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Comment Re:To be fair (Score 1) 276

by trickofperspective (#32864396) Attached to: FCC Dodges Pointed Questions On US Broadband Plan

I think you may have missed the other half of my post -- the infrastructure needs to be in place before innovation (ie, technology that makes use of or requires 100Mbps) can occur. This is a strategic plan for USian telecommunications we're discussing: the FCC's tack puts US businesses at a major R&D disadvantage compared to foreign competitors, and this is a failing of the plan.
Books

Puzzle In xkcd Book Finally Cracked 90

Posted by kdawson from the be-there-or-be-somewhere-else dept.
An anonymous reader writes "After a little over five months of pondering, xkcd fans have cracked a puzzle hidden inside Randall Munroe's recent book xkcd: volume 0. Here is the start of the thread on the xkcd forums; and here is the post revealing the final message (a latitude and longitude plus a date and time)."
Wireless Networking

Submission + - Second 3G GSM Cipher Cracked (threatpost.com) 1

Submitted by Trailrunner7
Trailrunner7 writes: A group of cryptographers has developed a new attack that has broken Kasumi, the encryption algorithm used to secure traffic on 3G GSM wireless networks. The technique enables them to recover a full key by using a tactic known as a related-hey attack, but experts say it is not the end of the world for Kasumi. Kasumi, also known as A5/3, is the standard cipher used to encrypt communications on 3G GSM networks, and it's a modified version of an older algorithm called Misty. In the abstract of their paper, the cryptographers say the attack can be implemented easily on one standard PC. "In this paper we describe a new type of attack called a sandwich attack, and use it to construct a simple distinguisher for 7 of the 8 rounds of KASUMI with an amazingly high probability of 214. By using this distinguisher and analyzing the single remaining round, we can derive the complete 128 bit key of the full KASUMI by using only 4 related keys, 226 data, 230 bytes of memory, and 232 time. These complexities are so small that we have actually simulated the attack in less than two hours on a single PC, and experimentally verified its correctness and complexity."

Submission + - Neural Nets Make Art While High (arbornet.org)

Submitted by brilanon
brilanon writes: telepathic-critterdrug is a controversial fork of the open source artificial-life sim Critterding, a physics sandbox where blocky creatures evolve neural nets in a survival contest. What we've done is to give these animals an extra retina which is shared with the whole population. It's extended through time like a movie and they can write to it for communication or pleasure. Since this introduces the possibility of the creation of art, we decided to give them a selection of narcotics, stimulants and psychedelics. This is not in Critterding.

The end result is a high-colour cellular automata running on a substrate that thinks and evolves, and may actually produce hallucinations in the user.
Earth

Submission + - Crumbling reactor springs tritium leak (rutlandherald.com) 1

Submitted by mdsolar
mdsolar writes: The decrepit nuclear reactor Vermont Yankee http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/07/09/08/2036240/New-Legislation-Proposed-For-Nuclear-Safety has sprung a radioactive leak similar to those at other poorly run reactors in Illinois (Braidwood, Byron and Dresden), Arizona (Palo Verde) and New York (Indian Point). The problem of radioactive tritium leaks even threatens Champagne from France http://www.greenpeace.org/international/news/radioactive-champagne-30-06-06 And, 55 people were intentionally poisoned with tritium in India last year http://weblog.greenpeace.org/nuclear-reaction/2009/12/tritium_poisoning_at_indias_ka.html

Tritium and its decay product helium 3 are incredibly valuable and there is currently a shortage of helium 3 http://science.slashdot.org/story/09/11/23/1859204/Program-To-Detect-Smuggled-Nuclear-Bombs-Stalls What, besides shutting down leaky old nuclear plants, could be done to better control release of tritium into the environment?
Programming

Submission + - Why Coder Pay Isn't Proportional to Productivity

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: John D. Cook takes a stab at explaining why programmers are not paid in proportion to their productivity. The basic problem, Cook explains, is that extreme programmer productivity may not be obvious. A salesman who sells 10x as much as his peers will be noticed, and compensated accordingly. And if a bricklayer were 10x more productive than his peers this would be obvious too (it doesn't happen). But the best programmers do not write 10x as many lines of code; nor do they work 10x longer hours. Programmers are most effective when they avoid writing code. An über-programmer, Cook explains, is likely to be someone stares quietly into space and then says "Hmm. I think I've seen something like this before."

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"What man has done, man can aspire to do." -- Jerry Pournelle, about space flight

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