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Science

Researchers Discover "Magnetic Current" 249

Posted by samzenpus from the positive-and-negative-waves dept.
fsouto writes "Researchers have discovered a magnetic equivalent to electricity. From the article, 'The phenomenon, dubbed "magnetricity," could be used in magnetic storage or in computing. Magnetic monopoles were first predicted to exist over a century ago, as a perfect analogue to electric charges. Although there are protons and electrons with net positive and negative electric charges, there were no particles in existence which carry magnetic charges. Rather, every magnet has a "north" and "south" pole.'"

Comment Tethering (Score 1) 69

by dakkar (#29446115) Attached to: Google Releases the SDK For Version 1.6 of Android

I have no problems tethering with my Samsung Galaxy out of the box. No root access required, no special applications. It provides a serial (over USB) interface to its internal modem, just point pppd to the proper device and it works.

(To enable it: Settings -> About phone -> Additional settings -> deselect "Mass storage only")
Biotech

Bacteria Used To Make Radioactive Metals Inert 237

Posted by CmdrTaco from the a-million-and-one-uses dept.
Serenissima writes "Researcher Judy Wall is experimenting with bacteria that can cleanse the radioactivity from toxic areas by rendering the heavy metals into non-toxic, inert versions. The technology is not without its flaws (the bacteria can't exist in an oxygenated environment yet), but it does have the potential to cleanse some of the world's hazardous sites. From the article: 'The bacteria Wall is studying are bio-corrosives and can change the solubility of heavy metals. They can take uranium and convert it to uraninite, a nearly insoluble substance.'"
Software

Submission + - URL shortener goes community-owned/FOSS (blog.tr.im)

Submitted by
Death Metal
Death Metal writes: "1. We will renounce all ownership interest in the tr.im domain name and donate it to the community. We will work out the legalities of this over the coming weeks, but it will ensure no one is ever able to hijack tr.im URLs in the future. They will always exist, period. Everyone can use tr.im with confidence.

2. We will release the source code used to implement tr.im for anyone to use, help develop, or privately extend as they like. We will release it under the MIT open-source license. It is our sincere hope that every URL shortener becomes as good or better than tr.im, or can learn from our architecture and feature set."
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft's GPL code because of breach. (theregister.co.uk)

Submitted by
ozmanjusri
ozmanjusri writes: "While Microsoft presented its recent embrace of the GPL as "a break from the ordinary", and the press spoke of them as going "to great lengths to engage the open source community", as is often the case with Microsoft, it turns out they had an ulterior motive.

According to Stephen Hemminger, an engineer with Vyatta, Microsoft's Hyper-V used open-source components in a network driver and the company released the code to avoid legal action over a GPL violation.

Microsoft's decision to embrace the GPL was welcomed by many in the open source community, but their failure to honestly explain the reason behind the release will have squandered this opportunity to build trust, something which is sadly lacking in most people's dealings with Microsoft."

Comment Re:Serious bug in gcc? (Score 2, Informative) 391

by dakkar (#28740087) Attached to: New Linux Kernel Flaw Allows Null Pointer Exploits

The description given by SANS is a bit misleading. What I believe is happening is:

  1. 1) tun is derefenced during the assignment to sk
  2. 2) if tun were NULL, the dereferencing would blow up the process
  3. 3) so the if (!tun) will always be false if we get there (says the compiler)

Since point 2 is mostly true, the compiler is not completely wrong to assume point 3

As Spengler says, a bigger problem is that loading SELinux (or, it looks like, most other security modules) causes the NULL dereference protection to be disabled.
Technology (Apple)

Submission + - Amazon Makes "1984" And "Animal Farm& (nytimes.com) 2

Submitted by
Oracle Goddess
Oracle Goddess writes: "In a story just dripping with irony, Amazon Kindle owners awoke this morning to discover that "1984" and "Animal Farm" had mysteriously disappeared from their e-book readers. These were books that they had bought and paid for, and thought they owned. Apparently the publisher changed its mind about offering an electronic edition, and apparently Amazon, whose business lives and dies by publisher happiness, caved. It electronically deleted all books by this author from people's Kindles and credited their accounts for the price. Amazon Customer service responded to queries by stating that. "We've always been at war with Eastasia.""
Security

Submission + - New Linux kernel flaw allows null pointer exploits (threatpost.com) 6

Submitted by Trailrunner7
Trailrunner7 writes: A new flaw in the latest release of the Linux kernel gives attackers the ability to exploit NULL pointer dereferences and bypass the protections of SELinux, AppArmor and the Linux Security Module. Brad Spengler discovered the vulnerability and found a reliable way to exploit it, giving him complete control of the remote machine. This is somewhat similar to the magic that Mark Dowd performed last year to exploit Adobe Flash. Threatpost.com reports: "The vulnerability is in the 2.6.30 release of the Linux kernel, and in a message to the Daily Dave mailing list Spengler said that he was able to exploit the flaw, which at first glance seemed unexploitable. He said that he was able to defeat the protection against exploiting NULL pointer dereferences on systems running SELinux and those running typical Linux implementations."
The Internet

Submission + - British Library Puts Oldest Surviving Bible Online

Submitted by
Peace Corps Library
Peace Corps Library writes: "BBC reports that about 800 pages of the earliest surviving Christian Bible, the 1,600-year-old Codex Sinaiticus manuscript, have been recovered and put on the internet. "The Codex Sinaiticus is one of the world's greatest written treasures," says Dr Scot McKendrick, head of Western manuscripts at the British Library. ""This 1,600-year-old manuscript offers a window into the development of early Christianity and first-hand evidence of how the text of the Bible was transmitted from generation to generation." The New Testament of the Codex Sinaiticus appears in Koine Greek, the original vernacular language and the Old Testament in the version, known as the Septuagint, that was adopted by early Greek-speaking Christians. For 1,500 years, the Codex Sinaiticus lay undisturbed in a Sinai monastery until it was found in 1844 and split between Egypt, Russia, Germany and Britain and is is thought to have survived because the desert air was ideal for preservation and because the monastery, on a Christian island in a Muslim sea, remained untouched, its walls unconquered. The British Library is marking the online launch of the manuscript with an exhibition which includes a range of historic items and artefacts linked to the document. "The availability of the virtual manuscript for study by scholars around the world creates opportunities for collaborative research that would not have been possible just a few years ago.""
Operating Systems

Submission + - How Do You Manage Your Home Directories? 1

Submitted by digitalderbs
digitalderbs writes: A problem plaguing most people with multiple computers is the arduous task of synchronizing files between them : documents, pictures, code, or data. Every one seems to have their own strategies, whether they involve usb drives, emailed attachments, rsync or a distributed management system, all of which have varying degrees of success in implementing fast synchronization, interoperability, redundancy and versioning, and encryption. Myself, I've used unison for file synchronization and rsnapshot for backups between two linux servers and a Mac OS X laptop. I've recently considered adding some sophistication by implementing a version control system like subversion, git or bazaar, but have found some shortcomings in automating commits and pushing updates to all systems. What system do you use to manage your home directories, and how have they worked for you for managing small files (dot config files) and large (gigabyte binaries of data) together?
Unix

Submission + - SPAM: Saving Unix one kernel at a time

Submitted by
coondoggie
coondoggie writes: "In this its 40th year of operating system life, some Unix stalwarts are trying to resurrect its past. That is they are taking on the unenviable and difficult job of restoring to its former glory old Unix software artifacts such as early Unix kernels, compilers and other important historical source code pieces. In a paper to be presented at next week's Usenix show, Warren Toomey of the Bond School of IT is expected to detail restoration work being done on four key Unix software artifacts all from the early 1970s — Nsys, 1st edition Unix kernel, 1st and 2nd edition binaries and early C compilers. In his paper, Toomey states that while the history of Unix has been well-documented, there was a time when the actual artifacts of early Unix development were in danger of being lost forever. [spam URL stripped]"
Link to Original Source
Power

Submission + - First Acoustic Black Hole Created In A BEC (technologyreview.com) 1

Submitted by
KentuckyFC
KentuckyFC writes: "One of the many curious properties of Bose Einstein Condensates (BECs) is that the flow of sound through them is governed by the same equations that describe how light is bent by a gravitational field. Now a group of Israeli physicists have exploited this idea to create an acoustic black hole in a BEC. The team created a supersonic flow of atoms within the BEC, a flow that prevents any phonon caught in it from making headway. The region where the flow changes from subsonic to supersonic is an event horizon because any phonon unlucky enough to stray into the supersonic region can never escape. But the real prize is not the acoustic black hole itself but what it makes possible: the first observation of Hawking radiation. Quantum mechanics predicts that pairs of phonon with opposite momentum ought to be constantly springing in and out of existence in a BEC. Were one of the pair to stray across the event horizon into the supersonic region, it could never escape. However, the other would be free to go on its way. This stream of phononic radiation away from an acoustic black hole would be the first observation of Hawking radiation. The team haven't got that far yet but it can't be long now before either they or their numerous competitors make this leap."
Robotics

Submission + - Pleo Robot Dinosaur Back From Extinction (robotsrule.com)

Submitted by
robotsrule
robotsrule writes: "Jetta Company Limited, the company that manufactured the Pleo baby robot dinosaur for Ugobe, has bought the intellectual property rights and other assets at the Ugobe bankruptcy sale that occurred on May 21. Steve Ohler, the United States liaison for the company, confirmed the news saying that the company is firmly committed to re-launching Pleo and continuing the line including producing accessories such as the vital battery and charger components. Jetta is the original manufacturer and therefore the best possible company to have acquired Ugobe's intellectual property and re-launch Pleo. Steve remarked that all the equipment needed to produce Pleos and accessories were all still intact and ready to go. Jetta is an established company with a 32 year history in manufacturing based in China and Hong Kong, and as part of their illustrious manufacturing history they have produced parts for members of iRobot's consumer robot line. They also issued a short press release announcing the relaunch of the Pleo line."
Google

Submission + - Google Labs Offers Table-Based Search Results (oreilly.com) 1

Submitted by
blackbearnh
blackbearnh writes: "Google just released Google Squared into the Google Labs playground. Google Squared lets you get results back in row and column format, and then add more columns to the result set. There's a brief tour of the features over on O'Reilly Radar, where the judgement is that there's lots of rough edges, but a huge amount of potential, especially for quick and dirty table generation for reports."
Space

Submission + - Voyager Clue Points to Origin of the Axis of Evil (technologyreview.com)

Submitted by
KentuckyFC
KentuckyFC writes: "Cosmologists have been scratching their heads over the discovery of a pattern imprinted on the cosmic microwave background, the radiation left over from the Big Bang. This pattern, the so-called Axis of Evil, just shouldn't be there. Now an independent researcher from Canada says the pattern may be caused by the boundary between the Solar System and interstellar space where there is a sharp change in pressure, temperature and density of ions in space. Known as the termination shock, astronomers had thought this boundary was spherical. But last year, data from the Voyager spacecraft which have crossed the boundary, showed it was asymmetric. The new thinking is that the termination shock acts like a giant lens, refracting light that passes through it. Any distortion of the lens ought to show up as a kind of imprinted pattern on an otherwise random image. But the real eye-opener is that as the shape of the termination shock changes (as the Solar Wind varies, for example), so too should the pattern in the microwave background. And there is tentative evidence that this is happening too (abstract)."

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