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Submission + - Your Personal Emails At Work May Be Private (lexology.com)

Submitted by ICLKennyG
ICLKennyG writes: Many are aware that what you do at work on your work computer is subject to being discovered and owned by your employer. The Supreme Court of New Jersey has reversed course and found a reasonable expectation of privacy in using personal, password-protected web-based email to communicate with a lawyer. It is unclear if this is a state specific anomaly or the beginning of a shift where computers are considered so ubiquitous that privacy is expected in personal communications.

Submission + - Possible New Homonid Species Remains Discovered

Submitted by mindbrane
mindbrane writes: The BBC is reporting on fossil finds "...uncovered in cave deposits near Malapa in the Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site near Johannesburg." The fossils of a mature female and juvenile male have "...small teeth, projecting nose, very advanced pelvis, and long legs..." suggesting more modern forms. "And yet its very long arms and small brain case might echo the much older Australopithecine group to which Professor Berger and colleagues have assigned it."

Aside from the debate as to classification the find is note worth in that it's discovery came about "...thanks to the "virtual globe" software Google Earth, which allowed the group to map and visualise the most promising fossil grounds in the World Heritage Site." Further the find in a cave bears the hallmarks of chance that often plays so large a part in fossilisation. "Their bones were laid down with the remains of other dead animals, including a sabre-toothed cat, antelope, mice and rabbits. The fact that none of the bodies appear to have been scavenged indicates that all died suddenly and were entombed rapidly.

"We think that there must have been some sort of calamity taking place at the time that caused all of these fossils to come down together into the cave where they got trapped and ultimately buried,""
Windows

Submission + - Windows 7 service pack leaked to torrent sites (techworld.com) 1

Submitted by superapecommando
superapecommando writes: An early build of Windows 7's first service pack has been leaked, leading to thousands of downloads on a whole host of various torrent websites.
As with every Windows operating system (OS) release, improvements and fixes often arrive in the form of a service pack, and only last month the Windows team discussed the upcoming Windows 7 SP1 release in a blog post. The team detailed that the first service pack would feature a number of minor updates for the popular OS. However, it is worth noting that the Windows team did not mention a final release date for the completed service pack.

Submission + - Lab-on-a-Chip Can Carry out Complex Analyses Quick (sciencedaily.com)

Submitted by Trintech
Trintech writes: Two years ago we read about a team of BYU engineers and chemists that created an inexpensive silicon microchip to reliably detects viruses, even at low concentrations. Now it seems a new Lab-On-A-Chip system, developed by Fraunhofer research scientists, can carry out complex analyses on the spot and will soon be ready for the market. The core element of this new chip is a disposable cartridge made of plastic which can be fitted with various types of sensors. To perform an assay, the doctor only has to place the relevant substances (reagents, etc) into the cartridge and the test then takes place automatically. It is the researcher's hope that, by using this chip, medical patients will be able to get their lab results in a matter of minutes instead of days.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Are Qwest's Modems Compromised? 6

Submitted by Ironlenny
Ironlenny writes: A friend and I spent the day working on a families network with Qwest Business connection. This family had be notified a week prior by Qwest that they were part of a botnet and as such were no longer allowed access to the network. After talking with customer service, the connection was reinstated, but they continued to receive email notifications. There was also an attempt by a third party to gain account information over the phone during this period (he was calling from an unidentified number). My friend ran several malware removal tools (Spybot Search & Destroy, Ad-Aware, AVG from a rescue disk, and others I don't remember), all scans were clean. He also ran Trend Micro's RUBotted on all the machines from the day they had their connection suspended up to today, and nothing was found. There is no unusual internal network activity. As far as we can tell, none of the machines are infected with anything.

Qwest was still saying that the family is running a bot net. When asked for, Qwest did provided a log of the suspicious activity. There are only three IP addresses in the logs. They all resolve to the same domain in the same German city. It appears that the domain is registered with T-Mobile. What is interesting is when we were checking the modem settings, we found two IP addresses that were unaccounted for (the family was using the modem as a wireless router). I used nmap to probe the suspect addresses. One address was 192.168.0.101 (unusual because it was far larger than the other address on the network), and the other was 192.31.80.30. 192.31.80.30 was listening on port 53 which (in my limited research) appears to be associated with a the ADM Worm. 192.168.0.101 had four ports open: 2869 (UPnP?), 3389 (MS Terminal Service), 4224 (xtell messaging service), and 8292. Port 8292 seemed to be querying several different protocols: SMB, LDAP, DNS, and X11. There was more in nmap's dump for the port, but those were the protocols I could identify off hand. Those two addresses were present and resolvable when only my Ubuntu netbook (which is clean and had never been connected to their network before) was physically connected to the modem and the WiFi radio was off.

While I was running the port scans, my friend was talking with Qwest Tech Support. During the course of the conversation, it was mention by Tech Support that they had received numerous complaints about connection issues related to botnets similar to our problem (this from what I overheard and what my friend told me.) I should also mention that we tried three different modems, all different models, and the same two address came up. On one of the modems, we actually had more than the two abnormal addresses, but I didn't run any scans on those. Our final solution was to use the modem in transparent bridge mode, with an IPCop box connecting directly to Qwest's servers.

I have three questions: Is it possible that Qwest's modems have been compromised and are being used to propagate botnets? Were we through enough in our investigation, or did we miss a step which could have led us in another direction? If the modem is compromised, will operating it in transparent bridge mode render the vulnerability moot?
Space

Spectrum of Light Captured From Distant World 32

Posted by Soulskill from the what-are-you-made-of dept.
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from Cosmos: "Astronomers have made the first direct capture of a spectrum of light from a planet outside the Solar System and are deciphering its composition. The light was snared from a giant planet that orbits a bright young star called HR 8799 about 130 light-years from Earth, said the European Southern Observatory (ESO). ... The find is important, because hidden within a light spectrum are clues about the relative amounts of different elements in the planet's atmosphere. 'The features observed in the spectrum are not compatible with current theoretical models,' said co-author Wolfgang Brandner. 'We need to take into account a more detailed description of the atmospheric dust clouds, or accept that the atmosphere has a different chemical composition from that previously assumed.' The result represents a milestone in the search for life elsewhere in the universe, said the ESO. Until now, astronomers have been able to get only an indirect light sample from an exoplanet, as worlds beyond our Solar System are called. They do this by measuring the spectrum of a star twice — while an orbiting exoplanet passes near to the front of it, and again while the planet is directly behind it. The planet's spectrum is thus calculated by subtracting one light sample from another."

Comment Re:Government setting up TOR nodes? (Score 1) 174

by Ironlenny (#28525099) Attached to: The Technology Keeping Information Flowing in Iran
Yes, theoretically Iran could setup enough relays to figure out who is using tor and where they are going, but in practice it is prohibitively expensive. Since the information is routed at random, and there is nothing in the encryped packet to give it's origen, Iran would need to control a large portion of the tor network inorder to have a reasonable chance of tracing the traffic.

The trouble is, as more relays are added that are outside of Iran's network, the number of possible routs information can take increases exponentially, the end result being a huge increase in the amount of resources Iran must devote to tracing packets with just a few outside nodes.

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