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Submission + - Federal Court Rejects NDAA - Issues Injunction (courthousenews.com) 1

Arker writes: A federal judge granted a preliminary injunction late Wednesday to block provisions of the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act that would allow the military to indefinitely detain anyone it accuses of knowingly or unknowingly supporting terrorism.

The Obama administration had argued, inter alia, that the plaintiffs, including whistleblower and transparency advocate Daniel Ellsberg and Icelandic Member of Parliament Birgitta Jonsdottir lacked standing, but Judge Katherine Forrest didnt buy it.

Given recent statements from the administration, it seems safe to say this will be the start of a long court battle.

Data Storage

Submission + - RunCore Introduces Self-Destructable SSD (runcore.com)

jones_supa writes: RunCore announces the global launch of its InVincible solid state drive, designed for mission-critical fields such as aerospace or military. The device improves upon a normal SSD by having two strategies for the drive to quickly render itself blank. First method goes through the disk, overwriting all data with garbage. Second one is less discreet and lets the smoke out of the circuitry by driving overcurrent to the NAND chips. Both ways can be ignited with a single push of a button, allowing James Bond -style rapid response to the situation on the field.

Comment Re:Harsh but... (Score 1) 668

When I was a kid growing up in Russia, if you got measles, neighbors with young kids would actually bring their kids over, so they can get infected and develop immunity to it for later in life. My sister had it and the whole neighborhood was over in a course of the week or 2 she had it. No one died and I've seen this over and over. Later all kids had the measles vaccine while in school, I think it was 1st or 2nd grade. Back then the doctors didn't give it to your within the first 2 weeks of your life...

Comment Think before you judge! (Score 1) 668

There's a lot of misunderstanding about this whole vaccination process. People started refusing vaccines not because they vaccines themselves affected their children but because the mercury based preservatives in those vaccines did. The preservatives are added to multi-doze vaccines, which most of the vaccines manufacturer's have shifted their production, ending most of single doze lines because of much higher profit on multi-doze orders. There was a Rolling Stones article on this a while ago. http://www.autismcoach.com/Rolling%20Stone%20Autism%20Article.htm Contrary to USA, most European countries ended mercury based vaccines back in the 1970's. Now because of the massive outcry against mercury based preservatives, a lot of vaccines manufacturers have switched to aluminum based ones. But distrust is still there and the lack of single doze is only feeding that mistrust. Now before you go and say that I don't know what I'm talking about, I have 2 nephews and a niece that became autistic after being given vaccines with thimerisol based preservatives. Each was give multiple vaccines at once, as is often done nowadays and is actually recommended by FDA. Each shot contained enough mercury, that if that amount of mercury was spilled on the floor, it would require a hazmat to clean up. All the children were perfectly fine before that and were really smart and outgoing. This was about 18 years ago. Another thing to consider is that mercury does not leave the body, it accumulates over lifetime. The only way to remove it, is through some rather aggressive chemo-therapy, so can't be done to young kids. One of my nephews had the process performed on him when he was about 12 and he became much better but the family didn't have the money or the will to put him though several more that were needed to remove the remaining mercury. Now, not every child is going to have that reaction but you don't know until you try. So before you go a label these people as complete idiots, try to put yourself in their place...
Google

Submission + - When is it right to go public with security flaws? (pcpro.co.uk)

nk497 writes: When it comes to security flaws, who should be warned first: users or software vendors? The debate has flared up again, after Google researcher Tavis Ormandy published a flaw in Windows Support. As previously noted on Slashdot, Google has since promised to back researchers that give vendors at least 60-days to sort out a solution to reported flaws, while Microsoft has responded by renaming responsible disclosure as "coordinated vulnerability disclosure." Microsoft is set to announce something related to community-based defence at Black Hat, but it's not likely to be a bug bounty, as the firm has again said it won't pay for vulnerabilities. So what other methods for managing disclosures could the security industry develop, that balance vendors need for time to develop a solution and researchers' needs to work together and publish?
Privacy

UK ISP TalkTalk Caught Monitoring Its Customers 139

An anonymous reader writes "The UK ISP TalkTalk has been caught using a form of Deep Packet Inspection technology to monitor and record the websites that its customers visit, without getting their explicit consent. The system, which is not yet fully in place, ultimately aims to help block malware websites by comparing the URL that a person visits against a list of good and bad sites. Bad sites will then be restricted. TalkTalk claims that its method is totally anonymous and that the only people with visibility of the URL database itself are Chinese firm Huawei, which will no doubt help everybody to feel a lot better (apply sarc mark here) about potentially having their privacy invaded."
Businesses

How Cyber Spies Infiltrate Business Systems 83

snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Bob Violino reports on the quiet threat to today's business: cyber spies on network systems. According to observers, 75 percent of companies have been infected with undetected, targeted attacks — ones that typically exploit multiple weaknesses with the ultimate goal of compromising a specific account. Such attacks often begin by correlating publicly available information to access a single system. From there, the entire environment can be gradually traversed enabling attackers to place monitoring software in out-of-the-way systems, such as log servers, where IT often doesn't look for intrusions. 'They collect the data and send it out, such as via FTP, in small amounts over time, so they don't rise over the noise of normal traffic and call attention to themselves,' Violino writes. 'There's probably no way you can completely protect your organization against the increasingly sophisticated attacks by foreign and domestic spies. That's especially true if the attacks are coming from foreign governments, because nations have resources that most companies do not possess.'"
Space

A New Take On the Fermi Paradox 388

TravisTR points out some new research that aims to update and supplement the Fermi paradox — the idea that if intelligent life was as common as we expect, we should have detected it by now. The academic paper (PDF) from scientists at the National Technical University of Ukraine is based on the idea that civilizations can't expand forever on their own. The authors make the assumption that an isolated civilization will eventually die out or go dark through some other means, which leads to some interesting models of intergalactic colonization. "In certain circumstances, however, when civilizations are close enough together in time and space, they can come into contact and when this happens the cross-fertilization of ideas and cultures allows them both to flourish in a way that increases their combined lifespan. ... Bezsudnov and Snarskii say that for certain values of these parameters, the universe undergoes a phase change from one in which civilizations tend not to meet and spread into one in which the entire universe tends to become civilized as different groups meet and spread. Bezsudnov and Snarskii even derive an inequality that a universe must satisfy to become civilized. This, they say, is analogous to the famous Drake equation which attempts to quantify the number of other contactable civilizations in the universe right now."
Data Storage

Why SSDs Won't Replace Hard Drives 315

storagedude writes "Flash drive capacities have been expanding dramatically in recent years, but this article says that's about to change, in part because of the limits of current lithography technology. Meanwhile, disk drive densities will continue to grow, which the author says will mean many years before solid state drives replace hard drives — if they ever do. From the article: 'The bottom line is that there are limits to how small things can get with current technology. Flash densities are going to have data density growth problems, just as other storage technologies have had over the last 30 years. This should surprise no one. And the lithography problem for flash doesn't end there. Jeff Layton, Enterprise Technologist for HPC at Dell, notes that as lithography gets smaller, NAND has more and more troubles — the voltages don't decrease, so the probability of causing an accidental data corruption of a neighboring NAND goes up. "So at some point, you just can't reduce the size and hope to not have data corruption," notes Layton.'"

Comment What about water? (Score 1) 450

All solar panels need to washed regularly to maintain efficiency because dust/sand build-up blocks sunlight. Now we have a dilemma, sun is abundant in desert but water by definition is not! So if you have these solar plans in desert area, they will have to fight for what little existing water there is with locals or devise ways to bring water where non exists. I recall seeing stories in the news about locals fighting solar plants for water rights because the planners of the plans apparently forgot that water is scarce in those sunny deserts where they built the plants.

Comment Seems that many are ignorant about what Islam is (Score 1) 1318

From reading all these comments, it's pretty obvious that a lot of you still have no clue what Islam is and the how truly fanatical it's followers are. I grew up in a muslim country and have had many muslim friends that explained to me that what it is and it is based on complete faith where questioning it is not allowed and if you're not a muslim, you must convert or die ( sooner or later) and muslims will pretend to be your friend until that time comes. But don't take my words, here's a good read on history of Islam. http://go.to/islamhistory After reading it, you will probably see building of giant mosque in front of Wold Trade Center and several others within a few block radius in a whole new light...

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