Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Power

Submission + - Walmart Goes Solar In California (tekgoblin.com)

Submitted by
tekgoblin
tekgoblin writes: "Walmart today has announced a way to appeal to the mass of eco-friendly California Liberals by installing solar panels on more than 75 percent of its stores in the state, making California the first state in the nation where Walmart has devoted this level of commitment to renewable energy."
Hardware

Submission + - Carnivorous plant inspires self-cleaning material (extremetech.com)

Submitted by
MrSeb
MrSeb writes: "Researchers from Harvard University have devised a material that is both superhydrophobic and superlipophobic. In other words, it repels water and oil, the bases of almost every commonly-occurring liquid including the smears on touchscreens caused by our fatty fingers! The new material, which is called SLIPS (Slippery Liquid-Infused Porous Surface — yes, really), is inspired by the leaves of the carnivorous pitcher plant which must be slippery enough to send sticky, oily-footed insects tumbling to their doom. To do this, SLIPS is made from a nano-structured material (like Teflon) and 3M's Fluorinert is added. The Fluroinert seeps into all the gaps and creates a thin, super-repellant layer that is just a few nanometers thick. Then, when almost anything comes into contact with SLIPS... it slips right off.

Needless to say, SLIPS could revolutionize oil transport (low-friction pipelines!), medicine (self-cleaning implements), houses (self-cleaning windows), and computers (smear-proof smartphones!)"
Patents

Submission + - Tax Loopholes No Longer Patentable (forbes.com) 4

Submitted by
Knowzy
Knowzy writes: "A section of the America Invents Act disallows issuing a patent "on a strategy for reducing, avoiding or postponing taxes," according to Forbes. The article describes one such strategy in some detail. The USTPO has already issued 161 of these "business method type" patents. 167 more were pending. The law only applies to future patent applications, leaving enforcement of existing patents an issue for the courts to decide."

Submission + - First billion dollar open source software vendor (yahoo.com) 1

Submitted by
head_dunce
head_dunce writes: "Red Hat is coming out way on top in this economy. Total revenue and subscription revenue for this quarter is up 28% year-over-year. Jim Whitehurst, President and Chief Executive Officer of Red Hat said, "Based on the strong first half results, we believe Red Hat remains well positioned to finish fiscal 2012 as the first billion dollar open source software vendor.”"
Security

Submission + - Adobe Pushes Emergency Flash Player Security Fix (securityweek.com)

Submitted by wiredmikey
wiredmikey writes: As expected, Adobe today released a security update for its Flash Player. The out of cycle update addresses critical security issues in flash player as well as an important universal cross-site scripting issue.

Adobe reported that one of the vulnerabilities (CVE-2011-2444) is being exploited in the wild in active targeted attacks designed to trick the user into clicking on a malicious link delivered in an email message.

To illustrate the importance of keeping systems up to date, including Adobe Flash products, the fact that the RSA cyber attack was executed using a spear phishing attack with an embedded flash file should serve as a friendly reminder. RSA was breached after an employee opened a spreadsheet that contained a zero-day exploit that installed a backdoor through an Adobe Flash vulnerability.
Hardware

Submission + - Opportunties From the Twilight of Moore's Law (bunniestudios.com)

Submitted by
saccade.com
saccade.com writes: "Andrew "bunnie" Huang just posted an excellent essay, Why the Best Days of Open Hardware are Yet to Come. He shows how the gradually slowing pace of semiconductor density actually may create many new opportunities for smaller scale innovators and entrepreneurs. It's based on a talk presented at the 2011 Open Hardware Summit.

Are we entering an age of heirloom laptops and artisan engineering?"
Chrome

Submission + - Google Prepares Fix to Stop BEAST SSL/TLS Attacks (theregister.co.uk)

Submitted by OverTheGeicoE
OverTheGeicoE writes: It was reported yesterday that researchers had found a way to break the most commonly used SSL/TLS encryption in browsers. According to the Register, Google is pushing out a patch to fix the problem. The patch doesn't involve adding support for TLS 1.1 or 1.2. FTFA: "The change introduced into Chrome would counteract these attacks by splitting a message into fragments to reduce the attacker's control over the plaintext about to be encrypted. By adding unexpected randomness to the process, the new behavior in Chrome is intended to throw BEAST off the scent of the decryption process by feeding it confusing information." The fix is supposedly in the latest developer version of Chrome.
Security

Submission + - EFF System To Warn Of Certificate Breaches (infoworld.com)

Submitted by
snydeq
snydeq writes: "With its distributed SSL Observatory, the Electronic Frontier Foundation hopes to detect compromised certificate authorities and warn users about attacks, InfoWorld reports. 'The EEF, along with developers at the Tor Project and consulting firm iSec Partners, has updated its existing HTTPS Everywhere program with the ability to anonymously report every certificate encountered. The group will analyze the data so that it can detect any rogue certificates — and by extension, compromised authorities — its users encounter, says Peter Eckersley, technology projects director for the EFF.'"
Apple

Submission + - Mac VMs Compared: VMware Fusion vs. Parallels (infoworld.com)

Submitted by
snydeq
snydeq writes: "InfoWorld's Galen Gruman provides a comparison of leading commercial Mac VMs, VMware Fusion 4 and Parallels Desktop 7, both of which have been updated to take advantage of Mac OS X Lion. 'In addition to supporting Lion as a host, both take advantage of Apple's change in policy that lets users run the desktop version of Mac OS X Lion in virtual machines. Prior to Lion, Apple restricted such usage to Mac OS X Server,' Gruman writes. 'The bottom line is that gamers and simulation users will get a bigger bang from Fusion, whereas number crunchers will do better by Parallels Desktop.'"
Games

Submission + - An FPS minus the shooting (arstechnica.com) 1

Submitted by phaedrus5001
phaedrus5001 writes: Ars has a story about a first person shooter under development that involves no shooting on the part of the player; at least, not shooting bullets. The game, Warco, has the player in the role of a war correspondent. The object is to immerse yourself in dangerous situations armed only with a camera.

From the article: "Players will experience the process of filming conflicts, going into dangerous situations armed with nothing but a camera. They will then edit the footage into a compelling news story."

While an interesting and different concept, it should be even more interesting to see if the developers can actually convince a publisher to release the project.
Science

Submission + - What You Eat Affects Your Genes (discovermagazine.com)

Submitted by purkinje
purkinje writes: Tiny bits of genetic material, called microRNAs, can make their way from the food you eat into your blood stream, and change how your genes are expressed, according to a new study. A team of Chinese scientists found tiny bits of white rice microRNA floating around in people's blood after a meal. When they looked at what was happening on a cellular level, they found that the microRNAs were changing gene expression, decreasing levels of a receptor that filters out LDL (bad) cholesterol. When the scientists gave mice both rice and a chemical to block the microRNAs, their levels of that receptor returned to normal---showing that the microRNAs weren't just swimming through the blood stream, but acting on genes in the animals' cells.

Submission + - WikiLeaks Founder's Unauthorized Autobiography (guardian.co.uk)

Submitted by macwhizkid
macwhizkid writes: After signing a major book deal for his autobiography, Julian Assange backed out (allegedly worrying about self-incrimination) but failed to return his £500,000 advance payment. The publisher is understandably unhappy with this outcome, and intends to publish the "world's first unauthorized autobiography" from an early draft Assange submitted. The book will be in stores tomorrow, but I'm still hoping it'll be published early on WikiLeaks...

Comment Re:Exploration (Score 1) 108

by 100_Monkeys_Typing (#32785658) Attached to: NASA Tests Hardware, Software On Armadillo Rocket
The word and concept of "exploration" is not necessarily human related. Animals and robots acting on our behalf can and do "explore." Why did the chicken cross the road? I would argue: "to find new resources and to expand it's knowledge of the surrounding area." Sounds like exploring to me. I don't necessarily disagree that humans should at some point wander around Mars and beyond, i think that the available tech for human travel beyond LEO is still too costly to bring us enough return on our investment.

Comment Re:No it isn't (Score 1) 1186

by 100_Monkeys_Typing (#32723378) Attached to: Tattoos For the Math and Science Geek?

Most jobs are "at will." This can translate to someone not liking your tattoo or color of your skin and finding a way for you to be let go. Ever been 1 minute late to work? Failed to make finish a project on time? Checked your bid on ebay on the company computer? These are all reasons a company could give for letting you go. Trying to prove intent in a unemployment hearing is pretty pointless.
I don't disagree with the law or it's intent, but the reality is the law can only be used in extremely flagrant cases.

Slashdot Top Deals

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

Close