destinyland writes "A New York professor has built a two-armed nanorobotic device with the ability to place specific atoms and molecules where scientists want them. The nano-scopic device is just 150 x 50 x 8 nanometers in size — over a million could fit inside a single red blood cell. But because of its size, it's able to build nanoscale structures and machines — including a nanoscale walking biped and even sequence-dependent molecular switch arrays!"

For the last couple of days news has been trickling in about how the US is trying to ram IP laws down Costa Rica's throat by blocking their access to the US sugar market. Techdirt has a good summary of the various commentaries and a related scoop in the Bahamas where the US is also applying IP pressure. "The first is in Costa Rica, which is included in the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA). Yet like with other free trade agreements that the US has agreed to elsewhere, this one includes draconian intellectual property law requirements. I still cannot understand why intellectual monopoly protectionism — the exact opposite of 'free trade' — gets included in free trade agreements. At least in Costa Rica, a lot of people started protesting these rules, pointing out that it would be harmful for the economy, for education and for healthcare. So the Costa Rican government has not moved forward with such laws. How has the US responded? It's blocking access to the US market of Costa Rican sugar until Costa Rica approves new copyright laws."

When it comes to net neutrality, can we get along? Google and Verizon, antagonists on the question yet partners in Droid, say yes. The two companies have even teamed up to send the FCC ideas on how to handle network management disputes. 'Google/Verizon say that the Internet should function as an "open platform." That means, to them, that "when a person accesses cyberspace, he or she should be able to connect with any other person that he or she wants to—and that other person should be able to receive his or her message," they write. The 'Net should operate as a place where no "central authority" can make rules that prescribe the possible, and where entrepreneurs and network providers are able to "innovate without permission."'"

BluePeppers writes "The Guardian is reporting that Google China is investigating its staff about The Incident. '"We're not commenting on rumor and speculation. This is an ongoing investigation and we simply cannot comment on the details," a Google spokeswoman said. Security analysts told Reuters the malicious software or malware used in the attack was a modification of a trojan called Hydraq. A trojan is a hidden program allowing unauthorized access to a computer. The analysts said the sophistication in the attack was in knowing whom to attack, not the malware itself.'"

nine-times writes "After many years in IT, I've been surprised to notice how much of my traffic is still unencrypted. A lot of businesses that I interact with (both business and personal) are still using unencrypted FTP, and very few people use any kind of encryption for email. Most websites are still using unencrypted HTTP. DNSSEC seems to be picking up some steam, but still doesn't seem to be widely used. I would have thought there would be a concerted effort to move toward encryption for the sake of security, but it doesn't seem to be happening. I wanted to ask the Slashdot community, what do you think the hold up is? Are the existing protocols somehow not good enough? Are the protocols fine, but not supported well enough in software? Is it too complicated to manage the various encryption protocols and keys? Is it ignorance or apathy on the part of the IT community, and that we've failed to demand it from our vendors?"

alphadogg writes "Cisco, HP and others are waging an epic battle to gain more control of the data center, but at the same time they are joining forces to push through new Ethernet standards that could greatly ease management of those increasingly virtualized IT nerve centers. The IEEE 802.1Qbg and 802.1Qbh specifications are designed to address serious management issues raised by the explosion of virtual machines in data centers that traditionally have been the purview of physical servers and switches. In a nutshell, the emerging standards would offload significant amounts of policy, security and management processing from virtual switches on network interface cards (NIC) and blade servers and put it back onto physical Ethernet switches connecting storage and compute resources. 'There needed to be a way to communicate between the hypervisor and the network,' says Jon Oltsik, an analyst at Enterprise Systems Group. 'When you start thinking about the complexities associated with running dozens of VMs on a physical server the sophistication of data center switching has to be there.'"

Barence writes "Microsoft has issued a statement urging people to upgrade their browser to IE8, after the zero-day exploit that was used to attack companies such as Google went public. According to Microsoft's security advisory: 'the vulnerability exists as an invalid pointer reference within Internet Explorer. It is possible under certain conditions for the invalid pointer to be accessed after an object is deleted. In a specially-crafted attack, in attempting to access a freed object, Internet Explorer can be caused to allow remote code execution.' But, although IE6 has been the source of the attacks until now, Microsoft's advisory admits that both IE7 and IE8 are vulnerable to the same flaw, even on Windows 7."

MojoKid writes "NVIDIA has decided to disclose more information regarding their next generation GF100 GPU architecture today. Also known as Fermi, the GF100 GPU features 512 CUDA cores, 16 geometry units, 4 raster units, 64 texture units, 48 ROPs, and a 384-bit GDDR5 memory interface. If you're keeping count, the older GT200 features 240 CUDA cores, 42 ROPs, and 60 texture units, but the geometry and raster units, as they are implemented in GF100, are not present in the GT200 GPU. The GT200 also features a wider 512-bit memory interface, but the need for such a wide interface is somewhat negated in GF100 due to the fact that it uses GDDR5 memory which effectively offers double the bandwidth of GDDR3, clock for clock. Reportedly, the GF100 will also offer 8x the peak double-precision compute performance as its predecessor, 10x faster context switching, and new anti-aliasing modes."

at_slashdot writes "The Perl CPAN Testers have been suffering issues accessing their sites, databases and mirrors. According to a posting on the CPAN Testers' blog, the CPAN Testers' server has been being aggressively scanned by '20-30 bots every few seconds' in what they call 'a dedicated denial of service attack'; these bots 'completely ignore the rules specified in robots.txt.'" From the Heise story linked above: "The bots were identified by their IP addresses, including 65.55.207.x, 65.55.107.x and 65.55.106.x, as coming from Microsoft."

An anonymous reader writes "A British man was arrested under anti-terrorism legislation for making a bomb joke on Twitter. Paul Chambers, 26, was arrested under the provisions of the Terrorism Act (2006). His crime? Frustrated at grounded flights over inclement weather, he made a joke bomb threat on the social networking site Twitter."

swandives writes "The Linux.conf.au is in full-swing in Wellington, New Zealand, and Computerworld Australia has an interview with Jon Corbet in the leadup to his Kernel Report. The latest kernel release is due early March and will include reversed-engineered drivers for Nvidia chipsets."

An anonymous reader writes "DivX was the first digital video format to really win mainstream acceptance, doing for movies what MP3 did for music (both good and bad). Eventually even Sony, the king of proprietary formats, caved into pressure and added DivX support to its DVD players and the PlayStation 3. Now HandBrake's developers have made an interesting choice for version 0.9.4 — they ditched support for AVI files using DivX and XviD. Your only option now is to convert DVDs and other media to MKV or MP4 files, with the option to save as Apple-friendly M4V files. So why is HandBrake ditching AVI and XviD support when it's a format that's won such widespread acceptance? In the words of the developers, 'AVI is a rough beast. It is obsolete.'"

charliesome writes "Hexxeh, a student from the United Kingdom, has been the source for ChromeOS builds since the release of the Google operating system. He's just released ChromeOS Zero, a small build designed for speed and aesthetics. He recently did an interview with The Chrome Source."

Hugh Pickens writes "New York Magazine reports that the NY Times appears close to announcing that the paper will begin charging for access to its website, according to people familiar with internal deliberations. After a year of debate inside the paper, the choice has been between a Wall Street Journal-type pay wall and the metered system in which readers can sample a certain number of free articles before being asked to subscribe. The Times seems to have settled on the metered system. The decision to go paid is monumental for the Times, and culminates a yearlong debate that grew contentious, people close to the talks say. Hanging over the deliberations is the fact that the Times' last experience with pay walls, TimesSelect, was deeply unsatisfying and exposed a rift between Sulzberger and his roster of A-list columnists, particularly Tom Friedman and Maureen Dowd, who grew frustrated at their dramatic fall-off in online readership. The argument for remaining free was based on the belief that nytimes.com is growing into an English-language global newspaper of record, with a vast audience — 20 million unique readers — that would prove lucrative as web advertising matured. But with the painful declines in advertising brought on by last year's financial crisis, the argument that online advertising might never grow big enough to sustain the paper's high-cost, ambitious journalism — gained more weight."

Gizmodo highlights a very cool repurposing effort for the Wii's Balance Board accessory. Rather than the specialized force platforms used to quantify patients' ability to balance after a trauma like stroke, doctors at the University of Melbourne thought that a Balance Board might serve as well. Says the article: "When doctors disassembled the board, they found the accelerometers and strain gauges to be of 'excellent' quality. 'I was shocked given the price: it was an extremely impressive strain gauge set-up.'" Games controllers you'd expect to be durable and at least fairly accurate; what's surprising is just how much comparable, purpose-built devices cost. In this case, the Balance Board (just under $100) was compared favorably with a test platform that costs just a shade less than $18,000.