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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."
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."
Censorship

A Custom Objectionable Word List Ate My Homework 386

Posted by timothy from the george-carlin-would-need-a-longer-list dept.
theodp writes "Among the first three schools using Chromebooks for Education is the Merton Community School District, which decided to go Chromebook after the Wisconsin Dept. of Public Instruction (WDPI) issued a news release (created using PDFMaker for Word) announcing that all Wisconsin schools can have access to Google Apps for Education by simply downloading a Google Consent Form (Microsoft Word format, oddly) from the WDPI website, completing & signing it, and submitting it to Google. And to help get the schools going, a separate Wisconsin Google Apps for Education website aims to jumpstart things with weekly webinars, the first of which — Getting started with the Google Apps for Education Control Panel — shows school officials how they can sandbox 'Naughty Students' and filter objectionable content. While Google illustrates how a list of 'custom objectionable words' can be used to flag and/or block students' e-mail with some cute examples — different spellings of 'booger' and a regex to block variants like 'b00g3r' — things get considerably nastier in the real world, as this NSFW custom objectionable word list used by the North Canton City Schools shows."
Communications

45,000 Verizon Workers On Strike Over New Contract 317

Posted by timothy from the your-call-is-very-important-to-us-please-hold dept.
Trouble with your landline? If you have Verizon, especially on the east coast, it might not be the best time to have it fixed; The Daily Mail reports that "Forty-five thousand Verizon workers from Massachusetts to Washington, D.C., are on the picket line Sunday as labour contract talks fizzled. More than a fifth of the wireless giant's work force has gone on strike as contract negotiations for the wireline division broke down last night."
Cellphones

Customer Asks For Itemized Bill, Verizon Tells Her To Get a Subpoena 415

Posted by Soulskill from the customer-is-always-right-when-backed-by-a-court-of-law dept.
suraj.sun writes with this quote from an article at Techdirt: "A woman, who called Verizon to try to find out about the $4.19 she was being charged for six local calls, was told by Verizon reps that the only way it would provide her an itemized bill was to get a lawyer and have the lawyer get a subpoena to force Verizon to disclose the information. Instead, the woman went to court (by herself) and a judge told Verizon (.docx) to hand over the itemized bill info. 'It is a basic matter of fair business practice that a consumer should be able to contact a utility about a charge on a bill and learn what the charge is for and learn that the charge was correctly applied. The only verification that Verizon's witness could offer that a charge like [the customer's] $4.19 measured use charge was accurate and billed correctly was her faith in the accuracy of Verizon's computer system. The only way that Verizon would offer any information about a past charge in response to a consumer inquiry was to require that customer to hire a lawyer and subpoena their own usage information. By no reasonable standard could this be considered reasonable customer service."

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)."

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