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Government

Submission + - Army Buys Macs to beef up security

Submitted by agent_blue
agent_blue writes: The Army is integrating macs into their IT network to thwart hack attempts. the Mac platform, they argue Mac are more secure because there are less attacks against macs than there is against windows based systems. Story Here
Space

Submission + - Mars Rover Technology Used to Make Better Maps

Submitted by
Cal
Cal writes: "Interesting article on O'Reilly Radar about a new street mapping technology by a company in Berkeley (earthmine). They are using technology developed by the Jet Propulsion Lab for the Mars Exploration Rover missions for reconstructing three-dimensional data of the street-scape. Will be interesting to see if the product ends up in the hands of consumers. From the press release: "The technology licensed by earthmine is currently utilized as a part of NASA's Mars Exploration Program, a long-term effort of robotic exploration of the red planet. Wide angle stereo cameras are mounted on NASA's twin robot geologists, the Mars Exploration Rovers (MERs) launched toward Mars in 2003. The licensed software and algorithms are used to create a 3D representation of the local terrain, allowing autonomous routing of the MERs through the Martian environment. earthmine has combined this JPL technology with its unique, capture hardware and web delivery technology to deliver 3D data with unprecedented density and accuracy.""
Space

Submission + - Group plans to bring Martian sample to earth

Submitted by
sm62704 (mcgrew)
sm62704 (mcgrew) writes: "New Scientist has a story about IMARS (the International Mars Architecture for Return Samples) planning to bring samples of Martian siol to earth.

The robotic mission would be a needed precursor to manned trips to the red planet. Also, international cooperation is necessary since the US has already nixed bankrolling manned Mars missions."
Networking

Submission + - Cablevision CEO has Verizon FiOS at home? (my-pc-help.com)

Submitted by
Keri_Love
Keri_Love writes: "As you may already know, Cablevision and Verizon are in the middle of heated debate over Fiber-to-the-Premises (FTTP) Broadband and Television. With Cablevision slinging lines like "We're not afraid of your fiber!" Mike Murray writes in his tech blog today "click the picture to the right showing a Verizon FiOS can and drop directly above Cablevision's CEO Chuck Dolan's Oyster Bay, Long Island mailbox."

He's not scared! He's a customer!"
Space

Submission + - A telescope as big as the Earth

Submitted by
Roland Piquepaille
Roland Piquepaille writes: "A week ago, seven telescopes around the world were linked together to watch a distant galaxy called 3C273 in real time and create a single world telescope. The data from these telescopes, which are located in Australia, China and Europe, was streamed around the world at a rate of 256 Mb per second. One of the Australian researchers involved in the project said that it was the first time that astronomers have been able to instantaneously connect telescopes half a world apart. He added that 'the diameter of the Earth is 12,750 km and the two most widely separated telescopes in our experiment were 12,304 km apart.' So he's almost right by cliaming they created 'a telescope almost as big as the Earth.' But read more for additional references and a picture showing the location of these telescopes."
Censorship

Submission + - Libraries Defend Open Access

Submitted by aisaac
aisaac writes:
Publisher plans to equate public access to federally funded research with government censorship and the destruction of peer review were exposed earlier this year (Nature, January 25, 2007). In an open letter last month, Rockefeller University Press castigated the Partnership for Research Integrity in Science & Medicine (PRISM) for using distortionary rhetoric in a coordinated PR attack on open access. Now the Association of Research Libraries has released an Issue Brief addressing this PR campaign in more detail. The Issue Brief exposes some of the distortions used to persuade key policy makers that recent gains open access scientific publishing pose a danger to peer reviewed scientific research, free markets, and possibly the future of western civilization. As an example of what the publishers backing PRISM hate, consider the the wonderfully successful grants policy of the National Institutes of Health, which requires papers based on grant-funded research to be published in PubMed Central.
Software

Submission + - Opera 9.5 beats Firefox and IE7 as fastest browser (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Abhinav Peddada
Abhinav Peddada writes: ars technica takes the latest from Opera's stable — Opera 9.5 for a test run and finds some interesting results, including it being a "solid improvement to an already very strong browser". On performace front, ars technica reports "Opera 9.5 scored slightly higher (281ms) than the previous released version, 9.23 (546ms). And Opera 9.x, let it be known, smacks silly the likes of Firefox and Internet Explorer, which tend to have results in the 900-1500ms range on this test machine (a 1.8 GHz Core 2 Duo with 2GB RAM). Opera was 50 percent faster on average than Firefox, and 100 percent faster than IE7 on Windows Vista, for instance."
Software

Submission + - Algorithm Rates Trustworthiness of Wikipedia Pages

Submitted by paleshadows
paleshadows writes: Researchers at UCSC developed a tool that measures the trustworthiness of each wikipedia page. Roughly speaking, the algorithm analyzes the entire 7-year user-editing-history and utilzes the longevity of the content to learn which contributors are the most reliable: If your contribution lasts, you gain "reputation", whereas if it's edited out, your reputation falls. The trustworthiness of a newly inserted text is a function of the reputation of all its authors, a heuristic that turned out to be successful in identifying poor content. The interested reader can take a look at this demo (random page with white/orange background marking trusted/untrusted text, respectively; note "random page" link at the left for more demo pages), this presentation (pdf), and this paper (pdf).
Technology (Apple)

Submission + - Can Apple+ATT shut down iPhone Unlockers? (businessweek.com)

Submitted by aalobode
aalobode writes: Do Apple and AT&T have the legal right to stop hackers from selling unlocked iPhones? Under their terms, only AT&T may sell iPhones, and Apple gets a commission. When unlocked iPhones are used on other providers' networks, AT&T and hence Apple get nothing beyond what they earned on the initial sale of the hardware. Can they prohibit unlocking? Reselling? The article in Businessweek gives the for and against arguments, but appears to indicate that the hackers have the law on their side for once.
The Almighty Buck

Submission + - Copyright advocacy group violates copyright (scienceblogs.com)

Submitted by
word munger
word munger writes: "Commercial scholarly publishers are beginning to get afraid of the open access movement. They've hired a high-priced consultant to help them sway public opinion in favor of copyright restrictions on taxpayer-funded research. Funny thing is, their own website contains several copyright violations. It seems they pulled their images directly from the Getty Images website — watermark and all — without paying for their use! Clearly their agenda is simply to make using copyrighted materials inconvenient and expensive for everyone but THEMSELVES."
The Courts

Submission + - Drug testing entire cities at once

Submitted by
Ellis D. Tripp
Ellis D. Tripp writes: "Researchers have developed a technique for determining what illicit drugs people might be consuming in a given area, by testing a sample from the local sewage treatment plant. As little as a teaspoonful of untreated wastewater can reveal drug use patterns in a given community. From the article:

"one fairly affluent community scored low for illicit drugs except for cocaine. Cocaine and ecstasy tended to peak on weekends and drop on weekdays, she said, while methamphetamine and prescription drugs were steady throughout the week."

Obviously, any drugs found can't be tied to any specific user, but how much longer until the drug warriors want to deploy automatic sampling units farther upstream of the sewage treatment plant, sampling sewage output from selected neighborhoods, blocks, or even individual houses?

http://www.townhall.com/news/sci-tech/2007/08/21/s cientists_drug-test_whole_cities"
Security

Submission + - How To Steal Cars - Breaking a Car's Cipher

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: KeeLoq is a cipher used in several car anti-theft mechanisms distributed by Microchip Technology Inc. It may protect your car if you own a Chrysler, Daewoo, Fiat, General Motors, Honda, Toyota, Volvo, Volkswagen, or a Jaguar. The cipher is included in the remote control device that opens and locks your car and that controls the anti-theft mechanisms.

The 64-bit key block cipher was widely believed to be secure. In a recent research, a method to identify the key in less than a day was found. The attack requires access for about 1 hour to the remote control (for example, while it is stored in your pocket). The attacker than runs the implemented software, finds the secret cryptographic key, and drives away in your car after copying the key.

More info at: http://www.cosic.esat.kuleuven.be/keeloq/

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