Slashdot Mirror

James Durie writes "The BBC have been setting light to Pigs to test theories about spontaneous human combustion. A touch gruesome actually. " Maybe I should have saved this for a weekend.

Paul Gill sent us a link to this BBC article where you can read about a scientist who got it right. Why bother with wearing computers when you can just implant them. Apparently he's doing this to show the 'sinister side' of technology.

A slew of you all wrote in saying that a year-end bug had been found in Windows 98. Well, it appears that Microsoft has confirmed the bug, stating that "a patch is being made".

Noel Maddy writes "BBC News has a report that a journalist was a target of a random search for pornography by H.M. Customs on entry into the U.K. Part of the search included hooking his laptop up to something to "scan the drive" -- apparently, it wouldn't work on his Apple computer, though."

This is an unsettling precedent, though. I may be just overly paranoid, but the first image that flashed into my mind as I read this article was trying to leave the U.S and being forced to remove any non-exportable or unapproved cryptography.

Like a lot of people, I keep an awful lot of my personal life on my PalmPilot and my laptop. They've become a surrogate memory for me. This precedent of random invasion worries me.

Paul Crowley wrote in to send us a link to a followup article on the 2048 bit teen encryption thing that we posted a bit ago. Talks about Slashdot a bit and about the problems with the article. I think the article is intended as an apology for the mistakes in the article. Refreshing honesty.

Apparently, for Windows 98 users, year 2000 will happen early, and every year; Alledgedly, Windows 98 leapt two days forward or one day back when the clock ticked past midnight on New Year's Eve, for every year attempted... I guess Windows dates must be coded in unary. Microsoft chairman Bill Gates will have ample oppurtunity to discuss this, and other complaints at his public deposition in the DOJ-Microsoft court case. Perhaps, the rumour of a Microsoft Unix with the Win32 API is not so far-fetched after all... Thanks to Edgar Villanueva and Rob Dyke for their contribution. Well, apparently Winix is an April fool's joke that I had never seen before. I guess it gives us an indication of "Spencer"'s newsworthyness. Also some slashdot readers have already tested the year wraparound bug, and declared it not to be there. Either the Year 2000 test tool has a bug, or it only occurs in the UK version. Anyone from the UK care to comment?

Apparently, for Windows 98 users, year 2000 will happen early, and every year; Alledgedly, Windows 98 leapt two days forward or one day back when the clock ticked past midnight on New Year's Eve, for every year attempted... I guess Windows dates must be coded in unary. Microsoft chairman Bill Gates will have ample oppurtunity to discuss this, and other complaints at his public deposition in the DOJ-Microsoft court case. Perhaps, the rumour of a Microsoft Unix with the Win32 API is not so far-fetched after all... Thanks to Edgar Villanueva and Rob Dyke for their contribution. Well, apparently Winix is an April fool's joke that I had never seen before. I guess it gives us an indication of "Spencer"'s newsworthyness. Also some slashdot readers have already tested the year wraparound bug, and declared it not to be there. Either the Year 2000 test tool has a bug, or it only occurs in the UK version. Anyone from the UK care to comment?

This one was sent in by JimBobJoe. Anyway, here is an article about a kid in the UK who wrote is own 2048 bit encryption software. I guess the US Govt won't have a problem with this, right? We didn't write it, a 17 year old kid did. More proof that 56bit encryption is plenty. Update Parkinson has spoken up and submitted a short reply to many of the comments appearing on these pages. Read on to see it. The following is a reply written by P. B. Parkinson

Dear Self confessed nerds,

I feel I aught to set the record straight on a number of issues. Firstly: the allegation that I'm crap at math. This is just wrong: and although I got a B grade at GCSE (16yr old exam) maths, I've already got two A grades at what is supposed to be an exam for 18 year old university hopefuls, Pure mathematics and Further mathematics. This was misrepresented.

Secondly, I don't feel to happy about having the strength of my Product cussed. UBE 98 uses RC4x, which I have proven to be the same strength as RC4: actually ladies and gentlemen, (and please don't tell me to read Sheier, 'cos I have) the algorithm is (almost) identical to RC4, the only difference being the way the keys are setup and 'used' during encryption. if anyone is interested (hoping that this may appease some of you, I'll be putting a file up on my website from the 15th which will be enciphered with UBE98 and will contain a short message. I'm not offering any reward, just the 'chance' of publically humiliating me.

Michel sent us this story where you can read an interesting formalization of something we already know:Some email domains are just 'cool'. @well.com is cool, @aol.com isn't. It's interesting to see the mainstream press trying to explain that sort of thing. (Note:Please do not beg for @slashdot.org addresses! The server is too slow, and I don't have time to administer accounts!)

This link to the BBC talks about how the US Pentagon has been accused of trying to hack into a "dolphin conservation group" group to gain information about how others might have used the mammals for military purposes.

The one and only Alan Cox sent us this article where you can read about the latest developments in UK Encrytion law. As you can well imagine, its not particularly happy news.

Ok, Justin sent me this link and I just had to post it. It discusses Prostitution in the penguin world, and well, I've been Raku Firing ceramic bowls since 8 this morning and I'm in just the frame of mind to think that this is the funniest thing since the invention of funny. Maybe its not, but I'm gonna post it anyway and then fire a couple more loads of bowls. Isn't clay fun?

The web has grown so much that even the best search-engines only cover a third of it. Although this might suggest that sites such as metacrawler would become more popular since they combine the results of many search-engines together, the result may be quite the opposite: sites such as devsearch which target a particular topic only. A full gory analysis is here.

LEGO is to integrate computer chips into their lego bricks. These intelligent bricks can be programmed by a home computer to make moving robots. This'll be great for teaching our kids programming. Who's doing the Linux port?

Dere sent us This link to another article on the ms/doj battle royale, but this one is from the BBC. This is one court case that has implications far outside of just the US.

jd writes "Scientists have decoded the mitochondrial DNA of the Woolly Mammoth. According to the article: 'the Mammoth was most closely related to the Asian elephant rather than the African Elephant. The three groups split from a common ancestor about six million years ago, with Asian elephants and mammoths diverging about half a million years later.' This work is tied into efforts by researchers to use DNA to analyze other extinct species, such as the cave bear, the Haast eagle and the American lion. The novel aspect of this latest work is that it involved stitching together almost 50 fragments of mtDNA in order to obtain the sequence as a whole."

jd writes "Scientists have decoded the mitochondrial DNA of the Woolly Mammoth. According to the article: 'the Mammoth was most closely related to the Asian elephant rather than the African Elephant. The three groups split from a common ancestor about six million years ago, with Asian elephants and mammoths diverging about half a million years later.' This work is tied into efforts by researchers to use DNA to analyze other extinct species, such as the cave bear, the Haast eagle and the American lion. The novel aspect of this latest work is that it involved stitching together almost 50 fragments of mtDNA in order to obtain the sequence as a whole."

jd writes "Scientists have decoded the mitochondrial DNA of the Woolly Mammoth. According to the article: 'the Mammoth was most closely related to the Asian elephant rather than the African Elephant. The three groups split from a common ancestor about six million years ago, with Asian elephants and mammoths diverging about half a million years later.' This work is tied into efforts by researchers to use DNA to analyze other extinct species, such as the cave bear, the Haast eagle and the American lion. The novel aspect of this latest work is that it involved stitching together almost 50 fragments of mtDNA in order to obtain the sequence as a whole."