November 2008
29 posts
2 tags
An Infinite Loop in the Brain →
Wouldn’t it be great to be able to remember everything? To see all our most important moments, all the priceless encounters, adventures and triumphs? What if memory never faded, but instead could be retrieved at any time, as reliably as films in a video store?
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IETF committee calls for a simple system for DNS... →
The Internet Architecture Board (IAB), the central committee of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF, a standards organisation), is calling for a simple system for signing the DNS root zone, and for the interest groups of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to be given a say in a number of operational questions. That would give the ICANN community an influence on,...
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Final judgment: SCO owes Novell millions (plus... →
Federal district judge Dale A. Kimball has handed down the final judgment in the SCO case. The decision dismisses SCO’s latest claims, grants declaratory relief to Novell, and sustains the court’s previous judgment that SCO owes Novell over $2.54 million (plus interest) for unjust enrichment.
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Kernel vulnerability found in Vista →
A flaw in Vista’s networking has been found that can crash the system, but no fix is expected until the next service pack A flaw has been found in Windows Vista that could allow rootkits to be hidden or denial-of-service attacks to be executed on computers using the operating system. The vulnerability was found by Thomas Unterleitner of Austrian security company Phion and was announced...
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Network Security Breaches Plague NASA →
America’s military and scientific institutions—along with the defense industry that serves them—are being robbed of secret information on satellites, rocket engines, launch systems, and even the Space Shuttle. The thieves operate via the Internet from Asia and Europe, penetrating U.S. computer networks. Some of the intruders are suspected of having ties to the governments of China and...
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Is white listing going mainstream? →
White lists will be on every desktop within the next five years, according to Patrick Morley, CEO of Massachusetts-based Bit9. Morley was in town to address the Dow Jones VentureWire Technology Showcase in Redwood City, Calif., on Tuesday. He stopped by CNET News afterward to discuss why he believes white listing will be important in the next few years.
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Microsoft hopes to make Windows 7 use less disk... →
The latest post on the Engineering Windows 7 blog is about disk space and is written by Michael Beck, a program manager in the core OS deployment feature team. The Windows 7 team outlined tradeoffs between disk space and a few key features, and emphasized the reliability concerns that Windows Vista addressed in Windows XP.
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DARPA enlists IBM to build computer brain as smart... →
Researchers have long been trying to model actual brains in order to build a better computer “brain,” and it looks like IBM is now getting a helping hand from none other than DARPA in its attempt to create one that it hopes will one day have the intelligence level of a cat. To that that somewhat unnerving end, DARPA is pouring $4.9 million into a project that’ll include five...
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EU opens digital library to public with over 2... →
The European Union has finally opened its digital online library, Europeana, to the public, allowing users everywhere free access to the rich archives of EU’s 27 member states. The library includes more than 2 million books, maps, recordings, photographs, archival documents, paintings, and films from national libraries and cultural institutions, all of which have been digitally encoded and...
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Eulogy for a good friend: RIP, twisted pair... →
DSL isn’t dead—in fact, I’m using it right now—but there’s plenty of talk about the state of its health, much of it grim. As cable and fiber-to-the-home connections gain subscribers and speed, the traditional twisted-pair phone line is already becoming less relevant. And if telcos don’t act, their link to the home threatens to disappear altogether.
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Microsoft on the cloud: Sharepoint and Exchange go... →
Back in July, Microsoft revealed pricing models and partner compensation details for Microsoft Online Services, and it boasted that a growing number of companies were finding the beta program solid enough to sign on for when the products were released. Yesterday, Microsoft finally announced the availability of two of the services in the United States: Exchange Online and SharePoint Online. Redmond...
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Adobe starts 64-bit Flash testing with Linux alpha →
Adobe has released the very first alpha version of a 64-bit Flash Player for Linux. This move is part of the company’s broader plans to provide comprehensive 64-bit support for the widely-used browser plugin. Adobe expects to release 64-bit versions for all three platforms with the next major version of Flash Player.
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The Unlikely Green Revolution of the US Military →
The best argument for “green” anything has never been morality — it’s just better business. When environmentalist genius Amory Lovins started his consulting group, the Rocky Mountain Institute, he probably never figured his clients would include Wal-Mart, Monsanto and Lockheed Martin. Massive scale leads to massive costs, though, and corporations are learning that their...
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Air Force scales back cyberwar plans →
The general in charge of the U.S. Air Force’s cyberwarfare effort says plans for his unit have been scaled back because staff who would have been used to set up a cybercommand will be allocated to the service’s new nuclear command instead.
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Spam sees big nosedive as rogue ISP McColo knocked... →
ix weeks ago, at the end of September, a loose organization of security researchers and network professionals announced that their collective efforts to fight badware had finally borne fruit. After years of complaints and shady dealings, the rogue ISP Atrivo was finally forced offline when the company’s last remaining uplink provider severed its business relationship with the beleaguered...
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Major Source of Online Scams and Spams Knocked... →
A U.S. based Web hosting firm that security experts say was responsible for facilitating more than 75 percent of the junk e-mail blasted out each day globally has been knocked offline following reports from Security Fix on evidence gathered about suspicious activity emanating from the network. For the past four months, Security Fix has been gathering data from the security industry about McColo...
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Visa introduces pin payment card →
Visa is introducing a revolutionary new credit card allowing users to use their PIN for online card transactions. Aimed at savvy internet users, the Visa PIN card features an alpha-numeric display and a 12-button keypad built into the back of a conventional credit, debit or prepaid card. The card, developed using technology from Australia-based Emue technologies, promises a three-year battery...
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Critical infrastructure open to attack, says study →
Computer systems that run the world’s critical infrastructure are not as secure as they should be and insiders are feeling angry. Advertisement That’s according to a new survey released Monday that asked management, network engineers and administrators in nine infrastructure industries about the state of cyber security in the US, Canada, and Europe.
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Songbird 1.0 music app soars →
In a desktop media realm dominated by iTunes and Windows Media Player, Songbird is an open source player that dances to its own beat. Built on Mozilla technology, Songbird offers a very customizable interface and integrates a pleasant variety of web services that offer everything from artist bios, lyrics, music store integration, and much more. Since Songbird is now available as an official 1.0...
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After 4 Years, HydrogenAudio Opens New 128kbps... →
After more than four years, a new MP3@128kbps listening test is finally open at HydrogenAudio.org! The featured encoders are: LAME 3.97, LAME 3.98.2, iTunes 8.0.1.11, Fraunhofer IIS mp3surround CL v1.5, and Helix v5.1 2005.08.09. The low anchor is l3enc 0.99a. The purpose of this test is to find out which popular MP3 VBR encoder outputs the best quality on bitrates around 128 kbps. All...
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Unknown "Structures" Tugging at Universe, Study... →
On the outskirts of creation, unknown, unseen “structures” are tugging on our universe like cosmic magnets, a controversial new study says. Everything in the known universe is said to be racing toward the massive clumps of matter at more than 2 million miles (3.2 million kilometers) an hour—a movement the researchers have dubbed dark flow.
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Battered, but not broken: understanding the WPA... →
Academic researchers have found an exploitable hole in a popular form of wireless networking encryption. The hole is in a part of 802.11i that forms the basis of WiFi Protected Access (WPA), so it could affect routers worldwide. German graduate student Erik Tews will present a paper at next week’s PacSec in Tokyo coauthored with fellow student and aircrack-ng team member Martin Beck that...
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Air Force Aims to 'Rewrite Laws of Cyberspace' →
The Air Force is fed up with a seemingly endless barrage of attacks on its computer networks from stealthy adversaries whose motives and even locations are unclear. So now the service is looking to restore its advantage on the virtual battlefield by doing nothing less than the rewriting the “laws of cyberspace.”
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Solar power game-changer: 'Near perfect'... →
A new anti-reflective coating developed by researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute could help to overcome two major hurdles blocking the progress and wider use of solar power. The nanoengineered coating boosts the amount of sunlight captured by solar panels and allows those panels to absorb the entire spectrum of sunlight from any angle, regardless of the sun’s position in the sky.
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MP3: Scientific Attempt To Create Most Annoying... →
An online poll conducted in the ’90s set Vitaly Komar, Alex Melamid and David Soldier on a quest to create the most annoying song ever. After gathering data about people’s least favorite music and lyrical subjects, they did the unthinkable: they combined them into a single monstrosity, specifically engineered to sound unpleasant to the maximum percentage of listeners. The song is not...
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How China Will Use Cyber Warfare To Leapfrog Foes →
A lengthy article published in Culture Mandala details how China is using cyber warfare (PDF) as an asymmetric means to obtain technology transfer and market dominance. Case studies of Estonia, Georgia, and Project Chanology point towards a new auxiliary arm of traditional warfare. Political hackers and common Web 2.0 users, referred to as useful idiots (PDF), are being manipulated through PSYOPS...