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Slashdot News for nerds, stuff that matters NASA Installing Shocks On Orion caffiend666 writes "In order to abate the massive vibration issues of their new Ares I spacecraft, NASA is installing shock absorbers. "The plan is to install 16 canisters in the bottom of the rocket with 100-pound weights attached to springs. Battery-powered motors will move the weights up and down to stop vibrations. Those are essentially remote-controlled shock absorbers, said Garry Lyles, who headed the team of NASA engineers tackling the shaking problem." So, when the spaceship is a rocking, don't come a knocking?" Read more of this story at Slashdot. Apple's IPhone 3G Firmware Update Bombs JagsLive writes "After lots of complaints about iPhone 3G connection issues, Apple released a firmware update Monday with hopes it would fix the issues. But early reports suggest it didn't work as planned. Complaints have included dropped calls, abrupt network switches, poor reception, and service interruptions. Apple declined to offer details about its iPhone 2.0.1 update, other than saying it included "bug fixes." However, comments in Apple's support forum say plenty about the latest attempt to rectify poor user experiences. In fact, the update seems to be causing new issues, apparently interfering with the GPS function, among others." Read more of this story at Slashdot. Hacker Uncovers Chinese Olympic Fraud SkeptOlympics writes "A new chapter in the ongoing controversy surrounding China's women's gymnastics team opened today, as search engine hacker stryde.hax found surviving copies of official registration documents issued by China's General Administration of Sport of China. The incriminating documents, expunged by censors from the official site and from Google's document cache, still appear in the document translation cache of Chinese search giant Baidu, here and here, showing the age of one of China's gold medal winning gymnasts to be 14 instead of 16, the minimum age for competition presented on her government issued passport. Now that official government documentation is available, how long will the IOC be able to keep a lid on this scandal?" I imagine the answer is "Forever". Read more of this story at Slashdot. Watchmen Delayed, Or Worse whisper_jeff writes "Due to some potential copyright issues, The Watchmen might be delayed, or worse. It seems that Fox claims it still owns copyrights which would prevent Warner Bros from releasing the movie. US District Court Judge Gary Feess decided that Fox had enough of a case that he's willing to hear things out. The geek in me hopes that it will be resolved quickly and the movie will hit theaters on time." Read more of this story at Slashdot. States Throw Out Electronic Voting Machines Davide Marney passes along an AP story about the thousands of voting machines gathering dust in warehouses across the country after states such as California, Ohio, and Florida have banned their use. Many of these machines cost $3.5K to $5K each. Local election boards are struggling to find ways to recover any of the cost of the machines, or even to recycle them. The picture in Ohio is the most confusing, as multiple court cases limit the state's options and result in a situation in which the discredited machines will nevertheless be used in the presidential election coming up in November. The state's new (Democratic) attorney general has just issued a rule banning the practice of election workers taking the machines home with them the night before elections. Read more of this story at Slashdot. Magpies Are Self-Aware FireStormZ writes "Magpies can recognize themselves in a mirror, confounding the notion that self-awareness is the exclusive preserve of humans and a few higher mammals. It had been thought only four species of apes, bottlenose dolphins, and Asian elephants shared the human ability to recognize their own bodies in a mirror. But German scientists reported on Tuesday that magpies, a species with a brain structure very different from mammals, could also identify themselves. It had been thought that the neocortex brain area found in mammals was crucial to self-recognition. Yet birds, which last shared a common ancestor with mammals 300 million years ago, don't have a neocortex, suggesting that higher cognitive skills can develop in other ways." Read more of this story at Slashdot. Why Corporates Hate Perl Anti-Globalism recommends a posting up at O'Reilly's ONLamp on reasons that some companies are turning away from Perl. "[In one company] [m]anagement have started to refer to Perl-based systems as 'legacy' and to generally disparage it. This attitude has seeped through to non-technical business users who have started to worry if developers mention a system that is written in Perl. Business users, of course, don't want nasty old, broken Perl code. They want the shiny new technologies. I don't deny at all that this company (like many others) has a large amount of badly written and hard-to-maintain Perl code. But I maintain that this isn't directly due to the code being written in Perl. Its because the Perl code has developed piecemeal over the last ten or so years in an environment where there was no design authority.. Many of these systems date back to this company's first steps onto the Internet and were made by separate departments who had no interaction with each other. Its not really a surprise that the systems don't interact well and a lot of the code is hard to maintain." Read more of this story at Slashdot. FTC Bans Prerecorded Telemarketing Drivel coondoggie writes "In the ongoing battle to let us eat dinner in peace without being interrupted by amazingly annoying telemarketer blather, and in this case the even more infuriating recorded telemarketing drivel, the Federal Trade Commission today basically outlawed recorded telemarketing calls. Specifically, the FTC changed its venerable Telemarketing Sales Rule (TSR) to prohibit, as of Sept. 2009, telemarketing calls that deliver prerecorded messages, unless a consumer has agreed to accept such calls from a given caller/seller. Between now and 2009, telemarketers must provide an obvious, easy and quick way for consumers to opt-out of any call, the FTC said. Such an opt-out mechanism needs to be in place by December 1, 2008." Read more of this story at Slashdot. Japan Demands Probe of iPod Nano Flameouts iminplaya sends in an item from TechNewsWorld that begins, "Several incidents of iPod Nanos bursting into flames have created consumer jitters in gadget-happy Japan. Apple is downplaying the problem, pointing out that no major injuries or damage have been reported. The problem is due to defective batteries, the company said, and only a tiny percentage of the devices have caught on fire." Japan has seen 14 such incidents so far, two in recent days. iminplaya adds, "I like that. Only a 'tiny percentage'... Is anybody beginning to understand why I would prefer that these devices not be allowed on airplanes?" Read more of this story at Slashdot. Adobe Flash Ads Launching Clipboard Hijack Attacks bullyBEEF writes "Malicious hackers are using booby-trapped Flash banner ads to hijack clipboards for use in rogue security software attacks. In the Web attacks, which affect Mac, Windows, and Linux users running Firefox, IE, and Safari, bad guys are seizing control of the machine's clipboard (probably using the Flash command setClipboard) and inserting a hard-to-delete URL that points to a fake anti-virus program. A number of legitimate sites have been seen to host acs carrying the attack — including Newsweek, Digg, and MSNBC.com. Researcher Aviv Raff offers a harmless demo of how it's done." Read more of this story at Slashdot. New Multi-GPU Technology With No Strings Attached Vigile writes "Multi-GPU technology from both NVIDIA and ATI has long been dependent on many factors including specific motherboard chipsets and forcing gamers to buy similar GPUs within a single generation. A new company called Lucid Logix is showing off a product that could potentially allow vastly different GPUs to work in tandem while still promising near-linear scaling on up to four chips. The HYDRA Engine is dedicated silicon that dissects DirectX and OpenGL calls and modifies them directly to be distributed among the available graphics processors. That means the aging GeForce 6800 GT card in your closet might be useful once again and the future of one motherboard supporting both AMD and NVIDIA multi-GPU configurations could be very near." Read more of this story at Slashdot. Judge Rules Man Cannot Be Forced To Decrypt HD I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "In Vermont, US Magistrate Judge Jerome Niedermeier has ruled that forcing someone to divulge the password to decrypt their hard drive violates the 5th Amendment. Border guards testify that they saw child pornography on the defendant's laptop when the PC was on, but they made the mistake of turning it off and were unable to access it again because the drive was protected by PGP. Although prosecutors offered many ways to get around the 5th Amendment protections, the Judge would have none of that and quashed the grand jury subpoena requesting the defendant's PGP passphrase. A conviction is still likely because prosecutors have the testimony of the two border guards who saw the drive while it was open." The article stresses the potential importance of this ruling (which was issued last November but went unnoticed until now): "Especially if this ruling is appealed, US v. Boucher could become a landmark case. The question of whether a criminal defendant can be legally compelled to cough up his encryption passphrase remains an unsettled one, with law review articles for the last decade arguing the merits of either approach." Update: 08/19 23:49 GMT by KD : Several readers have pointed out that this story in fact did not go unnoticed. Read more of this story at Slashdot. DPI and Net Neutrality's Overseas Weak Spot Ian Lamont writes "An unnamed source at an American ISP says staff there briefly considered using Deep Packet Inspection to comply with an order from Argentina's Department of Justice to block access to a local gambling site. The ISP ended up not going that route, owing to the cost, but some engineers at the company worry that DPI will eventually be implemented on the ISP's overseas network, thereby positioning it for an easier US rollout should Net Neutrality lose out in Washington. Besides being used for traffic-shaping, DPI can also monitor the traffic of ISP subscribers to supply targeted advertising." Read more of this story at Slashdot. IBM and AMD Create First 22nm SRAM Cell arcticstoat notes an announcement from IBM that, along with technology partners, they have produced the first working sample of a SRAM cell built on a 22nm fabrication process. According to the article, this represents the next generation after 32nm process chips and won't be in products for some years. "The technology was developed with several partners, including AMD, Toshiba, STMicroelectronics and Freescale, as well as the College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering, where IBM performs a lot of its semiconductor research. IBM says that the cell's development involved 'novel fabrication processes,' including high-NA immersion lithography..., high-K metal gate stacks, extremely thin silicide, damascene copper contacts, and advanced activation techniques." Read more of this story at Slashdot. Flagship Studios' Founder Discusses Its Demise 1Up is running a lengthy interview with Bill Roper, founder of Flagship Studios. The game company, known primarily for its Hellgate: London and Mythos titles, announced massive layoffs last month, and is now simply winding down and taking care of a few final issues. Roper gives quite a bit of detail regarding the financial machinations of a game developer and the current status of the games' code. Co-founders Max Schaefer and Travis Baldree gave a related interview recently as well. "The subscription money we did get, we all poured directly into keeping the game online, keeping it up and running. But the development demands far outstripped the revenues. There just wasn't a good contemplation early on of how that would work. It wasn't like: This is the budget that comes in every month; we'll do whatever we can do with that. We just said [that] development will get done out of the revenues, and whoever pays for development, they get paid back out of the revenues. And there wasn't really enough revenues coming in to cover the expected and required development." Read more of this story at Slashdot. Newsfeed display by CaRP |
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CNN.com - Technology CNN.com delivers up-to-the-minute news and information on the latest top stories, weather, entertainment, politics and more. Seven online-security blunders to avoid Computer users are getting savvier, but many people still make mistakes that compromise their online security or invite identity thieves. "You can't be too safe," says Jeff Fox, technology editor at Consumer Reports. "You need to be street-smart, the way you are in the real world." eBay seeks to placate frustrated sellers Read full story for latest details. Is 'Guitar Hero' saving rock 'n' roll? Metallica's Lars Ulrich loves Black Sabbath and Deep Purple -- and so does his 10-year-old son. Coming soon: 'wallet phones' from Japan Read full story for latest details. Experts: video games can help kids learn Read full story for latest details. U.S. at risk of cyberattacks, experts say The next military or terrorist attack on the United States may be carried out in cyberspace by shadowy hackers half a world a way. Experts say last week's computer attacks on the former Soviet republic of Georgia signal a new kind of cyberwar for which the U.S. is not fully prepared. Police use GPS as crime-fighting tool It's the stuff crime movies are made of: Determined police officers shadowing their suspect as he drives around town, watching and waiting for his next move, always careful not to lose him. Gulf 'dead zone' killing fish, livelihoods Fisherman Terry Pizani turns his captain's wheel with a mournful expression on his face. Far below, the fishing grounds off the Louisiana coast where the 63-year-old has made a living for five decades have become an aquatic graveyard known as a "dead zone." U.S. lags in offering cell phone TV Read full story for latest details. Windmills bring prosperity, anger Read full story for latest details. Newsfeed display by CaRP |
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CNN.com - Science & Space CNN.com delivers up-to-the-minute news and information on the latest top stories, weather, entertainment, politics and more. Glitch delays Phoenix's work on Mars Read full story for latest details. Planets make case for 'crowded universe' Read full story for latest details. Shuttle back with 'beautiful landing' Read full story for latest details. Ex-planet gets namesakes Read full story for latest details. White specks puzzle Mars team Read full story for latest details. Phoenix lander shakes its way to success Read full story for latest details. Google founder signs up for space trip Google co-founder Sergey Brin has paid $5 million to secure a seat on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft, officials said Wednesday. NASA launches telescope Read full story for latest details. Beaming solar power from space Jyoti is the Hindi word for light. It's something Pranav Mehta has never had to live without. And he is lucky. Near where he lives in Gujarat -- one of the most prosperous states in India -- thousands of rural villages lack electricity or struggle with an intermittent supply at best. Space farming takes root When Neil Armstrong took one small step onto the moon in 1969, it seemed only a matter of time before the advent of thriving space colonies and summer vacations on distant planets. But after an initial flurry of moon landings, manned lunar expeditions dwindled: the last time an astronaut left his footprints on the moon was in 1972. Newsfeed display by CaRP |
