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Microsoft

Submission + - Passwords not going away. Not soon, not ever. (wired.com)

Submitted by isoloisti
isoloisti writes: Hot on the heels of IBM's "no more passwords" prediction Wired has an article about provocative research saying that passwords are here to stay.
Researchers from Microsoft and Carleton U. take a harsh view of research on authentication saying “no progress has been made in the last twenty years.”
They dismiss biometrics, PKI, OpenID, and single-signon: “Not only have proposed alternatives failed, but we have learnt little from the failures.”
The problem is that the computer industry so thoroughly wrote off passwords about a decade ago, that not enough serious research has gone into improving them and understanding how they get compromised in the real world.

“It is time to admit that passwords will be with us for some time, and moreover, that in many instances they are the best-fit among currently known solutions.”

The MS/Carleton paper: http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/154077/Persistence-authorcopy.pdf

Submission + - manufacturers prepare for augmented reality drivin (cnn.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Manufacturers at CES are showing off their future integration of mobile computing technologies and automobiles:

"As digital tech — and our expectations for it — becomes more mobile, carmakers are taking notice. Many automotive designers here seem to have taken inspiration from smartphones, with their promise of being always connected and their vast menu of apps for every purpose.

Simply point your hand at them, and the icons open to show real-time information: when that bridge over there was built, what band is playing at that nightclub on the left, whether that new café up the street has any tables available. Wave your hand again, and you've made a restaurant reservation."

CNN notes: "All these advancements may make driving more interesting. Or they may spoil one of modern society's last refuges from the hyper-connected digital world. Either way, they are coming soon."
Medicine

Submission + - Totally drug-resistant TB emerges in India (nature.com)

Submitted by ananyo
ananyo writes: Physicians in India have identified a form of incurable tuberculosis there (http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/cid/cir889), raising further concerns over increasing drug resistance to the disease. Although reports call this latest form a "new entity", researchers suggest that it is instead another development in a long-standing problem.

The discovery makes India the third country in which a completely drug-resistant form of the disease has emerged, following cases documented in Italy in 2007 and Iran in 2009.
Idle

Submission + - Why US Gas Mileage Advances Don't Help Consumers a (inhabitat.com) 2

Submitted by
greenrainbow
greenrainbow writes: "The average, fuel efficiency for US vehicles actually increased by 60 percent between 1980 and 2006 but at the same time cars in the US got bigger (by 26% on average) and their horsepower increased (by 107 hp on average), which, when factored in, means that the average fuel efficiency of American cars only increased by a mere 15%. Almost all of the new technology went into making cars more efficient per pound of weight so that the cars could get bigger and still fit within average mile per gallon expectations."

Submission + - Library of Congress to receive entire Twitter arch (federalnewsradio.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: "The Library of Congress and Twitter have signed an agreement that will see an archive of every public Tweet ever sent handed over to the library's repository of historical documents.

"We have an agreement with Twitter where they have a bunch of servers with their historic archive of tweets, everything that was sent out and declared to be public," said Bill Lefurgy, the digital initiatives program manager at the library's national digital information infrastructure and preservation program. The archives don't contain tweets that users have protected, but everything else â" billions and billions of tweets â" are there. " ...
"Researchers will be able to look at the Twitter archive as a complete set of data, which they could then data-mine for interesting information."
Privacy

Submission + - Interpreting The Constitution In The Digital Era (npr.org)

Submitted by oik
oik writes: NPR's Fresh Air this week had an interesting interview with Jeffrey Rosen, one of the authors of Constitution 3.0 which addresses a number of issues to do with interpreting the US Constitution in the face of new technologies (both present an future). Many of the topics which he touches on come up on Slashdot a lot (including the GPS tracking cases). It's well worth listening to the program (link in the main page), of which TFA is just a summary.

Submission + - Yeti crab cultivates bacteria on claw, then eats t (nature.com)

Submitted by Pierre Bezukhov
Pierre Bezukhov writes: In the deep ocean off the coast of Costa Rica, scientists have found a species of crab that cultivates gardens of bacteria on its claws, then eats them.

The bristles that cover the crab’s claws and body are coated in gardens of symbiotic bacteria, which derive energy from the inorganic gases of the seeps. The crab eats the bacteria, using comb-like mouthparts to harvest them from its bristles.

Scientists believe the crab waves its claws to actively farm its bacterial gardens: movements stir up the water around the bacteria, ensuring that fresh supplies of oxygen and sulphide wash over them and helping them to grow.
Microsoft

Submission + - Spammers and HIV Virus Use Similar Methods To Avoi (threatpost.com)

Submitted by
chicksdaddy
chicksdaddy writes: "Security researchers often use language and metaphors from the natural world to describe problems in the virtual world. (Consider "virus," and "worm.") Now it turns out that the links may be more than just rhetoric. Microsoft Researchers say that tools they developed to detect spammers' efforts to avoid anti-spam filters were also great at spotting mutations in the HIV virus.
A report from Microsoft Research in honor of World AIDS Day yesterday described how Microsoft Researchers David Heckerman and Jonathan Carlson were called upon to help AIDS researchers analyze data about how the human immune system attacks the HIV virus. To do so, they turned to tools and algorithms developed at Microsoft to detect and block spam e-mail in the company's Hotmail, Outlook and Exchange e-mail products."
Earth

Submission + - Did Fracking Cause Recent Oklahoma Earthquakes?

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Oklahoma is typically seismically stable with about 50 small quakes a year but in 2009, that number jumped up to more than 1,000 and on November 5 a 5.6-magnitude tremor rattled Oklahoma — one of the strongest to ever hit the state — leading scientists to wonder if the increasingly common use of fracking, the controversial practice of blasting underground rock formations with high-pressure water, sand, and chemicals to extract natural gas, may have put stress on fault lines. Human intervention has caused earthquakes before with one "textbook case" occurring in 1967 in India, says Peter Fairley at IEEE Spectrum, when the reservoir behind the hydroelectric Koyna Dam was filled up. The added water "unleashed a magnitude 6.3 quake" by placing stress "on a previously unknown fault, killing 180 people and leaving thousands homeless." Last week’s earthquakes and aftershocks are centered in rural Lincoln County in an area about 30 miles east of Oklahoma City and there are 181 injection wells In Lincoln County. But a recent study by Austin Holland, a seismologist with the Oklahoma Geological Survey, says that it’s possible that hydraulic fracking caused a series of small earthquakes, peaking at 2.8, in an area south of Oklahoma City but doesn’t believe fracking caused the big Nov. 5, 6 and 8 earthquakes comparing a man-made earthquake to a mosquito bite. "It's really quite inconsequential," says Holland."
DRM

Submission + - Secret BBC documents reveal flimsy case for DRM (guardian.co.uk)

Submitted by
mouthbeef
mouthbeef writes: "The Guardian just published my investigative story on the BBC and Ofcom's abuse of secrecy laws to hide the reasons for granting permission for DRM on UK public broadcasts. The UK public overwhelmingly rejected the proposal, but Ofcom approved it anyway, saying they were convinced by secret BBC arguments that couldn't be published due to "commercial sensitivity." As the article shows, the material was neither sensitive nor convincing — a fact that Ofcom and the BBC tried to hide from the public."
Printer

Submission + - Polaroid: This time it's digital (extremetech.com)

Submitted by
MrSeb
MrSeb writes: "Long before Facebook and Twitpic, photos were shared by simply handing someone a print. No camera made this easier than the once-ubiquitous Polaroid. Nothing represented instant gratification better in the film era than having a print develop before your eyes, ready to hand out in a minute. Unfortunately for Polaroid, the advent of digital photography sounded the death knell for its iconic instant print cameras. A brief reprieve in the form of inexpensive sticker-printing versions was ended by the cellphone camera revolution. Now, after a decade in remission, Polaroid has returned with a full-up digital camera that incorporates instant printing technology. The Polaroid Z340 is a 14MP digital with an integrated Zink-enabled (Zero Ink) printer. In a nostalgic touch, the new camera prints 3×4-inch images, the same size as the original Polaroid film cameras. Remarkably, all this fits in a one-pound, seven-ounce package, about the same weight as a mid-range DSLR."
Idle

Submission + - This Gadget Keeps Bees in Even the Smallest Apartm (inhabitat.com)

Submitted by greenrainbow
greenrainbow writes: Philips(TM) just unveiled a new concept for an urban beehive that would allow anyone to become an amateur bee keeper – even those who live in apartments with no backyards. Best of all you pull a little string and all the fresh honey you want comes out. Hopefully no bees come with it!

Submission + - Mussels With Hydrogen Fuel Cells Found (inhabitat.com)

Submitted by
greenrainbow
greenrainbow writes: "According to scientists, there are mussels at the bottom of the ocean that are efficiently converting hydrogen into energy in their very own, nature-made hydrogen fuel cells. The mussels were found near hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor and have onboard symbiotic bacteria that convert hydrogen into energy. With this discovery, researchers might be able to clone the hydrogen eating bacteria to create all-natural hydrogen fuel cells to power things other than sea life."
Idle

Submission + - Yes, An Armadillo Can Give You Leprosy (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: For years, scientists have speculated that armadillos can pass on leprosy to humans, and that they are behind the few dozen cases of the disease that occur in the U.S. every year. Now, they have evidence. A genetic study published in The New England Journal of Medicine shows that U.S. armadillos and human patients share what seems to be a unique strain of the bacterium that causes leprosy. If an armadillo's blood "got on my tires of my car from running [the animal] over, I would wash it down," advises one expert. "And I would not dig in soil that has a lot of armadillo excrement."
Idle

Submission + - Best Buy bans customer for life (gizmocrunch.com)

Submitted by cobracommand0
cobracommand0 writes: And yet another reason to avoid shopping at Best Buy. After winning two out of three charges in a small claims court against the electronics store, a customer received a check and a letter from Best Buy informing him of his perma-ban from the entire chain.

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