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Comment Silly rules (Score 2, Interesting) 173

by Ektanoor (#28148999) Attached to: Microsoft Not the Only Firm Blocking IM Service To US Enemies

Anyway that will not impair Fidel Castro of browsing Google News through Chavez's personal proxy, right?
Or it will not stop Ahmenidjad of reading all those funny books on US rocket programs he already got from googling... Besides he already bookmarked all the stuff.
Anyway I think it will be more damaging the fact that information, on what people think of these countries, is being blocked to them...

Eeeee, stop... North Korea was taken out of terrorism support list a little before they started to mess around with missiles and nukes. Well, missiles and nukes, they already had isn't it? Yes, it could be possible that Kim just decided to google a little bit and found the reason for that litlte meany bug that was plaguing his rockets. But the man went really mad, he is blasting a rocket every day and scrapping every piece of paper he signed. He's cursing the whole world and threatening pure harakiri. Maybe because of such things as this?:

http://www.nkeconwatch.com/north-korea-uncovered-google-earth/

So long for secretive North Korea...
Censorship

Microsoft Not the Only Firm Blocking IM Service To US Enemies 173

Posted by Soulskill from the unfortunate-consistency dept.
ericatcw writes "It was reported last week that Microsoft had cut access to its Windows Live Messenger instant messaging service to citizens of five countries with whom the US has trade embargoes. Now, it turns out that Google and, apparently, AOL have taken similar actions. According to a lawyer quoted by Computerworld, even free, downloaded apps are viewed as 'exports' by the US government — meaning totally in-the-cloud services such as e-mail may escape the rules. Either way, there appear to be a number of ways determined citizens of Syria, Iran, and Cuba can get around the ban."
Power

Submission + - Future of LED Lighting is Looking Bright

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "LED lighting was once relegated to basketball scoreboards, cellphone consoles, traffic lights and colored Christmas lights but the NY Times reports that as a result of rapid developments in the technology, LED lighting is now poised to become common on streets and in buildings, as well as in homes and offices. Some American cities, including Ann Arbor, Mich., and Raleigh, N.C., are using the lights to illuminate streets and parking garages and dozens more are exploring the technology as studies suggest that a complete conversion to the lights could decrease carbon dioxide emissions from electric power use for lighting by up to 50 percent in just over 20 years. LEDs are more than twice as efficient as compact fluorescent bulbs, currently the standard for greener lighting and unlike compact fluorescents, LEDs turn on quickly and are compatible with dimmer switches. Thanks in part to the injection of federal cash, sales of the lights in new "solid state" fixtures — a $297 million industry in 2007 — are likely to become a near-billion-dollar industry by 2013. Wal-Mart Stores has started selling a consumer LED bulb that uses just seven watts of electricity and claims to last for more than 13 years. It costs around $35 — a daunting price tag for a light bulb. "We're kind of testing the waters," says Rand Waddoups, Wal-Mart's senior director of strategy and sustainability. "This is a behavior change, and that requires some work.""
Hardware Hacking

Developer Creates DIY 8-Bit CPU 187

Posted by Soulskill from the now-that's-impressive dept.
MaizeMan writes "Not for the easily distracted: a Belmont software developer's hand-built CPU was featured in Wired recently. Starting with a $50 wire wrap board, Steve Chamberlin built his CPU with 1253 pieces of wire, each wire wrapped by hand at both ends. Chamberlin salvaged parts from '70s and '80s era computers, and the final result is an 8-bit processor with keyboard input, a USB connection, and VGA graphical output. More details are available on the developer's blog."
Social Networks

Submission + - Facebook testing Virtual Currency (venturebeat.com)

Submitted by
Jefferson Franklin
Jefferson Franklin writes: "It looks like Facebook has silently launched a new payments feature to a number of partners. The payments system uses credits with a value of 10 cents. One of the partner applications, GroupCard allows you to make a purchase that normally costs $2.99 with 30 credits. The integration right now looks to be limited only to certain applications. Facebook has a list of them here"

Comment Catch 22 on the wild (Score 1) 3

by Ektanoor (#28146417) Attached to: Pentagon Plans New Arm to Wage CyberWars

If this comes to reality then it will be the worst mistake the US did since Iraq.

Crime is not a field military shall mess around. The bearing of arms puts a soldier at the very edge of crime. But, while excesses (and crude crimes) happen, the fact that it is the judicial system that controls these matters, we have a filter between the use of extreme measures by military means and crime. Now put the military dealing with crime and not only the filter dilutes completely but also crime may go rapant and uncontrollable. Just think, how judges will try to exercise his power over a general that has gone wild? How easy will be to take control over officers commiting crimes in a typical military environment where the "first" in discipline is subordination?

  In a judicial system it is hard to control cops going wild. In a military system the chance to stop rapant crime is near zero.

Argentina was not a lesson for anyone? And what about SS? The SS were all-in-one: police, military, paramilitary. The worst criminal gang ever.

Yes, the US is a democracy. In what country was written "Catch 22"? What was this book about? As far as I remember it was how the military went so easily on making contraband... With their own enemies... And while the story was fictional, in fact, there were wild cases inside the US military forces (and among other armies) by the end of WWII.

Comment Re:A no win situation (Score 2, Informative) 131

by Ektanoor (#28146135) Attached to: Who Would Want To Be Obama's Cybersecurity Czar?

Really? I remember that Windows NT & Sons had a too classical and nearly eternal flaw, which did not give a chance for a guaranteed secure environment - the internal messaging between progs. I met it a few times and it was really painful.

Yes Vista & Sons probably have solved this. But after 15 years on Windows I didn't wait for them.

Besides, you don't make backbones on Windows or *nixes. Anyway you don't use *just* Windows or *nix
----

A backbone admin

Comment Re:New military branch needed (Score 1) 131

by Ektanoor (#28145951) Attached to: Who Would Want To Be Obama's Cybersecurity Czar?

A military branch to fight crime? While I agree th US doesn't need a "czar" and even agree with your arguments, your alternative is not brighter.

Crime shall no be fought by the military in any possible way. First they will shoot and then... They will not give themselves the question "whom are we shooting at"! They will keep shooting until the field is flat.

Second, a military environment is always preemable to crime. BTW, I have already had to deal with such a case on Internet: military+cybergangs. If you want a pure "catch 22" burning under your... You know where... Just give the military a free hand on this field.

Third, military will never give themselves the trouble of building an infrastructure of databases and longterm tracking procedures. Their methods are simple - there is a foe, track him and shoot on the spot.

Oh, I nearly forgot to mention. Military intelligence is usually... Not so intelligent. Even foes are so badly defined, that things go wrong from the very start. They call it "colateral", I call it "dumbasses".
Medicine

Submission + - How Common is Scientific Misconduct?

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "The image of scientists as objective seekers of truth is periodically jeopardized by the discovery of a major scientific fraud. Recent scandals like Hwang Woo-Suk's fake stem-cell lines or Jan Hendrik Schön's duplicated graphs showed how easy it can be for a scientist to publish fabricated data in the most prestigious journals. Daniele Fanelli has an interesting paper on PLOS One where she performs a meta-analysis synthesizing previous surveys to determine the frequency with which scientists fabricate and falsify data, or commit other forms of scientific misconduct. A pooled weighted average of 1.97% of scientists admitted to have fabricated, falsified or modified data or results at least once -a serious form of misconduct by any standard- and up to 33.7% admitted other questionable research practices. In surveys asking about the behavior of colleagues, admission rates were 14.12% for falsification, and up to 72% for other questionable research practices. Misconduct was reported more frequently by medical/pharmacological researchers than others. "Considering that these surveys ask sensitive questions and have other limitations, it appears likely that this is a conservative estimate of the true prevalence of scientific misconduct," writes Fanelli. "It is likely that, if on average 2% of scientists admit to have falsified research at least once and up to 34% admit other questionable research practices, the actual frequencies of misconduct could be higher than this.""
Space

Submission + - Discovery: Even Tiny Stars Have Planets (space.com) 2

Submitted by
Paul server guy
Paul server guy writes: "From a story at http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/090528-exoplanet-small-star.html — A Jupiter-like planet has been discovered orbiting one of the smallest stars known, suggesting that planets could be more common than previously thought.
"This is an exciting discovery because it shows that planets can be found around extremely lightweight stars," said Wesley Traub, the chief scientist for NASA's Exoplanet Exploration Program at Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "This is a hint that nature likes to form planets, even around stars very different from the sun."

Astrometry was first attempted 50 years ago to search for planets outside our solar system, but the method requires very precise measurements over long periods of time, and until now, has failed to turn up any exoplanets.
The technique involves measuring the precise motions of a star on the sky as an unseen planet tugs the star back and forth.
The discovery will be detailed in the Astrophysical Journal.

The newfound exoplanet, called VB 10b, is about 20 light-years away in the constellation Aquila (a light-year is the distance that light travels in a year, about 6 trillion miles or 10 trillion kilometers). It is a gas giant, with a mass six times that of Jupiter, and an orbit far enough away from its star to be labeled a "cold Jupiter" similar to our own.

In reality, though, the planet's own internal heat would give it an Earth-like temperature.

The planet's star, called VB 10, is tiny. It is what's known as an M-dwarf and is only one-twelfth the mass of our sun, just barely big enough to fuse atoms at its core and shine with starlight."
Operating Systems

Submission + - Ext4: Stable for production systems? 1

Submitted by dr_dracula
dr_dracula writes: Earlier this year the ext4 filesystem was accepted into the Linux kernel. Shortly thereafter it was discovered that applications, such as KDE, were at risk of loosing files when used on top of ext4 http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/03/19/1730247. This was diagnosed as a rift between the design of the ext4 filesystem and the design of applications running on top of ext4. The crux of the problem was that applications were relying on ext3 specific behavior for flushing data to disk, which ext4 was not following. Recent kernel releases include patches to address these issues. My questions to the early adopters of ext4 is if the patches have performed as expected. What is your overall feeling about ext4? Do you think is solid enough for most users to trust it with their data? Did you find any significant performance improvements compared to ext3? Is there any incentive to move to ext4, other than sheer curiosity?
Security

Submission + - L0phtcrack (v6) rises again

Submitted by FyreWyr
FyreWyr writes: L0phtcrack--now 12 years old--used to be a security "tool of choice" for black hats, pen-testers, and security auditors alike...that is, until it was sold by L0pht to @stake, then Symantec, to be released and subsequently dropped as LC 5. As an IT security consultant, I used this tool to regularly expose vulnerabilities or recover data when there were few other options available...then let it go as tech evolved away.

Now returned to its original developers, version 6 was released this week with fresh features: support for 64-bit multiprocessors, (current) Unix and Windows operating systems, and a number of other features, including enhanced handling of NTLM password hashes (indicated here) and support for rainbow tables.

Interested parties--especially consultants--will find this shiny new version sports a hefty price tag. It raises doubts in my mind whether it can effectively compete with open source alternatives by similar names, but as I found earlier versions so useful, its re-emergence seems worth the mention.
Networking

Submission + - Help build an AI brain! (singularityhub.com)

Submitted by Sonoflin
Sonoflin writes: Much like SETI@Home Singularity Hub (http://singularityhub.com/2009/05/28/create-an-ai-on-your-computer/) is running a story detailing how you can help researchers at intelligence realm (http://www.intelligencerealm.com/user/system.php) create a software based map of the brain using only your idle CPU cycles! Ultimately they hope this work will lend a hand in the blooming AI research arena.

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