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Comment Could be Interesting (Score 1) 99

by bperkins (#64777087) Attached to: Australia Plans Age Limit To Ban Children From Social Media

I'm fairly certain this will be more trouble to enforce than they are bargaining for, and may have some knock on negative side-effects.

However, assuming it isn't a complete failure and social media use is decreased substantially, it may provide some interesting independent data about childrens mental health and social media use.

Comment On the other hand .... (Score 1) 996

by prof_bart (#54814309) Attached to: In America, Most Republicans Think Colleges Are Bad for the Country
... the same study indicates that the majority of Democrats feel that banks and financial institution have a negative effect on the country. And at first glance, it kind of makes sense - look at the very real problems these institutions have. For example, their role in causing the 2008 meltdown. It is totally plausible to imagine them being much better. But then go and imagine a U.S. without banks and financial institutions at all. What would that be like? Unless a person is a pretty committed communist, they would agree that it would be decidedly not good! While there are some extremists on both sides, I think that in the case of both the Republicans and the Democrats in the study, people focus in on 'non-optimalities' of the respective institutions, and answer accordingly, rather than seeing the tremendous good that these institutions provide, even with their problems.
Android

Meet "London," Marshall's First Android Smartphone 67

Posted by timothy from the are-they-stackable? dept.
MojoKid writes: Marshall may be better known for its music equipment, but that isn't stopping the company from bringing a better audio experience to the smartphone market with its London handset. Given its highly customizable nature, it should come as no surprise that London runs Google's Android operating system (Lollipop 5.0.2). The London features dual front-facing speakers, a Wolfson WM8281 sound processor, Bluetooth atpX support, and a gold-tinged scroll wheel on the right side of the device that handle volume control, which Marshall says offers "tactile precision [that] allows you to find that sweet spot of sonic goodness." Once you get past the audio-centric functionality, there's a lot of lower-end hardware under the hood of the London. You'll find a 4.7-inch 720p display, a quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 410 processor with 2GB of RAM, 16GB of internal storage, a microSD slot, LTE connectivity, 8MP rear camera, 2MP front-facing camera, and a removable 2500 mAh battery. In other words, those specs make the London more in line with the Moto G.
Bug

'Bar Mitzvah Attack' Plagues SSL/TLS Encryption 23

Posted by timothy from the process-not-product dept.
ancientribe writes Once again, SSL/TLS encryption is getting dogged by outdated and weak options that make it less secure. This time, it's the weak keys in the older RC4 crypto algorithm, which can be abused such that an attacker can sniff credentials or other data in an SSL session, according to a researcher who revealed the hack today at Black Hat Asia in Singapore. A slice: Bar Mitzvah exploits the weak keys used by RC4 and allows an attacker to recover plain text from the encrypted information, potentially exposing account credentials, credit card data, or other sensitive information. And unlike previous SSL hacks, this one doesn't require an active man-in-the-middle session, just passive sniffing or eavesdropping on SSL/TLS-encrypted connections, [researcher Itsik] Mantin says. But MITM could be used as well, though, for hijacking a session, he says.
Moon

How Astrophysicists Hope To Turn the Entire Moon Into a Cosmic Ray Detector 74

Posted by samzenpus from the that's-no-moon dept.
KentuckyFC writes One of the great mysteries in astrophysics surrounds the origin of ultra-high energy cosmic rays, which can have energies of 10^20 electron volts and beyond. To put that in context, that's a single proton with the same energy as a baseball flying at 100 kilometers per hour. Nobody knows where ultra-high energy cosmic rays come from or how they get their enormous energies. That's largely because they are so rare--physicists detect them on Earth at a rate of less than one particle per square kilometer per century. So astronomers have come up with a plan to see vastly more ultra high energy cosmic rays by using the Moon as a giant cosmic ray detector. When these particles hit the lunar surface, they generate brief bursts of radio waves that a highly sensitive radio telescope can pick up. No radio telescope on Earth is currently capable of this but astronomers are about to start work on a new one that will be able to pick up these signals for the first time. That should help them finally tease apart the origins of these most energetic particles in the Universe .

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