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Mars

4-Billion-Pixel Panorama View From Curiosity Rover 101

Posted by samzenpus from the take-a-look dept.
A reader points out that there is a great new panorama made from shots from the Curiosity Rover. "Sweep your gaze around Gale Crater on Mars, where NASA's Curiosity rover is currently exploring, with this 4-billion-pixel panorama stitched together from 295 images. ...The entire image stretches 90,000 by 45,000 pixels and uses pictures taken by the rover's two MastCams. The best way to enjoy it is to go into fullscreen mode and slowly soak up the scenery — from the distant high edges of the crater to the enormous and looming Mount Sharp, the rover's eventual destination."
Networking

Misconfigured Open DNS Resolvers Key To Massive DDoS Attacks 179

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the check-your-sources dept.
msm1267 writes with an excerpt From Threat Post: "While the big traffic numbers and the spat between Spamhaus and illicit webhost Cyberbunker are grabbing big headlines, the underlying and percolating issue at play here has to do with the open DNS resolvers being used to DDoS the spam-fighters from Switzerland. Open resolvers do not authenticate a packet-sender's IP address before a DNS reply is sent back. Therefore, an attacker that is able to spoof a victim's IP address can have a DNS request bombard the victim with a 100-to-1 ratio of traffic coming back to them versus what was requested. DNS amplification attacks such as these have been used lately by hacktivists, extortionists and blacklisted webhosts to great success." Running an open DNS resolver isn't itself always a problem, but it looks like people are enabling neither source address verification nor rate limiting.

Comment Re:What? (Score 1) 228

by Jeff321 (#38324386) Attached to: How many robocalls do you get each month?

I use a free Google Voice number and have it set to email me the voicemail recordings which are auto-transcribed. Of course I enrolled that number in Do Not Call too. The rare message I get is usually a misdial.

My biggest problem is I have a Vonage line for work and I keep getting fax machines trying to call even though there's no fax machine hooked up. Faxes are not covered by Do Not Call (nor are political calls), which makes zero sense to me. I started to just keep the ringer on silent and have Vonage transcribe/email the calls for me.
Games

Submission + - Vuvuzelas Blare on Pirated Copies (wired.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A novel anti-piracy measure baked into the Nintendo DS version of Michael Jackson: The Experience makes copied versions of the game unplayable and taunts gamers with the blaring sound of vuvuzelas.
Many games have installed switches that detect pirated copies and act accordingly, like ending the user’s game after 20 minutes. Ubisoft has come under fire multiple times for what players have seen as highly restrictive anti-piracy measures that annoy legitimate users as much or more so than pirates.

But some more-mischievous developers have used tricks similar to the vuvuzela fanfare to mess with pirates.

Batman: Arkham Asylum lets unauthorized users play through the game as if it were a normal copy, with a single exception: Batman’s cape-glide ability doesn’t work, rendering the game impossible to finish — although you might bash your head against it trying to make what are now impossible jumps.

If you pirate Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2, brace yourself for an explosion, as your entire base will detonate within 30 seconds of loading the game.
Education

Portal On the Booklist At Wabash College 203

Posted by Soulskill from the take-that-ebert dept.
jamie passes along this quote from a post by Michael Abbott at The Brainy Gamer: "This year, for the first time, a video game will appear on the syllabus of a course required for all students at Wabash College, where I teach. For me — and for a traditional liberal arts college founded in 1832 — this is a big deal. Alongside Gilgamesh, Aristotle's Politics, John Donne's poetry, Shakespeare's Hamlet, and the Tao Te Ching, freshmen at Wabash will also encounter a video game called Portal. "
It's funny. Laugh.

Details Emerge On Futurama's "Rebirth" (and Return) 183

Posted by timothy from the you'll-need-a-3d-tv-with-smellovision dept.
Svippy writes "As revealed last summer, Futurama will be returning this year, and while there were conflicts about the cast of the show in the late summer of 2009, a deal was eventually secured. Last week, Comedy Central confirmed the airing of the first episode, 'Rebirth,' will be 24 June 2010. Several other details related to plot and production have surfaced over the months, and for those interested, a full article is available on the subject."
Crime

Killer Convicted, Using Dog DNA Database 97

Posted by timothy from the what-about-concealed-dog-licenses? dept.
lee1 writes "It turns out that the UK has a DNA database — for dogs. And this database was recently used to apprehend a South London gang member who used his dog to catch a 16-year-old rival and hold him while he stabbed him to death. The dog was also accidentally stabbed, and left blood at the scene. The creation of human DNA databases has led to widespread debates on privacy; but what about the collation of DNA from dogs or other animals?"
Programming

Simpler "Hello World" Demonstrated In C 582

Posted by kdawson from the non-obfuscated dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Wondering where all that bloat comes from, causing even the classic 'Hello world' to weigh in at 11 KB? An MIT programmer decided to make a Linux C program so simple, she could explain every byte of the assembly. She found that gcc was including libc even when you don't ask for it. The blog shows how to compile a much simpler 'Hello world,' using no libraries at all. This takes me back to the days of programming bare-metal on DOS!"

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