Dean W, Armstrong writes "Pluto's two new satellites, previously identified as S/2005 P 2 and S/2005 P 1, received official names from the International Astronomical Union today. Nix and Hydra are named after the mother of Charon and the fierce nine-headed monster. The initials of the new names, N and H, call to mind the New Horizons spacecraft, on a fast trajectory to visit Pluto, just like Pluto's symbol calls to mind Percival Lowell."

Ritz_Just_Ritz writes "Apparently, the Chinese MII (Ministry of Information) is going to crack down on Spam from within China. This will include training for 1000 mail administrators and recruitment of 20,000 'anti-spam volunteers.'"

Andy Updegrove writes "In early May, Massachusetts issued a 'Request for Information' on plugins that could help ease the transition from a Microsoft Office based environment to one relying on ODF compliant software. Now the seven responses received have been posted by the ITD: six from vendors large and small — and one from Microsoft that purports to be informational, but in fact gives no information beyond what is already publicly available. Like everything else in the ODF saga, many of the responses are as much political as technical, with some delivering off-topic messages, one (from the ODF Foundation, strangely) refusing to disclose much at all, and several contradicting each other on the technical challenge of working with Office absent further code disclosures by Microsoft. All in all, they make for an intriguing read on multiple levels — offering more of an Easter egg hunt than informative offering. It will be interesting to see which, if any, of these offerings the Mass. ITD decides to utilize."

jht writes "Arriving in my Inbox a few minutes ago (I'm a Novell Partner), was the announcement that effective immediately, CEO Jack Messman and CFO Joe Tibbetts are out of jobs at Novell. Existing president Ron Hovsepian was named CEO, and an interim CFO was named as well. Messman will stay on the board thru the end of October, though. A webcast of the conference call should be available shortly at www.novell.com/company/ir." ukhackster links to ZDNet's coverage of the shakeup, writing "It looks like [Messman's] been blamed for Novell's poor performance in the Linux space versus Red Hat. But can Linux ever be a real cash cow?"

TheViewFromTheGround writes "Fyodor of nmap fame has released a top 100 list of network security tools, based on a poll of the nmap-hackers list, each with a handy synopsis and useful information about source-code availablity and OS-compatibility. The last version of this survey was published in 2003."

georgewilliamherbert writes "The latest installment of "As the PDF Blackouts Turn" hit today, with a U.S. government apparently releasing a redacted version of their court filing in the Balco grand jury leak case which merely stuck a black line over the text, which remains available in the document. As with prior documents, entering text cut/paste mode in a normal PDF browser such as Acrobat allows a reader to access the concealed text. Previous incidents include an AT&T filing in the NSA case." This works with Xpdf and KPDF, too; for KPDF, use the selection tool (under the Tools menu) around the redacted section, copy to clipboard, then paste into the text-manipulator of your choice.

An anonymous reader points out an article on XYZ Computing exploring the use of a 2.5" notebook hard drive in a desktop computer. From the article: "The tradeoff for these qualities has always been limited capacities, high costs, and slow transfer rates, but a the recent progression in portable storage techology has changed the 2.5" drive greatly. We put the Seagate Momentus 5400.3 160GB SATA notebook drive in our test system and took it for a spin."

ajdlinux writes "A few days ago ReactOS 0.3 RC1 was released! After a long 6 months without a release this seems good! The ReactOS team has also started a software compatibility list for programs that are ReactOS-compatible. AFAIK the documentation and wiki hasn't yet been updated, but it should be soon. Go get it and try it out!"

Sommelier writes "As reported by KATU in Portland, Oregon, a man was arrested for parking outside a coffee shop in nearby Vancouver, Washington, and using their open wireless AP — for three straight months. '"He doesn't buy anything," Manager Emily Pranger says about the man she ended up calling 911 about. "It's not right for him to come and use it."' Turns out the guy was a registered sex-offender as well." A different computer expert might have pointed out some ways to see if anyone is piggybacking on a wireless signal (many APs have a Web-interface client list), or even suggested something like NoCatAuth.

Alranor writes "BumpTop is a new way of manipulating your GUI desktop with a graphics pen. Documents can be moved and piled (among other actions) as if they were real pieces of paper on a physical desktop. Simulated real physical interactions, such as documents pushing others out of the way as you move them around, are intended to increase the intuitiveness of the layout tool. Given the messiness of my desks at work and home, I'm not so sure this will work for me, but it's an interesting idea."

An anonymous reader writes "According to an article on Forbes as well as other sources, 'Scientists have used [embryonic] stem cells and a soup of nerve-friendly chemicals to not just bridge a damaged spinal cord but actually regrow the circuitry needed to move a muscle, helping partially paralyzed rats walk.'"

InfoWorldMike writes "Security researchers have found a way to seize control of a laptop computer by manipulating buggy code in the system's wireless device driver, reports Robert McMillan. The hack will be demonstrated at the upcoming Black Hat USA 2006 conference during a presentation by David Maynor, a research engineer with Internet Security Systems and Jon Ellch, a student at the U.S. Naval postgraduate school in Monterey, California. They used an open-source 802.11 hacking tool called LORCON (Lots of Radion Connectivity) to throw an extremely large number of wireless packets at different wireless cards and see if they fail. They declined to disclose the specific details of their attack before the August 2 presentation, but said it was potentially a huge hole because exploiters could simply sit in a public space and wait for the right type of machine to come into range to attack. "This would be the digital equivalent of a drive-by shooting," said Maynor. The victim would not even need to connect to a network for the attack to work, he said."

dhollist writes "A story just released by the Inquirer shows that 80% of incoming search requests from Microsoft's domain arrived via Google's search engine. In contrast, 64% of Yahoo! staff and 100% of Google staff use their own company's search engine. How's that for a product endorsement? I'd guess that Microsoft may soon add google.com to the list of blocked URL's on their intranet."

Jhon writes "AOL customer Vincent Ferrari tried to cancel his account, but a phone rep wouldn't let him do it. What he got when he tried to cancel his account was a lot of frustration. Now that's customer support!"

Slashback tonight brings some clarifications, and updates to previous Slashdot stories including, justice for a stolen sidekick victim, free WebTV test a hit, SUSE 10.1 release postponed, Microsoft loses Office patent appeal, and PayPal fixes their phishing hole -- Read on for details.