Microsoft Escapes Kaspersky's Top 10 Vulnerabilities List

An anonymous reader writes “Security firm Kaspersky has released its latest IT Threat Evolution report. There were some interesting findings in the report, as always, but the most interesting thing that stuck out was all the way at the bottom: ‘Microsoft products no longer feature among the Top 10 products with vulnerabilities. This is because the automatic updates mechanism has now been well developed in recent versions of Windows OS.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Microsoft Escapes Kaspersky's Top 10 Vulnerabilities List

Glow-In-The-Dark Smart Highways Coming To the Netherlands In 2013

An anonymous reader writes “The Netherlands is moving forward with plans to build ‘smart’ highways that can become more easily visible in the dark or communicate weather conditions to drivers. Work will begin as early as next year. ‘Special paint will also be used to paint markers like snowflakes across the road’s surface — when temperatures fall to a certain point, these images will become visible, indicating that the surface will likely be slippery. Roosegaarde says this technology has been around for years, on things like baby food — the studio has just up-scaled it. The first few hundred meters of glow in the dark, weather-indicating road will be installed in the province of Brabant in mid-2013, followed by priority induction lanes for electric vehicles, interactive lights that switch on as cars pass and wind-powered lights within the next five years.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Glow-In-The-Dark Smart Highways Coming To the Netherlands In 2013

New York Data Centers Battle Floods, Utility Outages

miller60 writes “At least three data center buildings in lower Manhattan are struggling with power problems amid widespread flooding and utility outages caused by Hurricane Sandy. Flooded basements at two sites took out diesel fuel pumps, leaving them unable to refuel generators on higher levels. One of these was Datagram, which knocked out Buzzfeed and the Gawker network of sites. At 111 8th Avenue, some tenants lost power when Equinix briefly experienced generator problems.” The NY Times has a running list of Sandy-related problems, including 5,700 more flight cancellations, 6 million people without power, rising water levels at a nuclear plant, official disaster declarations from President Obama, and a death toll of 38. On the upside, and despite the high water levels, the Nuclear Energy Institute was quick to point out that all 34 nuclear facilities in Sandy’s path made it through without problems. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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New York Data Centers Battle Floods, Utility Outages

Use Windows 8 as a Windows Home Server

Still not convinced you want to upgrade to Windows 8? Here’s one more tempting reason t do so: Windows 8 can actually be a great Windows Home Server replacement. It offers most of the same features for sharing, storing, and protecting lots of data on your network. More »

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Use Windows 8 as a Windows Home Server

The Awesome Control Rooms that Run the World

Every day, an army of computers and human operators toil in control rooms, providing electricity to a city, guiding planes across the sky, or searching for the Higgs-Boson. These rooms are all extremely important, whether they’re making breakthrough discoveries or just keeping the lights on. More »

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The Awesome Control Rooms that Run the World

There’s a New Version of iBooks with Synced Pages and Continuous Scrolling

Apple just announced a new version of iBooks. It’s got a continuous scrolling reading option, which is pretty great. It’s also got its own iCloud-enabled version of Whispersync, that will sync your current page across any device you’re reading on—iPhone, iPad, etc. You’ve also got more sharing options, like copying and sharing quotes. More »

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There’s a New Version of iBooks with Synced Pages and Continuous Scrolling

Amazon EBS Failure Brings Down Reddit, Imgur, Others

Several readers have sent word of a significant Amazon EBS outage. Quoting: “Amazon Web Services has confirmed that its Elastic Block Storage (EBS) service is experiencing degraded service, leading sites across the Internet to experience downtime, including Reddit, Imgur and many others. AWS confirmed on its status page at 2:11 p.m. ET that it is experiencing ‘degraded performance for a small number of EBS volumes.’ It says the issue is restricted to a single Availability Zone within the US-East-1 Region, which is in Northern Virginia. AWS later reported that its Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) and its Elastic Beanstalk application plaform also experienced failures on Monday afternoon.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Amazon EBS Failure Brings Down Reddit, Imgur, Others

Build an Arduino-Based Hotel Room Master Key Housed in a Dry Erase Marker

A few months back at the Black Hat Security conference Cody Brocious demonstrated how you can easiy open an Onity hotel room lock, the standard system used in many hotel chains, with an Arduino but it was bulky setup and comletely obvious if anyone saw him pull out a lot of electronics. Here’s how you can fit that system in a dry erase marker. More »

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Build an Arduino-Based Hotel Room Master Key Housed in a Dry Erase Marker