idbedead - Slashdot User

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Alkaline water benifits? (question.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 28, 2011 @02:59PM

An anonymous reader writes: Recently a friend of mine bough a water ionizer that can, through chemicals, raise or lower the pH of the water to different settings, like 8.5, 9, 9.5, 10, etc. I did a bit of research and have yet to find any studies done on this – with 100% of the websites out there having only testimonial type information (which also might explain why this stuff is only sold in the USA through MLM, as it would be illegal to advertise that it cures cancer and aids without proof, but via testimonials apparently its allowed). Have any scientific studies been done on short/long term usage of alkaline water? Are there any proven (once again, through scientific studies) results? Is this stuff just a hoax? Have any REAL doctors and scientists chimed in on this?

Submission + - Google Drops Cloud Lawsuit Against US Gov't (itworld.com)

Submitted by

jfruhlinger

on Tuesday September 27, 2011 @06:29PM

jfruhlinger writes: "A year ago, Google sued the U.S. government because the government's request for proposals for a cloud project mandated Microsoft Office; Google felt, for obvious reasons, that this was discriminatory. Google has now withdrawn the suit, claiming that the Feds promised to update their policies to allow Google to compete. The only problem is that the government claims it did no such thing."

Submission + - Petition to Cease Software Patents (whitehouse.gov)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 24, 2011 @08:03PM

An anonymous reader writes: A petition to direct the patent office to stop issuing software patents has been put up on whitehouse.gov's "We the People" section. It has already gained enough signatures to earn it an official response. Please consider adding your name to the list of signatures. Let's show the government just how many of us realize that software patents are harmful.

Submission + - Speed-of-light experiments yield baffling results (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by

intellitech

on Thursday September 22, 2011 @01:41PM

intellitech writes: "Puzzling results from Cern, home of the LHC, have confounded physicists — because it appears subatomic particles have exceeded the speed of light. Neutrinos sent through the ground from Cern toward the Gran Sasso laboratory 732km away seemed to show up a few billionths of a second early. The results will soon be online to draw closer scrutiny to a result that, if true, would upend a century of physics. The lab's research director called it "an apparently unbelievable result"."

Submission + - Crowdsourced evolution of 3D printable objects (endlessforms.com)

Submitted by

JimmyQS

on Thursday September 22, 2011 @12:53PM

JimmyQS writes: "The Cornell Creative Machines Lab, which brought us chatbots debating God and unicorns, has developed Endlessforms.com, a site using evolutionary algorithms and crowdsourcing to design objects that can be 3D printed in materials such as silver, steel or silicone. MIT's Technology Review says "The rules EndlessForms uses to generate objects and their variants resemble those of developmental biology—the study of how DNA instructions unfold to create an entire living organism. The technology is 'very impressive,' says Neri Oxman, director of the MIT Media Lab's Mediated Matter research group. She believes the user-friendliness of the evolutionary approach could help drive the broader adoption of 3-D printing technologies, similar to how easy-to-use image editors fueled the growth of digital photography and graphic manipulation. Oxman [notes] that this could ultimately have an impact on design similar to the impact that blogs and social media have had on journalism, opening the field to the general public." The New Scientist has a quick video tour and describes how the same technology can evolve complex, artificially intelligent brains and bodies for robots that can eventually be 3D printed."

Submission + - Yahoo Blocks Emails About Wall Street Protest (itworld.com)

Submitted by

itwbennett

on Wednesday September 21, 2011 @01:16PM

itwbennett writes: "People trying to email information about the Wall Street protests on Monday using Yahoo mail, found themselves on the receiving end of messages from Yahoo claiming 'suspicious activity'. ThinkProgress.org has a YouTube video of users trying to send emails that mention the 'OccupyWallSt.org' web site, which seemed to be the magic phrase to get your email blocked. Via Twitter, Yahoo announced the blockage was now fixed, but 'there may be residual delays.'"

Submission + - The History and Evolution of Malware (securityweek.com)

Submitted by wiredmikey on Wednesday September 21, 2011 @11:32AM

wiredmikey writes: Wade Williamson provides an interesting read on the evolution of malware, starting with a brief history, and background of modern malware threats, along with an explanation of the modern malware lifecycle...

Modern malware is emerging as one of the most concerning forces at play in information technology. With the ability to potentially coordinate millions of infected nodes, pass through security boundaries undetected on demand, and to adapt functionality on demand, modern malware has more in common with a fully distributed cloud-based application than it does with the simple self-replicating viruses and worms that we have known in the past.

40 years ago while working at BBN, Bob Thomas began experimenting with the concept of a mobile application. To this end he developed the Creeper program, which had the ability to move from machine to machine. Creeper quickly proliferated through ARPANET infecting everything in its path, and the emergence of the computer virus was upon us.

Given the evolution of malware, it is important that we look at more than simply the function of the malware (i.e. a banking botnet). It's just as important to understand how malware protects itself, communicates and foils our existing defense in depth.

Submission + - A Patent Attorney Breaks Down Impact of New Act (redmondmag.com)

Submitted by msmoriarty on Tuesday September 20, 2011 @03:17PM

msmoriarty writes: As you probably heard, on Friday the Obama administration passed the America Invents Act, which changed our system to "first to file." Support for the bill itself was split in the tech industry: Microsoft and IBM (among others) supported the act, Google and Apple opposed it. We asked a patent attorney to explain in detail the act/what impact he thinks it will have on the tech industry. According to him, there's still many open questions. From the article: " The Act has not accomplished [first to file] harmonization in a straightforward or unambiguous way. For example, it is not clear whether a prior use or offer for sale of an invention by an inventor or joint inventor within a year of the date of filing would be render the invention unpatentable. " He also said that the act clearly favors larger corporations, and he doubts it will speed up the patent process itself, which was one of its intended benefits.

Submission + - Why Hackers Don't Need To Be Smart (infoworld.com)

Submitted by

snydeq

on Tuesday September 20, 2011 @02:29PM

snydeq writes: "InfoWorld's Roger Grimes challenges the view that malicious hacking is 'more sophisticated than ever before.' 'The reality is far different: Malicious hackers are using pretty much the same old tools and exploiting the same old weaknesses. With very few exceptions (such as dynamic botnets), nothing has changed — except for the fact that the intruders are doing more with the access they get,' Grimes writes. 'It's not too surprising that the bad guys are reusing the same ol' tactics and technologies: Why come up with new ways to hack when the old ways work just fine? Organizations that want to make their environment significantly more secure should be doing the following better: patching systems regularly; creating and enforcing password policies; embracing configuration management; adopting a least-privilege strategy; and training end-users.'"

Submission + - Full Tilt Poker a Ponzi Scheme? (myfoxphilly.com)

Submitted by OverTheGeicoE on Tuesday September 20, 2011 @01:40PM

OverTheGeicoE writes: The US Government's battle against online poker is escalating. The US Justice Department on Tuesday accused poker celebrities Howard 'The Professor' Lederer and Christopher 'Jesus' Ferguson and other executives of Full Tilt Poker of defrauding poker players out of more than $300 million. Their Web site was allegedly a Ponzi scheme: 'the government alleges Full Tilt executives misrepresented to the website's players that the money the company was supposed to be holding in player accounts was safely held when it was actually being used for other purposes, including owner profits.'

Submission + - OnStar Begins Spying on Customers' GPS For Profit (zdziarski.com)

Submitted by PainMeds on Tuesday September 20, 2011 @11:32AM

PainMeds writes: This article by author Jonathan Zdziarski reveals that OnStar has recently updated their terms and conditions to allow the company to sell customer GPS coordinates (the whereabouts of your vehicle), vehicle speed, and other information to third party marketers and analytics companies, where it could be used for a number of nefarious purposes.

Submission + - Hackers break SSL encryption (theregister.co.uk) 1

Submitted by CaVp on Monday September 19, 2011 @05:35PM

CaVp writes: The Register has it: Researchers have discovered a serious weakness in virtually all websites protected by the secure sockets layer protocol that allows attackers to silently decrypt data that's passing between a webserver and an end-user browser.

Submission + - AT&T and Verizon LTE Networks Compared

Submitted by adeelarshad82 on Monday September 19, 2011 @05:35PM

adeelarshad82 writes: AT&T launched a super-speedy 4G LTE network in five cities on Sunday and the only thing that comes to mind is how it compares to Verizon Wireless' 4G LTE system. Well according to the eight rounds of testing conducted in Houston, Texas, Verizon may have something to worry about. The AT&T network averaged out with about 24Mbps downloads and peaked at 42.85Mbps, the fastest cellular connection seen to date. Just as exciting as the sheer download speeds were the connection quality results: Pingtest.net generally rated the network an A or a B, good enough for video chat or gaming.

Submission + - The Search for Apollo 10's 'Snoopy' (discovery.com)

Submitted by

astroengine

on Monday September 19, 2011 @11:17AM

astroengine writes: "A UK-led team of astronomers are going to use their comet and asteroid-hunting skills to track down a piece of Apollo history. In 1969, Apollo 10 did everything the first moon landing (Apollo 11) did, except land on the lunar surface. During the Apollo 10 mission, the lunar module, nicknamed "Snoopy," was jettisoned and sent into a solar orbit — it is still believed to be out there, 42 years later. "We're expecting a search arc up to 135 million kilometers in size which is a huge amount of space to look at," British amateur astronomer Nick Howes told Discovery News. "We're aware of the scale and magnitude of this challenge but to have the twin Faulkes scopes assist the hunt, along with schools, plus the fact that we'll doubtless turn up many new finds such as comets and asteroids makes this a great science project too.""

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Recover twenty years old's diskettes (slashdot.org) 1

Submitted by

Zilog

on Monday September 19, 2011 @10:00AM

Zilog writes: "The end of the 3½-inch floppy and the disappearance of associated drives showed to me the need to backup the tens of diskettes that accompanied my youth. Carefully preserved, these diskettes have been proved readable for the most part while some are approaching 20 years. However, some diskettes have shown some surface defects in areas with compressed archives (zip). Any idea to recover as much as possible these bad sectors?"

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