Ron2K - Slashdot User

Submission + - Mandriva's Eugeni Dodonov Leaves Goodbye Gifts (ostatic.com)

Submitted by Thinkcloud on Wednesday July 27, 2011 @04:39AM

Thinkcloud writes: As a goodbye gesture truly in the spirit of the community Eugeni Dodonov contributes msec , netprofile, net_monitor and other handy tools to github directory for any distribution to use.

Submission + - BlackBerry maker RIM axes 2,000 jobs (bytebeats.com)

Submitted by

bytebeats

on Wednesday July 27, 2011 @04:35AM

bytebeats writes: "Waterloo, Ont.-based Research In Motion plans to cut about 2,000 jobs, the company announced Monday.Once Canada’s high-tech darling, the BlackBerry maker is cutting about 11 per cent of its global workforce."

Submission + - Lubuntu Hosted On Ubuntu Main Server (muktware.com)

Submitted by sfcrazy on Wednesday July 27, 2011 @03:40AM

sfcrazy writes: Lubuntu, the light weight Ubuntu-based OS has been recognized as an official flavor of Ubuntu. While the recognition was made recently, today the iso and other images of Lubuntu have been made available on Canonical's cdimage.ubuntu.com. This also means that Lubuntu is out of the Ubuntu factory.

Submission + - US Cyber Security Head Quits Amidst Cyber Attacks (itproportal.com) 1

Submitted by hypnosec on Wednesday July 27, 2011 @03:14AM

hypnosec writes: U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) director Randy Vickers has stepped down from his position amidst a growing number of cyber crimes targeted at government networks, new reports have confirmed.

US-CERT is the key organisation which is responsible for looking after the security infrastructure of the US federal government. Mr. Vicker's decision to call it a day as the head of the organisation came only after an email sent by Bobbie Stempfley, acting assistant secretary for cyber security and communications, to the US CERT was obtained by the media.

Submission + - Robot gets rid of landmines -- by crushing them (discovery.com) 1

Submitted by derGoldstein on Tuesday July 26, 2011 @02:40PM

derGoldstein writes: Discovery has an article about a robot that gets rid of landmines, not by using sensors to pinpoint their location, but by rotating a giant cylinder covered in tungsten hammers to smash them and blow them up: "An operator commands this beast from a safe distance using a remote control unit. The hull of the robot is made up of hardened steel plates in a "V" shape to help limit any damage from antitank mines and unexploded shells of sizes up to 3 inches, and the D-3 has been able to successfully ingest mines containing as much as 17.6 pounds of explosive, which is nothing to sneeze at.". A video of the beast in action can be found here.

Submission + - New Soyuz Launch Facility Gets Equator Boost (pbs.org) 1

Submitted by tcd004 on Tuesday July 26, 2011 @02:33PM

tcd004 writes: Russian and French teams are currently hard at work in French Guiana on the northern coast of South America, building the first Soyuz launch facility in the Western Hemisphere. Soyuz rockets normally carry 3,500 pound payloads into orbit, but from the French Guiana spaceport, the rocket will have an added benefit of being near the equator where the Earth's spin extremely fast. This extra boost allows it to deliver a 6,600 pound payload into orbit. The first launches are scheduled for October.

Submission + - Astronomers near capturing star's moment of death (digitaltrends.com)

Submitted by derGoldstein on Tuesday July 26, 2011 @02:26PM

derGoldstein writes: From DigitalTrends: "An amateur astronomer recently discovered what has been confirmed to be one of the best looks yet at a planetary nubula, the last, gassy breath of a dying star. The nebula, named Kronenberger 61 after the enthusiast who discovered it, will offer insights into the future and death of our own sun."

Submission + - Why Microsoft Won't Dump Bing (redmondmag.com)

Submitted by msmoriarty on Tuesday July 26, 2011 @01:56PM

msmoriarty writes: Bing is a still a money-loser for Microsoft, and the calls for the company to sell it off are growing. But according to long-time Microsoft watcher Mary-Joe Foley, dumping Bing is just not going to happen. From the article: "While the world sees Bing as a distant No. 2 search engine, Microsoft brass and bean counters see Bing as a reusable component and asset that will be built into more and more products. Those who think Microsoft will discard Bing or sell it to the highest bidder are dead wrong — that won't happen now or any time soon."

Submission + - The Rise of Git (infoworld.com)

Submitted by

snydeq

on Tuesday July 26, 2011 @01:56PM

snydeq writes: "InfoWorld takes a look at the rise of Git, the use of which has increased sixfold in the past three years. Buoyed in large part by interest among the Ruby community and younger developers, Git has been gaining share for open source development largely because of its distributed architecture, analysts note. And the version control system stands to gain further traction on Subversion in the years ahead, as Eclipse is making Git its preferred version control system, a move inspired by developers and members."

Submission + - DIY Dropbox alternatives (itworld.com)

Submitted by

jfruhlinger

on Tuesday July 26, 2011 @01:40PM

jfruhlinger writes: "Dropbox was a service that many techies fell in love with, only to be burned when they found out its dodgy security and dubious copyright claims. The company's tried to make amends — but what other options are there for those who have had enough? While there's nothing quite as seamless out there, it's not difficult to build your own Dropbox alternatives from freely available software and services from other vendors."

Submission + - Amazon Nerfs Their Product Advertising API (amazon.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 26, 2011 @01:39PM

An anonymous reader writes: After having spent a few hundred hours working on my Amazon affiliate sites, I was not pleased to read this morning that I could now only get ten pages of products instead of four hundred or that my coworker's affiliate site is pretty well crippled because he can't filter by MerchantId. Why have an affiliate program at all if you continually bait and switch the terms of service? Are there other large web sites that sell many products and off reasonable bounties?

Submission + - New Poll Has Contradictory Findings for Public Sup (yahoo.com)

Submitted by

MarkWhittington

on Tuesday July 26, 2011 @01:27PM

MarkWhittington writes: "A new IBD/TIPP poll has found contradictory findings where public support for the US space program is concerned. The poll found strong support for NASA and space exploration in general. However the same poll found that few people wanted to increase NASA's budget to pay for space exploration. However the reason behind the seeming contradiction may be found in a 2003 study by Robert Launius that found that the American public has an inflated notion of just how large NASA's budget really is."

Submission + - Inside job: anatomy of a bank card heist (pcpro.co.uk)

Submitted by

nk497

on Tuesday July 26, 2011 @01:20PM

nk497 writes: "Hacking website databases isn't the only way to get credit card details; some criminals are getting them right from the source: card readers. Hackers pick a terminal type, take it apart to uncover its security protections, and tamper with the hardware so it scrapes card data, sending it back to the criminals over a wireless connection. They either break in to hack one on location or find ways to install cracked terminals without anyone noticing. Because the card reader keeps working as normal, it's hard to spot if one's been tampered with, meaning cracked terminals stay in place for some time, sending back stolen details the whole time."

Submission + - Sony Breach Suit A Teaching Moment On Insurance (computerworld.com)

Submitted by

CWmike

on Tuesday July 26, 2011 @12:54PM

CWmike writes: "A brewing legal dispute between Sony and one of its insurers over data breach liability claims highlights the challenges that companies can sometimes face in getting insurance providers to cover expenses arising from cybersecurity incidents. Zurich American Insurance Co. asked the court last week to absolve it of any responsibility for defending or indemnifying Sony against claims arising from the recent data breaches at the company. The data breaches at Sony's PlayStation Network, Sony Entertainment Online and Sony Pictures resulted in account data on close to 100 million individuals becoming exposed and over 12 million credit and debit cards being compromised. The breaches have so far resulted in at least 55 putative class-action lawsuits being filed against Sony in the U.S and another three lawsuits filed against it in Canada. Sony expects to spend close to $180 million in the next year alone on breach-related costs. But analysts say insurance might not have even been worth it in Sony's case: 'There aren't many success stories where cyber insurance [has played] a significant role in reducing the cost of incidents,' said Gartner analyst John Pescatore. Um, better security as an insurance policy maybe?"

Submission + - Time travel proved impossible with a photon (geek.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 26, 2011 @12:52PM

An anonymous reader writes: In order to time travel all you have to do is manage to travel faster than the speed of light. It sounds quite simple when you put it like that, but the tough bit is managing to go fast enough to break through that speed barrier, a barrier that scientists now believe they have proved is impossible to exceed.

Professor Du Shengwang, physicist and head of a Hong Kong University Science and Technology research team, decided to prove that time travel was impossible once and for all. He did this by managing to measure the speed of a single photon in a vacuum using controllable waveforms. A photon is the basic unit of light and has no mass, it is also known as an elementary particle.

The experiment is relevant because for the past 10 years it has been thought optical pulses may be able to travel faster than light under specific circumstances. This is called superluminal. However, it was later proved wrong, but left scientists with questions about how fast a photon could travel as it would be the one particle that could potentially break the speed of light barrier.

Shengwang’s work has proved that is definitely not the case and Eintein’s theory that light is the “traffic law of the universe” still holds up as true. The research also goes beyond just proving light speed is the upper limit and offers insights into the transmission of quantum information.

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