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Submission + - GMO food proved almost harmless by a huge volume of data (journalofanimalscience.org)

Submitted by siddesu
siddesu writes: A new research suggests there are no ill effects from GMO ingredients for the billions of animals fed for slaughter. In particular, data on livestock productivity and health were collated from publicly available sources from 1983, before the introduction of GE crops in 1996, and subsequently through 2011, a period with high levels of predominately GE animal feed. These field data sets representing over 100 billion animals following the introduction of GE crops did not reveal unfavorable or perturbed trends in livestock health and productivity. Anti-GMO luddites expected to announce that animals are slaughtered too early to tell later today.

Submission + - NY Magistrate: Legal Papers Can Be Server Via Facebook (nypost.com)

Submitted by Wylde Stile
Wylde Stile writes: A Staten Island, NY family court support magistrate allowed a man to serve his ex-wife via Facebook. The man tried to serve the woman in person and via mail, but the woman moved with no forwarding address. The children would not return his calls so he has no way to get the address. The magistrate decided that in-person and mail would not work

The ex-wife maintains an active Facebook account. She even liked some photos on the current wife Facebook page days before the ruling. The magistrate conclude that the ex-wife could be served through Facebook.

Submission + - GeForce GTX 980 and GTX 970 Bring Unseen Power Efficiency (pcper.com)

Submitted by Vigile
Vigile writes: Launching today is a new GPU from NVIDIA along with two new graphics card that utilize it. GM204, the second chip released based on the Maxwell architecture, brings an incredibly high level of power efficiency to high-end enthusiast level graphics cards. The GeForce GTX 980, reviewed by PC Perspective, with 2048 CUDA cores, a 256-bit memory bus, 4GB of GDDR5 running at 7.0 GHz and a base clock over 1100 MHz, is able to outperform cards like the GeForce GTX 780 Ti and the AMD Radeon R9 290X and will sell for $549. Maybe most impressive is the power draw difference — the GTX 980 uses 130 watts LESS POWER than the R9 290X under a full load. The GTX 970, with 1664 CUDA cores, the same memory configuration and a base clock of 1050 MHz runs at even lower power, outperforming the Radeon R9 290 and using 80 watts less power and has an MSRP of just $329. Faster GPUs using less power — it's pretty impressive. New features of the GTX 900 series include MFAA (multi-frame AA), Dynamic Super Resolution and full DX12 feature set support. And the fact that we were able to overclock the GTX 980 to nearly 1500 MHz doesn't hurt either.

Submission + - A DC-10 Passenger Plane Is Perfect at Fighting Wildfires (vice.com)

Submitted by Daniel_Stuckey
Daniel_Stuckey writes: Friday night in Southern California's Silverado Valley, relief flew in on an old airliner. In this summer of drought and fire the DC-10, an airplane phased out of passenger service in February, has been spotted from Idaho to Arizona delivering up to 12,000 gallons of fire retardant in a single acrobatic swoop.

The three-engine DC-10 entered service in 1970 as a passenger jet, and the last airplane working in that capacity, operated by Biman Bangladesh Airlines, made its final flight on February 24. But some designs defy obsolescence. The DC-10 had already been converted to function as a mid-air refueling airplane for the Air Force, and in 2006, the first fire-fighting DC-10 was unleashed on the Sawtooth fire in San Bernardino County, California.

Submission + - Bing is adding street view (searchenginewatch.com)

Submitted by Technician
Technician writes: This story snuck by me. In August it was announced Bing is adding street view to it's maps. I became aware of it when I saw a car looking somewhat like a Google Streeet View car, but the camera package was cylindrical looking somewhat like R2D2 instead of the camera ball used by Google. This was spotted in Beaverton Oregon.

Submission + - Aussie state cops outed as Finfisher law enforcement malware users

Submitted by Bismillah
Bismillah writes: Wikileaks latest release of documents shows the the Australian New South Wales police force has spent millions on licenses for the FinFisher set of law enforcement spy- and malware tools — and still has active licenses. What it uses FinFisher, which has been deployed against dissidents by oppressive regimes, for is yet to be revealed.

Submission + - Malware Distributed Through Twitch Chat Is Hijacking Steam Accounts

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: If you use Twitch don't click on any suspicious links in the video streaming platform's chat feature. Twitch Support's official Twitter account issued a security warning telling users not to click the "csgoprize" link in chat. According to f-secure, the link leads to a Java program that asks for your name and email. If you provide the info it will install a file on your computer that's able to take out any money you have in your Steam wallet, as well as sell or trade items in your inventory. "This malware, which we call Eskimo, is able to wipe your Steam wallet, armory, and inventory dry," says F-Secure. "It even dumps your items for a discount in the Steam Community Market. Previous variants were selling items with a 12 percent discount, but a recent sample showed that they changed it to 35 percent discount. Perhaps to be able to sell the items faster."

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: What to do after digitizing VHS tapes? 2

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Now that I've spent close to a month digitizing a desk drawer's worth of VHS tapes, deinterlacing and postprocessing the originals to minimize years of tape decay, and compressing everything down to H.264, I've found myself with a hard drive full of loosely organized videos. They'll get picked up by my existing monthly backup, but I feel like I haven't gained much in the way of redundancy, as I thought I would. Instead of having tapes slowly degrade, I'm now open to losing entire movies at once, should both of my drives go bad. Does anyone maintain a library, and if so, what would they recommend? Is having them duplicated on two drives (one of which is spun down for all but one day of the month) a good-enough long term strategy? Should I look into additionally backing up to optical discs or flash drives, building out a better (RAIDed) backup machine, or even keeping the original tapes around despite them having been digitized?

Submission + - MOM or Mangalyaan has now done 95% of its journey without a hitch (nvonews.com)

Submitted by rinka
rinka writes: There's been progress since: http://science.slashdot.org/st...

The Indian Mars mission is on target has completed 95% of it's journey and will reach its destination before the month end. Indian scientists have successfully restarted the Mars orbiter. Meanwhile there are reasons to believe that NASA and ISRO, both space agencies that have sent Mars rovers, have decided to coordinate their mars missions: http://nvonews.com/india-mars-...

Submission + - School to fingerprint students to 'monitor their diets' (eagnews.org) 2

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: STOURBRIDGE, England – A school is implementing a biometric system to better track what students are eating each day.

The Express & Star reports students at Redhill School in Stourbridge, England will be fingerprinted in an attempt to reduce lunch lines and “monitor pupils’ diets.” The system requires pupils to press a finger against a machine which converts the print into biometric data. This can then be used to identify individual pupils accounts.

Headteacher Stephen Dunster wrote to parents, “We are aiming to have a cashless system throughout the school. The catering system is better for parents because they don’t have to provide children with lunch money every morning. From our perspective it is far more efficient as it reduces waiting times. We will also be able to monitor what children are buying to make sure they are eating a healthy diet.”

Submission + - California Declared Carpooling Via Ride-Share Services Illegal (cnet.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Ride-share companies like Uber, Lyft, and Sidecar got letters from the California Public Utilities Commission this week telling them that carpool features for their services are illegal. "Basically, the CPUC says that under California law it's illegal for these ride-sharing services to charge passengers an individual fare when carrying multiple people in one vehicle. If the companies would like to add a carpool feature, they first have to request an adjustment to their existing permits with the CPUC or petition the state legislature to modify the law. Uber, Lyft and Sidecar all unveiled carpool features last month. The three companies say the feature lets strangers in multiple locations, but heading the same direction, share rides and split fares — saving passengers up to 50 percent per ride."

Submission + - Overstock.com Becomes First Retailer to Accept Bitcoin Worldwide

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In January, Ovestock.com started accepting bitcoins as a method of payment in the U.S. On Thursday, it started accepting bitcoins from consumers all over the world. "You can order in North Korea if you want," stated Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne, "as long as you're having things delivered to, say, Singapore." The company will reportedly save significantly in foreign credit card transaction fees, but the fact that some governments are mobilizing to regulate the new currency could, at the very least, continue to stunt its widespread adoption.

Submission + - WD announces 8TB, 10TB helium hard drives (computerworld.com)

Submitted by Lucas123
Lucas123 writes: Western Digital's HGST subsidiary today announced it's shipping its first 8TB and the world's first 10TB helium-filled hard drive. The 3.5-in, 10TB drive also marks HGST's first foray into the use of singled magnetic recording technology, which Seagate announced it began using last year. Unlike standard perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR), where data tracks rest side by side, SMR overlaps the tracks on a platter like shingles on a roof, thereby allowing a higher areal density. Seagate has said SMR technology will allow it to achieve 20TB drives by 2020. That company has yet to use helium, however. HGST said its use of hermetically-sealed helium drives reduces friction among moving drive components and keeps dust out. Both drives use a 7-platter configuration with a 7200 RPM spindle speed. The company said it plans to discontinue its production of air-only drives by 2017, replacing all data center models with helium drives.

Submission + - Research Finds No Large Scale Heartbleed Exploit Attempts Before Disclosure (threatpost.com)

Submitted by msm1267
msm1267 writes: In the days and weeks following the public disclosure of the OpenSSL Heartbleed vulnerability in April, security researchers and others wondered aloud whether there were some organizations–perhaps the NSA–that had known about the bug for some time and had been using it for targeted attacks. A definitive answer to that question may never come, but traffic data collected by researchers on several large networks shows no exploit attempts in the months leading up to the public disclosure.

Researchers from the University of Michigan, the University of Illinois, the University of California at Berkeley , Purdue University and the International Computer Science Institute took a comprehensive look at the way that the Heartbleed vulnerability affected the Internet as a whole in the months since it was disclosed in April, focusing mainly on the response by organizations to patch vulnerable servers and revoke certificates. As the scope and effect of the Heartbleed vulnerability set in, security teams scrambled to determine which of their servers were vulnerable to the issue and whether they needed to begin revoking a bunch of SSL certificates, as well. Many of the top sites on the Internet were patched almost immediately after the disclosure, but that didn’t extend to the rest of the vulnerable server population.

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