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Submission + - Let Them Eat Teslas

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: If you're a bright kid who wants to prepare for the 21st century workforce (pdf) by studying engineering at Purdue, the government will help your parents pay the $100,000 or so tuition tab with a 7.9% interest loan (plus 4% fees) that's likely to be non-dischargeable in bankruptcy and paid back with after-tax money. If, on the other hand, you want to buy a tricked-out $100,000 Model S, Tesla has teamed up with the government, Wells Fargo, and U.S. Bank on what it calls a 'Revolutionary New Finance Product' that enables those who play the game right to avoid paying sales tax, get the government to pick up the first $15,000 (no down payment needed!), and also receive a 2.95% bankruptcy-dischargeable loan for the balance, the payments for which could be tax-deductible. Yep, 'Revolutionary' may be about right!
Security

Submission + - Did the Spamhaus DDos really slow down global Internet access? (informationweek.com)

Submitted by
CowboyRobot
CowboyRobot writes: "Despite the headlines, the big denial of service attack may not have slowed the Internet after all. The argument against the original claim include the fact that reports of Internet users seeing slowdowns came not from service providers, but the DDoS mitigation service CloudFlare, which signed up Spamhaus as a customer last week. Also, multiple service providers and Internet watchers have now publicly stated that while the DDoS attacks against Spamhaus could theoretically have led to slowdowns, they've seen no evidence that this occurred for general Internet users. And while some users may have noticed a slowdown, the undersea cable cuts discovered by Egyptian sailors had more of an impact than the DDoS."
Networking

Submission + - Open DNS Resolvers Center Stage in Massive DDoS Attacks (threatpost.com)

Submitted by msm1267
msm1267 writes: 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.

Submission + - Solar Impulse Airplane to Launch First Sun-Powered Flight Across America (inhabitat.com)

Submitted by
markboyer
markboyer writes: "The Solar Impulse just landed at Moffett Field in Mountain View, California to announce a journey that will take it from San Francisco to New York without using a single drop of fuel. The "Across America" tour will kick off this May when founders Bertrand Piccard and André Borschberg take off from San Francisco. From there the plane will visit four cities across the states before landing in New York."
Google

Submission + - Google pledges not to sue open source software, unless first attacked (muktware.com)

Submitted by sfcrazy
sfcrazy writes: Google has announced the Open Patent Non-Assertion (OPN) Pledge. In it's pledge Google says that they will not sue any user, distributor or developer of open-source software on specified patents, unless first attacked. Under this pledge, Google is starting off with 10 patents relating to MapReduce, a computing model for processing large data sets first developed at Google. Google says that over time they intend to expand the set of Google’s patents covered by the pledge to other technologies.
Patents

Submission + - Texas judge tosses out patent claim against Linux (networkworld.com)

Submitted by
netbuzz
netbuzz writes: "A federal judge in Texas, presiding over a district notorious for favoring patent trolls, has summarily dismissed all claims relating to a case brought by Uniloc USA against Rackspace for allegedly infringing upon Linux patents. Red Hat defended Rackspace in the matter and issued a press release saying: “In dismissing the case, Chief Judge Leonard Davis found that Uniloc’s claim was unpatentable under Supreme Court case law that prohibits the patenting of mathematical algorithms. This is the first reported instance in which the Eastern District of Texas has granted an early motion to dismiss finding a patent invalid because it claimed unpatentable subject matter.”"
Google

Submission + - What an anti-Google antitrust case by the FTC may look like (cnet.com)

Submitted by
hessian
hessian writes: "It's not certain that Google will face a federal antitrust lawsuit by year's end. But if that happens, it seems likely to follow an outline sketched by Thomas Barnett, a Washington, D.C., lawyer on the payroll of Google's competitors.

Barnett laid out his arguments during a presentation here last night: Google is unfairly prioritizing its own services such as flight search over those offered by rivals such as Expedia, and it's unfairly incorporating reviews from Yelp without asking for permission.

"They systematically reinforce their dominance in search and search advertising," Barnett said during a debate on search engines and antitrust organized by the Federalist Society. "Google's case ought to have been brought a year or two ago.""

Submission + - Android will surpass Windows by 2016 (reuters.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Google's Android operating system will be used on more computing devices than Microsoft's Windows within four years, data from research firm Gartner showed on Wednesday, underlining the massive shift in the technology sector.

At the end of 2016, there will be 2.3 billion computers, tablets and smartphones using Android software, compared with 2.28 billion Windows devices, Gartner data showed.
Open Source

Submission + - Red Hat Devs Working on ARM64 OpenJDK Port (paritynews.com)

Submitted by hypnosec
hypnosec writes: Developers over at Red Hat are busy porting the OpenJDK to ARM’s latest 64bit architecture – the ARMv8, also known as the A64. The current OpenJDK ARM situation is rather unsatisfactory as there for the current 32-bit ARM processors, there are two version of VM for OpenJDK – HotSpot; one being a proprietary version by Oracle and another one free. The free version comes with a just-in-time (JIT) compiler that has quite a smaller footprint, which can’t compete with Oracle’s JIT. To avoid a similar situation for the 64-bit platform, the developers are working on an entirely free software.
Moon

Submission + - A Supercomputer on the Moon to Direct Deep Space Traffic 1

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "NASA currently controls its deep space missions through a network of 13 giant antennas in California, Spain and Australia known as the Deep Space Network (DSN) but the network is obsolete and just not up to the job of transmitting the growing workload of extra-terrestrial data from deep space missions. That's why Ouliang Chang has proposed building a massive supercomputer in a deep dark crater on the side of the moon facing away from Earth and all of its electromagnetic chatter. Nuclear-powered, it would accept signals from space, store them, process them if needed and then relay the data back to Earth as time and bandwidth allows. The supercomputer would run in frigid regions near one of the moon’s poles where cold temperatures would make cooling the supercomputer easier, and would communicate with spaceships and earth using a system of inflatable, steerable antennas that would hang suspended over moon craters, giving the Deep Space Network a second focal point away from earth. As well as boosting humanity's space-borne communication abilities, Chang's presentation at a space conference (PDF) in Pasadena, California also suggests that the moon-based dishes could work in unison with those on Earth to perform very-long-baseline interferometry, which allows multiple telescopes to be combined to emulate one huge telescope. Best of all the project has the potential to excite the imagination of future spacegoers and get men back on the moon."
Facebook

Submission + - Wall Street Journal describes how Facebooks Outs your Most Personal Secrets (wsj.com)

Submitted by McGruber
McGruber writes: The Wall Street Journal (FREE Link: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444165804578008740578200224.html) is reporting that Facebook revealed the sexual preferences of users despite those users have choosen "privacy lockdown" settings on Facebook.

The article describes two students who were casualties of a privacy loophole on Facebook—the fact that anyone can be added to a group by a friend without their approval. As a result, the two lost control over their secrets, even though both students were sophisticated users who had attempted to use Facebook's privacy settings to shield some of their activities from their parents.

Facebook spokesprick Andrew Noyes responded with a statement blaming the users: "Our hearts go out to these young people. Their unfortunate experience reminds us that we must continue our work to empower and educate users about our robust privacy controls."
The Military

Submission + - US Navy Cruiser and Submarine Collide (usatoday.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Despite billions of dollars in advanced electronics, radars,and sonar it seems the Navy needs to install backup cameras on their boats. "The Pentagon said late Saturday that it is investigating why a Navy submarine collided with an Aegis cruiser during routine operations at an undisclosed location."
The Matrix

Submission + - Is the Universe a Simulation? (phys.org) 2

Submitted by olsmeister
olsmeister writes: Ever wonder if the universe is really a simulation? Well, physicists do too. Recently, a group of physicists have devised a way that could conceivably prove one way or the other whether that is the case. There is a paper describing their work on arXiv. Some other physicists propose that the universe is actually a giant hologram with all the action actually occurring on a two-dimensional boundary region.

Comment Power Consumption. (Score 3, Informative) 113

by bobwrit (#41369579) Attached to: Intel Details Power Management Advancements in Haswell
"Folks have been trading blows over whether Intel could compete with ARM's core power consumption. " For the mobile markets, Here's the best numbers I could find on the various processor's power output: http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/mobile/display/20110921142759_Nvidia_Unwraps_Performance_Benchmarks_of_Tegra_3_Kal_El.html The 10W Intel processor is still ~8x outside the power output of a Tegra 3 at 1GHz/Core, and ~6.662x the power output of a OMAP4 processor. While Intel is clearly working on getting down to the ~1W power range, they still have a ways to go. They may get there, but until I see silicon, I'm not holding my breath for it.

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