Follow Slashdot blog updates by subscribing to our blog RSS feed

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror

Submission + - Linking mass extinctions to the Sun's journey in the Milky Way (lanl.gov)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: In a paper published today on the Los Alamos astro-ph preprint service, astronomers propose that as many as eleven past extinction events can be linked to the Sun’s passage through the spiral arms of the Milky Way. (You can download the paper here [pdf].)

A correlation was found between the times at which the Sun crosses the spiral arms and six known mass extinction events. Furthermore, we identify five additional historical mass extinction events that might be explained by the motion of the Sun around our Galaxy. These five additional significant drops in marine genera that we find include significant reductions in diversity at 415, 322, 300, 145 and 33 Myr ago. Our simulations indicate that the Sun has spent ~60% of its time passing through our Galaxy’s various spiral arms.

Submission + - Crunching the Numbers On Shared Cellphone Contracts (itworld.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: The Wall Street Journal has a handy online calculater to help you sort out which phone plan is best for you. But one thing you'll notice is that shared or 'family' plans rarely offer any real savings, or benefits beyond the convenience of having a single bill, says blogger Kevin Purdy, who is bracing himself to propose a phone plan separation with his wife.

Submission + - Hacking and attacking automated homes (networkworld.com)

Submitted by colinneagle
colinneagle writes: If you use the Z-Wave wireless protocol for home automation then you might prepare to have your warm, fuzzy, happiness bubble burst; there will be several presentations about attacking the automated house at the upcoming Las Vegas hackers' conferences Black Hat USA 2013 and Def Con 21. For example, CEDIA IT Task force member Bjorn Jensen said, "Today, I could scan for open ports on the Web used by a known control system, find them, get in and wreak havoc on somebody's home. I could turn off lights, mess with HVAC systems, blow speakers, unlock doors, disarm alarm systems and worse."

Among other things, the hacking Z-Wave synopsis adds, "Zigbee and Z-wave wireless communication protocols are the most common used RF technology in home automation systems...An open source implementation of the Z-wave protocol stack, openzwave, is available but it does not support the encryption part as of yet. Our talk will show how the Z-Wave protocol can be subjected to attacks."

Submission + - Robotic Kiosk Stores Digital Copies Of Physical Keys

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The New York Daily News reports that a startup company in Manhattan is putting robotic key copying machines in 7-Eleven stores. The machines can automatically create physical copies of common apartment and office keys. What is more interesting is that they allow users to save digital copies of their keys, which can later be created when the original is lost or the user is locked out of their home.

Submission + - Popular smartphone and free app used to get data from chip-enabled credit cards. (www.cbc.ca)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: CBC is reporting: Using a Samsung Galaxy SIII — one of the most popular smartphones available in Canada — and a free app downloaded from the Google Play store, CBC was able to read information such as a card number, expiry date and cardholder name simply holding the smartphone over a debit or credit card. And it could be done through wallets, pockets and purses.

Slashdot Top Deals

And on the seventh day, He exited from append mode.

Close