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What was highest label on your first car speedometer?

  • 80 mph
  • 88 mph
  • 100 mph
  • 120 mph
  • 150 mph
  • it was in kph like civilized countries use you insensitive clod
  • Other (please specify in comments)

[ Results | Polls ]
Comments:46 | Votes:108

posted by CoolHand on Friday November 27 2015, @11:12PM   Printer-friendly
from the injection-infection dept.

One of the hackers suspected of being behind the TalkTalk breach, which led to the personal details of at least 150,000 people being stolen, used a vulnerability discovered two years before he was even born.

That method of attack was SQL injection (SQLi), where hackers typically enter malicious commands into forms on a website to make it churn out juicy bits of data. It's been used to steal the personal details of World Health Organization employees, grab data from the Wall Street Journal, and hit the sites of US federal agencies.

"It's the most easy way to hack," the pseudonymous hacker w0rm, who was responsible for the Wall Street Journal hack, told Motherboard. The attack took only a "few hours."

But, for all its simplicity, as well as its effectiveness at siphoning the digital innards of corporations and governments alike, SQLi is relatively easy to defend against.


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posted by n1 on Friday November 27 2015, @10:50PM   Printer-friendly

Four police officers and an unknown number of civilians have been hurt in an "active shooter" incident in the US city of Colorado Springs, police say.

Officers were exchanging fire with a gunman inside a Planned Parenthood clinic, police Lt Catherine Buckley said.

It was unclear if hostages had been taken, she said.

The city's Penrose hospital said it had received six patients, but did not say whether they were civilians or police.

The situation was still active and roads were closed, the city's police said in a tweet.

"We do not have the shooter at this point but we do have all of our resources brought to bear," Lt Buckley told local TV.

My local news station

AP story BBC story


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posted by n1 on Friday November 27 2015, @09:37PM   Printer-friendly
from the phileas-fogg dept.

Google may be planning to deploy its Project Loon balloons above the United States:

Google appears to be planning to test its Project Loon internet balloons across the entire US, according to recent documents filed with the FCC.

The company has asked the Federal Communications Commission for a license to test experimental radios that use wireless spectrum in the millimeter bandwidth in all 50 states and Puerto Rico. Google said it wants to begin the tests on January 1 for a period of 24 months.

The testing could indicate that Google is broadening its ambitions for providing consumers with internet access through the special balloons developed in its secretive X Labs.

Project Loon is Google's plan to operate a fleet of solar-powered balloons — flying at an altitude of 60,000 to 90,000 feet — that are capable of beaming internet access down to the earth. Google has described the project as a way to bring internet access to people in developing economies and regions of the world that lack communications infrastructure.

[...] More tellingly, the filing notes that Google's latest request for an experimental license is for continued development of previous tests, in which the company also acquired experimental licenses from the FCC. According to the previous filings that Google references, those tests were conducted in Winnemucca, Nevada.

Winnemucca is a remote town of roughly 7,000 in Nevada, and its attractions include a small brothel district known as "The Line" and an annual Basque festival, according to Wikipedia. But in August 2014, one month before Google's first FCC request for a license to test in Winnemucca, the published minutes of the Winnemucca City Council contain a proposal to let Google use its airport industrial park as a "temporary balloon launching facility."

The most recent Google FCC filings indicated that Google wants to use frequencies in the 71 GHz to 76 GHz range and in the 81 GHz to 86 GHz range.

Previously: Google Releases New Project Loon Video
Google to Provide Sri Lanka with 3G Internet Using Balloons


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posted by n1 on Friday November 27 2015, @08:35PM   Printer-friendly
from the shill-for-freedom dept.

A convicted software pirate has been handed an unusual punishment. The man, named only as Jakub F, will be spared having to pay hefty damages - as long as a film denouncing piracy he was made to produce gets 200,000 views.He came to the out-of-court settlement with a host of firms whose software he pirated after being convicted by a Czech court. In return, they agreed not to sue him. The 30-year-old was also given a three-year suspended sentence.

The criminal court decided that any financial penalty would have to be decided either in civil proceedings or out of court. The firms, which included Microsoft, HBO Europe, Sony Music and Twentieth Century Fox, estimated that the financial damage amounted to 5.7m Czech Crowns (£148,000). But the Business Software Alliance (BSA), which represented Microsoft, acknowledged that Jakub could not pay that sum.

Instead, the companies said they would be happy to receive only a small payment and his co-operation in the production of the video. In order for the firms' promise not to sue to be valid, they said, the video would have to be viewed at least 200,000 times within two months of its publication this week. A spokesman for the BSA told the BBC that the stipulation was to ensure that Jakub would help share it as widely as possible. But, if the video did not reach the target, the spokesman said that - "in theory" - the firms would have grounds to bring a civil case for damages.

The YouTube film, currently at over 450k views means Jakub should avoid any further legal action.


[Editor's note: SiKing also submitted this, but not quite in time to get it merged with the other already in the queue.]

Original Submission

posted by n1 on Friday November 27 2015, @07:03PM   Printer-friendly
from the fightin'-words dept.

Henry Farrel writes in the Washington Post that there's a group of people which appears to be highly prone to violent extremism - engineers - who are nine times more likely to be terrorists as you would expect by chance. In a forthcoming book, "Engineers of Jihad," published by Princeton University Press, Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog provide a new theory for why it is that engineers seem unusually prone to become involved in terrorist organizations. Gambetta and Hertog find strongly suggestive evidence that engineers are more likely to become terrorists because of the way that they think about the world. Survey data indicates that engineering faculty at universities are far more likely to be conservative than people with other degrees, and far more likely to be religious. They are seven times as likely to be both religious and conservative as social scientists. Gambetta and Hertog speculate that engineers combine these political predilections with a marked preference towards finding clearcut answers. This preference has affinities with the clear answer that radical Islamist groups propose for dealing with the complexities of modernity: Get rid of it.

Gambetta and Hertog suggest that this mindset combines with frustrated expectations in many Middle Eastern and North African countries, and among many migrant populations, where people with engineering backgrounds have difficulty in realizing their ambitions for good and socially valued jobs. This explains why there are relatively few radical Islamists with engineering backgrounds in Saudi Arabia (where they can easily find good employment) and why engineers were more prone to become left-wing radicals in Turkey and Iran.

Some people might argue that terrorist groups want to recruit engineers because engineers have valuable technical skills that might be helpful, such as in making bombs. This seems plausible – but it doesn't seem to be true. Terrorist organizations don't seem to recruit people because of their technical skills, but because they seem trustworthy and they don't actually need many people with engineering skills. "Bomb-making and the technical stuff that is done in most groups is performed by very few people, so you don't need, if you have a large group, 40 or 50 percent engineers," says Hertog. "You just need a few guys to put together the bombs. So the scale of the overrepresentation, especially in the larger groups is not easily explained."


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posted by cmn32480 on Friday November 27 2015, @05:34PM   Printer-friendly
from the swallow-this-hook-line-and-sinker dept.

Was that fish on your plate once a sentient being? Scientists have long believed that the animals aren't capable of the same type of conscious thought we are because they fail the "emotional fever" test. When researchers expose birds, mammals (including humans), and at least one species of lizard to new environments, they experience a slight rise in body temperature of 1°C to 2°C that lasts a while; it's a true fever, as if they were responding to an infection. The fever is linked to the emotions because it's triggered by an outside stimulus, yet produces behavioral and physiological changes that can be observed. Some scientists argue that these only occur in animals with sophisticated brains that sense and are conscious of what's happening to them. Previous tests suggested that toads and fish don't respond this way.

Now, a new experiment that gave the fish more choices shows the opposite. Researchers took 72 zebrafish and either did nothing with them or placed them alone in a small net hanging inside a chamber in their tank with water of about 27°C; zebrafish prefer water of about 28°C. After 15 minutes in the net, the team released the confined fish. They could then freely swim among the tank's five other chambers, each heated to a different temperature along a gradient from 17.92°C to 35°C. (The previous study used a similar setup but gave goldfish a choice between only two chambers, both at higher temperatures.) The stressed fish spent more time—between 4 and 8 hours—in the warmer waters than did the control fish, and raised their body temperatures about 2°C to 4°C, showing an emotional fever, the scientists report online today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Thus, their study upends a key argument against consciousness in fish, they say.


Original Submission

posted by cmn32480 on Friday November 27 2015, @03:49PM   Printer-friendly
from the my-vacuum-has-a-bag-not-a-tube dept.

More than a half century later, traveling-wave-tube amplifiers still dominate satellite communication. That's right—your ultrahigh-definition satellite TV and satellite radio come to you courtesy of vacuum tubes in space.

Of course, there's a huge difference between Telstar's 3.5-watt, 4-gigahertz amplifier and one of the dozens of highly efficient microwave amplifiers on, say, the DirecTV-15 satellite, launched earlier this year. The latest generation of traveling-wave tubes can provide up to 180 W at frequencies up to 22 GHz, with efficiencies approaching 70 percent and rated lifetimes exceeding 15 years. Though their basic function is the same—amplifying RF signals—just about everything else has changed: the design, the testing, the materials, and the fabrication.
...
And now, ongoing research into a new and potentially revolutionary kind of traveling-wave tube—the ultracompact and ultraefficient cold-cathode TWT—looks poised to deliver the first practical device by the end of this decade. These are exciting times for vacuum tubes. Here's why.

No cheating this time--read the article to find out why.


Original Submission

posted by cmn32480 on Friday November 27 2015, @02:14PM   Printer-friendly
from the Raspberry-Pi-justin-time-for-Thanksgiving dept.

The big news in Raspberry Pi circles yesterday was the release of the new Raspberry Pi Zero a higher clocked, updated, smaller version of the original Raspberry Pi.

Exciting as that is, what seems much more news worthy is that the price point of just £4 means that they can include 10,000 of them on the Mag Pi print magazine available on sale yesterday.

In this video run down of the features done by The Raspberry Pi Guy YouTube you can see it happily run Minecraft: Pi Edition and is reported to run most software without issue.

The only down side with the new Pi appears to be the micro connectors. Various companies willing to set you up with kits to fill the void.

ModMyPi

Pi Hut

Also beware of the P&P (postage and packaging) from various retailers, a £4 Pi Zero with triple the carriage.

[Specs provided after the break.]

  • A Broadcom BCM2835 application processor
    • 1GHz ARM11 core (40% faster than Raspberry Pi 1)
  • 512MB of LPDDR2 SDRAM
  • A micro-SD card slot
  • A mini-HDMI socket for 1080p60 video output
  • Micro-USB sockets for data and power
  • An unpopulated 40-pin GPIO header
    • Identical pinout to Model A+/B+/2B
  • An unpopulated composite video header
  • Our smallest ever form factor, at 65mm x 30mm x 5mm

At that price, I'd be tempted to get a baker's dozen of them and make my own little Beowolf cluster.


Original Submission 1 Original Submission 2

posted by cmn32480 on Friday November 27 2015, @12:27PM   Printer-friendly
from the what-is-your-motivation dept.

Open source software development is a model that provides free public access to software packages and source code. Since programmers can freely contribute improvements, bug fixes and modifications, open source development gives rise to communities of authors and users that can number into the thousands for some software packages. The free, open-source Linux operating system is a prominent open source success story.

Another is the R environment for statistical computing, supported by the R Project for Statistical Computing. Freely available via the open-source GNU General Public License, R has evolved into an invaluable tool for professionals in data analysis fields across many industries. A group of researchers in Austria became interested in the motivations and values of the hundreds of people who give their time and energy so freely to advance such a large technological project. As there were no known empirical studies investigating these psychological factors, they designed a study to collect data from a large group of R developers. They have published the results of their study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

It seems illogical for software developers to give away their skills and efforts from an economic point of view. The authors hypothesized that a different set of motivations was required for the successful development of such a large software environment. They sent surveys to about 4,300 software package developers, and ultimately received around 764 responses.

Analyzing the collected data, the authors concluded that hybrid motivations and social characteristics were broadly responsible for the success of the R project. Hybrid motivations refer to both intrinsic and extrinsic motivations; among R project developers, purely intrinsic motivations like personal satisfaction and purely extrinsic motivations like receiving compensation were found to be less important.

I do it for the drink comps at all the best clubs. And the babes.


Original Submission

posted by janrinok on Friday November 27 2015, @10:35AM   Printer-friendly
from the you-tell-'em dept.

http://thediplomat.com/2015/11/us-cyber-commands-veiled-threat-china-vulnerable-in-cyberspace/

Speaking at this year's Halifax Security Forum, the head of U.S. Cyber Command, who also is the director of the National Security Agency (NSA), Admiral Michael Rogers, issued a vicious warning to China should it not change its behavior in cyberspace.

The U.S. admiral pointed out that China is as vulnerable to cyberattacks as any other nation, according to Defense News. "To my Chinese counterparts, I would remind them, increasingly you are as vulnerable as any other major industrialized nation state. The idea that you can somehow exist outside the broader global cyber challenges I don't think is workable," he said.

By openly pointing to Chinese vulnerabilities, the admiral issued a veiled threat cautioning that China itself may be target of cyber intrusions in the future should Beijing not change its behavior in cyberspace, although Rogers cautioned: "None of us wants behavior on either side that ends up accelerating or precipitating a crisis. That's in no one's interests."

Despite the September 25 joint statements, issued in parallel by the Chinese government and the White House, on how to strengthen bilateral relations in cyberspace–the most positive development between the two countries in this field since the June 2013 Sunnylands summit—tensions between the two countries remain. As a result, the United States has increasingly toughened its stance vis-à-vis alleged Chinese state-sponsored cyberattacks.

For example, in April 2015, U.S. President Barack Obama signed an executive order establishing the first-ever sanctions program specifically designed to deter state-sponsored malicious activities in cyberspace on a strategic scale, declaring such activities a "national emergency."

In addition, already in March 2015, Admiral Mike Rogers said that the United States will step up its active cyber defense postures in order to deter attacks on U.S. critical information infrastructure. He emphasized that hackers will "pay a price" that "will far outweigh the benefit" should they target U.S. critical information infrastructure.


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posted by janrinok on Friday November 27 2015, @09:05AM   Printer-friendly
from the slip-slidin'-away dept.

It's not quite the Esquilax of flatworms, but it's way more interesting. A team of biologists at Tufts University have induced one species of flatworm to grow the head and brain of another species of flatworm, without tampering with the genomic sequence. Instead, they manipulated electrical synapses in the worm's body.

The research shows that large-scale anatomy is not hard-wired in the genome, but can also be affected by physiological circuits outside the genes (at least in flatworms). It has been published this week in the International Journal of Molecular Sciences.

"It is commonly thought that the sequence and structure of chromatin -- material that makes up chromosomes -- determine the shape of an organism, but these results show that the function of physiological networks can override the species-specific default anatomy," said senior and corresponding author Michael Levin.

What would your favorite Frankenstein creation be?


Original Submission

posted by janrinok on Friday November 27 2015, @07:32AM   Printer-friendly
from the was-there-no-tv? dept.

In August 2014, Otis Johnson was released from prison after serving a 44-year sentence for the attempted murder of a police officer. He went to jail when he was 25 years old. By the time he came out, he was 69.

He's confused. Being completely removed from society since 1975, Johnson thinks he's entered a dystopia where everyone has become a secret agent wearing wires. The Steve Jobs era has completely passed him by.

Al Jazeera has an interesting video interview with the guy, talking about how modern world is full of surprises for him.


Original Submission

posted by cmn32480 on Friday November 27 2015, @06:07AM   Printer-friendly
from the stand-up dept.

Submitted via IRC for chromas

A coalition of dozens of the largest tech companies in the world is adamantly opposing any form of an official "backdoor" into encrypted devices.

The Information Technology Industry Council is a group of more than 60 major tech companies and organizations, including Google, Apple, Microsoft, Intel and Facebook.

"We deeply appreciate law enforcement's and the national security community's work to protect us," the council said in a statement issued Thursday, "but weakening encryption or creating backdoors to encrypted devices and data for use by the good guys would actually create vulnerabilities to be exploited by the bad guys, which would almost certainly cause serious physical and financial harm across our society and our economy."

Source: http://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/tech-industry-coalition-defies-calls-weakened-encryption-n466616


Original Submission

posted by cmn32480 on Friday November 27 2015, @04:31AM   Printer-friendly
from the we'll-have-it-in-10-years dept.

A team of physicists led by Stephen Jardin of the U.S. Department of Energy's Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) has discovered a mechanism that prevents the electrical current flowing through fusion plasma from repeatedly peaking and crashing. This behavior is known as a "sawtooth cycle" and can cause instabilities within the plasma's core. The results have been published online in Physical Review Letters. The research was supported by the DOE Office of Science.

The team, which included scientists from General Atomics and the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics, performed calculations on the Edison computer at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, a division of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Using M3D-C1, a program they developed that creates three-dimensional simulations of fusion plasmas, the team found that under certain conditions a helix-shaped whirlpool of plasma forms around the center of the tokamak. The swirling plasma acts like a dynamo -- a moving fluid that creates electric and magnetic fields. Together these fields prevent the current flowing through plasma from peaking and crashing.


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posted by martyb on Friday November 27 2015, @02:53AM   Printer-friendly
from the waiting-for-the-128-GB-ewe dept.

Samsung has developed the world's first 128 GB DDR4 registered memory modules for servers. From the press release:

Following Samsung's introduction of the world-first 3D TSV DDR4 DRAM (64GB) in 2014, the company's new TSV registered dual inline memory module (RDIMM) marks another breakthrough that opens the door for ultra-high capacity memory at the enterprise level. Samsung's new TSV DRAM module boasts the largest capacity and the highest energy efficiency of any DRAM modules today, while operating at high speed and demonstrating excellent reliability.

From The Register:

The Register is aware of servers with 96 DIMM slots, which means ... WOAH! ... 12.2 terabytes of RAM in a single server if you buy Samsung's new babies.

Samsung says these new DIMMS are special because "the chip dies are ground down to a few dozen micrometers, pierced with hundreds of fine holes and vertically connected by electrodes passing through the holes, allowing for a significant boost in signal transmission."

There's also "a special design through which the master chip of each 4GB package embeds the data buffer function to optimise module performance and power consumption."


Original Submission

posted by cmn32480 on Friday November 27 2015, @01:38AM   Printer-friendly
from the space-mining dept.

An event of cosmic proportions occurred on November 18 when the US congress passed the Space Act of 2015 into law. The legislation will give US space firms the rights to own and sell natural resources they mine from bodies in space, including asteroids.

Although the act, passed with bipartisan support, still requires President Obama's signature, it is already the most significant salvo that has been fired in the ideological battle over ownership of the cosmos. It goes against a number of treaties and international customary law which already apply to the entire universe.

The new law is nothing but a classic rendition of the "he who dares wins" philosophy of the Wild West. The act will also allow the private sector to make space innovations without regulatory oversight during an eight-year period and protect spaceflight participants from financial ruin. Surely, this will see private firms begin to incorporate the mining of asteroids into their investment plans.

The act represents a full-frontal attack on settled principles of space law which are based on two basic principles: the right of states to scientific exploration of outer space and its celestial bodies and the prevention of unilateral and unbridled commercial exploitation of outer-space resources. These principles are found in agreements including the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 and the Moon Agreement of 1979.

I learned everything I need to know about asteroid mining from Rip Foster. [Read it at Project Gutenberg. -Ed.]


Original Submission

posted by martyb on Friday November 27 2015, @12:01AM   Printer-friendly
from the names-are-complex--there-are-real-and-imaginary-ones dept.

The Montana Standard always collected real names from people in their comments section, but until recently allowed them to post under a screen name.

Their new policy is to display the real name.

They will also display the real names of all people who posted pseudonymous comments before the policy changed. This is bad news for anyone who had a good reason to use a nom de plume.

http://pubcit.typepad.com/clpblog/2015/11/retroactive-change-on-anonymous-comments-at-the-montana-standard.html


Original Submission