News

Mayan Plumbing Found In Ancient City 220

Posted by kdawson from the series-of-tubes dept.
DarkKnightRadick writes "An archaeologist and a hydrologist have published evidence that the ancient Mayans had pressurized plumbing as early as sometime between the year 100 (when the city of Palenque in Chiapas, Mexico, was first founded) and 800 (when it was abandoned). While the Egyptians had plumbing way earlier (around 2500 BC), this is the first instance of plumbing in the New World prior to European exploration and conquest."
AMD

Intel Turbo Boost vs. AMD Turbo Core Explained 198

Posted by kdawson from the highly-pressurized-gas dept.
An anonymous reader recommends a PC Authority article explaining the whys and wherefores of Intel Turbo Boost and AMD Turbo Core approaches to wringing more apparent performance out of multi-core CPUs. "Gordon Moore has a lot to answer for. His prediction in the now seminal 'Cramming more components onto integrated circuits' article from 1965 evolved into Intel's corporate philosophy and have driven the semiconductor industry forward for 45 years. This prediction was that the number of transistors on a CPU would double every 18 months and has driven CPU design into the realm of multicore. But the thing is, even now there are few applications that take full advantage of multicore processers. What this has led to is the rise of CPU technology designed to speed up single core performance when an application doesn't use the other cores. Intel's version of the technology is called Turbo Boost, while AMD's is called Turbo Core. This article neatly explains how these speed up your PC, and the difference between the two approaches. Interesting reading if you're choosing between Intel and AMD for your next build."
Security

Foxit One-Ups Adobe In Blocking PDF Attack Tactics 112

Posted by kdawson from the can't-fox-us dept.
CWmike writes "Foxit Software, the developer of a rival PDF viewer to Adobe's vulnerability-plagued Reader, released an update on Tuesday that blocks some attacks with a 'safe mode' that's switched on by default. Foxit Reader 3.3 for Windows' 'Trust Manager' blocks all external commands that may be tucked into a PDF document. 'The Foxit Reader 3.3 enables users to allow or deny unauthorized actions and data transmission, including URL connection, attachment PDF actions, and JavaScript functions,' the update's accompanying text explains. Last week, several security companies warned of a major malware campaign that tried to dupe users into opening rigged PDFs that exploited an unpatched design flaw in the PDF format, one attackers could use to infect users of Adobe's and Foxit's software. That flaw in the PDF specification's '/Launch' function was disclosed in late March by Belgium security researcher Didier Stevens, who demonstrated how he could abuse the feature to run malware embedded in a PDF document. He also reported he had figured out how to change Adobe Reader's warning to enhance the scam."
OS X

Mac OS X Problem Puts Up a Block To IPv6 204

Posted by kdawson from the twenty-five-or-six-to-four dept.
An anonymous reader lets us know of an experiment conducted in Norway to determine real-world problems in using IPv6 today (Google translation; Norwegian original). "According to a Norwegian article in digi.no, Redpill Linpro did an experiment with regard to IPv6 on one of the largest online newspapers there (www.vg.no). They added a hidden iframe that pointed to an IPv6-enabled domain to test real-life problems about the reported IPv6 holes. The result was that mainly Mac OS X, older versions of Opera, and a few Linux distributions exhibited problems. For Mac OS X it took 75 seconds to time out before failing back to IPv4." From the consultant's report: "Mac OS X has a problem in that it will prefer 6to4-based IPv6 over IPv4-based connectivity, at least if its local IPv4 address is an RFC 1918-based private address as commonly found in NAT-ed home network environments. This is unfortunate, as 6to4 has shown itself to be much less reliable than IPv4."
Oracle

Oracle Restricts Access To Sun Firmware Downloads 202

Posted by kdawson from the where-the-bits-did-once-freely-roam dept.
boer lee writes with the news that you can expect trouble in downloading firmware updates for your Sun server if you purchased it before March 16, 2010. "In a somewhat surprising move (and without any notification to customers), Oracle shut down public access to firmware downloads. I learned this the hard way when I contacted Oracle customer service almost two weeks ago. Yes, it took 13 days for me to get access to the firmware download for systems under the standard warranty (i.e. less than a year old)."
Businesses

The Humble Indie Bundle 290

Posted by kdawson from the now-how-much-would-you-pay dept.
supersloshy writes "Last year, 2D Boy, the developers of the popular independent game World of Goo, had a pay-what-you-want birthday sale with curious results. For the next seven days, Wolfire Games is attempting the same kind of sale, but with some new twists. Wolfire Games' Humble Indie Bundle contains five independent games (World of Goo, Aquaria, Gish, Lugaru HD, and Penumbra) with no DRM and they are all cross-platform. In addition to directly supporting the developers of these five games, part of the money also goes to the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Child's Play Charity. No matter how much you spend, you also get to choose who your money goes to (charity only, developers only, evenly, or custom)."
Education

RFID Checks Student Attendance in Arizona 554

Posted by kdawson from the present-and-accounted-for dept.
The student newspaper at UW-Madison is running a piece about the use of RFID to check lecture attendance at Northern Arizona University. One poster to an email discussion list suggested that getting around this system would be simple if "all one has to do is walk into a classroom with 10 RFID-enabled cards in their pocket." "The new system will use sensors to detect students' university identification cards when they enter classrooms, according to NAU spokesperson Tom Bauer. The data will be recorded and available for professors to examine. ... [The spokesman] added the sensors, paid for by federal stimulus money, initially would only be installed in large freshmen and sophomore classes with more than 50 students. NAU Student Body President Kathleen Templin said most students seem to be against the new system. She added students have started Facebook groups and petitions against the sensor system. ... One of the most popular Facebook groups ... has more than 1,400 members." What are the odds that the use of tracking RFID will expand over time on that campus?
Open Source

Metasploit As Case Study In Selling a FOSS Project 50

Posted by kdawson from the keeping-it-real dept.
coondoggie sends in a Network World interview with HD Moore on the occasion of the commercial release of Metasploit by Rapid7, the company that bought it half a year ago. The pseudonomous author uses the occasion to explore the question of what happens to a vital open source project once it is sold commercially. "Metasploit might become one of the first examples of how a completely FOSS project grows up to be successful. It is the venture capital model without the startup money (though VCs are funding plenty of OS startups these days, too). Build it. They will come. Someone will buy it. And if you want them to stay, the FOSS project better remain as well supported as the eventual commercial version. This isn't the first open source project to have been bought by a big guy. And the jury is still out on on most of them. I could argue that Metasploit is a bit unique in that it didn't have a commercial arm when Rapid7 acquired it. That could not be said about SUSE or MySQL or even Gluecode (bought by IBM), etc."
Microsoft

Microsoft .Net Libraries Not Acting "Open Source" 246

Posted by kdawson from the promises-broken-or-forgotten dept.
figleaf writes "Three years ago, with much fanfare, Microsoft announced it would make some of the .Net libraries open source using the Microsoft Reference License. Since then Microsoft has reneged on its promise. The reference code site is dead, the blog hasn't been updated in a year and a half, and no one from Microsoft responds to questions on the forum."
The Military

US Air Force Launches Secret Flying Twinkie 234

Posted by CmdrTaco from the that's-one-big-twinkie dept.
Spectrummag writes "One of the most secretive US Air Force spaceflights in decades, launched this month, is keeping aficionados guessing as to the nature of the secret. The 6000-kilogram, 8-meter X-37B, nicknamed the flying Twinkie because of its stubby-winged shape, is supposed to orbit Earth for several weeks, maneuver in orbit, then glide home. What's it for? Space expert James Oberg tracks the possibilities."

Intel Shows Off First Light Peak Laptop 271

Posted by CmdrTaco from the more-bits-please dept.
Barence writes "Intel has provided the first hands-on demonstration of a laptop running its Light Peak technology — an optical interconnect that can transfer data at 10Gbit/sec in both directions — at the company's inaugural European research showcase here in Brussels. Intel has fitted Light Peak into a regular USB cable, with optical fibres running alongside the electrical cabling. Intel provided a visual demonstration of how data is passed through the cable by shining a torch into one end of the cable, with two little dots of light visible to the naked eye at the other end. The demonstration laptop was sending two separate HD video streams to a nearby television screen without any visible lag. The laptop includes a 12mm square chip that converts the optical light into electrical data that the computer understands."
United States

State Senator Caught Looking At Porn On Senate Floor 574

Posted by samzenpus from the let's-vote-on-this-instead dept.
Everyone knows how boring a debate on a controversial abortion bill can get on the Senate floor. So it's no wonder that Florida State Sen. Mike Bennett took the time to look at a little porn and a video of a dog running out of the water and shaking itself off. From the article: "Ironically, as Bennett is viewing the material, you can hear a Senator Dan Gelber's voice in the background debating a controversial abortion bill. 'I'm against this bill,' said Gelber, 'because it disrespects too many women in the state of Florida.' Bennett defended his actions, telling Sunshine State News it was an email sent to him by a woman 'who happens to be a former court administrator.'"
Mars

Martian Gullies Explained By ... Sand 97

Posted by CmdrTaco from the well-thats-not-'as-much-fun dept.
eldavojohn writes "There's a lot of evidence that a very long time ago some fluid once flowed on Mars, but the primary evidence of water today — gullies inside craters — is explainable by a much less exotic reason: flowing dust and sand. It would now seem that the news from 2006 that NASA had found definitive evidence of flowing water on today's Mars needs to be comprehensively reexamined. The Bad Astronomer lays claim that flowing sand and dust doesn't explain all recent hi-res imagery from the red planet, but it certainly does seem more plausible, considering what we know about Mars."
Data Storage

"Digital Universe" Enters the Zettabyte Era 137

Posted by CmdrTaco from the less-than-half-porn dept.
miller60 writes "In 2010 the volume of digital information created and duplicated in a year will reach 1.2 zettabytes, according to new data from IDC and EMC. The annual Digital Universe report is an effort to visualize the enormous amount of data being generated by our increasingly digital lives. The report's big numbers — a zettabyte is roughly a million petabytes — pose interesting questions about how the IT community will store and manage this firehose of data. Perhaps the biggest challenge isn't how much data we're creating — it's all the copies of it. Seventy-five percent of all the data in the Digital Universe is a copy, according to IDC. See additional analysis from TG Daily, The Guardian, and Search Storage."
Image

Salad Spinner Made Into Life-Saving Centrifuge Screenshot-sm 87

Posted by samzenpus from the kitchen-and-lab-equipment dept.
lucidkoan writes "Two Rice University students have transformed a simple salad spinner into an electricity-free centrifuge that can be used to diagnose diseases on the cheap. Created by Lauren Theis and Lila Kerr, the ingenious DIY centrifuge is cobbled together using a salad spinner, some plastic lids, combs, yogurt containers, and a hot glue gun. The simple and easily-replicated design could be an invaluable tool for clinics in the developing world, enabling them to separate blood to detect diseases like anemia without electricity."

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