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Space

Submission + - NASA Snaps New Photo of Incoming Asteroid (discovery.com)

Submitted by
astroengine
astroengine writes: "Wider than an aircraft carrier and darker than coal, asteroid 2005 YU55 is soaring at over 11 miles a second straight towards Earth and moon on its latest path through the inner solar system. This new radar image was acquired Nov. 7 by the 70-meter radio telescope at NASA's Deep Space Network in Goldstone, Calif., and shows the approaching space rock in unprecedented detail."
Facebook

Submission + - Judge Orders Divorcing Couple To Swap Facebook/Dat (forbes.com)

Submitted by nonprofiteer
nonprofiteer writes: A Connecticut judge issued an order telling divorce attorneys for Stephen and Courtney Gallion to swap passwords for their clients' Facebook and dating site accounts. The husband's lawyer asked for access to the wife's account to try to find evidence that she didn't want responsibility for caring for their two children so that he could get full custody. This is quite an overreach when it comes to discovery — usually discovery is limited to making you turn over "responsive" material, not letting opposing counsel shuffle through anything they want to determine what's relevant. It's a huge violation of privacy, but apparently judges are increasingly forcing litigants to turn over their social networking passwords, especially in personal injury cases.
Security

Submission + - Brazilian ISPs Hit with Massive DNS Attack (securityweek.com)

Submitted by wiredmikey
wiredmikey writes: Millions of people in Brazil have potentially been exposed to malware, as a result of a nationwide DNS attack. Additionally, several organizations in Brazil are reporting that network devices are also under attack. After being compromised remotely, scores of routers and modems had their DNS settings altered to redirect traffic.

Across the country, organizations are reporting that network devices were compromised and had their DNS settings changed to join the existing DNS attack. In those cases, when employees of the affected companies tried to open any website they were requested to execute a malicious Java applet, which would install malware presented as "Google Defence" software that tells the user is required to use the search engine, but instead is a trojan.

"These are typically not "classic" cache-poisoning attacks done with botnets in a Kaminsky-style attack," said one security expert.

While the DNS attacks rampaged, Brazil’s Federal Police arrested a 27-year-old who was an employee of a medium-sized ISP in the southern part of the country.

Submission + - SPAM: Survey Finds Cheating Among Students at All GPA Le

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Over a third of undergraduate students admitted to some form of cheating at one of America's top research universities, according to a survey published November in the journal Science and Engineering Ethics.

The researchers expected to find more cheating among the top-performing group — and at the minimum at least some students with excellent grades cheated.

Not so. As it turned out, the overall cheating rate was similar to that found in other studies, but the types of cheating and stated reasons for cheating were all over the map. Researchers uncovered one trend among the cheaters: the perception that teaching assistants either ignored or didn't care about cheating.
Link to Original Source
The Military

Submission + - The F-35 story (bloomberg.com) 1

Submitted by
phyzz
phyzz writes: "After 10 years in development and numerous cost and schedule overruns, the JSF program aimed at replacing several aircrafts from three major military services and partner nations with a fifth generation aircraft capable of STOVL as sustained supersonic flight in an affordable package finally gets some test points validated, yet faces an uphill fight against budget reductions. Bloomberg has this interesting story about the program's troubled past."
DRM

Submission + - Bell Labs Experimental System Enables 3D Rendering (phoronix.com)

Submitted by
billakay
billakay writes: "A recently open-sourced experimental Linux infrastructure created by Bell Labs researchers allows 3D rendering to be performed on a GPU and displayed on other devices, including DisplayLink dongles. The system accomplishes this by essentially creating "Virtual CRTCs", or virtual display output controllers, and allowing arbitrary devices to appear as extra ports on a graphics card.

The code and instructions to get the system running can be found here at GitHub."

Comment The kids these days! (Score 2) 532

by Jedimstr397 (#34552394) Attached to: Why Special Effects No Longer Impress
Moreover, the youth of this generation is completely desensitized to it, likened to a forensic investigator at a gory crime scene. Star Wars is saved due to it's 'cool' factor, but Toy Story 1 is shrugged off. Story and originality are very important, and it's great to see films that aren't remakes or sequels. But I will be at the Tron premiere tomorrow night, and that's because I connected with the original. The fact that it's in 3D is meaningless. The film makers of today are being forced to lure audiences in. It's a bit sad because who knows what's next? Holographic projection? It all boils down to the elusive "block-buster", and content is the unfortunate victim.
Communications

Facebook Competitor Diaspora Revealed 306

Posted by CmdrTaco from the tremble-in-something-something dept.
jamie writes "A post has just gone up on Diaspora's blog revealing what the project actually looks like for the first time. While it's not yet ready to be released to the public, the open-source social networking project is giving the world a glimpse of what it looks like today and also releasing the project code, as promised. At first glance, this preview version of Diaspora looks sparse, but clean. Oddly enough, with its big pictures and stream, it doesn't look unlike Apple's new Ping music social network mixed with yes, Facebook."
Graphics

Adobe Releases New 64-Bit Flash Plugin For Linux 240

Posted by samzenpus from the flash-in-the-pan dept.
TheDarkener writes "Adobe seems to have made an about face regarding their support for native 64-bit Linux support for Flash today, and released a new preview Flash plugin named 'Square.' This includes a native 64-bit version for Linux, which I have verified works on my Debian Lenny LTSP server by simply copying libflashplayer.so to /usr/lib/iceweasel/plugins — with sound (which I was never able to figure out with running the 32-bit version with nspluginwrapper and pulseaudio)."
Medicine

Radiation Therapy Mistakes Cost Lives 215

Posted by kdawson from the feel-the-burn dept.
jmtpi recommends a long NY Times investigative report about how powerful medical linear accelerators have contributed to at least two deaths in the New York area. Although the mistakes were largely due to human error, buggy software also played a role. "...the records described 621 mistakes from 2001 to 2008... most were minor... The Times found that on 133 occasions, devices used to shape or modulate radiation beams... were left out, wrongly positioned, or otherwise misused. On 284 occasions, radiation missed all or part of its intended target or treated the wrong body part entirely. ... Another patient with stomach cancer was treated for prostate cancer. Fifty patients received radiation intended for someone else, including one brain cancer patient who received radiation intended for breast cancer."
Power

Submission + - Centrifuge Problems Slow Iran Nuke Development

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "The NY Times reports that international nuclear inspectors say that at Iran’s nuclear enrichment plant in Natanz, where thousands of centrifuges spin to enrich uranium for nuclear fuel, the number of the machines currently operating has dropped by 20 percent since the summer, a decline nuclear experts attribute to technical problems while others, including some European officials, believe the problems may have been accentuated by a series of covert efforts by the West to undermine Iran’s program, including sabotage on its imported equipment and infrastructure. These factors have led the administration’s policy makers to lengthen their estimate of how long it would take Iran to accomplish what nuclear experts call “covert breakout” — the ability to secretly produce a workable weapon. “For now, the Iranians don’t have a credible breakout option, and we don’t think they will have one for at least 18 months, maybe two or three years,” said one senior administration official at the center of the White House Iran strategy. By the recent count of inspectors for the International Atomic Energy Agency, there were 3,936 centrifuges running at Iran’s enrichment plant in the desert at Natanz — down from a peak of 4,920 centrifuges in June. Administration officials say Iran began producing almost all of its own centrifuge components after discovering that the United States and other Western countries had sabotaged some key imported parts, and that the Iranians have made a series of manufacturing errors in their centrifuges. R. Scott Kemp, a Princeton University physicist, said that another factor was in the basic design of the centrifuges, obtained from Pakistan nearly two decades ago. “I suspect design problems,” Kemp says. “The machines run hot and have short lives. They’re terrible. It’s a really bad design.”"

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