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Space

Black Hole At Center of Milky Way Confirmed 392

Posted by CmdrTaco from the i-can-see-it-from-here dept.
Smivs writes "The BBC are reporting that a German team has confirmed the existence of a Black Hole at the center of the Milky Way. Astronomers tracked the movement of 28 stars circling the center of the Milky Way, using the 3.5m New Technology Telescope and the 8.2m Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile. Both are operated by the European Southern Observatory (Eso). The black hole is four million times heavier than our Sun, according to the paper in The Astrophysical Journal. According to Dr Robert Massey, of the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS), the results suggest that galaxies form around giant black holes in the way that a pearl forms around grit."
Security

FBI Says Military Had Counterfeit Cisco Routers 186

Posted by kdawson from the who-do-you-trust dept.
There are new developments in the case of the counterfeit Cisco routers, which we have been discussing for some time. The NYTimes updates the story after an FBI PowerPoint presentation made its way onto the Web. It seems that experts at Cisco have examined some of the counterfeit routers in detail and proclaimed that they contain no back doors. Others don't believe we can be so sure. "Last month, [DARPA] began distributing chips with hidden Trojan horse circuitry to military contractors who are participating in the agency's Trusted Integrated Circuits program. The goal is to test forensic techniques for finding hidden electronic trap doors, which can be maddeningly elusive... The threat was demonstrated in April when a team of computer scientists from the University of Illinois presented a paper at a technical conference in San Francisco detailing how they had modified a Sun Microsystems SPARC microprocessor... The researchers were able to create a stealth system that would allow them to automatically log in to a computer and steal passwords."

Feed The Register: Robot sailboats to race across Atlantic (theregister.com)

From feed by registerfeed
Seagull poo on solar cells is primary tech snag

In the Irish Sea off Wales this week, a new kind of robot is taking to the waves. For once, this is not a military kill-droid, nor a securo-pork powered surveillance machine. Instead, we are seeing the debut of the fully-autonomous sailboat, which uses its own software to navigate out at sea. For now the uninhabited windjammers will stay relatively close to home but, next year, their successors will race across the Atlantic.
Microsoft

Journal Journal: Microsoft's fast track bid for OOXML standarization rejected 1

Journal by vmxeo
Microsoft's push for fast-track approval of its OOXML document format as an ISO standard has failed, according to a news article from PC World. The proposal now must be reworked to address comments made during the voting process and will be up for another vote by ISO members early next year. Details on the voting outcome can also be found at Groklaw, and yo

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