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Submission + - Facebook is building an Android-based smartphone (bloomberg.com) 1

Submitted by destinyland
destinyland writes: Reports are surfacing of a Facebook-backed smartphone running Google's Android system, built by INQ (who also manufactures a phone for Skype). GigaOm's Om Malik says he's been aware of the project "for quite some time," and Bloomberg News reported that Facebook Inc. will release two AT&T smartphones in 2011, first in Europe and then in America. (Adding that 25% of Facebook users access the social networking site with their wireless devices.) "Like some people would love to have a Hello Kitty phone or a Batman phone, there are undoubtedly buyers waiting with bated breath for a phone that says Facebook on it..." notes one technology blog. "The buying public seems to be entranced with the idea of the phrase 'Facebook phone' so rumors persist."

Submission + - The Last of the Punch Card Programmers (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by Peter Cus
Peter Cus writes: English lacemaking manufacturer, to compete on quality, has reverted to 19th-Century Leavers machines. These machines use Jacquard punch cards. Ian Elm, thought to be the last of the card punchers, says young people don't want factory work.
The Internet

Submission + - 4chan Does Something Nice (nytimes.com)

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "Members of 4chan aren't known for doing things that are cute and heart-warming and when they decide to go after someone, it's typically to subject them to ridicule. But not this time. Someone at 4chan decided that the Internet should get together and wish 90-year-old WWII veteran William J. Lashua a happy birthday, and soon Lashua's local branch of the American Legion was deluged by birthday calls from people as far away as Sweden. The account someone set up for Mr. Lashua's birthday on facebook had 3,956 "likes" and over 500 comments, most of which wished him a happy birthday and thanked him for his military service. It's not clear how 4chan originally came across a photo of Lashua, but a member of the site posted a snapshot of a flyer that was on the bulletin board at a store in Ashburnham, Massachusetts asking for guests to attend the nonagenarian's birthday on at the American Legion hall and the post took off. In contrast to their usual behavior, 4chan members "were giving him nice phone calls and sending him nice notes" and discouraging those who wanted to do something stupid or mean. "They were all being.. well, shucks, awful nice.""
Security

Submission + - 1978 Cryptosystem Resists Quantum Attack (technologyreview.com) 1

Submitted by KentuckyFC
KentuckyFC writes: In 1978, the CalTech mathematician Robert McEliece developed a cryptosystem based on the (then) new idea of using asymmetric mathematical functions to create different keys for encrypting and decrypting information. The security of these systems relies on mathematical steps that are easy to make in one direction but hard to do in the other. The most famous example is multiplication. It is easy to multiply two numbers together to get a third but hard to start with the third number and work out which two generated it, a process called factorisation. Today, popular encryption systems such as the RSA algorithm use exactly this idea. But in 1994, the mathematician Peter Shor dreamt up a quantum algorithm that could factorise much faster than any classical counterpart and so can break these codes. As soon as the first decent-sized quantum computer is switched on, these codes will become breakable. Since then, cryptographers have been hunting for encryption systems that will be safe in the post quantum world. Now a group of mathematicians have shown that the McEliece encryption system is safe against attack by Shor's algorithm and all other known quantum algorithms. That's because it does not depend on factorisation but gets its security from another asymmetric conundrum known as the hidden subgroup problem which they show is immune to all known quantum attacks (although the work says nothing about its safety against new quantum (or classical) attacks).
Science

Submission + - Sun's 'quiet period' explained (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by Arvisp
Arvisp writes: Solar physicists may have discovered why the Sun recently experienced a prolonged period of weak activity.
The most recent so-called "solar minimum" occurred in December 2008.
Its drawn-out nature extended the total length of the last solar cycle — the repeating cycle of the Sun's activity — to 12.6 years, making it the longest in almost 200 years. The new research suggests that the longer-than-expected period of weak activity may have been linked to changes in the way a hot soup of charged particles called plasma circulated in the Sun.

Submission + - How do you organize your experimental data?

Submitted by digitalderbs
digitalderbs writes: As a researcher in the physical sciences, I have generated thousands of experimental datasets that need to be sorted and organized--a problem which many of you have had to deal with as well, no doubt. I've sorted my data with an elaborate system of directories and symbolic links to directories that sort my data by sample, pH, experimental type, and other qualifiers, but I've found that through the years, I've needed to move, rename, and reorganize these directories and links, which have left me with thousands of dangling links and a heterogeneous naming scheme. What have you done to organize, tag and add metadata to your data, and how have you dealt with redirecting thousands of symbolic links at a time?
Firefox

Submission + - How Much Faster Is Konqueror With WebKit? (digitizor.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: We always knew that WebKit is going to make Konqueror fast; but how much faster? Today we test that by putting Konqueror with KHTML through the SunSpider JavaScript Test and the then do the same with WebKit. To get an idea of how fast they are compared to other browsers, we also decided to put Firefox 4.0 Beta 2 through the tests.

Submission + - Swarm Intelligence (economist.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: From optimizing truck delivery routes to inspiring nerve-cell-based cognition models, ant intelligence has arrived.

'Mimicking the behaviour of ants, bees and birds started as a poor man's version of artificial intelligence. It may, though, be the key to the real thing.' The full article in the Economist is available.

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