Raylen - Slashdot User

Submission + - Buffer Overflow in RFID Passport Readers (wired.com)

Submitted by

epee1221

on Friday August 10, 2007 @01:14PM

epee1221 writes: "Wired ran a story describing Lukas Grunwald's Defcon talk on an attack on airport passport readers. After extracting data from the (read-only) chip in a legitimate passport, he placed a version of the data with an altered passport photo (JPEG2000 is used in these chips) into a writable chip. The altered photo created a buffer overflow in two RFID readers he tested, causing both to crash. Grunwald suggests that vendors are typically using off-the-shelf JPEG2000 libraries, which would make the vulnerability common."

Submission + - New 'Stellarator' Design for Fusion Reactors (physorg.com)

Submitted by

eldavojohn

on Friday August 10, 2007 @12:41PM

eldavojohn writes: "The holy grail in fusion reactors has always seemed just a few years off for many decades. But a recent design enhancement termed a 'Stellarator' may change all that. The point at which a fusion reactor crashes is when particles begin escaping due to disruptions in the plasma. A NYU team has discovered that coiling specific wires to form a magnetic field to contain the plasma is a viable way to create a plasma body with axial symmetry and far better chance of remaining stable. This, of course, like other forms of containment does require energy but brings us closer to a stable fusion reactor. It may not be cold fusion or 'table top' fusion but it certainly is a step forward. The paper is up for peer review in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences."

Submission + - Pico-ITX- Because Size Matters

Submitted by on Friday August 10, 2007 @11:10AM

An anonymous reader writes: It's not every day that a new form factor comes out, especially not one that is 10cm x 7.2cm. Despite its size, Pico-ITX is the hottest new thing in the rapidly changing small form factor market. It is considerably smaller than Mini-ITX (17cm x 17cm) which has proven itself to be quite versatile and though some sacrifices had to be made to shrink the platform, Pico-ITX is surprisingly complete. The system was tested with Feather Linux but the PX10000 has the power to run Windows XP or Ubuntu if you want to add on a hard drive.

Submission + - China Sets Sights on Comprehensive Lunar Survey (physorg.com)

Submitted by

eldavojohn

on Friday August 10, 2007 @10:13AM

eldavojohn writes: "Perhaps unsatisfied with the closeups that Google Moon has to offer, China has decided to survey the moon down to the "inch". In the second half of 2007, they plan to launch an unmanned lunar satellite to first orbit the moon, land on the moon & then return samples to earth for them to analyze. One would hope that we could work together in space exploration but it looks like everyone's planning on their own route."

Submission + - Schneier: Police data-mining done right (www.cbc.ca)

Submitted by

enharmonix

on Friday August 10, 2007 @09:56AM

enharmonix writes: "Courtesy of Bruce Schneier, it's nice to hear something good about data mining for a change: predicting and stopping crime. For example, police in Redmond, VA, "started overlaying crime reports with other data, such as weather, traffic, sports events and paydays for large employers. The data was analyzed three times a day and something interesting emerged: Robberies spiked on paydays near cheque cashing storefronts in specific neighbourhoods. Other clusters also became apparent, and pretty soon police were deploying resources in advance and predicting where crime was most likely to occur.""

Submission + - Sun Enters the Commodity Silicon Business (sun.com)

Submitted by Samrobb on Tuesday August 07, 2007 @11:54AM

Samrobb writes: According to Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz, Sun has decided to release its UltraSPARC T2 processor under the GPL. According to Schwartz, "We're announcing the fastest microprocessor we've ever shipped this week — delivering 89.6 Ghz of parallel computing power on a single chip — running standard Java applications and open source OS's. Simultaneously, we've said we're entering the commodity marketplace, and opening the chip up to our competition... To add fuel to the fire, the blueprints for our UltraSPARC T2... the core design files and test suites, will be available to the open source community, via its most popular license: the GPL."

Submission + - DoD offers $1 million for wearable power supply (networkworld.com)

Submitted by

coondoggie

on Friday July 06, 2007 @03:38PM

coondoggie writes: "The Department of Defense wants to pay you $1 million to come up with a lightweight "wearable power" battery pack for soldiers.The DoD says typical soldier going out for a four-day mission carries as much as 40 pounds of batteries and rechargers in his pack and it wants to fix that. The goal is to reduce the weight for the power system that drives radios, night-vision devices, global positioning systems and other combat gear, including a recharging system, to about 2 pounds per day. The DoD is looking to mimic the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency which has experienced successes using contests to attract competitors to develop innovative unmanned vehicles and other objects. Now the Defense Research and Engineering Office is hoping to tap into that same competitive spirit to develop longer-duration, lighter-weight power supplies. Three prizes will be awarded in November 2008: $1 million, $500,000 and $250,000. http://www.networkworld.com/community/?q=node/1726 8"

Submission + - Open source set-top-box adds YouTube support (last100.com)

Submitted by mrspin on Thursday June 28, 2007 @12:55PM

mrspin writes: Media streaming boxes such as the AppleTV, XBox 360, PS3, and products from Netgear, do a varying job of bridging the gap between the PC and television, as well as, in some cases, delivering Internet content directly into the living room. But all are closed systems. The result of which is that users are left trying to hack these devices against the wishes of manufacturers or have to make-do with whatever official features are implemented. Bucking this trend, Neuros is taking a wholly different approach, and has open-sourced the firmware for it's Neuros OSD media-center, meaning that anybody is free to write add-ons that extend the device's functionality. This week the company announced that thanks to the open-source community, the device now lets users browser, search and view the entire YouTube catalog.

Slashdot Top Deals