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Comment Re:Already happened at least once before. (Score 1) 443

by willyv (#36205770) Attached to: Why IT Needs To Change for Gen Z

I don't really see that there is much different between these portable devices and laptops, so I don't see that there are many issues. They are both computers and encryption and locking down should not be an issue. If it is not possible to to it now, then in the near future these things will be demanded and implemented.

I'm thinking a little earlier than you as far as PCs. I remember typing into my PC off of printouts so I could use a PC to work out something and then using a printer to send the results back so they could be hand entered into the mainframe again, plain stupidity. Could I get the guys who ran the mainframe to provide me with a CSV file. No way that's a security issue. Could I send the data back as a CSV, no way, you can't do that, the data needs to be send on the appropriate form. Two years later all the data was available and loadable with tab delimited files using kermit. Now days you just tap straight into a SQL server to generate whatever reports you require, in whatever format you want.

It may be that these new devices are storing and using a remote system and all the device is being used for is as a client, but somehow they will have to be integrated into our present IT systems, because that will be the way things will work.

You could see a person in a store ordering stuff on a tablet, expecting to see what is available and being able to get order it online. Just as you'd expect someone in the field to be able to work on a report and have the pictures/data available for a colleague back in the office, I don't know if these devices would be laptops or even tablet or phone devices. They could as easily be cameras, meters, or GPS devices.

I'm surprised at the vitriol that this topic has produced. I have always assumed it was a given that these devices would end up attached to a network, and the administrators that run these networks will have to work out how they will secure the network to accommodate these devices. If not an enterprise should easily still be stuck with mainframes teletypes and card readers, because clearly there is no security issue with these.
Science

An Electron Microscope For Your Home? 125

Posted by Soulskill from the take-two-they're-small dept.
CuteSteveJobs writes "Could microscopy be in for a new golden age? Wired previewed the desktop-sized Hitachi TM-1000 Electron Microscope a while back. Light microscopes can magnify up to 400X (1,000X at lower quality) — just enough to see bacteria as shapes — but this one offers 20X to 10,000X, giving some amazing pictures. Unlike traditional electron microscopes, this one plugs into a domestic power socket and specimens don't need any special preparation; it's point-and-shoot, much like your typical digital camera. So easy a grade-schooler could use it, and earlier this year that's what happened: The kids at Iwanuma Elementary School in Miyagi, Japan got their own electron microscope. At $60,000, you'll have to give up on the BMW, but the hope is with economy of scale (so far 1,000 have sold) and miniaturization, the price will continue to drop. The only bad news? It runs XP."
The Internet

New Zealand Halts Internet Copyright Law Changes 216

Posted by CmdrTaco from the undo-undo-undo dept.
phobonetik writes "The New Zealand Prime Minister announced his Government will throw out the controversial Section 92A of the Copyright Amendment (New Technologies) Act and start again. The proposed law changes contained 'guilty upon accusation, without appeal' clauses and heavy compliance costs to ISPs and businesses. The changes were hours away from being signed but a series of online protests, a petition on Government grounds, as well as public rebuttal by a large ISP and by Google contributed to the Government changing course and respecting the wishes of the IT industry."
Censorship

Australian Judge Rules Simpsons Cartoon Rip-off Is Child Porn 612

Posted by CmdrTaco from the now-we-can-all-rest..-hey-wait dept.
An anonymous reader was one of several to note a bizarre story in which an Australian judge ruled that drawings can be child porn. In this case, it was knock off drawings of the Simpsons doing naughty things. Good thing they're going to be censoring the Down Undernet soon. Who knows what damage this could cause.
Earth

Chemical Pollution Is Destroying Masculinity 773

Posted by kdawson from the lower-your-voice-and-say-that dept.
myrdos2 writes "A host of common chemicals is feminizing males of every class of vertebrate animals, from fish to mammals, including people. Many have been identified as 'endocrine disruptors' or gender-benders because they interfere with hormones. Communities heavily polluted with gender-benders in Canada, Russia, and Italy have given birth to twice as many girls as boys, which may offer a clue to the mysterious shift in sex ratios worldwide. And a study at Rotterdam's Erasmus University showed that boys whose mothers had been exposed to PCBs grew up wanting to play with dolls and tea sets rather than with traditionally male toys. It also follows hard on the heels of new American research which shows that baby boys born to women exposed to widespread chemicals in pregnancy are born with smaller penises and feminized genitals. It is calculated that 250,000 babies who would have been boys have been born as girls instead in the US and Japan alone. And sperm counts are dropping precipitously. Studies in more than 20 countries have shown that they have dropped from 150 million per milliliter of sperm fluid to 60 million over 50 years."
Medicine

Cold Sore Virus May Be Alzheimer's Smoking Gun 285

Posted by kdawson from the you-must-remember-this dept.
Science Daily is reporting that the virus behind cold sores has been found to be a major cause of the insoluble protein plaques found in the brains of Alzheimer's disease sufferers. Researchers believe the herpes simplex virus is a significant factor in developing the debilitating disease and could be treated by antiviral agents such as acyclovir, which is already used to treat cold sores and other diseases caused by the herpes virus. Another future possibility is vaccination against the virus to prevent the development of Alzheimer's in the first place. The research was just published in the Journal of Pathology (abstract).
Privacy

European Police Plan to Remote-Search Hard Drives 260

Posted by timothy from the oh-you-needn't-come-into-the-office dept.
Smivs points out a blandly-worded story from the BBC with scary implications, excerpting "Remote searches of suspect computers will form part of an EU plan to tackle hi-tech crime. The five-year action plan will take steps to combat the growth in cyber theft and the machines used to spread spam and other malicious programs. It will also encourage better sharing of data among European police forces to track down and prosecute criminals. Europol will co-ordinate the investigative work and also issue alerts about cyber crime sprees."
Operating Systems

FreeBSD 6.4 Released 64

Posted by timothy from the unsung-but-nicely-free dept.
hmallett writes "FreeBSD 6.4-RELEASE, the fifth release from the 6-STABLE branch of FreeBSD development, is now available. In addition to being hosted at many FTP sites, ISO images can be downloaded via the BitTorrent tracker, or for users of earlier FreeBSD releases, FreeBSD Update can be used to perform a binary upgrade."
AMD

45nm Opteron Performance, Power Efficiency Tested 129

Posted by kdawson from the brass-tacks dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Now that Intel has unleashed its next-generation Core i7 processors, all eyes are turned to AMD and its incoming wave of 45nm CPUs. To get a feel for AMD's future competitiveness, The Tech Report has taken a pair of 2.7GHz 45nm Opterons (with 75W power envelopes) and put them through the paces against Intel Xeons and older, 65nm Opterons in an extensive suite of performance and power efficiency tests — from Cinema 4D and SPECjbb to computational fluid dynamics and a custom XML handling benchmark. The verdict: AMD's new 45nm quad-core design is a notable improvement over the 65nm iteration, and it proves to be a remarkably power-efficient competitor to Intel's Xeons. However, 45nm AMD chips likely don't have what it takes to best Intel's Core i7 and future Nehalem-based Xeons."
Image

World's Oldest Marijuana Stash Found 108

Posted by samzenpus from the it's-a-little-dry dept.
jage2 writes "Researchers say they have located the world's oldest stash of marijuana in a tomb in a remote part of China. The cache of cannabis is about 2,700 years old and was clearly 'cultivated for psychoactive purposes,' rather than as fibre for clothing, or as food, says a research paper in the Journal of Experimental Botany. The 789 grams of dried cannabis was buried alongside a light-haired, blue-eyed Caucasian man, likely a shaman of the Gushi culture, near Turpan in northwestern China."
Databases

Searching DNA For Relatives Raises Concerns 199

Posted by kdawson from the database-creep dept.
An anonymous reader calls our attention to California's familial searching policy, which looks for genetic ties between culprits and kin. The technique has come to the fore in the last few years, after a Colorado prosecutor pushed the FBI to relax its rules on cross-state searches. "Los Angeles Police Department investigators want to search the state's DNA database again — not for exact matches but for any profiles similar enough to belong to a parent or sibling. The hope is that one of those family members might lead detectives to the killer. This strategy, pioneered in Britain, is poised to become an important crime-fighting tool in the United States. The Los Angeles case will mark the first major use of California's newly approved familial searching policy, the most far-reaching in the nation."
Sci-Fi

The Real Monsters Behind Godzilla 243

Posted by kdawson from the radioactively-enhanced-cash-cow dept.
eldavojohn writes "A Wired blog looks at the real monsters behind Godzilla: his lawyers. Do you think Godzilla is basically a glorified T. Rex? Guess again, as his lawyers have tirelessly argued: 'He's erect-standing. He's got muscular arms, scaly skin and spines on back and tail and he breathes fire and has a furrowed brow, he's got an anthropomorphic torso. The T. rex has emaciated bird-like arms and stands at a 45-degree angle.' Read on to find out why they targeted the site davezilla.com but not mozilla.org. Another abuse of the American trademark & copyright system? You decide — just don't make a float of him or you'll find yourself paying an undisclosed sum to Toho Co. Ltd."

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