mcnoch - Slashdot User

Comment Re:Of course Comcast "helped" TPB... (Score 1) 237

by mcnoch on Saturday May 14, 2011 @05:10AM (#36125506) Attached to: Comcast Helps Fix Pirate Bay Connection Problems

Well, and on a more serious note one should remember that sites like TPB attract also some serious attention from LE. It is sometimes surprising what the FBI and other agency are able to do to protect the success of some operations with a Group I authorization.

Comment Blocked updates only helped botnets (Score 1) 233

by mcnoch on Tuesday December 21, 2010 @03:16AM (#34625630) Attached to: Microsoft Kills Office Anti-Piracy Program

The problem with the anti-piracy program was that it was only partly successful. It didn't prevent the user from using pirated copies, but it blocked their access to security updates and so opened a very big pool of PCs that could be turned to botnet-drones. So the security experts were lobbing for months to stop these kinds of anti-piracy programs that are blocking in most cases security updates.

Submission + - Hidden debug mode found in AMD processors (woodmann.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 11, 2010 @11:42PM

An anonymous reader writes: A hidden (and hardware password protected, by means of required special values in processor registers) debug mode has been found in AMD processors, and documented by a reverse engineer called Czernobyl on the RCE Forums community today. It enables powerful hardware debugging features long longed by reverse engineers, such as hardware data-aware conditional breakpoints, and direct hardware "page guard"-style breakpoints. And the best part is, it's sitting right there in your processor already, just read the details and off you go with the debugging ninja powers!

Comment Re:Brings back memories (Score 1) 224

by mcnoch on Sunday July 05, 2009 @04:29AM (#28585131) Attached to: AOL Shuts Down CompuServe

Yes, memories... As 10043,3005 I was not only one of the first subscribers when CS became available here in Germany, but unfortunately I was playing on the dark-side too, feeding the 3,5" disc spitting AOL-monster. I was one of those beta-testers for the German off-spring of AOL, BOL (Bertelsmann Online) later to be named AOL Germany and even further down the road for CS 2000. I helped to open the floodgate for the German "me-too"s of that time. I was young and needed the money and the free internet access, instead of paying 4.95 US$ for one hour with a 9600 Baud connection or 2.95 US$ for a 2400 Baud connection. Sorry!

Space Station Marathon Starting This Weekend 61

Posted by timothy on Saturday July 04, 2009 @11:02PM from the this-calls-for-a-twitter-mashup dept.

RobGoldsmith writes with this snippet from Space Fellowship: "If you've never seen a spaceship with your own eyes, now's your chance. The International Space Station (ISS) is about to make a remarkable series of flybys over the United States. Beginning this 4th of July weekend, the station will appear once, twice, and sometimes three times a day for many days in a row. No matter where you live, you should have at least a few opportunities to see the biggest spaceship ever built."

You, Too, Can Learn Echolocation 133

Posted by timothy on Saturday July 04, 2009 @09:06PM from the and-you-swear-this-isn't-a-joke dept.

The Narrative Fallacy writes "Wired reports that with just a few weeks of training, you can learn to 'see' objects in the dark using echolocation the same way dolphins and bats do. Acoustic expert Juan Antonio Martinez at the University of Alcalá de Henares in Spain has developed a system to teach people how to use echolocation, a skill that could be particularly useful for the blind and for people who work under dark or smoky conditions, like firefighters — or cat burglars. 'Two hours per day for a couple of weeks are enough to distinguish whether you have an object in front of you,' says Martinez. 'Within another couple weeks you can tell the difference between trees and pavement.' To master the art of echolocation, you can begin by making the typical 'sh' sound used to make someone be quiet. Moving a pen in front of the mouth can be noticed right away similar to the phenomenon when traveling in a car with the windows down, which makes it possible to 'hear' gaps in the verge of the road. The next level is to learn how to master 'palate clicks,' special clicks with your tongue and palate that are better than other sounds because they can be made in a uniform way, work at a lower intensity, and don't get drowned out by ambient noise. With the palate click you can learn to recognize slight changes in the way the clicks sound depending on what objects are nearby. 'For all of us in general, this would be a new way of perceiving the world,' says Martinez."

Planck Telescope Is Coolest Spacecraft Ever 196

Posted by timothy on Saturday July 04, 2009 @05:39PM from the that's-certainly-what-the-moon-rabbits-think dept.

Hugh Pickens writes "Launched in May, BBC reports that Europe's Planck observatory has reached its operating temperature, a staggering minus 273.05C — just a tenth of a degree above what scientists term "absolute zero." and although laboratory set-ups have got closer to absolute zero than Planck, researchers say it is unlikely there is anywhere in space currently that is colder than their astronomical satellite. This frigidity should ensure the bolometers will be at their most sensitive as they look for variations in the temperature of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) that are about a million times smaller than one degree — comparable to measuring from Earth the heat produced by a rabbit sitting on the Moon. Planck has been sent to an observation position around the second Lagrange point of the Sun-Earth system, L2, some 1.5 million km from Earth and Planck will help provide answers to one of the most important sets of questions asked in modern science — how did the Universe begin, how did it evolve to the state we observe today, and how will it continue to evolve in the future. Planck's objectives include mapping of Cosmic Microwave Background anisotropies with improved sensitivity and angular resolution, determination of the Hubble constant, testing inflationary models of the early Universe, and measuring amplitude of structures in Cosmic Microwave Background. 'We will be probing regimes that have never been studied before where the physics is very, very uncertain,' says Planck investigator Professor George Efstathiou from Cambridge University. 'It's possible we could find a signature from before the Big Bang; or it's possible we could find the signature of another Universe and then we'd have experimental evidence that we are part of a multi-verse.'"

Comment Re:overwritten once CAN be recovered (Score 1) 780

by mcnoch on Saturday May 16, 2009 @06:37AM (#27977687) Attached to: Hacker Destroys Avsim.com, Along With Its Backups

Restoring zeroed disks is only theoretical possible when the overwritten file was written onto a virign media and never was changed, because else one couldn't be sure that the remains of a "1" polarisation belonged to the deleted file; it might be from another file of a earlier version of the deleted file.

Comment All just one big error (Score 1) 215

by mcnoch on Monday April 13, 2009 @03:11PM (#27561141) Attached to: German Wikileaks Domain Suspended Without Warning

Heise.de reports that the provider of wikileaks.de had cancelled the contract in December 2008 with effect to the 31st March 2009, so when the domain wasn't transferred to a new provider on 9th April 2009 its status was changed by the provider to "In Transit" and so is inaccessible. http://www.heise.de/newsticker/Wikileaks-de-Denic-wehrt-sich-gegen-Sperr-Vorwurf--/meldung/136096 Seems the guys at wikileaks.de haven't read their mail, maybe they thought it was spam.

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