Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Security

Submission + - Flash 9 Plugin Vulnerability

Submitted by
Aristotle's Fearless
Aristotle's Fearless writes: "The current Flash Player 9 plugin for IE and Firefox on Windows (9.0.28.0) has a serious bug. Certain bitmap draws using the BitmapData class in ActionScript 3 cause immediate page faults and close both IE and Firefox on all flavors of Windows.

This writer has isolated a proof of concept code fragment in AS3 and submitted a bug report to Adobe. Details are being withheld pending a reply from Adobe because of concerns this may be exploitable by buffer overrun code injection.

See this page for the proof of concept SWF. Be warned: your windows browser will exit with a page fault upon clicking the link on this page."
Bug

Submission + - Redefining Avogadro's number

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Have you ever asked questions like What went first, the universal gas constant or the Boltzmann's constant? In this article. the ultimate definitions for mass, time, and distance are discussed; and the authors propose a new operative definition (i. e. not based on references to physical objects) for both mole and mass units. Maybe it is the final improvement the SI needs to be completely reproducible.
Biotech

Submission + - Cancer cure Ignored due to not being profitable

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn10971-cheap- safe-drug-kills-most-cancers.html It sounds almost too good to be true: a cheap and simple drug that kills almost all cancers by switching off their "immortality". The drug, dichloroacetate (DCA), has already been used for years to treat rare metabolic disorders and so is known to be relatively safe. It also has no patent, meaning it could be manufactured for a fraction of the cost of newly developed drugs. Evangelos Michelakis of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, and his colleagues tested DCA on human cells cultured outside the body and found that it killed lung, breast and brain cancer cells, but not healthy cells. Tumours in rats deliberately infected with human cancer also shrank drastically when they were fed DCA-laced water for several weeks. DCA attacks a unique feature of cancer cells: the fact that they make their energy throughout the main body of the cell, rather than in distinct organelles called mitochondria. This process, called glycolysis, is inefficient and uses up vast amounts of sugar. [.........]
First Person Shooters (Games)

Submission + - New Duke Nukem Forever screenshot released

Submitted by Datamonstar
Datamonstar writes: Gametrailers.com reports a confirmation of sorts for the existence of Duke Nukem Forever. According to the article:

"In what almost feels like a sick joke, the guys at 3D Realms have appeared out of the ether to reaffirm the existence of the vaporware that is Duke Nukem Forever."
The picture's authenticity was confirmed "After finding an image of Duke on a Gameasutra jobs posting for a programmer at 3D Realms, members of the Shacknews messageboards discussed its authenticity until George Broussard, co-creator of the franchise, popped up to verify it as an in-game image." The article is quick to admit that "The screenshot offers little in terms of information. It simply shows Duke in typical fashion: grimacing behind a pair of sunglasses while holding some pistols." But it also states "It took 'em 10 years to make this screenshot, so you'd better appreciate it." If this event is any indication at all, it would seem that the game's production is still moving (somewhat) forward after all.
The Internet

Submission + - The Pirate Bay, an own country?

Submitted by
DemoniZer
DemoniZer writes: "The Pirates wants to buy their own country. The Pirate Bay has gone official about their intensions to set up an permanent harbor at Sealand Attractive Micronation The micronation is from the world war 2, and is located near the coast of England, with 550 square feet. Sealand has potential to be a juridical freezone, and as an independent state at international water. You could be a citizen! The Pirate Bay want's more PayPal-Donations to try collecting more money, with a promise that you could be come a member of Sealand if they should win the bid-round. "It should be a great place for everybody, with high-speed Internets access, no copyright laws and vip accounts to The Pirate Bay." Says the swedish owners in the announcement on BuySealand.com The Pirate Bay has also looked at the micronation right outside sweden, called Ladonia"
Power

Submission + - Open Project to Develop Renewable Energy System

Submitted by
rohar
rohar writes: "We have been working on a system that combines some existing indirect solar technologies to build a location independant, renewable, reliable and economically feasible indirect solar electrical power generation system. The idea is to "roll-your-own" geothermal source by capturing heat from the ambient air with a solar powered absorption heat pump, store it underground and generate electricity from the air cooling convection. When the air is cooler the stored heat is then used in a reverse process to generate electricity by transferring the heat back to the air when it is cooler (at night or seasonal). There are many additional benefits including clean water capture from the "dehumidifier" effect of the air cooling, construction from common materials and thermal storage that may be incorporated into dwelling heat systems."
Games

Submission + - Will Vista make it cheaper to be a gamer ?

Submitted by
rathalian
rathalian writes: "After spending many a year wrestling home built PCs and working through the inevitable issues seen with increasing performance including heat and noise reduction, I decided to investigate purchasing a 'gaming' laptop. As the salary sacrificing options I have make it very appealing, particulary as I have an IT business that requires some mobility, it was interesting to see how over the last 4 months the online specifications available for laptops is changing fairly rapidly as we have approached Vista's release. Notably the premium that was charged for a laptop containing a 'decent' GPU to play games has dropped sharply. You can now get laptops with Core 2 Duo's, ATI X1700 GPUs and 1 gig of memory for under $2000 (Australian) as these chips are now more mainstream. And why are they more mainstream ? — see Vista GPU requirements for one... A classic example of this has been Dell's site. Previously their 6400 and 9400 Inspiron series of laptops offered the Intel 950, ATI X1400 and in the case of the 9400, the Nvidia 9700GS. Just over a month ago the Intel line was dropped from both the 6400 and the 9400's catalogue and it is standard on the 6400 to get an X1400 at a much lower price than Dell was offering around the end of October 2006. You can now get Toshiba's laptop that includes an Nvidia 7900GTX for $3400 (Australian) which was previously unheard of in a laptop re bang for buck. Now I know that prices change, however there has been a clear surge in the amount of laptops running higher performance GPU's and for a lower cost. So, does this mean that 2007 will mark the year where there is an across the board drop in GPU prices as the higher performance GPU cards become the standard cards in the 'average' PC or laptop due to Vista requirements? What are your thoughts?"
Privacy

Submission + - Why blurring sensitive information is a bad idea

Submitted by
dheera
dheera writes: "Many of us have seen images of credit cards or statements online where information is blurred to hide sensitive information. I describe in an article why this is a bad idea and how it can be attacked in a method similar to a dictionary attack on a Unix password file."
Google

Submission + - Google taking a stand in the 08 presidential race?

Submitted by
owenc67202
owenc67202 writes: "With all the talk recently about funky Google search results I thought the following was funny. This morning I had big plans to make some waffles so I went to Google to find a recipe. I was lazy so I only searched for the word "waffles". Imagine my amusement to see the top result a John Kerry web site. Not just any Kerry web site but the campaigns official one. Search URL is http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=waffles&b tnG=Search In case it has changed here is a screen shot of my results http://home.hubris.net/owenc/temp/waffles.png Not sure if that is a political statement or not ;-]"
Desktops (Apple)

Submission + - Mac OS X and Font Smoothing

Submitted by Piroca
Piroca writes: Font smoothing in OS X is one of the worst aspects of the system, yet few users dare to complain about it. The rationale behind Quartz font rendering is that anything in the screen should be rendered as they would while printing. Apple decided to turn off font hinting and perform anti-aliasing indiscriminately, thus adding artifacts to horizontal and vertical lines. It happens the end result is that fonts at small sizes are blurry and not very easy to read (which is exactly the opposite result expected from the anti-aliasing strategy, and renders the crispness of LCDs useless). Apple has been heavy-handed about this issue since OS X 10.1 by not acknowledging it and not providing configuration options to turn off anti-aliasing in small fonts while providing font hinting and choices for system fonts (the ubiquitous Lucida Grande is not hinted therefore it looks wrong when anti-aliased) as the old System 9 and Windows do. This situation is unlikely to change anytime soon (Leopard won't do anything about it, at least). For me, this is a problem because I have to develop on OS X and keep starring at blurry fonts the whole day gives me headaches. I'm pretty sure other developers out there have the same problem, therefore here goes my question: what do you do to cope with the troublesome font smoothing in OS X?
The Media

Submission + - Second Life land owner challenges press freedom

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Citing the DMCA, Second Life's biggest land owner, Anshe Chung Studios, has challenged the right for users (including members of the press) to publish 'screen shots' from the game that they claim would infringe on their copyright. The issue has surfaced after the avatar Anshe Chung (real name Ailin Graef) was attacked by animated flying penises during a virtual interview with CNET news, conducted in their Second Life bureau last month. A video of the attack surfaced on YouTube, and was then taken town after Anshe Chung Studios filed a DMCA complaint. The Sydney Morning Herald and the blog BoingBoing have also received similar notices.

Slashdot Top Deals

All seems condemned in the long run to approximate a state akin to Gaussian noise. -- James Martin

Close