Comment Truth is stranger than fiction ... (Score 1) 180
never thought I'd see Lady Gaga and Donald Knuth mentioned in the same post.
Submission + - Iran Says Siemens Helped US, Israel Build Stuxnet (computerworld.com) 1
CWmike writes: "Iran's Brigadier General, Gholam Reza Jalali, accused Siemens on Saturday with helping U.S. and Israeli teams craft the Stuxnet worm that attacked his country's nuclear facilities. 'Siemens should explain why and how it provided the enemies with the information about the codes of the SCADA software and prepared the ground for a cyber attack against us,' Jalali told the Islamic Republic News Service. Siemens did not reply to a request for comment on Jalali's accusations. Stuxnet, which first came to light in June 2010 but hit Iranian targets in several waves starting the year before, has been extensively analyzed by security researchers. Symantec and Langner Commuications say Stuxnet was designed to infiltrate Iran's nuclear enrichment program, hide in the Iranian SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) control systems that operate its plants, then force gas centrifuge motors to spin at unsafe speeds. Jalali suggested that Iranian officials would pursue Siemens in the courts, and claimed that Iranian researchers traced the attack to Israel and the U.S. He said information from infected systems was sent to computers in Texas."
Submission + - Chrome Shields Websites From DDoS Attacks (conceivablytech.com) 1
An anonymous reader writes: Google has an interesting idea how to take the edge off denial of service attacks. The latest developer builds of Chrome 12 have an option called http throttling which will simply deny a user to access a website once the browser has received error messages from a certain URL. Chrome will react with a "back-off interval" that will increase the time between the requests to a website. If there are enough chrome requests flooding a website under attack, this could give webmasters some room to recover from a nasty DDoS attack.
Submission + - Can Open Source Hardware Feed The World? (itworld.com)
jfruhlinger writes: "When it comes to food scarcity in the developing world, one of the major problems is production capacity: land that could be arable using modern techniques goes underutilized because locals don't have the abbility to build or buy equipment. A group calling itself Open Source Eclology is trying to solve that problem. They've developed a set of open source hardware specs for 50 different industrial machines, which they're calling the Global Village Construction Set."
Submission + - Titan May Have Ocean (technologyreview.com)
olsmeister writes: In the seven years Cassini has spent orbiting Saturn, the spacecraft has sent back mountains of data that has changed our view of the ringed planet and its moons. Saturn's largest moon, Titan, has been a particular focus of attention because of its dense, complex atmosphere, its weather and its lakes and oceans.
Now it looks as if Titan is even stranger still. The evidence comes from careful observations of Titan's orbit and rotation. This indicates that Titan has an orbit similar to our Moon's: it always presents the same face towards Saturn and its axis of rotation tilts by about 0.3 degrees.
Together, these data allow astronomers to work out Titan's moment of inertia and this throws up something interesting. The numbers indicate that Titan's moment of inertia can only be explained if it is a solid body that is denser near the surface than it is at its centre.
Now it looks as if Titan is even stranger still. The evidence comes from careful observations of Titan's orbit and rotation. This indicates that Titan has an orbit similar to our Moon's: it always presents the same face towards Saturn and its axis of rotation tilts by about 0.3 degrees.
Together, these data allow astronomers to work out Titan's moment of inertia and this throws up something interesting. The numbers indicate that Titan's moment of inertia can only be explained if it is a solid body that is denser near the surface than it is at its centre.
Submission + - Open Source Programming Tools on the Rise (infoworld.com)
snydeq writes: "InfoWorld's Peter Wayner takes a look at 13 open source development projects making waves in the enterprise. From Git to Hadoop to build management tools, 'even in the deepest corners of proprietary stacks, open source tools can be found, often dominating. The reason is clear: Open source licenses are designed to allow users to revise, fix, and extend their code. The barber or cop may not be familiar enough with code to contribute, but programmers sure know how to fiddle with their tools. The result is a fertile ecology of ideas and source code, fed by the enthusiasm of application developers who know how to "scratch an itch".'"
Submission + - WikiLeaks Gives $15k to Bradley Manning Defense (securityweek.com)
wiredmikey writes: The Web site supporting Bradley Manning, the Army soldier charged with leaking a massive number of U.S. classified information to WikiLeaks, posted an announcement on its site today, saying that WikiLeaks had transferred $15,100 to the legal trust account of Manning’s attorney. WikiLeaks has been publicly soliciting donations specifically for the expenses of Manning’s legal defense following his arrest in May 2010.
The contribution by WikiLeaks brings the total funds raised and transferred to Bradley’s civilian legal defense team, led by attorney David Coombs, to over $100,000. Supporters say that a "vigorous defense" for Manning is estimated to cost $115,000.
The contribution by WikiLeaks brings the total funds raised and transferred to Bradley’s civilian legal defense team, led by attorney David Coombs, to over $100,000. Supporters say that a "vigorous defense" for Manning is estimated to cost $115,000.
Submission + - Dual-core chips coming to all smartphones in 2011
An anonymous reader writes: All top of the range smartphones will be sporting dual-core chips this year, according to this story. So is it time to ditch your current pocket rocket? Not necessarily — dual-core will give a bit of a boost to multitasking and media streaming but probably won't persuade iPhone owners to switch to Android, says the writer.
IBM's Plans For the Cell Processor 124
angry tapir writes "Development around the original Cell processor hasn't stalled, and IBM will continue to develop chips and supply hardware for future gaming consoles, a company executive said. IBM is working with gaming machine vendors including Nintendo and Sony, said Jai Menon, CTO of IBM's Systems and Technology Group, during an interview Thursday. 'We want to stay in the business, we intend to stay in the business,' he said. IBM confirmed in a statement that it continues to manufacture the Cell processor for use by Sony in its PlayStation 3. IBM also will continue to invest in Cell as part of its hybrid and multicore chip strategy, Menon said."
2011, Year of the Tablet? 324
frontwave writes "After the huge success of the iPad, with over 4 million units sold since its introduction, all major hardware vendors of PCs and mobile devices are coming out with new tablets in the next few months, including Apple with a smaller version of the popular product. Analysts estimate the market for tablet devices (over 6" screen size) to be around 25 million units for 2011."
Introducing the Invulnerable Evercookie 332
An anonymous reader writes "Using eight different techniques and locations, a 'security' guy has developed a cookie that is very, very hard to delete. If just one copy of the cookie remains, the other locations are rebuilt. My favorite storage location is in 'RGB values of auto-generated, force-cached PNGs using HTML5 Canvas tag to read pixels (cookies) back out' — awesome."
Newspaper May Have Given Implicit License To Copy 175
An anonymous reader writes "Following up on the story of Righthaven, the 'copyright troll' that is working with the Las Vegas Journal Review to sue lots of websites (including one of Nevada's Senate candidates) for reposting articles from the LVRJ, a judge in one of the cases appears to be quite sympathetic to the argument that the LVRJ offered an 'implied license' to copy by not just putting their content online for free, but including tools on every story that say 'share this' with links to various sharing services (including one tool to 'share' via Slashdot!)."
Comment heatsink/fan (Score 1) 715
... was the crappy heatsink that came with my boxed Intel Quad Core. It only lasted a year, then suddenly my computer started doing random shutdowns. I bought I nice bolt-on model from Microcenter and problem solved.
Hawking Picks Physics Over God For Big Bang 1328
Hugh Pickens writes "The Guardian reports that in his new book, The Grand Design, Professor Stephen Hawking argues that the Big Bang, rather than occurring following the intervention of a divine being, was inevitable due to the law of gravity. 'Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist,' Hawking writes. 'It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.' Hawking had previously appeared to accept the role of God in the creation of the universe. Writing in his bestseller A Brief History Of Time in 1988, Hawking wrote: 'If we discover a complete theory, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason – for then we should know the mind of God.'"
IBM Unveils Fastest Microprocessor Ever 292
adeelarshad82 writes "IBM revealed details of its 5.2-GHz chip, the fastest microprocessor ever announced. Costing hundreds of thousands of dollars, IBM described the z196, which will power its Z-series of mainframes. The z196 contains 1.4 billion transistors on a chip measuring 512 square millimeters fabricated on 45-nm PD SOI technology. It contains a 64KB L1 instruction cache, a 128KB L1 data cache, a 1.5MB private L2 cache per core, plus a pair of co-processors used for cryptographic operations. IBM is set to ship the chip in September."
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The universe does not have laws -- it has habits, and habits can be broken.
