Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
Blackberry

Throwing Light On Elcomsoft's Analysis of Smartphone Password Managers 48

An anonymous reader writes "Security firm Elcomsoft analyzed 17 iOS and BlackBerry password-keeping apps and found their actual security levels well below their claimed level of protection. With additional digging, however, Glenn Fleishman at TidBITS found that Elcomsoft's criticisms rely on physical access to the apps' data stores, and, for some of the more common apps, on the user employing a short (6 characters or fewer) or numeric password. In other words, there really isn't much risk here."
Science

Redheads Feel Pain Differently Than the Rest of Us 265

schwit1 writes "If you think redheads are inherently different, well, you'd be right; they're better than you. In fact, they have a higher pain threshold than most of us, and can handle spicier food, too. It turns out that gingers are less sensitive to stinging pain in the skin, according to researchers who injected capsicum, the active ingredient in chilies, into the arms of patients. Professor Lars Arendt-Nielsen, one of the researchers, said, 'Our tests showed that redheads are less sensitive to this particular type of pain. They react less to pressure close to the injected area, or to a pinprick. They seem to be a bit better protected, and that is a really interesting finding.' The finding also means redheads can handle spicier food, reports Science Nordic. It lends some scientific weight to previous suggestions that gingers have a different pain response to the rest of, which were even investigated by MythBusters."
Japan

NRC Releases Audio of Fukushima Disaster 56

mdsolar writes "The Nuclear Regulatory Commission today released transcripts and audio recordings made at the NRC Operations Center during last year's meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in Japan. The release of these audio recordings comes at the request of the public radio program 'BURN: An Energy Journal,' and its host Alex Chadwick. The recordings show the inside workings of the U.S. government's highest level efforts to understand and deal with the unfolding nuclear crisis as the reactors meltdown. In the course of a week, the NRC is repeatedly alarmed that the situation may turn even more catastrophic. The NRC emergency staff discusses what to do — and what the consequences may be — as it learns that reactor containment safeguards are failing, and that spent fuel pools are boiling away their cooling water, and in one case perhaps catching fire."
Patents

Submission + - Linked List Patented in 2006

An anonymous reader writes: Congratulations are in order to Ming-Jen Wang of LSI Logic Corporation who, in patent #10260471 managed to invent the linked list. From the abstract, "A computerized list is provided with auxiliary pointers for traversing the list in different sequences. One or more auxiliary pointers enable a fast, sequential traversal of the list with a minimum of computational time. Such lists may be used in any application where lists may be reordered for various purposes." Good-bye doubly linked list. We should also give praise to the extensive patent review performed by Cochran Freund & Young LLP.

Slashdot Top Deals

How many Bavarian Illuminati does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Three: one to screw it in, and one to confuse the issue.

Working...