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Microsoft

Submission + - Mark Shuttleworth Highly Recommends Windows Azure (muktware.com)

Submitted by sfcrazy
sfcrazy writes: Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu has become a Microsoft partner to bring Ubuntu to Microsoft's Azur platform. Canonical joins SUSE, the long time Microsoft partner which also helped Microsoft in validating that Linux infringes upon its bogus patents.
Facebook

Submission + - George Takei Facebook Fans in 'DDoS Attack' on His Own Website (ibtimes.co.uk)

Submitted by
DavidGilbert99
DavidGilbert99 writes: "George Takei posts a link to a new t-shirt on his Facebook Page. A lot of his 2 million fans try to go to his merchandise page at the same time. The ISP believes it is under a DDoS attack and shuts down the site. Once the reason fort eh site shutting down is discovered, Takei's fans tell him he has a new power: "You now command an entire army that can take down any site at will, just say the word.""
SuSE

Submission + - openSUSE Back on Track with 12.2 Beta 1 (ostatic.com)

Submitted by Thinkcloud
Thinkcloud writes: Jos Poortvliet announced the release yesterday and said some of the new things include GIMP 2.8, KDE SC 4.8.3, GNOME 3.4.2, GCC 4.7, GRUB 2, LibreOffice 3.5.4.3, and Linux 3.4.0.
Security

Submission + - How Charles Dickens helped crack your LinkedIn password (computerworld.com.au)

Submitted by
angry tapir
angry tapir writes: "Security expert Kevin Young and his colleagues are working to decode some 2.6 million scrambled LinkedIn passwords, part of a total of 6.1 million released earlier this week on a Russian password cracking forum. Young studies how people pick passwords and how resistant they are to cracking. Converting the hashes into their original passwords is possible using decoding tools and powerful graphics processors. But the longer and more complicated the password — using sprinklings of capital letters, numbers and symbols — the longer and harder it is to crack. What's interesting about the LinkedIn hashes is the trouble experts are having at converting the hashes to their original password. Of the 6.1 million hashes, some 3.5 million appeared to have already been cracked since those hashes have "00000" at the beginning. In order to crack them, Young and his team need more words and more word combinations for so-called brute-force attempts. They've turned to some of the world's most famous books.Young has written a program that draws passphrase strings from books such as Tale of Two Cities, War and Peace, The Call of the Wild and The Land of Oz. The program takes words from those books and creates phrases and concatenations such as "lionsandtigersandbears" and "ihavebeenchangedforgood." Both generated hits in the LinkedIn hashes."
Apple

Submission + - Apple fined $2.5 million for false advertising (theage.com.au)

Submitted by
Whiney Mac Fanboy
Whiney Mac Fanboy writes: "Apple has agreed to pay a $2.25 million (AUD) fine (along with 300k legal costs) to the Australian Competition & Consumer Commision for misleading advertising. Apple misrepresented their iPad product as being a '4G' device, when in fact they're only compatible with a very small percentage of 4G networks around the world. The Age online has the full story."
The Military

Submission + - Reddit users uncover potential nuclear coverup (reddit.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Earlier today, a user on Reddit claimed to have found evidence of a nuclear incident in the vicinity of Indiana or Michigan, and suspects it is being covered up by the government.

Initially I was highly skeptical, but as the day progressed, more and more evidence has surfaced indicating that there may actually be something going on. Independent radiation monitoring stations have detected high counts-per-minute values (CPM), but those data sources were changed or pulled shortly thereafter. Throughout the day, more "evidence" has appeared: many people have reported increased numbers of military aircraft, fire stations and other sources have reported high levels of radiation, and some science labs have had radiation alerts as well.

So, what's going on? Is it merely a series of coincidences being blown up by the hyperbole machine of the internet? Or is there actually something sketchy going on — and if so, what?
Medicine

Submission + - California City May Tax Sugary Drinks Like Cigarettes

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Voters in Richmond, California are set to decide in November whether to make the San Francisco Bay area city the nation's first municipality to tax soda and other sugary beverages to help fight childhood obesity as the penny-per-ounce tax, projected to raise between $2 million and $8 million, would go to soccer fields, school gardens and programs to treat diabetes and fight obesity. Councilman Jeff Ritterman, a doctor who proposed the measure, says soda is a prime culprit behind high childhood obesity rates in Richmond, where nearly 20 percent of residents live below the poverty line. "If you look at where most of our added sugar is coming, it's coming from the sugar-sweetened beverages," says Rittman. "It's actually a poison for you, because your liver can't handle that huge amount of fructose." Not everyone is please by the proposed license fee on businesses selling sweetened drinks that would require owners of bodegas, theaters, convenience stores and other outlets to tally ounces sold and, presumably, pass the cost on to customers and soda taxes have failed elsewhere — most notably in Philadelphia, where Mayor Michael A. Nutter’s attempts to impose a 2-cents-per-ounce charge on sugary drinks have sputtered twice. However Dr. Bibbins-Domingo says similar taxes on cigarettes have had a dramatic affect on public health. "It was a few decades ago when we had high rates of tobacco and we had high rates of tobacco-related illnesses. Those measures really turned the tide and really led to lower rates of tobacco across the country.""
China

Submission + - Riot at Foxconn factory (geekosystem.com) 1

Submitted by
Presto Vivace
Presto Vivace writes: "One Thousand Foxconn Workers Riot At Chinese Dormitory

A dispute of unclear origin sparked a riot at a Chinese Foxconn plant, in which as many as 1,000 workers participated. For two hours, the workers threw bottles at security and destroyed property in the plant’s dormitory area before ultimately being subdued with the help of local law enforcement.

Retribution will be swift and terrible. I can only assume that conditions in the factory must be very bad indeed."
Security

Submission + - IPMI: Hack a server that is turned "off" (sans.edu)

Submitted by
UnderAttack
UnderAttack writes: "A common joke in infosec is that you can't hack a server that is turned off. You better make sure that the power cord is unplugged too. Otherwise, you may be exposed via IPMI, a component present on many servers for remote management that can be used to flash firmware, get a remote console and power cycle the server even after the normal power button has been pressed to turn the server off."
Encryption

Submission + - How many seconds would it take to crack your password? (itworld.com)

Submitted by DillyTonto
DillyTonto writes: Want to know how strong your password is? Count the number of characters and the type and calculate it yourself. Steve Gibson's Interactive Brute Force Password Search Space Calculator shows the how dramatically the time-to-crack lengthens with every additional character in your password, especially if one of them is a symbol rather than a letter or number.
Worst-case scenario with almost unlimited computing power for brute-forcing the decrypt:
6 alphanumeric characters takes 0.0000224 seconds to crack
10 alpha/nums with a symbol takes 2.83 weeks.
The Courts

Submission + - Judges know fair use when they see it on South Park (justia.com)

Submitted by WindyWonka
WindyWonka writes: You'd think that that 45 million views of your own bizarre YouTube video wouldn't prompt you to sue South Park for copyright infringement. Guess again.

No matter. A federal appeals court in Chicago affirmed a lower court's decision to toss copyright claims over the infamous "What, What (in the Butt!)" video. They cited South Park‘s “distinct animation style and scatological humor," (that fancy word means "pooh") through the eyes of Cartman's 4th grade character, as a pretty damn good example of fair use.
Security

Submission + - Flame malware authors hit self-destruct (cio.com.au)

Submitted by
angry tapir
angry tapir writes: "The creators of the Flame cyber-espionage threat ordered infected computers still under their control to download and execute a component designed to remove all traces of the malware and prevent forensic analysis. Flame has a built-in feature called SUICIDE that can be used to uninstall the malware from infected computers. However, late last week, Flame's creators decided to distribute a different self-removal module to infected computers that connected to servers still under their control."
The Courts

Submission + - Samsung sues Aussie patent office in Apple suit (itnews.com.au)

Submitted by schliz
schliz writes: Samsung has sued the Australian patent commissioner — and by extension the Australian Government — in an attempt to force a review of patents key to its global battle with smartphone rival Apple. The Korean manufacturer claims that the commissioner should not have been able to grant four patents used by Apple in its case against Samsung's Galaxy Tab 10.1. The Government solicitor will face Samsung in court on June 25.
Education

Submission + - Looking for recommendations for training

Submitted by
SouthSeaDragon
SouthSeaDragon writes: "I'm a computer professional who has performed most of the functions that could be expected over a 39 year career, including hardware maintenance and repair, sitting on a 800 support line, developing a help desk application from the ground up (terminal-based), writing a software manual, plus developing and teaching software courses. In recent years, I've worked for computer software vendors doing pre-sales support generally for infrastructure products including applications, app servers, integration with Java based messaging and ESB product and most recently a Business Rules product. I was laid off recently due to a restructuring and am now trying to figure out the next phase. With the WIA displaced worker grants now available I am attempting to figure out what training would be good to pursue. I am hearing that "the Cloud" is the next big thing, but I'm also looking into increasing my development skills with a current language. I wonder what the readers might suggest for new directions."
Cloud

Submission + - CentOS Backs Linux on Windows Azure With SLA (wired.com)

Submitted by
MikeatWired
MikeatWired writes: "OpenLogic announced on Thursday that it will provide CentOS Linux — and service-level agreement (SLA) support — through Microsoft’s new Windows Azure gallery. Yesterday, Microsoft announced support for Linux instances on its cloud service, among other cloud news, in what Wired Enterprise’s Cade Metz dubbed an Amazonian facelift. OpenLogic’s Steven Grandchamp writes in a blog post that for 'enterprise developers and IT folks who are multi-source and multi-platform, today’s announcement is good news. The Windows and Linux worlds take one step towards each other.' However, Grandchamp notes that despite Microsoft 'maturing its views on open source' with 'significant work' with Node.js, Hadoop, and Samba, the open source community 'will meet [Linux on Azure] with overall wariness and skepticism.' (See related: Windows Azure: Misunderstood or Misguided?) 'Some will view this with hope and a positive step; others will continue to be cynical,' he writes. 'For me, it’s part of a larger overall process that continues to signal open source coming of age. What major vendor doesn’t have an open source story now? It’s such an ingrained part of development, from legacy to mobile to cloud, that we can’t live without and we are figuring out how to love living with it.'"
Earth

Submission + - Huge phytoplankton bloom found under Arctic ice (nature.com)

Submitted by ananyo
ananyo writes: Researchers have been shocked to find a record-breaking phytoplankton bloom hidden under Arctic ice. The finding is a big surprise — few scientists thought blooms of this size could grow in Arctic waters. The finding implies that the Arctic is much more productive than previously thought — researchers now think some 25% of the Arctic Ocean has conditions conducive to such blooms (abstract). The discovery also helps to explain why Arctic waters have proven such a good carbon dioxide sink.
The Military

Submission + - Trained Rats Map Minefields Automatically (blogspot.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Believe it or not, but the Department of Defense is paying psychologists to train rats to find mines and circle around them. By attaching little GPS backpacks and supplying a laptop with software that looks for the 'circling around' signature, the DOD hopes its project will allow the release of platoons of rats near suspected minefields so that the laptop software creates a detailed map of where all the mines are located automatically. Not sure if they plan on picking up the rats afterward, but they do assure us that the rats are too lightweight to set off the mines!"
Politics

Submission + - The Art of Elections Forecasting (nytimes.com)

Submitted by
ideonexus
ideonexus writes: "Years ago Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com, a blog seeking to educate the public about elections forecasting, established his model as one of the most accurate in existence, rising from a fairly unknown statistician working in baseball to one of the most respected names in election forecasting. In this article he describes all the factors that go into his predictions. A fascinating overview of the process of modeling a chaotic system."
The Internet

Submission + - DARPA wants electronics with radically novel liquid cooling technology (networkworld.com)

Submitted by
coondoggie
coondoggie writes: "With increased electronic minituriztion and the density of the chips running such devices heat is a mortal enemy for the power and scalability of such systems. DARPA today announced a program called Intrachip/Interchip Enhanced Cooling (ICECool) that it hopes will go the heart of such heat problems by building chips with a drastically different way of cooling that uses what the agency calls a microfluid channel inside the chip or component that will more effectively dissipate heat than current cooling technologies."
Robotics

Submission + - Linux for Navy Drone Ground Stations (suasnews.com)

Submitted by
garymortimer
garymortimer writes: "Raytheon will help the U.S. Navy transition to using Linux software at ground control stations for unmanned air vehicles, the Defense Department announced Wednesday.

The company’s intelligence and information systems unit won a $27,883,883 contract to implement the tactical control system software, used for directing vertical take-off UAVs."

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