An anonymous reader writes “American scientists and engineers are researching a new generation of UAV’s that would be nuclear-powered. Why do this? They would have the capacity to stay over a target area for months and only be limited by the ordinance they could drop on a potential foe. They would be similar to a nuclear attack submarine but not limited to the amount of food on-board. The article notes: ‘The blueprints for the new drones, which have been developed by Sandia National Laboratories – the U.S. government’s principal nuclear research and development agency – and defense contractor Northrop Grumman, were designed to increase flying time “from days to months” while making more power available for operating equipment, according to a project summary published by Sandia,’ the paper reported.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Read the original post:
Coming To a War Near You: Nuclear Powered Drones

zacharye writes with this snippet from BGR: “Nearly a dozen suspects have been arrested and charged with crimes related to the theft and sale of AMOLED display technology under development at Samsung. Yonhap News Agency on Thursday reported that 11 suspects either currently or formerly employed by Samsung Mobile Display have been arrested. One 46-year-old researcher at Samsung is believed to have accepted a payment of nearly $170,000 from an unnamed ‘local rival firm’ in exchange for trade secrets pertaining to proprietary Samsung technology used in the company’s AMOLED panels…”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

See more here:
Samsung Employees Conspired To Sell AMOLED Tech; 11 Arrested

There are a few thousand fewer registered sex offenders playing on online gaming networks today thanks to “Operation: Game Over,” a joint effort between the New York attorney general’s office and half a dozen gaming companies to purge the convicted felons from their servers.

New York state law requires convicted sex offenders to register their e-mail addresses, screen names, and other online aliases with the state. Companies including Microsoft, Sony, Apple, Blizzard, EA, Disney Interactive, and Warner Bros. are now using this information to block 3,580 users from their networks, according to an announcement made this morning by New York Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman.

Calling the project a first-of-its-kind effort to “ensure online video game systems do not become a digital playground for dangerous predators,” Schneiderman defended the need for the restrictions by highlighting the case of Richard Ketovic, a Monroe County, NY man who last month pled guilty to sexually abusing a 10-year-old boy after first making contact through Xbox Live.

“By leveraging the online identity information all registered sex offenders are required to provide, we are able to help reduce potentially harmful situations,” Microsoft VP and Deputy General Counsel Rich Wallis said in a statement. “We’re supportive of Attorney General Schneiderman’s efforts to make the Internet, including online gaming environments like Xbox Live, safer for everyone.”

While acknowledging that current game consoles already have parental controls that could protect children from unwelcome advances, Schneiderman argued that “parents often do not realize that gaming consoles have these capabilities.” He also noted that 27 percent of teenagers aged 12 to 17 play games online with people they don’t know.

Read the comments on this post

View article:
Thousands of New York sex offenders blocked from online gaming networks

In March 2011, a Microsoft-led team targeted and decapitated the Rustock botnet, and a dramatic decrease in spam traffic was noticed almost immediately. It turns out that a full year later, spammers have not been able to fill the gaping hole left by Rustock’s absence.

Just before the Rustock takedown, “spam levels were around the 150 billion mark daily,” security vendor Commtouch said in a new analysis. “Spam levels dropped immediately after that takedown and have continued to decrease ever since. In the first quarter of 2012, an average of 94 billion spam emails were sent per day… There is no sign of a return to pre-Rustock spam levels.”

Rustock was responsible for sending 30 billion spam e-mails a day, and thus its takedown alone can’t account for the entire drop in spam volume. Commtouch said the sustained improvement was a combination of multiple botnet takedowns, as well as “increased prosecution of spammers and the source industries such as fake pharmaceuticals and replicas.”

Spam accounted for 75 percent of all e-mails sent in the first three months of 2012, according to Commtouch’s “April 2012—Internet Threats Trend Report.” Commtouch said it is “tempting” to conclude that a decade-long growth in spam has been permanently reversed, but the signs are not all good. Commtouch estimates that 270,000 zombie computers were activated each day for the purposes of sending spam in the first quarter of 2012, up from 209,000 in the last quarter of 2011. There had been a drop in November because of the “Esthost” botnet takedown, but “spammers have worked to source new zombies since the start of 2012,” Commtouch said.

Commtouch’s estimates are based on traffic going through its GlobalView Cloud service, which handles more than 10 billion transactions each day, including “URL and spam queries from millions of endpoints.” The data does not include internal corporate traffic.

Read the comments on this post

Follow this link:
Spam levels still low a year after Rustock botnet takedown

YouTube lets you watch 1080p 2D videos in ‘3D’ with your anaglyph specs originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 05 Apr 2012 14:59:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink | The Official YouTube Blog | Email this | Comments

View post:
YouTube lets you watch 1080p 2D videos in ‘3D’ with your anaglyph specs

Lasers by their nature emit light where each photon has nearly the same frequency. That “nearly” is good enough for most applications, but there are still cases where we’d like to do better: atomic clocks, gravitational wave detectors, and tests of variations in physical constants. All of these bump up against the limits of current lasers. A laser with a more stable frequency known as a superradiant laser has been studied theoretically, and now a prototype has been built shows what must be done to make it a practical reality.

Justin G. Bohnet et al. (of JILA/NIST) constructed a demonstration superradiant laser using ultracold rubidium atoms, in which the laser’s photons act to synchronize the electronic transitions within the atoms. While a standard laser has many photons present in the laser cavity, this superradiant laser has a cavity that, at any given time, may be empty of photons. Where in a normal laser the light is coherent and the atoms are uncorrelated, in a superradiant laser, it’s the atoms that are coherent, transitioning between energy states in concert. While the prototype is not a fully-working superradiant laser, it shows what steps are necessary to construct the real thing, and demonstrates how it should work.

Read the comments on this post

Continue Reading:
First superradiant lasers produce nearly no photons (and that’s expected)

It’s a bird. It’s a plane. It’s a semiconductor sequencer. It took nearly 13 years to sequence the first human genome and it cost nearly $3 billion, but today, thanks to Life Technologies and RKS, the Ion Proton™ Sequencer can deliver an entire human genome sequence in a single day for $1000.

The implications of the affordability and speed of this type of technology are manifold but Life Technologies anticipates the applications to be far-reaching: “As DNA sequencing deciphers human, animal, and plant genomes, [the Ion Proton™ Sequencer] promises to deliver personalized medical diagnoses, improved agricultural crop yields and new sources of energy.” Moreover, RKS’ work on the design and delivery of the system created a simple and compact form that houses complex technologies without compromising ease of use.

In addition to delivering a world-class aesthetic and user experience, the Ion Proton™ Sequencer is a scalable, simple and fast scientific instrument. The compact housing of the instrument provides optimal ventilation. Sequencing reagents are easily accessed through doors, and the process is initiated and monitored through a touch screen interface. LED indicators provide at-a-glance confirmation of operational status, and instruments can be rack-mounted, both increasing efficiency and maximizing use of space. The front panel is highly chemical and scratch resistant, and body textures and finishes were selected to utilize materials that are expected to become recyclable.

Outshining the media accolades garnered when the Ion Proton™ Sequencer debuted at this year’s CES, “The Coolest Thing I Saw at CES 2012,” from PCMag and a “landmark development from the Financial Times, it was recently announced that the Ion Proton™ Sequencer received a red dot award for product design (life science category). Congratulations to RKS and Life Technologies and we look forward to seeing what innovations might develop from this technology.

(more…)

Read the article:
Ion Proton Sequencer Delivers an Entire Human Genome in 24 Hours

Microsoft has released two new desktop virtualization betas. The App-V application virtualization and streaming system is getting bumped to version 5.0, and the company has added a new product, User Experience Virtualization (UE-V) to its desktop virtualization range.

UE-V is designed for organizations that use multiple machines and environments. It synchronizes settings and preferences across desktops, whether those desktops are running on bare metal or hosted VDI desktops, and regardless of whether the applications are directly installed or virtualized and streamed.

This is superficially similar to the roaming profiles first introduced in Windows NT 4, but with two important differences. Roaming profiles are loaded once at log-on, and saved back at log-off. UE-V, however, is live: open an application on one machine, change its settings, and then close it. Switch to a second machine and start the same application, and it will pick up the modified settings immediately.

The second major difference is that where roaming profiles copy almost everything, both files and settings, UE-V only replicates settings, and not all of them: the virtualized settings must match a template. There are pre-supplied templates for Office 2010, Internet Explorer, the built-in Windows applications, and basic system preferences like wallpapers and color schemes. UE-V includes a tool to generate new templates that monitors applications to see which files and registry locations they depend on.

App-V 5.0 has an improved Web-based management console, support for Windows 7 and Windows 8 features including the new “Windows To Go“, and a new facility for linking virtualized applications.

This is useful for applications such as Outlook 2010 and Lync. Outlook can show presence information from Lync—each user in Outlook gets an colored indicator to say if they’re offline, busy, or available, depending on their Lync status—but to do this, Outlook needs to be able to communicate with Lync. With prior versions of App-V, each application would be streamed to the user in its own virtual machine, precluding this kind of communication. With App-V 5.0, the related applications can be linked together and published together, enabling their interoperability.

Read the comments on this post

See the original post:
Microsoft updates desktop virtualization line-up with App-V 5, User Experience Virtualization

Variations of the Flashback trojan have reportedly infected more than half a million Macs around the globe, according to Russian antivirus company Dr. Web. The company made an announcement on Wednesday—first in Russian and later in English—about the growing Mac botnet, first claiming 550,000 infected Macs. Later in the day, however, Dr. Web malware analyst Sorokin Ivan posted to Twitter that the count had gone up to 600,000, with 274 bots even checking in from Cupertino, CA, where Apple’s headquarters are located.

We have been covering the Mac Flashback trojan since 2011, but the most recent variant from earlier this week targeted an unpatched Java vulnerability within Mac OS X. That is, it was unpatched (at the time) by Apple—Oracle had released a fix for the vulnerability in February of this year, but Apple didn’t send out a fix until earlier this week, after news began to spread about the latest Flashback variant.

Read the comments on this post

More here:
Flashback trojan reportedly controls half a million Macs and counting

Adventure Game Studio, with more than a decade of development behind it, is among the most successful game creation apps of all time. Countless excellent adventures emerge from its development community, but where to start? Lewis Denby picks the very best for your delectation. Pictured above is a Concurrence, an Another World-inspired platformer that shows the system’s good for more than point-and-click. [Rock Paper Shotgun]

View original post here:
Adventure Game Studio’s greatest hits