Tag: article

What Would Have Happened If Philae Were Nuclear Powered?

StartsWithABang writes After successfully landing on a comet with all 10 instruments intact, but failing to deploy its thrusters and harpoons to anchor onto the surface, Philae bounced, coming to rest in an area with woefully insufficient sunlight to keep it alive. After exhausting its primary battery, it went into hibernation, most likely never to wake again. We’ll always be left to wonder what might have been if it had functioned optimally, and given us years of data rather than just 60 hours worth. The thing is, it wouldn’t have needed to function optimally to give us years of data, if only it were better designed in one particular aspect: powered by Plutonium-238 instead of by solar panels. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

View article:
What Would Have Happened If Philae Were Nuclear Powered?

BitTorrent Unveils Sync 2.0

An anonymous reader writes BitTorrent today outlined the company’s plans for its file synchronization tool Sync. Next year, the company will launch Sync 2.0, finally taking the product out of beta, as well as three new paid Sync products. Ever since its debut, Sync has provided a wide variety of solutions to various problems, BitTorrent says, from distributing files across remote servers to sharing vacation photos. BitTorrent thus believes it needs to build three distinct products for each of these separate audiences, including a Pro version for $40 per year. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Continue Reading:
BitTorrent Unveils Sync 2.0

Millions of Spiders Seen In Mass Dispersal Event In Nova Scotia

Freshly Exhumed writes A bizarre and oddly beautiful display of spider webs have been woven across a large field along a walking trail in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Canada. “Well it’s acres and acres; it’s a sea of web, ” said Allen McCormick. Prof. Rob Bennett, an expert on spiders who works at the Royal British Columbia Museum in Victoria, BC, Canada, said tiny, sheet-web weaver spiders known as Erigoninae linyphiidae most likely left the webs. Bennett said the spiders cast a web net to catch the wind and float away in a process known as ballooning. The webs in the field are the spiders’ drag lines, left behind as they climb to the top of long grass to be whisked away by the wind. Bennett said it’s a mystery why these spiders take off en masse. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Original post:
Millions of Spiders Seen In Mass Dispersal Event In Nova Scotia

Court Rules Google’s Search Results Qualify As Free Speech

wabrandsma writes with this news from Ars Technica: The regulation of Google’s search results has come up from time to time over the past decade, and although the idea has gained some traction in Europe (most recently with “right to be forgotten” laws), courts and regulatory bodies in the U.S. have generally agreed that Google’s search results are considered free speech. That consensus was upheld last Thursday, when a San Francisco Superior Court judge ruled in favor of Google’s right to order its search results as it sees fit. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Visit site:
Court Rules Google’s Search Results Qualify As Free Speech

81% of Tor Users Can Be De-anonymized By Analysing Router Information

An anonymous reader writes A former researcher at Columbia University’s Network Security Lab has conducted research since 2008 indicating that traffic flow software included in network routers, notably Cisco’s ‘Netflow’ package, can be exploited to deanonymize 81.4% of Tor clients. Professor Sambuddho Chakravarty, currently researching Network Anonymity and Privacy at the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, uses a technique which injects a repeating traffic pattern into the TCP connection associated with an exit node, and then compares subsequent aberrations in network timing with the traffic flow records generated by Netflow (or equivalent packages from other router manufacturers) to individuate the ‘victim’ client. In laboratory conditions the success rate of this traffic analysis attack is 100%, with network noise and variations reducing efficiency to 81% in a live Tor environment. Chakravarty says: ‘it is not even essential to be a global adversary to launch such traffic analysis attacks. A powerful, yet non- global adversary could use traffic analysis methods [] to determine the various relays participating in a Tor circuit and directly monitor the traffic entering the entry node of the victim connection.’ Read more of this story at Slashdot.

More:
81% of Tor Users Can Be De-anonymized By Analysing Router Information

R. A. Montgomery, Creator of the "Choose Your Own Adventure" Books, Dead At 78

Dave Knott writes Raymond Almiran Montgomery, original publisher and author of the incredibly popular “Choose Your Own Adventure” book series for children, the 4th bestselling children’s series of all time, has died at the age of 78. In 1975, Montgomery founded a small press and when, in 1977, Ed Packard submitted an innovative book for young readers, “Sugarcane Island”, Montgomery immediately saw it for what it was: a role-playing game in book form. He leapt at the chance to publish it, and launched a series, writing the second book, “Journey Under The Sea”, himself. When Montgomery went through a divorce and sold his stake in the press to his ex-wife, he took the series, renamed as “Choose Your Own Adventure”, to Bantam. The books went on to sell more than 250 million copies across 230 titles in 40 languages. Montgomery’s interests also extended to new technology, adapting the series to the Atari console in 1984. He was also responsible for the Comic Creator software on Apple’s Macintosh computers. Montgomery died on November 9th. The cause of death was not disclosed. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

See the original post:
R. A. Montgomery, Creator of the "Choose Your Own Adventure" Books, Dead At 78

Why Are ISPs Removing Their Customers’ Email Encryption?

Recently, Verizon was caught tampering with its customer’s web requests to inject a tracking super-cookie . Another network-tampering threat to user safety has come to light from other providers: email encryption downgrade attacks. Read more…

More:
Why Are ISPs Removing Their Customers’ Email Encryption?

PC Cooling Specialist Zalman Goes Bankrupt Due To Fraud

An anonymous reader writes Zalman’s parent company Moneual’s CEO Harold Park, and vice presidents Scott Park and Won Duck-yeok, have apparently spent the last five years producing fraudulent documentation relating to the sales performance of Zalman. These documents inflated sales figures and export data for Zalman’s products. The reason? Bank loans. By increasing sales and exports Park and his associates were able to secure bank loans totaling $2.98 billion. Someone has finally realized what has been going on, though, triggering Zalman’s shares to be suspended on the stock market and the company filing for bankruptcy protection. The questions now turn to how this practice was allowed to continue unnoticed for so long and how the banks will go about getting their near $3 billion back. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

More:
PC Cooling Specialist Zalman Goes Bankrupt Due To Fraud

New Particle Collider Is One Foot Long

Jason Koebler writes The CERN particle collider is 17 miles long. China just announced a supercollider that is supposed to be roughly 49 miles long. The United States’ new particle collider is just under 12 inches long. What the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory’s new collider lacks in size, it makes up for by using plasma to accelerate particles more than 500 times faster than traditional methods. In a recent test published in Nature, Michael Litos and his team were able to accelerate bunches of electrons to near the speed of light within the tiny chamber.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Read More:
New Particle Collider Is One Foot Long

Windows 8 and 8.1 Pass 15% Market Share, Windows XP Drops Below 20% Mark

An anonymous reader writes Everyone is well-aware by now that Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 have not seen the impressive adoption rate of their predecessor. Yet the duo had a particularly good run last month, finally passing 15 percent market share together. Together, they owned 16.80 percent of the market at the end of October, up from 12.26 percent at the end of September. Windows XP meanwhile dropped a whopping 6.69 points to 17.18 percent. The biggest catalyst for these changes was most likely back to school sales in September, which are better reflected in the data after students use their new machines for a full month. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

More:
Windows 8 and 8.1 Pass 15% Market Share, Windows XP Drops Below 20% Mark