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Submission Summary: 0 pending, 122 declined, 52 accepted (174 total, 29.89% accepted)

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Microsoft

Submission + - Did Microsoft Supply Al-Qaida? 2

Submitted by
jd
jd writes: "In startling revelations, convicted terrorist Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri accused Al-Qaida of using public telephones, pre-paid calling cards, Google and Microsoft's Hotmail. Now, whilst the vision of seeing Balmer do time in Gitmo probably appeals to most Slashdotters, the first real story behind all this is that the Evil Bastards aren't using sophisticated methods to avoid detection or monitoring — which tells us just how crappy SIGINT really is right now. If the NSA needs to wiretap the whole of the USA because they can't break into a Hotmail account, you know they've problems. The second real story is that even though e-mail is virtually ubiquitous (the Queen of England started using it in 1975), the media still thinks "technology" and "free" combined is every bit as hot as any sex scandal."
Books

Submission + - Ancient Books Go Online

Submitted by
jd
jd writes: "The BBC is reporting that the United Nations' World Digital Library has gone online with an initial 1,200 offering of ancient manuscripts, parchments and documents. To no great surprise, Europe comes in first with 380 items. South America comes in second with 320, with a very distant third place being given to the Middle East at a paltry 157 texts. This is only the initial round, so the leader board can be expected to change. There are, for example, many Sumerian and Babylonian tablets, many of which are already online elsewhere. Astonishingly, the collection is covered by numerous copyright laws, according to the legal page. Use of material from a given country is subject to whatever restrictions that country places, in addition to any local and international copyright laws. With some of the contributions being over 8,000 years old, this has to be the longest copyright extension ever offered. There is nothing on whether the original artists get royalties, however."
Security

Submission + - GRSecurity "victim of economy" (grsecurity.net)

Submitted by
jd
jd writes: "GRSecurity, one of the mandatory access control patches for the Linux kernel, has lost its financial sponsorship due to the lousy economy and now the team of developers is saying that if they don't get backing for their project soon, they'll be forced to disband. Although I've had a few somewhat heated arguments with the development team, I would be very sad to see GRSecurity vanish. It is a very nice security solution, arguably better than SELinux is in many ways, but hasn't really had much exposure compared to other Linux hardening projects and isn't provided in a ready-built form in the major distros. Is this Darwinism in action, the effects of the Unseen Hand on drugs, or a sobering reflection of how even an Open Source project is vulnerable to the current climate? Can this project be rescued? If the fittest projects get the developers, should it survive? And if it should, what can be done to improve its chances?"
Programming

Submission + - What Parallel Programming? (llnl.gov) 1

Submitted by
jd
jd writes: "Lawrence-Livermore publishes a nice summary of many (but not all) of the different ins and outs of parallel programming. Different programming languages implement either different models of parallel programming or radically different interpretations. Examples would include Cilk++ (a modded version of Gnu C++), Erlang and Occam (Pascal derivative with more hacks than a newspaper). You could write a small book on the communications libraries that facilitate parallel programming — not in describing them, just listing them. Everything from the major families of message passing (PVM, MPI and BSP) to sharing memory (Distributed Shared Memory, ccNUMA, RDMA) to remote calls (RMI, Corba, RPC) to platform-specific aids (MOSIX, Keerighed and even TIPC), and beyond. There are way, way too many options and no real good guides on when one options should be used above another. I've done my share of parallel processing, but I want to hear other people's opinions on what solutions they've personally tried, what situations they've thought would work (but didn't) or what situations unexpectedly worked better than they'd hoped."
Encryption

Submission + - NIST Cryptographic Hash Contest, round 1 (nist.gov)

Submitted by
jd
jd writes: "NIST has announced the round 1 candidates for the Cryptographic Hash Algorithm Challenge. Of the 64 who submitted entries, 51 were accepted. Of those, in mere days, one has been definitely broken and three others are believed to have been. At this rate, it won't take the couple of years NIST were reckoning to whittle down the field to just one or two.

(In comparison, the European Union version, NESSIE, recieved just one cryptographic hash function for it's contest. One has to wonder if NIST and the crypto experts are so concerned about being overwhelmed with work for this current contest, why they all but ignored the European effort. A self-inflicted wound might hurt, but it's still self-inflicted.)

Popular wisdom has it that no product will have any support for any of these algorithms for years — if ever. Of course, popular wisdom is ignoring all Open Source projects that support cryptography (including the Linux kernel) which could add support for any of these tomorrow. Does it really matter if the algorithm is found to be flawed later on, if most of these packages support algorithms known to be flawed today? Wouldn't it be just, oh, geekier to have passwords in Blue Midnight Wish or SANDstorm rather than boring old MD5, even if it makes no practical difference whatsoever?"
Hardware Hacking

Submission + - New Attempt at World Land Speed Record (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by
jd
jd writes: "In the most eccentric of high-speed hardware hacks, Richard Noble's supersonic team is aiming to break their own World Land Speed Record, which currently stands at around 716 mph. This latest project straps a cockpit onto a Typhoon jet engine and a high-power rocket, with the aim of exceeding 1000 mph. The article gives most of the truly geeky stats on this project — nicknamed Bloodhound SSC — but omits that the driver will be experiencing an average of about 1.3g during the 40 seconds it takes to get up to full speed. The prior car to be developed by this team, Thrust SSC, had a jet engine on either side of a main body. At full speed, the sonic shockwave was etched into the sand. The damage caused by the vibrations came perilously close to shattering the entire vehicle. Had they gone much faster, neither the car nor the driver RAF pilot Andy Green would have survived. They also had enormous problems with downforce — the first practice run ripped into the ground badly. The new design is based on their experience with Thrust SSC, particularly on how not to design ground vehicles traveling faster than sound. The new vehicle is expected to debut at a desert near you in 2011."
Security

Submission + - San Fransisco Police Network Kidnapped (yahoo.com)

Submitted by
jd
jd writes: "Network Administrator Terry Childs has been arrested for concealing the password for a crucial network that (according to the article) "handles city payroll files, jail bookings, law enforcement documents and official e-mail for San Francisco". Administrators are unable to gain access of any kind and, although the network is operating, city officials are claiming Mr. Childs provided a tap by which information could be accessed by third parties. What is not said is whether third-party access would allow data to be injected into the network, whether the data is encrypted, or whether information exposed is likely to be mundane or be potentially highly delicate. Nor is it explained as to how a single administrator could gain sufficient access rights, given the highly segregated nature of any secure computing environment. It is also unexplained as to why the remaining administrators are having difficulty regaining control, given that all they need is a backup of a password file from the last day they knew the passwords worked. Since the human element is always going to be unpredictable, it would seem obvious that this should wake people up to the needs of good security policies. Throwing it open to Slashdotters, if someone like that were working in your company, would they be any better at recovering?"
Networking

Submission + - World's slowest e-mail, garlic butter is extra (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by
jd
jd writes: "Bournemouth University has a new e-mail server. Well, snail-mail. Literally. Three snails are fitted with electronic tags which can collect data packets off transmitters — when they go close to one — and likewise deposit the data packet when they go near a reader. Large attachments can take a while. Indeed, any message will take a while — there's an average transfer rate of one packet every 1.96 days. Just imagine what the French would do with a Beowulf cluster of these..."
It's funny. Laugh.

Submission + - It's quite definitely an ex-parrot.

Submitted by
jd
jd writes: "It turns out, Monty Python was right. The Norwegian Blue parrot is not only real, but is also very, very dead. Perhaps the most remarkable part of this discovery is that not only did parrots once live in Scandanavia, that is where they came from before migrating south. With or without the aid of swallows is not made clear."
Music

Submission + - More Bands Go Free (yahoo.com)

Submitted by
jd
jd writes: "Nine Inch Nails and The Charlatans have followed Radiohead's lead and are offering free music. NIN is offering several free tracks and you pay for extras. This has included the band uploading their music to The Pirate Pay. The Charlatans are offering the entire album for free. Oasis and Jamiroquai are considering doing the same. What this will mean for ISPs who try to ban or constrict filesharing protocols is unclear."
Biotech

Submission + - The Case of the Identical Twins

Submitted by
jd
jd writes: "DNA researchers have discovered something that will cause no end of headaches for biology textbooks. "Identical Twins" aren't. In the fascinating (but tediously titled) paper "Phenotypically Concordant and Discordant Monozygotic Twins Display Different DNA Copy-Number-Variation Profiles", researchers demonstrate that, indeed, "identical twins" (whether they look the same or not) have different DNA. The number of times genes are copied (known as "Copy Number Variations") differs. This is important, because the number of times a gene is copied can reduce the risk of certain genetically-related diseases. (It can also increase the risk of others.) It used to be assumed that the DNA was identical, so that the risks were identical. It is unclear if the differences occur at the outset or over time, or whether such differences could harm the development of stem cell therapies in the future."
Microsoft

Submission + - EU hits Microsoft with record 899 million euro fne (eubusiness.com)

Submitted by
jd
jd writes: "Microsoft has been slammed with a 899 million euro (1.4 billion dollars) fine for perpetuating violations of the 2004 antitrust ruling. It is the first company to be fined for non-compliance, the amazing thing being that the EU expects Microsoft to comply now and "close a dark chapter" in their history. There is something seriously wrong about this, in light of all the other accusations being made. Will Microsoft comply at long last, or does this hint at the battle intensifying?"
Announcements

Submission + - 1000 Genomes Project (genome.gov)

Submitted by
jd
jd writes: "An international consortium of specialists in genetics have announced the 1000 Genomes Project, in which at least 1,000 people will have their genomes fully sequenced as part of an effort to discover the relationship between genetics and disease. At present, over 100 regions of DNA are known to be related to illnesses, but the maps that exist are vague and drawn from an extremely small population pool. According to the article, this results in slow, expensive and laborious studies being required to actually pinpoint causes, especially for rarer conditions. The claim is that this study is aiming to find conditions that might only appear once in every 2,000 people, though how they intend to do that with half that number is unclear, and that by doing so, they will be able to massively speed up the diagnosis of genetically-linked illnesses and improve the reliability of such a diagnosis."
Quickies

Submission + - It's only a flesh wound! (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by
jd
jd writes: "Fossilized skin from a dinosaur in China is allowing paleontologists a better understanding of what dinosaur skin was like. A tear, caused by a predator, shows that below the scales of the Psittacosaurus was a thick hide comprised of 25 layers of collagen. Other than the multitude of layers, this is very similar in nature to modern shark skin. The gash caused by a predator allowed the skin and the soft interior to be fossilized along with the bones. This is not the same dinosaur that had been reported previously in Slashdot, which was found in South Dakota, although the process and extent of fossilization is very similar."

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