iksowrak - Slashdot User

Comcast Launches First Public US Trial of DNSSEC 100

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday February 23, 2010 @03:41PM from the am-who-i-am-because-i-say-so dept.

cryan7755 and netbuzz both sent along a NetworkWorld story on Comcast's public test deployment of DNSSEC. Here is the company's blog post announcing the trial. "Comcast this morning announced what is believed to be the first public test deployment of DNS Security Extensions. The company says it has deployed DNSSEC throughout its nationwide network and will immediately make validating servers available to customers. In addition, Comcast said it would digitally sign all of its own domain names using DNSSEC by early next year. 'There is often talk about a chicken-and-egg sort of problem with DNSSEC. People don’t want to sign their own domains with DNSSEC until people are validating signatures,' says Jason Livingood, Executive Director of Internet Systems Engineering at Comcast. 'We want to explain how we as an ISP have a roadmap for validating signatures with DNSSEC.'"

Google Buys iPhone Search App, Kills It 223

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Friday February 19, 2010 @12:20PM from the throw-money-at-it dept.

Hugh Pickens writes "PC World reports that Google has acquired a popular iPhone application called reMail that provides 'lightning fast' full-text search of your Gmail and IMAP e-mail accounts. The app downloads copies of all your e-mail which can then be searched with various Boolean options. reMail has only been in the application store for about six months — with a free version limited to one Gmail account and a premium version which can connect to multiple accounts. 'Google and reMail have decided to discontinue reMail's iPhone application, and we have removed it from the App Store,' writes company founder Gabor Cselle, who will be returning to Google as a Product Manager on the Gmail team. Google isn't saying what the fate of reMail might be. Some are suggesting reMail could be integrated into Gmail search or live on in some form as a part of Android, Google's mobile platform. Another possibility is that Google may have snapped up reMail just to kill it, not because reMail was a competitor to anything Google had, but because reMail made the iPhone better or the acquisition may have more to do with keeping good search technology away from the competition, as opposed to an attempt to undercut the iPhone. 'Perhaps Google is just planning to buy up all the iPhone developers, one at a time, until Android is the only game in town,' writes Bill Ray at the Register."

Texas Textbooks Battle Is Actually an American War 1252

Posted by kdawson on Friday February 12, 2010 @03:40PM from the molding-young-minds dept.

ideonexus writes "I've been lackadaisical when it comes to following stories about Texas schoolboard attempts to slip creationism into biology textbooks, dismissing the stories as just 'dumbass Texans,' but what I didn't realize is that Texas schoolbooks set the standard for the rest of the country. And it's not just Creationism that this Christian coalition is attempting to bring into schoolbooks, but a full frontal assault on history, politics, and the humanities that exploits the fact that final decisions are being made by a school board completely academically unqualified to make informed evaluations of the changes these lobbyists propose. This evangelical lobby has successfully had references to the American Constitution as a 'living document,' as textbooks have defined it since the 1950s, removed in favor of an 'enduring Constitution' not subject to change, as well as attempting to over-emphasize the role Christianity played in the founding of America. The leaders of these efforts outright admit they are attempting to redefine the way our children understand the political landscape so that, when they grow up, they will have preconceived notions of the American political system that favor their evangelical Christian goals."

When Will AI Surpass Human Intelligence? 979

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday February 10, 2010 @07:43PM from the I'm-afraid-I'm-smarter-than-you-dave dept.

destinyland writes "21 AI experts have predicted the date for four artificial intelligence milestones. Seven predict AIs will achieve Nobel prize-winning performance within 20 years, while five predict that will be accompanied by superhuman intelligence. (The other milestones are passing a 3rd grade-level test, and passing a Turing test.) One also predicted that in 30 years, 'virtually all the intellectual work that is done by trained human beings ... can be done by computers for pennies an hour,' adding that AI 'is likely to eliminate almost all of today's decently paying jobs.' The experts also estimated the probability that an AI passing a Turing test would result in an outcome that's bad for humanity ... and four estimated that probability was greater than 60% — regardless of whether the developer was private, military, or even open source."

The Final Release of Apache HTTP Server 1.3 104

Posted by timothy on Wednesday February 03, 2010 @05:30PM from the people-of-earth-you're-on-your-own dept.

Kyle Hamilton writes "The Apache Software Foundation and the Apache HTTP Server Project are pleased to announce the release of version 1.3.42 of the Apache HTTP Server ('Apache'). This release is intended as the final release of version 1.3 of the Apache HTTP Server, which has reached end of life status There will be no more full releases of Apache HTTP Server 1.3. However, critical security updates may be made available."

Will Your Super Bowl Party Anger the Copyright Gods? 560

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday February 01, 2010 @03:11PM from the too-many-weekend-lawyers dept.

garg0yle writes "According to some folks, watching the Super Bowl on a television bigger than 55 inches is illegal. Is this true? Yes and no — long story short, if you're in a private residence you're probably okay, but if you're running a sports bar you may technically have to negotiate a license with the NFL. Just don't charge for food, or call it a 'Super Bowl' party, since the term itself is copyright."

Humans Nearly Went Extinct 1.2M Years Ago 356

Posted by kdawson on Monday January 25, 2010 @09:18AM from the pinch-point dept.

Hugh Pickens writes "Scientific American has a story on researchers from the University of Utah who have calculated that 1.2 million years ago, at a time when our ancestors Homo erectus, H. ergaster, and archaic H. sapiens were spreading through Africa, Europe, and Asia, there were probably only about 18,500 individuals capable of breeding in all these species together (PNAS paper here). Pre-humans were an endangered species with a smaller population than today's gorillas and chimpanzees. Researchers scanned two completely sequenced modern human genomes for a type of mobile element called Alu sequences, then compared the nucleotides in these old regions with the overall diversity in the two genomes to estimate differences in effective population size, and thus genetic diversity between modern and early humans. Human geneticist Lynn Jorde says that the diminished genetic diversity one million years ago suggests human ancestors experienced a catastrophic event at that time as devastating as the Toba super-volcano in Indonesia that triggered a nuclear winter and is thought to have nearly annihilated humans 70,000 years ago."

Comment Re:Energy is conserved by law of physics (Score 1) 238

by Praeluceo on Thursday January 21, 2010 @08:50PM (#30854818) Attached to: Researchers Pooh-Pooh Algae-Based Biofuel

You "rounded" roughly 304,059,724 people...to 3 million? I think you'd have to have over a billion people in the US before you could write off two orders of magnitude as a "rounding error". But yes, I agree, your estimate for being hurt by the reactor is correct enough, although 0/300 million does sound better to me. I'll toss my vote in for putting the next reactor in my city, please! Oh wait, my State had one, then decommissioned it at a freaking -loss-, and a 30 years later I get a check for $40 remunerating me for the trouble. While it worked it single-handedly generated 12% of Oregon's power. From a single reactor! Goodness I hate knee-jerk politics that interfere with our nation's ability to do rational things like operate its existing power plants.

YouTube To Allow Video Rentals 215

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday January 21, 2010 @06:28AM from the viral-rentals dept.

poopdeville writes "Starting Friday, Google and YouTube will allow movie rentals. The first five films available to rent through YouTube will cost $3.99 for a 48-hour viewing period. Movie studios will be able to set their own prices, with rental viewing windows ranging from one to 90 days. YouTube will get an unspecified commission from each rental. Barclays Capital analyst Douglas Anmuch expects YouTube to generate about $700 million in revenue this year, an estimated 55 percent increase from 2009. If YouTube hits that target, it likely will turn profitable, helping to justify the $1.76 billion in stock that Google paid for the site more than three years ago."

Comment Re:If you give a mouse a cell phone, (Score 1) 254

by Praeluceo on Thursday January 07, 2010 @03:26PM (#30686260) Attached to: Cellphone Radiation May Protect Brain From Alzheimers

If you give him a Bluetooth headset he's going to ask for a latte.

Comment Re:What about money contribution? (Score 4, Funny) 210

by Praeluceo on Wednesday January 06, 2010 @12:36PM (#30671068) Attached to: Ubuntu "Memberships" Questioned

I thought it was Catholicism where you had to buy indulgences?

Dark Matter Particles May Have Been Detected 156

Posted by kdawson on Friday December 18, 2009 @09:51AM from the who-you-callin'-a-wimp dept.

During two seminars at Stanford and Fermilab on Thursday, researchers described signals for two events detected deep in an old iron mine in Minnesota that might mark the first detection of dark matter — or not. The presenters said the chances that the signals they detected were caused by something other than "neutralino" dark matter particles was 23 percent. "One source indicates that we'd need less than 10 total detections within the CDMS' range in order to have a high degree of confidence in the results." The NY Times describes the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search methodology: "The cryogenic experiment is nearly half a mile underground in an old iron mine in Soudan, Minn., to shield it from cosmic rays. It consists of a stack of germanium and silicon detectors, cooled to one-hundredth of a degree Kelvin. When a particle hits one of the detectors, it produces an electrical charge and deposits a small bit of energy in the form of heat, each of which are independently measured. By comparing the amounts of charge and heat left behind, the collaboration’s physicists can tell so-called wimps from more mundane particles like neutrons, which are expected to flood the underground chamber from radioactivity in the rocks around it." Here are the research team's summary notes of the latest results (PDF).

Microsoft Promises Not To Sue Moonlight 2.0 Users 233

Posted by timothy on Thursday December 17, 2009 @02:48PM from the even-the-stars-above dept.

darthcamaro writes "Moonlight 2.0, Novell's open source implementation of the Microsoft media framework, is now available and comes with a new patent promise from Microsoft. Any Linux user can use it now without worrying about being sued: '"A really important change in how the community and individuals will see and use Moonlight is a change and extension to the patent covenant that Microsoft provides to Novell and its end users," Brian Goldfarb, director of Web and user experience platforms at Microsoft, told InternetNews.com. "We're now increasing the reach of the agreement — Microsoft's commitment not to sue Novell or Novell's customers now extends to redistributors."'"

SCO Terminates Darl McBride 458

Posted by CmdrTaco on Monday October 19, 2009 @12:05PM from the end-of-an-era dept.

bpechter writes "Linux Today reports SCO has terminated Darl McBride and linked to the SCO 8K SEC report. The report found also at the SCO site and states: 'the Company has eliminated the Chief Executive Officer and President positions and consequently terminated Darl McBride.'"

New Superconductor World Record Surpasses 250K 271

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday October 12, 2009 @05:37PM from the and-a-new-hobby-is-born dept.

myrrdyn writes to tell us that a new superconductivity record high of 254 Kelvin (-19C, -2F) has been recorded. According to the article this is the first time a superconductive state has been observed at a temperature comparable to a household freezer. "This achievement was accomplished by combining two previously successful structure types: the upper part of a 9212/2212C and the lower part of a 1223. The chemical elements remain the same as those used in the 242K material announced in May 2009. The host compound has the formula (Tl4Ba)Ba2Ca2Cu7Oy and is believed to attain 254K superconductivity when a 9223 structure forms"

Slashdot Top Deals