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Censorship

Submission + - Google Mail now blocked in China

An anonymous reader writes: For some time, access to Gmail has been deliberately "delayed" in China.
Since about 6pm on Friday, local time it has been completely blocked. The login screen "may" come up, but login itself just times out.
China

Submission + - China arrested a CIA spy (latimes.com)

Taco Cowboy writes: A 38-year-old Chinese national, who was a secretary to Qiu Jin, the deputy minister of state security, is alleged to have been recruited and trained by the CIA and was arrested by the Chinese authority sometime this year

It was reported that the man was approached by the CIA while he was a student studying in the USA

To "cement" the relationship, the CIA arranged a classic "honey trap", where the guy was photographed with a woman in a compromising setting in a Hong Kong apartment. And with that, the guy is coerced into spying for the CIA

Politics

Submission + - 'Legitimized' cyberwar will make culture wars much dirtier (itworld.com)

DillyTonto writes: US officials have acknowledged playing a role in the development and deployment of Stuxnet, Duqu and other cyberweapons against Iran.
The acknowledgement makes cyberattacks more legitimate as a tool of not-quite-lethal international diplomacy.
It also legitimizes them as more-combative tools for political conflict over social issues, in the same way Tasers gave police less-than-lethal alternatives to shooting suspects and gave those who abuse their power something other than a club to hit a suspect with. Political parties and single-issue political organizations already use "opposition research" to name-and-shame their opponents with real or exaggerated revelations from a checkered past, jerrymander districts to ensure their candidates a victory and vote-suppression or get-out-the-vote efforts to skew vote tallies. Imagine what they'll do with custom malware, the ability to DDOS an opponent's web site or redirect donations from an opponent's site to their own.
Cyberweapons may give nations a way to attack enemies without killing anyone. They'll definitely give domestic political groups a whole new world of dirty tricks to play.

Australia

Submission + - What is a patent troll? (itnews.com.au)

schliz writes: Australian tech publication iTnews is defining ”patent trolls" as those who claim rights to an invention without commercializing it, and notes that government research organization CSIRO could come under that definition.

The CSIRO in April reached a $220 million settlement over three US telcos’ usage of WLAN that it invented in the early 1990s. Critics have argued that the CSIRO had failed to contribute to the world’s first wifi 802.11 standard, failed to commercialize the wifi chip through its spin-off, Radiata, and chose to wage its campaign in the Eastern District courts of Texas, a location favored by more notorious patent trolls.

Open Source

Submission + - Spanish Basque --all government software must b open sourced and published. (h-online.com)

lsatenstein writes: The regional government of Spain's Basque Country has decreed that all software produced for Basque government agencies and public bodies should be open sourced. Joinup, the European Commission's open source web site, cites an articleSpanish language link in Spanish newspaper El Pais, saying that the only exceptions will be software that directly affects state security and a handful of projects which are being conducted in conjunction with commercial software suppliers.

Comment Re:question (Score 2) 135

The probe started out at roughly our speed and accelerated to 34,471 mph, or about 15.4 km/s. In the absence of a complex acceleration history, the simple, first-order approximation of the probe's average speed over the last 6 years is about 7.7 km/s or about 2.6e-5 c. At that speed, the relativistic effect is about 0.99999999967015470011, meaning that the probe has aged about 62 milliseconds less than you have.

News

Submission + - Novell wins over SCO again (uscourts.gov)

duh P3rf3ss3r writes: The Tenth Circuit Court of Appeal has just affirmed the District Courts ruling in SCO v Novell in its entirety. The decision is quite a good read and lays out the reasons why the court has rejected, in toto, SCO's attempt to re-argue the case before the Court of Appeals. Is this the last gasp for SCO or will they try to appeal this to the Supreme Court? The betting lines open at 11...

Comment Re:Atheist claims have other fundamental problems (Score 1) 318

I'm afraid this is just silly.

There is a very simple action that would invalidate the claims of atheists: that would be for a god, any god, to reveal himself in some obvious, unequivocal, unmistakable way. Like, pop up on the nightly news and heal an amputee or something.

The theists, on the other hand, are the ones making the unfalsifiable claims. They're the ones claiming that there exists a sky fairy who chooses to keep himself hidden from man and whose presence can only be intimated by reading an ancient book or books with the aid of some sort of secret decoder ring.

Please, put aside your rancour for a second and tell me, truthfully, which side is making a claim which cannot be falsified...

Oh, wait, you're an AC. I should have known better than respond because you're only here to make yourself feel like you're too good to be living in mommy's basement among piles of pizza boxes and soiled Kleenex.

Robotics

Submission + - BEAR Robot Designed to Rescue Wounded Soldiers (gizmag.com)

Zothecula writes: The U.S. Army is currently testing a robot designed to locate, lift and carry wounded soldiers out of harm’s way without risking additional lives. With feedback from its onboard sensors and cameras, the Battlefield Extraction-Assist Robot (BEAR) can be remotely controlled through the use of a special M-4 rifle grip controller or by hand gestures using an AnthroTronix iGlove motion glove. This equipment would allow a soldier to direct BEAR to a wounded soldier and transport them to safety where they can be assessed by a combat medic.
United Kingdom

Submission + - Supercomputer Used In the Fight Against Cancer (eweekeurope.co.uk)

jhernik writes: Imperial College London and Cancer Research UK are leading mainstream supercomputer use in the UK

High Performance Computing is entering the mainstream, according to Intel, and the UK is at the forefront of that development, leading the world in both bioscience and weather forecasting.

At an event in London, Intel highlighted how HPC is now used in everything from measuring blood flow in the human body and mapping the evolution of the ocean in light of climate change, to carrying out data analysis in the financial sector.

One of the top 500 supercomputers in the world – an SGI Altix ICE 8200 EX, known as cx2 – is situated at Imperial College London. A single rack can be powered by up to 512 Intel Xeon processor cores and deliver 6 teraflops of performance. Students are able to enhance their experiments through simulation, creating models of situations that are either impossible in real life or too expensive to carry out.

Google

Submission + - Security Expert Warns Of Android Browser Flaw (eweekeurope.co.uk)

justice4all writes: Google is working on a fix to a zero-day flaw that could see Android users’ data being accessed by hackers

A British security expert, Thomas Cannon, has a discovered a potentially serious vulnerability in the Android browser that could lead to a user’s data on their mobile phone or tablet device being exposed to attack. Google confirmed to eWEEK Europe UK that it is currently working on a fix.

Cannon discovered the vulnerability in the Android browser and then informed Google, before posting information about the flaw on his blog.

“While doing an application security assessment one evening I found a general vulnerability in Android which allows a malicious website to get the contents of any file stored on the SD card,” Cannon wrote. “It would also be possible to retrieve a limited range of other data and files stored on the phone using this vulnerability.”

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