The AAS meeting in San Diego is producing lots of news on the astronomy front. Studying galaxies that were forming in the universe's first billion years, astronomers have solved a longstanding cosmic chicken-and-egg problem: which forms first, galaxies or the black holes at their cores? "'We finally have been able to measure black-hole and bulge masses in several galaxies seen as they were in the first billion years after the Big Bang, and the evidence suggests that the constant ratio seen nearby may not hold in the early Universe. The black holes in these young galaxies are much more massive compared to the bulges than those seen in the nearby Universe,"' said Fabian Walter of the Max-Planck Institute for Radioastronomy in Germany. 'The implication is that the black holes started growing first.'"

snydeq writes "Security researchers from Invisible Things Lab have created software that can 'compromise the integrity' of software loaded using Intel's vPro Trusted Execution Technology, which is supposed to help protect software from being seen or tampered with by other programs on the machine. The researchers say they have created a two-stage attack, with the first stage exploiting a bug in Intel's system software. The second stage relies on a design flaw in the TXT technology itself (PDF). The researchers plan to give more details on their work at the Black Hat DC security conference next month."

An anonymous reader writes "A war has erupted on the Internet between Israel and Palestine, alongside the war being fought on the ground in Gaza. A new report claims that a group called the 'DNS Team' has defaced an Israeli Website, with anti-Israel graphical images — one in a series of instances of 'e-vandalism.' This sort of e-vandalism, says the author, is not only an inconvenience for Webmasters, but many of the images contain malware links and 'redirects or Flash links to Jihadist forums or blogs.' However, while the Jihadist forums are registered in Saudi Arabia, they are hosted by companies like Layered Tech and SoftLayer in Plano, Texas. On the Israeli side, 'A fascinating approach over the last few days is being made by an Israeli Website, "Help Israel Win," which provides a download so your PC can become part of a worldwide pro-Israeli botnet. So far 7,786 have joined, already a fairly powerful global computing force...'"

paleshadows writes "The first issue of Dr. Dobb's Journal (DDJ) was published in January 1976. A few days ago, Herb Sutter (the chair of the ISO C++ committee and a long-time DDJ columnist) announced through his latest blog post that, 'as of January 2009, Dr. Dobb's Journal is permanently suspending print publication and going web-only.' This follows an earlier announcement that PC Magazine is to become digital-only, too, as of February 2009. To those of us who enjoy reading such stuff away from the computer these are bad news, as there seems to be no other major technical programmers' magazines left standing."

BinaryGrind writes "I just got started taking Computer Science classes at my local university and after reading Universities Patenting More Student Ideas I felt I needed to ask: How do I tell if any of my projects while attending classes will be co-opted by my professors or the university itself and taken away from me? Is there anything I can do to prevent it from happening? What do I need to do to protect myself? Are there schools out there that won't take my work away from me if I discover TheNextBigThing(TM)? If it does happen is there anything I can do to fight back? The school I'm attending is Southern Utah University. Since it's not a big university, I don't believe it has a big research and development department or anything of that ilk. I'm mostly wanting to cover my bases and not have my work stolen from me."

ruphus13 writes "Now, the suits and the geeks can unite — Barry allows BlackBerrys to serve as modems for Linux machines. From the news post, 'Barry, created by open source software vendor Net Direct, lets you not only sync your contacts and calendar but also use your smartphone as a computer modem. Sure, it's not as fast as T1 or cable, but you can't beat it if you're stuck somewhere with no Internet access. Currently, there are packages available for Ubuntu, Debian, Mandriva, and Fedora (although syncing is not supported on Fedora 9). Most older BlackBerrys work just fine with Barry, but the newest generation of devices — the Storm and Bold — are not yet fully supported.'"

Sol-Invictus writes "The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 7.1-RELEASE. This is the second release from the 7-STABLE branch which improves on the functionality of FreeBSD 7.0 and introduces some new features. Some of the highlights: The ULE scheduler is now the default in GENERIC kernels for amd64 and i386 architectures. The ULE scheduler significantly improves performance on multicore systems for many workloads. Support for using DTrace inside the kernel has been imported from OpenSolaris. DTrace is a comprehensive dynamic tracing framework. A new and much-improved NFS Lock Manager (NLM) client. Boot loader changes allow, among other things, booting from USB devices and booting from GPT-labeled devices. KDE updated to 3.5.10, GNOME updated to 2.22.3. DVD-sized media for the amd64 and i386 architectures."

ptorrone writes "Make: television debuted online and on public television (broadcast / cable tv). The series encourages everyone to invent, reinvent, recycle, upcycle, and act up. Based on the popular Make magazine, each half-hour episode hopes to inspire viewers to think, create, and, well, make. Each episode can be viewed or downloaded DRM-free, in HD on makezine.tv — the show is also available on Vimeo, YouTube, blip.tv and iTunes."