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Comment Re:What OS? And how annoying? (Score 5, Informative) 366

by crisco (#33819130) Attached to: Simple Virus For Teaching?
Back in the late 80s we had a bunch of 10MHz XT clones in a computer lab networked together using Novel and 10BASE2 or maybe even TokenRing. Some of the games we had ran timing loops for the original 4.77 MHz PC so we had some simple TSR that sat on the interrupt timer and ran some NOPs to slow the computers down. I thought it would be a funny prank to add this to the AUTOEXEC.BAT file on most of the boot floppies in the lab, sadly I didn't test it on more than one computer.

The interrupts and NOPs interfered greatly with the network cards, causing the whole thing to come crashing down when more than a couple of the computers were running at a time. It took at least a couple of days for the sysadmin to sort it out.

RIP George, thanks for introducing me to the Internet and I'm sorry that you didn't get to stick around for Linux and /. I should have taken your Minix class when I had the chance.

Comment Re:overwritten once CAN be recovered (Score 5, Informative) 780

by crisco (#27962711) Attached to: Hacker Destroys Avsim.com, Along With Its Backups
The [a href="http://16systems.com/zero.php"]Great Zero Challenge[/url] says otherwise. They're simply asking for the filename of one of the files on a drive that has been wiped once with zeros. Despite offering the challenge for over a year and actively speaking to data recovery companies, no one has taken them up on the offer.
Image

Police Race At Dragway To Fight Illegal Street Racing 15

Posted by samzenpus from the to-fuel-inject-and-swerve dept.
For $25, anyone over the age of 18 can race a police officer at the monthly "Beat the Heat" night in Miami, Florida. The races are held at County Line Drag Way and are designed to redirect people from racing on the streets to the dragstrip. "You could bring your mother's minivan. You can bring a pure racing car. It doesn't matter," said Officer Jose Ayala with the Medley Police Department.
Security

Submission + - Tracking Down an ISP on Craigslist.org

Submitted by
Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward writes: "Hi — I'm sort of desperately in need of help because somebody is harassing my sister. I was wondering if any of you knew or had suggestions about how to track down an ISP or email address of an anonymous posting on craigslist.org. Some dickhead posted my sister's phone number and a raunch photo (not her) on the casual encounters section. Needless to say, she's been getting a lot of nasty calls and is really freaked out. Shy of subpoena-ing craigslist (which we think we're gonna do), I wanted to know if there was a way to find out who did it. Then I can begin plotting his (her?) comeuppance ... I don't know if its possible. I don't know if any of you are looking to make a few bucks to do it (we'll most definitely pay). I swear this isn't anything sketchy and honestly, you'd really be helping her out because she's having a shit day. Thanks in advance and please contact us at the email posted."
Education

Submission + - Snow Drift Game Replaces Prisoner's Dilemma (physorg.com)

Submitted by
eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes: "It's a well known situation and one often studied in everything from behavioral sciences to artificial intelligence. It involves the idea that cooperation is promoted by two or more individuals working together to achieve a return greater than working for their own interests. Scientists are now leaning toward the iterated snow drift game (ISD) replacing the iterated prisoner's dilemma (IPD) to accurately model what humans experience in real life. Essentially it removes the defective partner risk that is inherent in the IPD situation. If you are fingered by your friend while in separate interrogation rooms while you claim that both you and your friend are innocent, the outcome is much worse. In the ISD, your idle partner does not negate points from your efforts to work together — it just doesn't add anything either."
Music

Submission + - Multiformat Listening Test at 64kbps 1

Submitted by
prospective_user
prospective_user writes: "Do you think you have good ears? Think again.

The community at Hydrogenaudio has prepared a Public Listening Test for comparison of the most popular audio codecs (AAC, Vorbis, and Microsoft's WMA included) in a battle to see how they stand at compressing audio at 64kbps.

Many of the participants right now have expressed their surprise at being unable to determine which is the original and which is the compressed version of 18 samples covering a vast amount of musical styles.

The results of this test (and other that are conducted at Hydrogenaudio) will be used by the developers of the codecs to further improve the "transparency" and let this kind of test be even harder.

Everyone is invited to participate and show how good your listening is!"
Wireless Networking

Submission + - 'Sidejacking ' On WiFi

Submitted by ancientribe
ancientribe writes: As if you need another reason not to use WiFi unprotected, here's one: a researcher has released a tool that lets hackers "sidejack" your machine and access your Web accounts. Called Hamster, the tool basically clones the victim's cookies by sniffing their session IDs and controlling their Website accounts.

http://www.darkreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=130 692&WT.svl=news1_2
Biotech

Submission + - New antibiotics for pathogenic attacks of bacteria (heraldbiz.com)

Submitted by
allengineering
allengineering writes: "A team of research directed by the pr. KIM Kyung-Gyu of the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Sungkyunkwan discovered the structure of the protein Rse B playing an essential part in the transmission of the signals of stresses resulting from the pathogenic attacks of bacteria. The article is been published in the edition of May of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the the USA (PNAS). This projection should make it possible to develop new antibiotics."
United States

Submission + - Forensics Expert says Al-Qaeda Images Altered

Submitted by WerewolfOfVulcan
WerewolfOfVulcan writes: Wired reports that researcher Neal Krawetz revealed some veeeeeery interesting things about the Al-Qaeda images that our government loves to show off.

From the article: "Krawetz was also able to determine that the writing on the banner behind al-Zawahiri's head was added to the image afterward. In the second picture above showing the results of the error level analysis, the light clusters on the image indicate areas of the image that were added or changed. The subtitles and logos in the upper right and lower left corners (IntelCenter is an organization that monitors terrorist activity and As-Sahab is the video production branch of al Qaeda) were all added at the same time, while the banner writing was added at a different time, likely around the same time that al-Zawahiri was added, Krawetz says." Why would Al-Qaeda add an IntelCenter logo to their video? Why would IntelCenter add an Al-Qaeda logo? Methinks we have bigger fish to fry than Gonzo and his fired attorneys... }:-) The article contains links to Krawetz's presentation and the source code he used to analyze the photos.
Supercomputing

Submission + - Spintronic Microprocessors

Submitted by
eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes: "IEEE is running an article on MIT's efforts to create a microprocessor that uses the spin of electrons for computations. The big step they're working on is using a magnetically charged material to be able to use the electrons at room temperature. Prior to this, the electrons needed to be cooled below -120 Celsius in order for their magnetic properties to take hold. Slashdot covered the discovery of this material in 2004 as well as a follow up story and also research on possibilities about using it for quantum computing. Now MIT is working on implementing its use in processors but there still are some barriers to overcome. Spintronics has also been applied to data storage and memory."
Space

Submission + - NASA May have inadvertently killed Martian life

Submitted by
Nezer
Nezer writes: "CNN is reporting that NASA may have killed, Martian microbes. From the article, "The Viking space probes of 1976-77 were looking for the wrong kind of life, so they didn't recognize it, a geology professor at Washington State University said." Could this be the beginnings of War of the Worlds?"
Operating Systems

Submission + - Linux KVM Virtualization Performance

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Linux Kernel-based Virtual Machine is one of the features that will be introduced with the Linux 2.6.20 kernel. KVM (unlike Xen in para-virtualization mode) supports full virtualization on supported Intel and AMD processors so it does not require any modifications to the guest operating system. KVM also supports running Microsoft Windows XP 32-bit "out of the box". Phoronix has taken a look at the Linux virtualization performance as they compare the Kernel-based Virtual Machine to Xen 3.0.3 and QEMU with its binary-only kqemu accelerator.
Moon

Submission + - Geminid explosions on moon visible by amateurs

Submitted by
saskboy
saskboy writes: "The ET scanning project SETI@Home was wildly popular, and the mock project Yeti@Home much less so, but soon there will be a chance for the enthusiastic amateur astronomer to combine those respective scanning techniques and spot explosions on the moon with simple telescope and camera equipment at home.
"On Dec. 14, 2006, we observed at least five Geminid meteors hitting the Moon," reports Bill Cooke of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office in Huntsville, AL. Each impact caused an explosion ranging in power from 50 to 125 lbs of TNT and a flash of light as bright as a 7th-to-9th magnitude star. "The amazing thing is," says Cooke, "we've [caught explosions] using a pair of ordinary backyard telescopes, 14-inch, and off-the-shelf CCD cameras. Amateur astronomers could be recording these explosions, too."
NASA will "soon release data reduction software developed specifically for amateur and professional astronomers wishing to do this type of work. The software runs on an ordinary PC equipped with a digital video card. 'If you have caught a lunar meteor on tape, this program can find it.'""

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