Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
Crime

Convicted Terrorist Relied On Single-Letter Cipher 254

Posted by timothy from the was-the-letter-q? dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "The Register reports that the majority of the communications between convicted terrorist Rajib Karim and Bangladeshi Islamic activists were encrypted with a system which used Excel transposition tables which they invented themselves. It used a single-letter substitution cipher invented by the ancient Greeks that had been used and described by Julius Caesar in 55BC. Despite urging by the Yemen-based al Qaida leader Anwar Al Anlaki, Karim rejected the use of a sophisticated code program called 'Mujhaddin Secrets' which implements all the AES candidate cyphers, 'because "kaffirs," or non-believers, know about it so it must be less secure.'"
Oracle

RIP, SunSolve 100

Posted by timothy from the to-the-moon-instead dept.
Kymermosst writes "Today marks the last day that SunSolve will be available. Oracle sent the final pre-deployment details today for the retirement of SunSolve and the transition to its replacement, My Oracle Support Release 5.2, which begins tomorrow. People who work with Sun's hardware and software have long used SunSolve as a central location for specifications, patches, and documentation."
Wireless Networking

Killer Apartment Vs. Persistent Microwave Exposure? 791

Posted by kdawson from the will-it-fry-an-egg dept.
An anonymous reader writes "I am considering buying a penthouse apartment in Manhattan that happens to be about twenty feet away from a pair of panel antennas belonging to a major cellular carrier. The antennas are on roughly the same plane as the apartment and point in its direction. I have sifted through a lot of information online about cell towers, most of which suggest that the radiation they emit is low-level and benign. Most of this information, however, seems to concern ground-level exposure at non-regular intervals. My question to Slashdot is: should the prospect of persistent exposure to microwave radiation from this pair of antennas sitting twenty feet from where I rest my head worry me? Am I just being a jackass? Can I, perhaps, line the walls of the place with a tight metal mesh and thereby deflect the radiation? My background is in computer engineering — I am not particularly knowledgeable about the physics of devices such as these. Please help me make an enlightened decision."
Space

FTL Currents May Power Pulsar Beams 236

Posted by kdawson from the it's-the-law dept.
thomst passes along news out of the recent AAAS meeting of a new explanation for pulsar beams that involves faster-than-light currents. Here are Los Alamos's press release and three related papers on the arXiv. "The new model explains the beam emissions from pulsars as products of superluminal currents within the spinning neutron stars' atmospheres. According to the authors' model, the current generated is, itself, faster than light, although the particles that compose it never individually exceed the universal speed limit, thereby preventing Einsteinian post-mortem rotation. The new model is a general explanation of the phenomenon of pulsar beam emissions that explains emissions at all observed frequencies (and different pulsars emit everything from radio waves to x-rays), which no previous model has done."
It's funny. Laugh.

John Hodgman Asks Obama, "Are You a Nerd?" 147

Posted by samzenpus from the gooble-gobble-one-of-us-one-of-us dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "Watch a video of comedian John Hodgman speak after Barack Obama at the recent Radio and Television Correspondents Association dinner in DC and discuss the central question of our age: "how we can heal the great and shameful division that has plagued our nation for so long — the age old conflict between jocks and nerds" and ask Obama: Are you now, or have you ever been, a nerd?"
The Military

Iraq Game Sparks Outrage, Soldiers Have Mixed Reactions 196

Posted by Soulskill from the konami-could-be-in-for-some-hurtin dept.
We recently discussed news that Konami will be releasing a video game based on a 2004 battle in Fallujah. Many people have now had a chance to react to the game, and there has been a great deal of criticism voiced over the game's choice of setting. A group of families of soldiers who lost their lives in the war questioned "how anyone can trivialize a war that continues to kill and maim members of the military and Iraqi civilians to this day." Others criticized the game's glorification of the "massacre." Conversely, some soldiers and veterans have responded with optimism, hoping the game can raise awareness of the realities of war. Dan Rosenthal, Iraq veteran and long-time gamer, worries whether Konami will be able to do justice to the experience. Eurogamer posted a related story about the controversy over increasingly realistic war games.
Programming

Strange Glitches In Games 282

Posted by Soulskill from the where-did-the-walls-go dept.
Parz writes "Even the best of game developers can leave a big dirty glitch buried within its products that can turn a gameplay experience on its head (sometimes literally). Gameplayer has trawled through the web to locate video footage of some of the more amazing and hilarious examples of glitches in games. It acts as an interesting insight into the bugs that some games — especially today — ship with. What interesting bugs have you encountered?"
Businesses

Job and Internship Salary Comparisons? 231

Posted by timothy from the who-makes-what? dept.
spydabyte writes "I'm a current undergraduate at the Georgia Institute of Technology and have been getting offers for internships next summer. I was wondering if there is a source of information on intern markets or how a market's competitive salaries are. How do you know if you're getting a decent offer or you deserve more when you're entering a (personally) new market? Is there a definite source? Do you have your favorite? I know that many factors matter, as in location, previous experience, etc., but I think there's more to find out besides asking for my friends' current offers. If not internships, how about full time or careers? Any ideas?"
Medicine

Antidepressants Work No Better Than a Placebo 674

Posted by kdawson from the sugar-pills-are-cheaper dept.
Matthew Whalley writes "Researchers got hold of published and unpublished data from drug companies regarding the effectiveness of the most common antidepressant drugs. Previously, when meta-analyses have been conducted on only the published data, the drugs were shown to have a clinically significant effect. However, when the unpublished data is taken into account the difference between the effects of drug and placebo becomes clinically meaningless — just a 1 or 2 point difference on a 30-point depression rating scale — except for the most severely depressed patients. Doctors do not recommend that patients come off antidepressant drugs without support, but this study is likely to lead to a rethink regarding how the drugs are licensed and prescribed."

Feed The Register: Programming Flex 2 (theregister.com)

From feed by registerfeed
A book on programming RIAs

Book review The move towards rich internet applications (RIA) seems to be unstoppable. Aiming to offer browser-based applications with the speed, flexibility and functionality of traditional desktop applications, companies like Google and others continue to raise the bar as to what you can do in a browser. One of the key technologies in this area has been Ajax, but even with the proliferation of Ajax toolkits and frameworks, there are an increasing range of alternatives. These include JavaFX from Sun, JBoss Seam, Google’s GWT and Microsoft’s Silverlight.

Feed The Register: BlackBerry gets free international calls (theregister.com)

From feed by registerfeed
EQO service uses local minutes and data instead

Internet phone service specialist EQO has added BlackBerry to the list of around 400 handsets that it says can now make local-rate or free international calls - without using Wi-Fi or VOIP to the handset. Users also get cheap text messaging and free access to all the popular IM services, the company said.

Feed Engadget: Fujitsu LiberTouch keyboard lets you have it your way (engadget.com)

From feed by engfeed
If Fujitsu has its way, typing on a keyboard that you're uncomfortable with will soon become a thing of the past, and hopefully your children will never have to know what it was like to work on an input device that you wanted to smash against the nearest wall. For those affected by such problems, the company has created a semi-modular system called the LiberTouch which lets you customize the key-layout, as well as attenuate the sound and tactile response of the keys. The board also has a single USB port, and a somewhat surgical looking "tool" used (presumably) to make "extractions" -- so you don't get your hands dirty. No word yet on street date or price.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Slashdot Top Deals

Make it myself? But I'm a physical organic chemist!

Close