A Google Chrome experiment has gone horribly wrong this week and ended up crashing browsers on thousands, if not more, enterprise networks for nearly two days. From a report: The issue first appeared on Wednesday, November 13. It didn't impact all Chrome users, but only Chrome browsers running on Windows Server "terminal server" setups -- a very common setup in enterprise networks According to hundreds of reports, users said that Chrome tabs were going blank, all of a sudden, in what's called a "White Screen of Death" (WSOD) error. The issue was no joke. System administrators at many companies reported that hundreds and thousands of employees couldn't use Chrome to access the internet, as the active browser tab kept going blank while working. In tightly controlled enterprise environments, many employees didn't have the option to change browsers and were left unable to do their jobs. Similarly, system administrators couldn't just replace Chrome with another browser right away.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNET: Drivers in England and Wales now have a direct line to police for ratting on their fellow motorists, thanks to a new national dash cam database. The National Dash Cam Safety Portal, run by UK dashcam manufacturer Nextbase, lets drivers upload footage from their dashcam to a single database and send it directly to police, the BBC reports. Drivers can choose their region of England or Wales and send footage of accidents or illegal behavior on the road directly to local police, as well as sending a witness statement that can then be used in court.

MarkWhittington quotes a report from Examiner: Ever since the EmDrive entered the news about a year or so ago, it has sparked considerable controversy. The device is alleged to work by using microwaves that produce, in some fashion as yet unknown to science, thrust. Many scientists suggest that the EM drive is impossible as it violates known physics. However, a number of tests conducted in Great Britain, Germany, China, and at NASA's Eagleworks at the Johnson Spaceflight Center have resulted in thrust that cannot, as yet, be explained by experimental error. The International Business Times reported that a Finnish scientist has published an article in a peer-reviewed science journal with a possible explanation as to how the drive works. International Business Times writes, "A new peer-reviewed paper on the EmDrive from Finaland states that the controversial electromagnetic space propulsion technology does work due to microwaves fed into the device converting photons that leak out of the closed cavity, producing an exhaust. The research, entitled "On the exhaust of electromagnetic drive," is published in the journal AIP Advances 6 and is the brainchild of Dr Arto Annila, a physics professor at the University of Helsinki; Dr Erkki Kolehmainen, an organic chemistry professor at the University of Jyvaskyla; and Patrick Grahn, a multiphysicist at engineering software firm Comsol."

An anonymous reader writes: The healthcare sector gets a hand from Microsoft, who will release a new encryption algorithm which will allow developers to handle genomic data in encrypted format, without the need of decryption, and by doing so, minimizing security risks. The new algorithm is dubbed SEAL (Simple Encrypted Arithmetic Library) and is based on homomorphic encryption, which allows mathematical operations to be run on encrypted data, yielding the same results as if it would run on the cleartext version. Microsoft will create a new tool and offer it as a free download. They've also published the theoretical research. For now, the algorithm can handle only genomic data.

jrepin writes The Pirate Party now measures as the largest political party in Iceland, according to a new servey from the Icelandic market and research company MMR which regularly surveyes the support for the political parties in Iceland. Support for political parties and the government was surveyed in the period between the 13thand 18th of March. The results show that The Pirate Party has gained increased support. Now, support for The Pirate Party totals 23.9%, compared to their previous 12.8% in the last MMR survey.

KentuckyFC writes Photons have many properties, such as their frequency, momentum, spin and orbital angular momentum. But when it comes to quantum teleportation, physicists have only ever been able to to transmit one of these properties at a time. So the possibility of teleporting a complete quantum object has always seemed a distant dream. Now a team of Chinese physicists has worked out how to teleport more than one quantum property. The team has demonstrated it by teleporting both the spin and orbital angular momentum of single photons simultaneously. They point out that there is no reason in principle why the technique cannot be generalized to include other properties as well, such as a photon's frequency, momentum and so on. That's an important step towards teleporting complex quantum objects in their entirety, such as atoms, molecules and perhaps even small viruses.

rjmarvin writes "Google released version 1.1 of its Dart open-source web programming language today, with new features and improved tools. The Dart Editor is updated with improved debugging, code implementation and more descriptive toolkits, and new UDP (User Datagram Protocol) and documentation support command-line and server-side Dart applications. Google also highlighted benchmarks such as the Richards benchmark, where Dart 1.1 is running 25% faster than JavaScript, as part of the larger competition between Dart and JavaScript in creating more complex applications in the web development space."

sciencehabit writes "Dating experts working in Spain, using a technique relatively new to archaeology, have pushed dates for the earliest cave art back some 4000 years to at least 41,000 years ago, raising the possibility that the artists were Neandertals rather than modern humans. And a few researchers say that the study argues for the slow development of artistic skill over tens of thousands of years — not a swift acquisition of talent, as some had argued."

An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla has an idea for how it can bridge the gap between native apps and web applications: WebAPI will be developed as a set of HTML5 APIs and deliver consistent, web-based application interfaces that can be accessed by any HTML5-capable device, specifically smartphones."

ZerXes writes "It seems that APNIC has just released the last block of IPv4 addresses and are now completely out, a lot faster then expected. Even though APNIC received 3 /8 blocks in February the high growth of mobile devices made the addresses run out even before the summer. 'From this day onwards, IPv6 is mandatory for building new Internet networks and services,' says APNIC Director General Paul Wilson."

Julie188 writes "Craig Heffner, a researcher with Maryland-based security consultancy Seismic, plans to release a software tool at the Black Hat conference later this month that he says could be used on about half the existing models of home routers, including most Linksys, Dell, and Verizon FiOS or DSL versions. The tool apparently exploits the routers through DNS rebinding. While this technique has been discussed for 15 years or more, Heffner says, 'It just hasn't been put together like this before.'" Notebooks.com has a list of routers tested and some advice on securing vulnerable routers.

Readers today have been sending tons of stories about the iPhone 4, so here are a few of the highlights: Following the Consumers Reports announcement that the iPhone has antenna problems, Andy Patrizio asks if Apple can withstand the pressure to recall, while CNet estimates that a recall would cost them $1.5B. But that's just the latest on the iPhone 4 — the long running carrier exclusivity lawsuit rumors have been upgraded to Class Action status.

darthcamaro writes 'We all know that IPv4 address space is almost all gone — but how will we know when the exact date is? And what will happen that day? In a new report, ARIN's CIO explains exactly what will happen on that last day of IPv4 address availability: '"We will run out of IPv4 address space and the real difficult part is that there is no flag date. It's a real moving date based on demand and the amount of address space we can reclaim from organizations," Jimmerson told InternetNews.com. "If things continue they way they have, ARIN will for the very first time, sometime between the middle and end of next year, receive a request for IPv4 address space that is justified and meets the policy. However, ARIN won't have the address space. So we'll have to say no for the very first time."'

Hugh Pickens writes "Scientific American has a story on researchers from the University of Utah who have calculated that 1.2 million years ago, at a time when our ancestors Homo erectus, H. ergaster, and archaic H. sapiens were spreading through Africa, Europe, and Asia, there were probably only about 18,500 individuals capable of breeding in all these species together (PNAS paper here). Pre-humans were an endangered species with a smaller population than today's gorillas and chimpanzees. Researchers scanned two completely sequenced modern human genomes for a type of mobile element called Alu sequences, then compared the nucleotides in these old regions with the overall diversity in the two genomes to estimate differences in effective population size, and thus genetic diversity between modern and early humans. Human geneticist Lynn Jorde says that the diminished genetic diversity one million years ago suggests human ancestors experienced a catastrophic event at that time as devastating as the Toba super-volcano in Indonesia that triggered a nuclear winter and is thought to have nearly annihilated humans 70,000 years ago."

An anonymous reader writes "As expected, Microsoft has issued an out-of-band security patch to address a remote code execution hole in Internet Explorer that was used in the recent Chinese attacks disclosed by Google. Ars Technica has all the download links you need."