely over to 1.1 or 1.2, he loses a significant part of his customers and vice versa.”"
Link to Original Source
The Proton Just Got Smaller 289
Posted
by
samzenpus
from the size-does-matter dept.
from the size-does-matter dept.
inflame writes "A new paper published in Nature has said that the proton may be smaller than we previously thought. The article states 'The difference is so infinitesimal that it might defy belief that anyone, even physicists, would care. But the new measurements could mean that there is a gap in existing theories of quantum mechanics. "It's a very serious discrepancy," says Ingo Sick, a physicist at the University of Basel in Switzerland, who has tried to reconcile the finding with four decades of previous measurements. "There is really something seriously wrong someplace."' Would this indicate new physics if proven?"
Doctor Invents 'Zero Gravity' Radiation Suit 83
Posted
by
samzenpus
from the baron-harkonnen-approved dept.
from the baron-harkonnen-approved dept.
DrFrasierCrane writes "You think you feel weighed down when your dentist lays that lead apron on you to take X-rays: how about the doctors who deal with radiation treatments and have to wear those aprons all day long? A Dallas, Texas, doctor has created a 'zero gravity' radiation suit for just that problem. From the article: 'Physicians are supposed to wear a lead apron during those procedures. It is back-breakingly heavy and doesn't cover the body completely. The zero gravity suit eliminates the weight and the exposed openings.'"
Comment: Ok guys, this is how to do it (Score 3, Interesting) 150
The sad guy mistook a db25 rs232 for a parallel port... sigh
I've been doing this for years, since 1997... so this must be one of the oldest tricks in the book.
Here is my 4 step recipe for Ubuntu, using USB serial adapters:
1) hook up the stuff and config the terminals correctly (I used 9600 8n1 due to long cables, got weird chars at 19200+)
2) Install Ubuntu on your system
3) put the following in
# ttyUSB0 - getty
#
# This service maintains a getty on tty1 from the point the system is
# started until it is shut down again.
#start on stopped rc RUNLEVEL=[2345]
#stop on runlevel [!2345]
respawn
exec
---(repeat for as many terminals you have, incrementing the 0 of ttyUSB0 to 1 to 2 etc)---
4a) reboot
or
4b) sudo service ttyUSB0 start
(repeat for as many terminals you have, incrementing 0 to 1 to 2 etc)
*) profit
Here is my setup with a WYSE vt420 compatible and two vt320's
http://www.flickr.com/photos/rickdeckardt/4748415699/
Gee wiz, that was easy... So why is this on the frontpage of slashdot?
How Game Gimmicks Break Immersion 228
Posted
by
Soulskill
from the they-can't-all-be-portal dept.
from the they-can't-all-be-portal dept.
The Moving Pixels blog has brief discussion of how gimmicky game mechanics often break a player's sense of immersion, making it painfully obvious that he's simply jumping through carefully planned hoops set up by the developers. The author takes an example from Singularity, which has a weapon that can time-shift objects between a pristine, functional state and a broken, decayed state. Quoting:
"The core issue with this time control device is that it's just not grand and sweeping enough. It doesn't feel like it's part of a world gone mad. Instead it's just a gameplay tool. You can only use it on certain things in certain places. You can 'un-decay' this chalkboard but not that desk. You can dissolve that piece of cover but not most of the walls in the game. The ultimate failure of such cheap tricks is that they make the game world less immersive rather than more compelling. The world gets divided into those few things that I can time shift, that different set of things I can levitate, and that majority of things that I can't interact with at all. ... I'm painfully aware that all that I'm really doing is pushing the right button at the right place and time. Sure, that's what many games are when you get down to it, but part of the artistry of game design comes from trying to hide this fact."
Cheap Cancer Drug Finally Tested In Humans 363
Posted
by
timothy
from the good-enough-for-the-likes-of-you dept.
from the good-enough-for-the-likes-of-you dept.
John Bayko writes "Mentioned on Slashdot a couple of years ago, the drug dichloroacetate (DCA) has finally finished its first clinical trial against brain tumors in humans. Drug companies weren't willing to test a drug they could not patent, so money was raised in the community through donations, auctions, and finally government support, but the study was still limited to five patients. It showed extremely positive results in four of them. This episode raises the question of what happens to all the money donated to Canadian and other cancer societies, and especially the billions spent buying merchandise with little pink ribbons on it, if not to actual cancer research like this."
Microsoft Kills Support For XP SP2 315
Posted
by
timothy
from the too-soon? dept.
from the too-soon? dept.
Trailrunner7 writes "Microsoft's announcement this week that it is preparing to end support for machines running Windows XP SP2 not only represents a challenge for the thousands of businesses still running SP2, but also is the end of an era for both Microsoft and its customers. It wasn't until 2004 that the final release of XP SP2 hit the streets, but when it did, it represented a huge step forward in security for Windows users. It wasn't necessarily the feature set that mattered as much as the fact that the protections were enabled by default and taken out of the users' hands."
+ - PS3 firmware signing keys released->
Submitted
by
Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "The PS3 firmware signing keys have been leaked by an anonymous Sony employee, in response to Sony's removal of the Other OS feature from the PS3 as of their latest firmware update."
Link to Original Source
Link to Original Source
+ - Fed in Hot Water Over Secret Bailouts->
Submitted
by
Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "The Fed has finally came clean. It now admits it bailed out Bear Stearns — taking on tens of billions of dollars of the bank's bad loans — in order to smooth Bear Stearns' takeover by JPMorgan Chase. The secret Fed bailout came months before Congress authorized the government to spend up to $700 billion of taxpayer dollars bailing out the banks, even months before Lehman Brothers collapsed. The Fed also took on billions of dollars worth of AIG securities, also before the official government-sanctioned bailout."
Link to Original Source
Link to Original Source
+ - Ed Roberts, Personal Computer Pioneer, 1941-2010-> 2
Submitted
by
jcr
jcr writes "CNET and the Huffpo both report the death of Henry Edward Roberts, best known to all of us as the inventor of the Altair computer, at the age of 88 from pneumonia.
As it happens, I never got to use an Altair, but I did meet Ed once, back in the mid-1980s. Since that time, I've never referred to the Altair bus as the "S100" bus, since I agree with him that an inventor is entitled to name his invention.
-jcr"
Link to Original Source
As it happens, I never got to use an Altair, but I did meet Ed once, back in the mid-1980s. Since that time, I've never referred to the Altair bus as the "S100" bus, since I agree with him that an inventor is entitled to name his invention.
-jcr"
Link to Original Source
+ - Why the you should care about PS3 dropping Linux->
Submitted
by
Crazzaper
Crazzaper writes "So today Sony dished out the latest firmware for the PS3, which disables the ability to install your own OS. But the implications go far beyond cost-cutting--it attacks directly at the open source community. Sony was once an open-source evangelist, but with copy-protection pressure from publishers, it looks like there's more than meets the eye. Interesting piece on that by Alan Dang, at Tom's."
Link to Original Source
Link to Original Source