For centuries, before refrigeration, an old Russian practice was to drop a frog into a bucket of milk to keep the milk from spoiling. In modern times, many believed that this was nothing more than an old wives’ tale . But researchers at Moscow State University, led by organic chemist Dr. Albert Lebedev, have shown that there could be some benefit to doing this, though of course in the end you’ll be drinking milk that a frog was in. Read more…
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How to Keep Milk from Spoiling Without Refrigeration
Daniel_Stuckey (2647775) writes “Finally, you don’t have to raise your voice over a group of whisperers in the New York Public Library to get a better view of its map collection. Actually, you don’t even need to visit the place at all. Over 20, 000 maps and cartographic works from the NYPL’s Lionel Pincus & Princess Firyal Map Division have been uploaded and made downloadable for the public. ‘We believe these maps have no known U.S. copyright restrictions, ‘ explains a blog post announcing the wholesale release of the library’s map collection. ‘It means you can have the maps, all of them if you want, for free, in high resolution. We’ve scanned them to enable their use in the broadest possible ways by the largest number of people.’ The NYPL is distributing the maps under Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication, which means you can do whatever you want with the maps.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
First time accepted submitter paddysteed writes “I go to secondary school in the UK. I went digging around the computers there and found that on the schools machines, there was a root CA from the school. I then suspected that the software they instruct windows users to install on their own hardware to gain access to the BYOD network installed the same certificate. I created a windows virtual machine and connected to the network the way that was recommended. Immediately afterwards I checked the list of root CA’s, and found my school’s. I thought the story posted a few days ago was bad, but what my school has done is install their certificate on people’s own machines — which I think is far worse. This basically allows them to intercept and modify any HTTPS traffic on their network. Considering this is a boarding school, and our only method of communicating to the outside world is over their network, I feel this is particularly bad. We were not told about this policy and we have not signed anything which would excuse it. I confronted the IT department and they initially denied everything. I left and within five minutes, the WiFi network was down then as quickly as it had gone down, it was back up. I went back and they confirmed that there was a mistake and they had ‘fixed’ it. They also told me that the risk was very low and the head of networks told me he was willing to bet his job on it. I asked them to instruct people to remove the bad certificate from their own machines, but they claimed this was unnecessary due to the very low risk. I want to take this further but to get the school’s management interested I will need to explain what has happened and why it is bad to non-technical people and provide evidence that what has been done is potentially illegal.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
An anonymous reader writes “Google today released Chrome version 32 for Windows, Mac, and Linux. The new version includes tab noise indicators, a new look for Windows 8 Metro mode, and automatic blocking of malware downloads. You can update to the latest release now using the browser’s built-in silent updater, or download it directly from google.com/chrome.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes “Shona Ghosh writes at PC Pro that the final deadline for Windows XP support in April 2014 will act as the starting pistol for developing new exploits as hackers reverse-engineer patches issued for Windows 7 or Windows 8 to scout for XP vulnerabilities. “The very first month that Microsoft releases security updates for supported versions of Windows, attackers will reverse-engineer those updates, find the vulnerabilities and test Windows XP to see if it shares [them], ” says Tim Rains, the director of Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing group. Microsoft says that XP shared 30 security holes with Windows 7 and Windows 8 between July 2012 and July 2013. Gregg Keizer says that if a major chunk of the world’s PCs remains tied to XP, as seems certain, Microsoft will face an unenviable choice: Stick to plan and put millions of customers at risk from malware infection, or backtrack from long-standing policies and proclamations.” (Read on for more.) Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
ericgoldman writes “People often feel passionately about fonts, but government decisions shouldn’t depend on what font people choose for their written submissions. In Massachusetts, a sex offender overturned the decision of a hearing officer after it was determined that (among other possible biases) the hearing officer posted to Facebook that he ‘can’t trust someone who drafts a letter in arial font!’ and ‘I might be biased. I think arial is inappropriate for most things.’ This is just the latest example of how social media rants by government workers are causing problems for the workers — and the people they deal with.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.