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Submission + - Linux isn't API based .. (theregister.co.uk)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: "Snover (one of the original authors of PowerShell) explained that Windows is API based, whereas Linux and Unix are file based, which makes it harder to automate configuration and makes this approach necessary"

Submission + - Researcher:Hackers can cause traffic jams by manipulating real-time traffic data (pcworld.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Hackers can influence real-time traffic-flow-analysis systems to make people drive into traffic jams or to keep roads clear in areas where a lot of people use Google or Waze navigation systems, a German researcher demonstrated at BlackHat Europe.

“You don’t need special equipment for this and you can manipulate traffic data worldwide,” Jeske said.
Earth

Submission + - Method Developed to Produce Vastly Cheaper Clean Water 1

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "David Alexander reports that defense contractor Lockheed Martin has found a way to produce thin carbon membranes with regular holes about a nanometer in size that are large enough to allow water to pass through but small enough to block the molecules of salt in seawater, potentially making it vastly cheaper to produce clean water at a time when scarcity has become a global security issue. Because the sheets of pure carbon known as graphene are so thin — just one atom in thickness — it takes much less energy to push the seawater through the filter with the force required to separate the salt from the water. "It's 500 times thinner than the best filter on the market today and a thousand times stronger," says John Stetson, who began working on the issue in 2007. "The energy that's required and the pressure that's required to filter salt is approximately 100 times less." Stetson adds that if the new filter material, known as Perforene, was compared to the thickness of a piece of paper, the nearest comparable filter for extracting salt from seawater would be the thickness of three reams of paper — more than half a foot thick. Access to clean drinking water is increasingly seen as a major global security issue. Competition for water is likely to lead to instability and potential state failure in countries important to the United States, according to a U.S. intelligence community report last year. According to the report “during the next 10 years, many countries important to the United States will almost certainly experience water problems — shortages, poor water quality, or floods — that will contribute to the risk of instability and state failure, and increase regional tensions (PDF).""
China

Submission + - China 3-D Prints Its Newest Jets, Dramatically Cut Cost and Time (3ders.org) 2

Submitted by hackingbear
hackingbear writes: Cong Sun, Chief Architect of the new Chinese carrier-based J-15 fighter jet Cong, recently unveiled that 3D printing has been widely used in designing and producing of the jet which had its first successful test in October 2012. 3D printing has been used to manufacture critical titanium alloy load-bearing structure on the aircraft, including the entire nose landing gear. China aims to become a leader in commercializing 3D printing technology to manufacture titanium parts in aviation industry. The laser additive manufacturing technology could save 90% of raw material, and the cost is only 5% of the traditional method — for example, the cost of a part made with traditional technology is 25 million RMB (4 million USD), but using laser additive manufacturing technology the cost is only 1.3 million (210K USD). Because no tooling is required, the processing charge is also just 10% of the orginal. Chief Architect Cong Sun recently unveiled that 3D printing has been widely used in designing and producing of the newest J-15 prototype which had its first successful test in October 2012. 3D printing has been used to manufacture critical titanium alloy load-bearing structure on the aircraft, including the entire nose landing gear. If the forged titanium parts on an American F-22 were made in China, 40 percent of the weight can be reduced while same strength could be maintained. Chinese media report (in Chinese) also credited the use of 3-D printing in recent massive speeding up of new generation military jet development, including the J-31 stealth fighter jets. Looks like we can outsource F-22/F-35 production as well to save our budget.
Crime

Submission + - Aaron Swartz's Estate Seeks Release of Documents

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: The Boston Globe reports that the estate of Aaron Swartz filed a motion in federal court in Boston Friday to allow the release of documents in the case that has generated national controversy over the US attorney's aggressive pursuit of a stiff sentence. The Court filing suggests that the US attorney's office is still up for jerking Aaron around a little posthumously, seeking what his lawyers termed overbroad redactions, including names and titles that are already publicly known. Swartz's family also seeks the return of his seized property. Last week, Swartz's girlfriend accused MIT of dragging its feet on investigating his suicide. Meanwhile, Slate's Justin Peters asks if the Justice Department learned anything from the Aaron Swartz case, noting that Matthew Keys, who faces 25 years in prison for crimes that include aiding-and-abetting the display of humorously false content, could replace Swartz as the poster boy for prosecutorial overreach.
Patents

Submission + - X-Plane Inventor Discusses Patent Trolls (avweb.com)

Submitted by ShoulderOfOrion
ShoulderOfOrion writes: Austin Meyer, creator of the X-Plane PC flight simulator, holds a podcast discussion with an editor of the online aviation website Avweb. The latter half of the podcast discusses Meyer's battles with a patent troll, his views on the patent system in general, and his intent to fight the troll and change the system. It also discusses the impact the patent battle is having on the X-Plane flight simulator, particularly on Android. The patent conversation starts at 11:50 on the podcast.
Graphics

Submission + - NVIDIA's GeForce TITAN Scores Big, Tested In 15 Different Game Benchmarks (hothardware.com) 1

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: NVIDIA's new GeForce GTX Titan graphics card, announced earlier this week, employs a massive 7.1 billion transistor GPU and 6GB of GDDR5 memory clocked at an effective 6GHz. With those kinds of specs, you can imagine the new GeForce cuts through gaming and graphics benchmarks like a hot knife through butter. Tested in fifteen different game benchmarks, in both single and multi-card configurations as well as overlocked, it's apparent that NVIDIA can easily lay claim to the fastest consumer 3D graphics processor on the market right now. And yes, it even runs Crysis 3 with ease. Regardless of resolution, the GeForce GTX Titan outpaces the Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition and NVIDIA's previous high-end card, the GeForce GTX 680, sometimes by margins over 50 percent.
AMD

Submission + - New GPU Testing Methodology Puts Multi-GPU Solutions in Question (pcper.com)

Submitted by Vigile
Vigile writes: A big shift in the way graphics cards and gaming performance are tested has been occurring over the last few months with many review sites now using frame times rather than just average frame rates to compare products. Another unique testing methodology called Frame Rating has been started by PC Perspective that uses video capture equipment capable of recording uncompressed high resolution output direct from the graphics card, a colored bar overlay system and post-processing on that recorded video to evaluate performance as it is seen by the end user. The benefit is that there is literally no software interference between the data points and what the user sees making it is as close to an "experience metric" as any developed. Interestingly, multi-GPU solutions like SLI and CrossFire have VERY different results when viewed in this light, with AMD's offering clearly presenting a poorer, and more stuttery, animation.
HP

Submission + - HP's first 'Project Moonshot' server due next quarter (networkworld.com)

Submitted by alphadogg
alphadogg writes: Hewlett-Packard's first low-power server for hyperscale computing environments, developed under a project it calls Moonshot, will go on sale next quarter, CEO Meg Whitman said this week. Project Moonshot is an effort to build low-power servers based on alternatives to Intel's Xeon processors for use in mega data centers like those operated by Facebook and Google. HP announced the project in 2011, and the first server platform it talked about, known as Redstone, was to be based on an ARM-type processor from Calxeda.
Android

Submission + - Pwnie Express releases network hacking Kit (wired.com)

Submitted by puddingebola
puddingebola writes: From the article, "The folks at security tools company Pwnie Express have built a tablet that can bash the heck out of corporate networks. Called the Pwn Pad, it’s a full-fledged hacking toolkit built atop Google’s Android operating system.
Some important hacking tools have already been ported to Android, but Pwnie Express says that they’ve added some new ones. Most importantly, this is the first time that they’ve been able to get popular wireless hacking tools like Aircrack-ng and Kismet to work on an Android device."

Pwnie Express the price is $795.
Earth

Submission + - Who's Bankrolling the Climate-Change Deniers? 1

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Bryan Walsh writes in Time Magazine that climate denialism exists in part because there has been a long-term, well-financed effort on the part of conservative groups and corporations to distort global-warming science. "The blows have been struck by a well-funded, highly complex and relatively coordinated denial machine," say sociologists Riley Dunlap and Aaron McCright. Fossil-fuel companies like Exxon and Peabody Energy — which obviously have a business interest in slowing any attempt to reduce carbon emissions — have combined with traditionally conservative corporate groups like the US Chamber of Commerce and conservative foundations like the Koch brothers' Americans for Prosperity, to raise doubts about the basic validity of what is, essentially, a settled scientific truth. The naysayers seem to be following the playbook written by the tobacco industry in its long, ongoing war against medical findings about the dangers of smoking. For both Big Oil and Big Smoke, that playbook is lethally simple: don't straight-up refute the science, just raise skepticism and insist that the findings are "unsettled" and that "more research" is necessary."
China

Submission + - slashdot blocked in china 2

Submitted by tvlinux
tvlinux writes: I woke up this morning, and accessed /. I received a "connection reset". After living in China to a few years, I know what that means. Slashdot is being blocked by "Golden Shield". I am in ShenZhen, anybody else being blocked?
Slashdot is a great place to keep track of the latest technology advances. Google is some times throttled. Many other technical sites are blocked just because they are on a blog site.
Is China cutting it throat learning about new technology?
Windows

Submission + - Windows 8 to reduce memory footprint (msdn.com)

Submitted by
bheer
bheer writes: "Microsoft's Windows 8 blog has a good post about the work being done to reduce Windows 8's memory footprint. The OS will use multiple approaches to do this, including combining RAM pages, re-architecting old bits of code and adding new APIs for more granular memory management. Interestingly, it will also let services start on a trigger and stop when needed instead of running all the time."

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