Despite all the best intentions and meticulous overengineering, some of the equipment on spacecraft like the ISS inevitably breaks. An anonymous reader poses the question "Why carry out a very expensive launch into space to resupply the ISS, when astronauts could just manufacture replacement parts themselves?" Startup Made in Space is working on a space-oriented 3D printing system to make it easy to transmit the information needed to pop out complex shapes (as might be in delicate mechanical systems), but the founders are also talking about using 3D printers to jump-start construction if humans extend their presence from the Earth to other planets (or revisit the moon).

gringer writes "Dan Kaminsky presented at the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas on Wednesday, and said that the DNS vulnerability he discovered is much more dangerous than most have appreciated. Besides hijacking web browsers, hackers might attack email services and spam filters, FTP, Rsync, BitTorrent, Telnet, SSH, as well as SSL services. Ultimately it's not a question of which systems can be attacked by exploiting the flaw, but rather which ones cannot. Then again, it could just be hype. For more information, see Kaminsky's power point presentation." Update: 08/07 19:48 GMT by T : There's also an animation of the progress of the patch.

Death Metal Maniac writes "New microchip passports designed to be foolproof against identity theft failed the test when a researcher was able to manipulate one in minutes. The cloned passports were accepted as genuine by the computer software recommended for use at international airports. According to the article: 'A computer researcher cloned the chips on two British passports and implanted digital images of Osama bin Laden and a suicide bomber. The altered chips were then passed as genuine by passport reader software used by the UN agency that sets standards for e-passports.'"