Forgot your password?

Close
typodupeerror
Transportation

General Motors: Driverless cars ready by 2018

Submitted by
Gregor Stipicic
Gregor Stipicic writes " Cars that drive themselves — even parking at their destination — could be ready for sale within a decade, General Motors Corp. executives say. "This is not science fiction," Larry Burns, GM's vice president for research and development, said in a recent interview. GM plans to use an inexpensive computer chip and an antenna to link vehicles equipped with driverless technologies. The first use likely would be on highways; people would have the option to choose a driverless mode while they still would control the vehicle on local streets, Burns said. He said the company plans to test driverless car technology by 2015 and have cars on the road around 2018. "
Privacy

Scroogle.org alternative to Google.com spying

Submitted by carp3_noct3m
carp3_noct3m writes "Scroogle.org (please don't go to Scroogle.com, its pr0n) Offers a good alternative to Google.com and their lack of privacy. from http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/technology/article3055825.ece "The London-based watchdog Privacy International ranked Google as "hostile to privacy" in its survey of internet firms, its lowest rating. Rivals Yahoo and Microsoft also fared poorly." "Google, the industry leader, stores personal information for 18 months, as does Microsoft's search engine. Yahoo and Time Warner's AOL retain search requests for 13 months." So, if you're like me and have been looking for a Google alternative, this may be it, at least until its shutdown."
Biotech

NIH Research To Go Public 1

Submitted by shofutex
shofutex writes "According to the Washington Post, the omnibus spending bill recently passed includes provisions to make NIH-funded research publicly available.

Under the bill's terms, scientists getting grant money from the National Institutes of Health would now have to submit to the NIH a final copy of their research papers when those papers are accepted for publication in a journal. An NIH database would then post those papers, free to the public, within 12 months after publication.
"
Space

Active glacier found on Mars-> 1

Submitted by
FireFury03
FireFury03 writes "The European Space Agency's Mars Express spacecraft has spotted an icy feature which appears to be a young active glacier. Dr Gerhard Neukum (what a cool name :), chief scientist on the spacecraft's High Resolution Stereo Camera said "We have not yet been able to see the spectral signature of water. But we will fly over it in the coming months and take measurements. On the glacial ridges we can see white tips, which can only be freshly exposed ice". Estimates place the glacier at 10,000 — 100,000 years old."
Link to Original Source
Sci-Fi

Gravity Defying Carpet very much possible-> 2

Submitted by
SK
SK writes "A flying carpet, just like the one in Walt Disney's creation 'The Arabian Nights' may soon be a reality. Laminarayan Mahadevan along with his colleagues at Harvard studied the aerodynamics of a flexible, rippling sheet moving through a fluid. Based on their study, the researchers came to the conclusion that making a carpet that would stay aloft in air may be possible. Mahadevan says that to stay afloat in air, a sheet measuring about 10 centimetres long and 0.1 millimetres thick would need to vibrate at about 10 hertz with amplitude of about 0.25 millimetres."
Link to Original Source
Security

China behind daily internet attacks on Germany

Submitted by Stony Stevenson
Stony Stevenson writes "China is conducting almost daily spying attacks on businesses and government agencies in Germany, according to one of the country's intelligence officers. Hans Elmar Remberg, vice president of the German Office for the Protection of the Constitution, told a Berlin conference on industrial espionage that his country was involved in "the Chinese cyber war".

"In our view, state Chinese interests stand behind these digital attacks," he said. "Supporting this view is the intensity, structure and scope of the attacks, and above all the targets, which include authorities and companies." Remberg's comments follow a recent spate of government statements that China is using hacking to gain information."
Networking

Japan Asks US Government to Stop Anime on P2P

Submitted by SailorSpork
SailorSpork writes "The Japanese government has formally asked the American government for their help in stopping the distribution of fan-subtitled anime, specifically via P2P networks like Bittorrent and video sharing sites such as YouTube. The full document (in Japanese) is available here, a Google translation of an article on a Japanese website summarizing the request is available here, and a short article is available in english here. In a nutshell, the Japanese government blames rampant filesharing with the recent decline of the industry both at home and abroad. While individual companies have made similar, targeted requests before to stop a few specific projects, this is the first time the Japanese government has asked for help in enforcing its international copyrights across the board.
Ironically, Geneon Entertainment, an anime distributor that had an agreement with Azureus to digitally distribute its titles via Bittorrent, has recently withdrawn from the American market."
Security

Attack of the PDFs->

Submitted by
retwit it
retwit it writes "Less than 24 hours after Adobe shipped a fix for a gaping hole affecting its Reader and Acrobat software, PDF files rigged with malware are beginning to land in e-mail inboxes. The attack, which includes two rootkits to hijack financial data, is exploiting the "mailto: option" vulnerability previously covered by Slashdot here. Symantec has tagged the threat as Trojan.Pidief.A, a malware file that's being used to lower security settings and download more malicious executables on to the compromised computer."
Link to Original Source
The Internet

Unibet CEO Detained by Dutch Authorities->

Submitted by
mpawlo
mpawlo writes "Mr Petter Nylander, CEO of Swedish online gaming company Unibet, was yesterday detained by Dutch authorities, using a European arrest warrant issued by French authorities. Unibet is considered (by French authorities) to be in violation of French gaming laws. However, the European Court of Justice recently ruled that betting services are to be considered under the EU Treaty, hence Unibet's French operations should be deemed legal under EU law. No relevant Swedish official has yet commented on the issue. Mr Nylander is reportedly still held, awaiting questioning Wednesday morning."
Link to Original Source

Bizoos, n.: The millions of tiny individual bumps that make up a basketball. -- Rich Hall, "Sniglets"