An anonymous reader writes with an excerpt from Neowin.net "Sarah Sharp, a self-styled 'geekess' and Linux developer at Intel's Open Source Technology Center who has recently been working on the Linux USB subsystem, announced on her blog that support of USB 3.0 will soon be integrated into the Linux kernel. This makes Linux the first operating system to support the standard. If you can't wait and have the expertise necessary, she includes instructions on how to get USB 3.0 support in Linux now." Here's Sharp's post.

eldavojohn writes "The Hubble Constant is used for many things in astrophysics: from determining how fast things are moving away from us, to the total volume of the universe, to predicting how our universe will end. The current best value for the Hubble Constant is 74.2 ± 3.6 (km/s)/Mpc according to recent conventional methods and the recently restored Hubble Telescope. Most astronomers agree that that's within 10% of its actual value. Researchers now claim that they might be able to get to 3% using water molecules in galactic disks to act as masers that amplify radio waves, to analyze galaxies seven times as far away as the current measurements. The further away the 'standard candle' is, the more assured they can be that local effects are not skewing the measurements. From one of the researchers: 'We measured a direct, geometric distance to the galaxy, independent of the complications and assumptions inherent in other techniques. The measurement highlights a valuable method that can be used to determine the local expansion rate of the universe, which is essential in our quest to find the nature of dark energy.' Once the Square Kilometer Array is completed, they hope to get even closer to the actual value."

An anonymous reader writes "An interesting (and profane) writeup of one frustrated user's discovery that Comcast is actually intercepting DNS requests bound for non-Comcast DNS servers and redirecting them to their own servers. I had obviously heard of the DNS hijacking for nonexistent domains, but I had no idea they'd actually prevent people from directly contacting their own DNS servers." If true, this is a pretty serious escalation in the Net Neutrality wars. Someone using Comcast, please replicate the simple experiment spelled out in the article and confirm or deny the truth of it. Also, it would be useful if someone using Comcast ran the ICSI Netalyzr and posted the resulting permalink in the comments.

Keldrin_1 writes "The discovery of 24 security vulnerabilities may have contributed to the death of the chief of LxLabs. A flaw in the company's HyperVM software allowed data on 100,000 sites, all hosted by VAserv, to be destroyed. The HyperVM solution is popular with cheap web hosting services and the attacks are easy to reproduce, which could lead to further incidents."