The black swallower ( Chiasmodon niger ), capable of eating 10 times its weight, is only one of the curious animals introduced to visitors at the American Museum of Natural History’s new Life At The Limits exhibition. Read the rest
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Deeply strange black swallower fish and other odd animals
the_newsbeagle writes The $10 million Tricorder X-prize is getting to the “put up or shut up” stage: The 10 finalists must turn in their working devices on June 1st for consumer testing. At SXSW last week, the finalist team Cloud DX showed off its prototype, which includes a wearable collar, a base station, a blood-testing stick, and a scanning wand. From the article: “The XPrize is partnering with the medical center at the University of California, San Diego on that consumer testing, since it requires recruiting more than 400 people with a variety of medical conditions. Grant Campany, director of the Tricorder XPrize, said he’s looking forward to getting those devices into real patients hands. ‘This will be a practical demonstration of what the future of medicine will be like, ‘ said Campany at that same SXSW talk, ‘so we can scale it up after competition.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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First Prototype of a Working Tricorder Unveiled At SXSW
itwbennett writes The U.S. Federal Communications Commission has fined Verizon $3.4 million over its failure to notify police and fire departments during a 911 service outage last year. Under the commission’s rules, Verizon and other carriers were required to notify emergency call centers of a six-hour outage that occurred in April. The outage involved multiple carriers and affected over 11 million people in seven states. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Feds Fine Verizon $3.4 Million Over 911 Service Outage Issues
Quantum computing could make complex calculations trivial in the future, but right now it’s fraught with problems . Consider one of them solved, though, in the shape of a new quantum error correction technique. Read more…
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New Error Correction Take Us a Step Closer to Quantum Computing
Encrypted comms company Silent Circle, one half of the SGP Technologies joint venture behind the pro-privacy Android smartphone Blackphone, has just announced it’s reached an agreement to buy out its hardware partner, Spanish smartphone maker Geeksphone. Read More
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With $50M Boost, Silent Circle Aims Blackphone At Enterprise Security
AmiMoJo writes On Monday, imageboard site 8chan’s “baphomet” subboard, an Internet destination known for hosting aggressive “doxing” posts, received a major history wipe the day after one of its users posted the personal information of a federal judge in the Silk Road case. A follow-up post by baphomet’s “Board Owner” account stated that “HW, ” a reference to site founder Frederick “hotwheels” Brennan, deleted “the SSN posts” and told the baphomet board founder, previously identified via an associated Twitter handle as Benjamin Biddix, to “lay low.” The same day baphomet’s “Board Owner” announced a “doxing for hire” service due to “running low on funds.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Notorious 8chan Board Has History Wiped After Federal Judge’s Doxing
An anonymous reader sends word that Rackspace has recovered from a severe distributed denial of service attack. “Over on the company’s Google+ page Rackspace warned of ‘intermittent periods of latency, packet loss, or connectivity failures when attempting to reach rackspace.com or subdomains within rackspace.com.’ The company’s status report later confirmed it had ‘… identified a UDP DDoS attack targeting the DNS servers in our IAD, ORD, and LON data centers [North Virigina, Chicago and London]. As a result of this issue, authoritative DNS resolution for any new request to the DNS servers began to fail in the affected data centers. In order to stabilize the issue, our teams placed the impacted DNS infrastructure behind mitigation services. This service is designed to protect our infrastructure, however, due to the nature of the event, a portion of legitimate traffic to our DNS infrastructure may be inadvertently blocked. Our teams are actively working to mitigate the attack and provide service stability.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Rackspace Restored After DDOS Takes Out DNS
My, this is beautiful. Artists Friedrich van Schoor and Tarek Mawad teamed up in this projection map installation to create a ‘bioluminescent forest’ . The entire forest glows with light, from the mushrooms to the trees to the leaves to the grounds to the insects. The darkness is transformed into a magical place. Read more…
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A glow in the dark forest is a magical and trippy place
Nature abhors a vacuum. Aristotle said that. Of course, he was talking about how nature has a tendency to fill empty spaces with stuff. In a way, the internet also abhors a vacuum, and the “downfall” of The Pirate Bay is just the latest example. Read more…
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The Pirate Bay Shutdown Hasn’t Slowed Piracy At All
crookedvulture writes The SSD Endurance Experiment previously covered on Slashdot has reached another big milestone: two freaking petabytes of writes. That’s an astounding total for consumer-grade drives rated to survive no more than a few hundred terabytes. Only two of the initial six subjects made it to 2PB. The Kingston HyperX 3K, Intel 335 Series, and Samsung 840 Series expired on the road to 1PB, while the Corsair Neutron GTX faltered at 1.2PB. The Samsung 840 Pro continues despite logging thousands of reallocated sectors. It has remained completely error-free throughout the experiment, unlike a second HyperX, which has suffered a couple of uncorrectable errors. The second HyperX is mostly intact otherwise, though its built-in compression tech has reduced the 2PB of host writes to just 1.4PB of flash writes. Even accounting for compression, the flash in the second HyperX has proven to be far more robust than in the first. That difference highlights the impact normal manufacturing variances can have on flash wear. It also illustrates why the experiment’s sample size is too small to draw definitive conclusions about the durability of specific models. However, the fact that all the drives far exceeded their endurance specifications bodes well for the endurance of consumer-grade SSDs in general. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Consumer-Grade SSDs Survive Two Petabytes of Writes