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Technology

Submission + - SSD Write Endurance Considered... Sufficient (ef.gy)

Submitted by jyujin
jyujin writes: Ever wonder how long your SSD will last? It's funny how bad people are at estimating just how long "100,000 writes" are going to take when spread over a device that spans several thousand of those blocks over several gigabytes of memory. It obviously gets far worse with newer flash memory that is able to withstand a whopping million writes per cell. So yeah, let's crunch some numbers and fix that misconception. Spoiler: even at the maximum SATA 3.0 link speeds, you'd still find yourself waiting several months or even years for that SSD to start dying on you.
Politics

Submission + - Is "Left" vs. "Right" hard-coded into your brains? (smithsonianmag.com) 2

Submitted by kyjellyfish
kyjellyfish writes: Research published in the journal PLOS ONE (http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/science/2013/02/study-predicts-political-beliefs-with-83-percent-accuracy/?utm_source=smithsoniantopic&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=20130217-Weekender), suggests that your parents "Left" or "Right" party affiliations are not the only factor at work shaping a person’s political identity. Differences in opinion between "Lefty's" and "Righty's" may reflect specific physiological processes, and claim that politics isn’t the only influence causing structural changes in the brain. In research performed over 10 years ago, brain scans showed that London cab drivers’ gray matter grew larger to help them store a mental map of the city.
Security

Submission + - 'Stuxnet-like' Malware Hits Manufacturing Industries in Iran (securityweek.com)

Submitted by wiredmikey
wiredmikey writes: Iranian officials on Tuesday said that a “Stuxnet-like” cyber attack against hit some industrial units in a southern province.
"A virus had penetrated some manufacturing industries in Hormuzgan province, but its progress was halted," Ali Akbar Akhavan said, quoted by the ISNA news agency.

Akhavan said the malware was "Stuxnet-like" but did not elaborate and that the attack had occurred over the "past few months." One of the targets of the latest attack was the Bandar Abbas Tavanir Co, which oversees electricity production and distribution in Hormuzgan and adjacent provinces. He also accused "enemies" of constantly seeking to disrupt operations at Iran's industrial units through cyber attacks, without specifying how much damage had been caused.

Iran has blamed the US and Israel for cyber attacks in the past. In April, it said a voracious malware attack had hit computers running key parts of its oil sector and succeeded in wiping data off official servers.

Submission + - Scientists Construct First Map of How the Brain Organizes Everything We See

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Our eyes may be our window to the world, but how do we make sense of the thousands of images that flood our retinas each day? Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, have found that the brain is wired to put in order all the categories of objects and actions that we see. They have created the first interactive map of how the brain organizes these groupings.

Submission + - BLAKE2: An Alternative to SHA-3, SHA-2 and MD5 Announced (paritynews.com)

Submitted by hypnosec
hypnosec writes: BLAKE2 has been recently announced as a new alternative for the existing cryptographic hash algorithms — MD5 and SHA-2/3. With applicability in cloud storage, software distribution, host-based intrusion detection, digital forensics and revision control tools, BLAKE2 performs a lot faster than MD5 algorithm on Intel 32 and 64-bit systems. Developers of BLAKE2 insist that even though the algorithm is faster, there are no loose ends when it comes to security. BLAKE2 is an optimized version of the then SHA-3 finalist BLAKE.
China

Submission + - Acer Rethinks the "Tablet Bubble", Launching $99 Tablet (digitalspy.com)

Submitted by
retroworks
retroworks writes: "In August 2011, Acer Chairman JT Wang declared that the consumer affection for tablets had already begun to cool, basically labelling it a fad (Slashdot). What a difference a year (and a half) makes. Acer now plans to introduce a "category killer" $99 tablet. "In the past few months, we've made project roadmap changes in response to big changes in the tablet market," according to a source at the Wall Street Journal [Eva Dou blog] . "The launch of the Nexus 10 has changed the outlook for what makes competitive pricing." Acer is aiming the new tablet at emerging markets, competing with Chinese "white box" tablets (already available in Shenzhen at $45 each) ."

Comment financial sad for vendors (NL) (Score 2, Informative) 327

by Emmeau (#33262402) Attached to: BFG Tech Sending Out RMA Denial Letters, 'Winding Down Business'
This won't change much in the Netherlands. The customers get their warrany from the store they bought the product from. So if I bought a week ago one of their cards, and it breaks in 6 months (when BFG prolly has vanished) I go back to the store, and the store has to provide the warranty. The fact the company they send it to doesn't exist anymore is not the problem of the end-consumer. It's business risk. Shop thus has the option to try and repair the card themselves, or they will have to replace it with a similar product. Of course, stores won't be eager to do this/tell you. Bottomline, in Netherlands, consumer won't get effected too much by this.
Iphone

Apple Just Says Yes To iPhone Smoking Game 192

Posted by kdawson from the thought-they-were-banning-e-cigs dept.
ZosX sends along a puff piece from Wired's Brian X. Chen: "Apple on Monday approved Puff Puff Pass, a $2 game whose objective is to pass a cigarette or pipe around and puff it as many times as you can within a set duration. So much for taking the high road, Apple. The game allows you to choose between smoking a cigarette, a cigar, and a pipe. Then you select the number of people you'd like to light up with (up to five), the amount of time, and a place to smoke (outdoors or indoors). And you're ready to get right on puffing."
Moon

Decades-Old Soviet Reflector Spotted On the Moon 147

Posted by Soulskill from the always-in-the-last-place-you-look dept.
cremeglace writes "No one had seen a laser reflector that Soviet scientists had left on the moon almost 40 years ago, despite years of searching. Turns out searchers had been looking kilometers in the wrong direction. On 22 April, a team of physicists finally saw an incredibly faint flash from the reflector, which was ferried across the lunar surface by the Lunokhod 1 rover. The find comes thanks to NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which last month imaged a large area where the rover was reported to have been left. Then the researchers, led by Tom Murphy of the University of California, San Diego, could search one football-field-size area at a time until they got a reflection."
The Courts

Supreme Court To Rule On State Video Game Regulation 278

Posted by Soulskill from the incrementing-scalia's-frag-count dept.
DJRumpy sends in this quote from an AP report:"The Supreme Court will decide whether free speech rights are more important than helping parents keep violent material away from children. The justices agreed Monday to consider reinstating California's ban on the sale or rental of violent video games to minors, a law the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco threw out last year on grounds that it violated minors' constitutional rights. California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who signed the law in 2005, said he was pleased the high court would review the appeals court decision. He said, 'We have a responsibility to our kids and our communities to protect against the effects of games that depict ultra-violent actions, just as we already do with movies.'" SCOTUSblog has a more thorough legal description of the case.
Image

Google Street View Shoots the Same Woman 43 Times 106

Posted by samzenpus from the get-your-face-out-there dept.
Geoffrey.landis writes "Terry Southgate discovered that his wife Wendy appears on the Google Street View of his neighborhood not once or twice but a whopping 43 times. From the article: 'It seems as if the Street View car simply followed the same route as Wendy and Trixie. However, Wendy was a little suspicious that the car was doing something on the "tricksie" side. Several of the Street View shots show Wendy looking with some concern towards the car that was, well, to put it politely, crawling along the curb. "I didn't know what it was doing. It was just driving round very, very slowly," Wendy told the Sun.' The next best thing to being a movie star — a Street View star!"

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