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Earth

Painting The World's Roofs White Could Slow Climate Change 712

Posted by timothy from the why-do-you-think-they-paint-ice-white? dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "Dr. Steven Chu, the Nobel prize-winning physicist appointed by President Obama as Energy Secretary, wants to paint the world white. Chu said at the opening of the St James's Palace Nobel Laureate Symposium that by lightening paved surfaces and roofs to the color of cement, it would be possible to cut carbon emissions by as much as taking all the world's cars off the roads for 11 years. Pale surfaces reflect up to 80 percent of the sunlight that falls on them, compared with about 20 percent for dark ones, which is why roofs and walls in hot countries are often whitewashed." (Continues, below.)
Security

Could the Internet Be Taken Down In 30 Minutes? 289

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the millions-of-voices-suddenly-cried-out-in-terror dept.
GhostX9 writes "Tom's Hardware recently interviewed Dino A. Dai Zovi, a former member of Sandia National Labs' IDART (the guys who test the security of national agencies). Although most of the interview is focused on personal computer security, they asked him about L0pht's claim in 1998 if the Internet could still be taken down in 30 minutes given the advances on both the security and threat sides. He said that the risk was still true."
Networking

Submission + - Long URLs wasting as much as 75MBps at Facebook (o3magazine.com)

Submitted by
Ryan McAdams
Ryan McAdams writes: "Popular websites such as Facebook are wasting as much as 75MBit/sec of bandwidth due to excessively long URLs. According to this article over at o3magazine.com, they took a typical Facebook home page, the traffic statistics from compete.com and figured out the bandwidth savings if Facebook switched from using URL paths that in some cases over 150 characters in length with shorter ones. It looks at the impact on service providers, with the wasted bandwidth used by the subsequent GET requests for these excessively long URLs. Facebook is just one example, many other sites have similar problems, as well as CMS products such as Word Press. Takes an interesting approach to web optimization for high traffic sites."
Spam

100 Email Bouncebacks - Welcome to Backscattering 316

Posted by timothy from the annoying-as-heck-if-heck-is-like-hell dept.
distefano links to a story on Computerworld, excerpting: "E-mail users are receiving an increasing number of bounceback spam, known as backscatter, and security experts say this kind of spam is growing. The bounceback e-mail messages come in at a trickle, maybe one or two every hour. The subject lines are disquieting: 'Cyails, Vygara nad Levytar,' 'UNSOLICITED BULK EMAIL, apparently from you.' You eye your computer screen; you're nervous. What's going on ? Have you been hacked? Are you some kind of zombie botnet spammer? Nope, you're just getting a little backscatter — bounceback messages from legitimate e-mail servers that have been fooled by the spammers."
Google

Submission + - Should We SEO Our Children?

Submitted by
gbulmash
gbulmash writes: ""Freakonomics" turned a lot of people on to how your name can affect your career prospects. Now a Wall Street Journal article is discussing parents who are considering how well their children will rank in Google searches when they pick the child's name. With everyone "googling" each other, common names make pages related to you harder to find. Is this the future of baby naming: search engine optimizing our children?"
Announcements

Submission + - 100Mbps mobiles coming soon?

Submitted by
DownintheUpside
DownintheUpside writes: "While today's 3G connectivity seems positively zippy at 1.8Mbps, some of the biggest names in telecoms are clubbing together to work on a standard that could boost mobile speeds to 100Mbps. Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson, Nokia, Nokia Siemens Networks, Nortel, Orange and its parent company France Telecom, T-Mobile and Vodafone have all announced their intention to work together on promoting LTE (long term evolution), a super high speed version of 3G. Hmm, just think of the possibilities for video telephony and movie streams."
Biotech

Submission + - Resumption of oxygen to cells kill cells

Submitted by Carlinya
Carlinya writes: Newsweek reports that standard emergency-room procedure has it backward by pumping oxygen to someone who's heart has stopped for more than a few minutes.

According to the article: "Once the cells have been without oxygen for more than five minutes, they die when their oxygen supply is resumed. The cellular surveillance mechanism cannot tell the difference between a cancer cell and a cell being reperfused with oxygen. Something throws the switch that makes the cell die."
Google

Submission + - You're a Nobody Unless Your Name Googles Well

Submitted by
Ant
Ant writes: "The Wall Street Journal says that in the age of Google, being special increasingly requires standing out from the crowd online. Many people aspire for themselves — or their offspring — to command prominent placement in the top few links on search engines or social networking sites' member lookup functions. But, as more people flood the Web, that's becoming an especially tall order for those with common names ... ... People increasingly rely on search engines to find things they want to read, music they want to hear, people and companies they want to do business with. United States/U.S. Internet users conduct hundreds of millions of search queries daily. About 7% of all searches are for a person's name, estimates search engine Ask.com. More than 80% of executive recruiters said they routinely use search engines to learn more about candidates, according to a recent survey by executive networking firm ExecuNet. Nearly 40% of individuals have used search engines to look up friends or acquaintances with whom they'd lost touch, according to a Harris Interactive survey commissioned by Microsoft Corp.'s MSN unit. Seen on Digg."
Censorship

Submission + - Another DMCA Takedown Notice For Digg

Submitted by
ngottlieb
ngottlieb writes: "Digg has received another DMCA takedown notice for a post containing a number used to decrypt a copyrighted poem. The hosting of the key violates the DMCA's "ban on trafficking in circumvention devices" in the same way the hosting of the AACS key violated it. Will Digg.com comply with this takedown notice, or continue it's stand against the DMCA, supporting its users all the way?"

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