July 2008
95 posts
Encrypted Traffic No Longer Safe From Throttling →
New research could allow ISPs to selectively block or slow down your encrypted traffic even if they cannot snoop on your transmitted data. Italian researchers have found a way to categorize the type of traffic that is hidden inside an encrypted SSH session to around 90% accuracy. They are achieving this by analyzing packet sizes and inter-packet intervals instead of looking at the content itself....
June 2008
23 posts
Louisiana passes first antievolution "academic... →
As we noted last month, a number of states have been considering laws that, under the guise of “academic freedom,” single out evolution for special criticism. Most of them haven’t made it out of the state legislatures, and one that did was promptly vetoed. But the last of these bills under consideration, the Louisiana Science Education Act (LSEA), was enacted by the signature of...
comic - Brain On, Brain Off →
Brain On, Brain Off
Google Employees Press 14 Buttons to Operate Their... →
Of course, employees at the California offices of Google don’t necessarily have to have to press all 14 buttons during each visit to the loo, but then they wouldn’t be getting the full benefit of this fancy toilet, made by Toto (no, not the Toto that stole a song from the Beatle(s) until Jake Shimabukuro stole it back, this Toto, from Japan).
It’s the Jasmin Washlet E200. Awesome! It has a...
20 Beautiful HDR Pictures - Part 3 →
I was looking around for some new HDR pictures and found this great one from a car race. That’s when i decided to make a third part of our series “20 Beautiful HDR Pictures”. Hope this will never end.
ClickPass Adds Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Hotmail To... →
Clickpass, a startup that has simplified the OpenID login platform, has built out support for additional third parties that brings the promise of a universal login even closer. Users will now be able to use their Google, Facebook, Yahoo, or Hotmail passwords on any site that includes the Clickpass authentication system.
Alkaline Soil Sample From Mars Reveals Presence of... →
Stick an asparagus plant in a pot full of Martian soil, and the asparagus might grow happily, scientists announced Thursday.
An experiment on the Phoenix Mars lander showed the dirt on the planet’s northern arctic plains to be alkaline, though not strongly alkaline, and full of the mineral nutrients that a plant would need.
Google Public Relations →
Yesterday, I got an unexpected package from Google. It contained a “thank you” letter, a Polo-Shirt and a USB card reader.
The whole story began a few weeks ago, when I had a call on my answering machine and a mail in my inbox from the legal department of Google Germany. A Google lawyer asked me if he could talk with me on the phone.
First look: KDE 4.1 beta 2 shows solid... →
The developers of the open source KDE desktop environment announced the availability of the second KDE 4.1 beta release this week. This version has many improvements to usability and overall robustness compared to the previous beta. I tested KDE 4.1 beta 2 with a LiveCD build of openSUSE 11.
Exclusive: Scientists warn that there may be no... →
It seems unthinkable, but for the first time in human history, ice is on course to disappear entirely from the North Pole this year.
The disappearance of the Arctic sea ice, making it possible to reach the Pole sailing in a boat through open water, would be one of the most dramatic – and worrying – examples of the impact of global warming on the planet. Scientists say the ice at 90 degrees north...
Stephen Hawking's explosive new theory →
Prof Stephen Hawking has come up with a new idea to explain why the Big Bang of creation led to the vast cosmos that we can see today.
Astronomers can deduce that the early universe expanded at a mind-boggling rate because regions separated by vast distances have similar background temperatures.
They have proposed a process of rapid expansion of neighbouring regions, with similar cosmic...
Holographic display by USC Graphics lab →
The Graphics Lab at the University of Southern California has designed an easily reproducible, low-cost 3D display system with a form factor that offers a number of advantages for displaying 3D objects in 3D.
.confusion: ICANN opens up Pandora's Box of new... →
By next spring, businesses and other organizations will be able to apply for any top-level domain they can possibly think of, like arstechnica.awesome or google.thegoogle. Joking aside, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) voted today in Paris on a measure that significantly expands the scope of generic Top Level Domains (gTLDs), allowing organizations to apply for...
Mars Had an Ancient Impact Like Earth →
The puzzle of why the northern and southern hemispheres of Mars look so different may now have been solved.
Mars’ crust is thicker in the southern hemisphere, and magnetic anomalies are found in the south but not the north.
New studies in Nature magazine suggest that a massive space rock smashing into the planet could have created an abrupt disparity between the two halves.
20 million Firefox 3 downloads in a week, ~4%... →
Mozilla’s Firefox 3 web browser, which was officially released one week ago, has already been downloaded over 20 million times since the official launch. This is a noteworthy achievement for the open source browser, which is rapidly eroding the dominance of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.
The Website Is Down →
McCain is aware of the Internet →
John McCain’s nemesis may not be the Democrats but technology itself! CNN’s Jeanne Moos reports.
I've Seen the Future, and It Has a Kill Switch →
It used to be that just the entertainment industries wanted to control your computers — and televisions and iPods and everything else — to ensure that you didn’t violate any copyright rules. But…
Why the cloud cannot obscure the scientific method →
Every so often, someone (generally not a practicing scientist) suggests that it’s time to replace science with something better. The desire often seems to be a product of either an exaggerated sense of the potential of new approaches, or a lack of understanding of what’s actually going on in the world of science. This week’s version, which comes courtesy of Chris Anderson, the...
Sony's PS3 movie download service rolling out... →
Sony just released a rambling update to it corporate strategy through fiscal year 2010. An interesting read for fans and competitors alike as Sony lays bare initiatives intent on moving Sony from recovery to the “leading global provider of networked consumer electronics and entertainment.” Most notable in the near-term however, is word from Kazuo Hirai, chieftain of Sony Computer...
Creating three-dimensional qubits in an atomic... →
Sometimes it seems so obvious that something won’t work very well that no one bothers to try the experiment. This seems to be the case for a pair of recent electromagnetic induced transparency (EIT) experiments that may have significance in the world of quantum computing in the near future.
Clueless video game bill nears passage in New York →
Trying to pass legislation that impacts how games can be sold or what has to be put on them is a popular and expensive way of sending the message that you’re concerned about the issues that affect the youth of today. Although every law attempted has gone down in flames, and has cost taxpayers at least $1 million through the years, politicians continue to line up to give it a go. The newest...
Leadership is never given, it's taken. →
Hey, Freud, roll over dude. Help me understand this one: How is it that people can sit at work all day and allow their conscious selves to have a robust internal dialogue about how many great ideas they have to improve the business they are employed at, while their unconscious selves leave them entirely powerless to speak up? How is it that instead of speaking up, they somehow justify their...