Kreuzfeld - Slashdot User

Submission + - Robots To Clear the Baltic Seafloor of WWI Mines (infrastructurist.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 16, 2010 @01:41PM

An anonymous reader writes: A Russian company is building a massive natural gas pipeline that will run across the Baltic Sea floor. But first, they must clear the150,000 unexploded bombs sitting at the bottom of the sea, left there by the Russian and German armies in the 1940s. Clearing them all will constitute the biggest commercial mine-clearance project ever. About 70 of these mines, each filled with 300 kg of explosive charge, sit in the pipeline’s path, mostly in its northern section just south of Finland. And so the company is bringing in robots to do the dirty work. Here’s how it will work: A research ship deploys the robot to the seabed, where it identifies the exact location of the explosive. After sounding a warning to surrounding ship traffic, scaring fish away using a small explosive, and then emitting a “seal screamer” of high intensity noises designed to make the area around the blast quite uncomfortable for marine mammals, Bactec’s engineers erupt a 5 kg blast, forcing the mine to detonate. This process ensures the safety of humans plus any animals living in the surrounding environment. The operation concludes with the robot being redeployed to clear up the scrap of the now-destroyed bomb.

Submission + - OpenOffice 3.2 Released

Submitted by harmonise on Thursday February 11, 2010 @02:12PM

harmonise writes: Version 3.2 of the OpenOffice.org office suite is now available. This marks the tenth anniversary year of the office suite, with over three hundred million downloads recorded in total. The new features include faster start up times; improved compatibility with open standard (ODF) and proprietary file formats; improvements to all components, particularly the Calc spreadsheet, with over a dozen new or enhanced features; and the Chart module (usable throughout OpenOffice.org) has had a usability makeover as well as offering new chart types.

Comment Learner-centered astronomy (Score 2, Informative) 377

by Kreuzfeld on Wednesday February 10, 2010 @05:27PM (#31090984) Attached to: What Objects To Focus On For School Astronomy?

Why not let your students choose some/all of the targets, subject to final vetting (or pre-screening) by you? In this way they gain a feeling of ownership over the process and generally become more invested in the subject matter. You could even point them to Stellarium for free home planetarium software to plan their observations.

Whatever you decide to observe, your students will get more out of it if they are actively involved -- i.e., no passive observing. If you have several nights, you could look at Jupiter each night and have them sketch the arrangement of the moons (c.f. Galilei 1610). If you have a solar filter, you could do the same thing with sunspots (if any are visible). Venus, Mars, or Saturn's rings may be attractive targets, depending on what you want to do with the observations.

Finally, there are additional astronomy education resources at the Astronomy Education Review, a free online journal.

FBI Pushing For 2-Year Retention of Web Traffic Logs 256

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Friday February 05, 2010 @05:11PM from the build-a-better-proxy dept.

suraj.sun writes to tell us that the FBI is pushing to have ISPs keep detailed records of what web sites customers have visited for up to two years. Claiming a desire to combat "child pornography and other serious crimes," the FBI and others are pressing for increased data retention, which they have been doing since as early as 2006. "If logs of Web sites visited began to be kept, they would be available only to local, state, and federal police with legal authorization such as a subpoena or search warrant. What remains unclear are the details of what the FBI is proposing. The possibilities include requiring an Internet provider to log the Internet protocol (IP) address of a Web site visited, or the domain name such as cnet.com, a host name such as news.cnet.com, or the actual URL such as http://reviews.cnet.com/Music/2001-6450_7-0.html. While the first three categories could be logged without doing deep packet inspection, the fourth category would require it. That could run up against opposition in Congress, which lambasted the concept in a series of hearings in 2008, causing the demise of a company, NebuAd, which pioneered it inside the United States."

Submission + - Secret Copyright Treaty Guide: All the Leaked Docs (michaelgeist.ca)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 26, 2010 @11:07AM

An anonymous reader writes: Negotiations in the 7th round of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement talks open this morning in Mexico with civil enforcement issues on the agenda. Michael Geist has been posting a guide to the secret copyright treaty. Yesterday he posted on the developments to-date, including a chronology of talks, issues, and leaks that have led to this week's round of discussions. Today comes a post with links to all the leaked documents, including the Internet provisions, border measures, criminal rules, and civil enforcement.

Submission + - U.S. Has No Deterrent for Digital Attacks (nytimes.com)

Submitted by twailgum on Tuesday January 26, 2010 @10:47AM

twailgum writes: A NYTimes article outlines the dire and grim outlook for US infosecurity in an age when there is no comparative "nuclear retaliation" for cyber threats.
"On a Monday morning earlier this month, top Pentagon leaders gathered to simulate how they would respond to a sophisticated cyberattack aimed at paralyzing the nation’s power grids, its communications systems or its financial networks. The results were dispiriting. The enemy had all the advantages: stealth, anonymity and unpredictability. No one could pinpoint the country from which the attack came, so there was no effective way to deter further damage by threatening retaliation."

Submission + - One day later, Microsoft investigates new IE flaw 1

Submitted by Jared on Monday January 25, 2010 @09:37PM

Jared writes: A day after releasing an out-of-band security bulletin for a vulnerability in Internet Explorer notably exploited in the recent series of Chinese-based attacks against Google and 30 other tech companies, new flaws have been discovered in Microsoft's browser.

Boston-based research firm Core Security Technologies has outlined a set of vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer that hackers can link together to remotely exploit a Windows PC. None of the vulnerabilities are serious enough to compromise a machine alone, but a hacker could take control of a PC by exploiting all of them at once. "There are three or four ways to conduct this type of attack," Jorge Luis Alvarez Medina, a security consultant with Core, told Reuters, though he admitted he was uncertain whether any hackers had already exploited his findings.

"Microsoft is investigating a responsibly disclosed vulnerability in Internet Explorer," a Microsoft spokesperson told Ars. "We're currently unaware of any attacks trying to use the vulnerability or of customer impact, and believe customers are at reduced risk due to responsible disclosure."

Ars Technica

Super-Earths Discovered Orbiting Nearby, Sun-Like Star 242

Posted by Soulskill on Monday December 14, 2009 @05:52PM from the i-for-one dept.

likuidkewl writes "Two super-earths, 5 and 7.5 times the size of our home, were found to be orbiting 61 Virginis a mere 28 light years away. 'These detections indicate that low-mass planets are quite common around nearby stars. The discovery of potentially habitable nearby worlds may be just a few years away,' said Steven Vogt, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UCSC. Among hundreds of our nearest stellar neighbors, 61 Vir stands out as being the most nearly similar to the Sun in terms of age, mass, and other essential properties."

NASA WISE Satellite Blasts Into Space 139

Posted by CmdrTaco on Monday December 14, 2009 @01:23PM from the hope-sean-enjoyed-it-anna dept.

coondoggie writes "After a three day delay, NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer this morning blasted into space courtesy of a Delta II rocket and will soon begin bathing the cosmos with infrared light, picking up the glow of hundreds of millions of objects and producing millions of images. The space agency says the WISE spacecraft will circle Earth over the poles, scanning the entire sky one-and-a-half times in nine months. The idea behind the spacecraft is to uncover objects never seen before, including the coolest stars, the universe's most luminous galaxies and some of the darkest near-Earth asteroids and comets."

Obama Wants Computer Privacy Ruling Overturned 670

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday November 25, 2009 @08:08PM from the let-me-see-what-you-got-there dept.

schwit1 writes "The Obama administration is seeking to reverse a federal appeals court decision that dramatically narrows the government’s search-and-seizure powers in the digital age. Solicitor General Elena Kagan and Justice Department officials are asking the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals to reconsider its August ruling that federal prosecutors went too far when seizing 104 professional baseball players’ drug results when they had a warrant for just 10. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss."

Slashdot Top Deals