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Domain: darksideprogramming.org
Stories and comments across the archive that link to darksideprogramming.org.
Stories · 7
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Drink Decaf and Die
jose parinas writes "Decaffeinated -- not caffeinated -- coffee may cause an increase in harmful LDL cholesterol by increasing a specific type of blood fat linked to the metabolic syndrome, hints a new study presented at the American Heart Association's Scientific Sessions 2005." -
The Microsoft Singularity
jose parinas writes ""Microsoft Research has published the first details of a wholly new operating system under development called Singularity, designed new from the ground up, built on a new language and designed with emphasis on dependability instead of performance."" -
Internet is Killing the Newspaper
jose parinas writes "MediaDailyNews is reporting that 2005 will go down as one of the worst newspaper years in history, and 2006 doesn't look promising. Online media is continuously generating more readership and ad dollars, but currently only accounts for 5% of total newspaper revenues." -
Airbus A380 Under Fire
jose parinas writes "The security of the Airbus A380 jetliner is questioned by a U.S. Engineer that faces arrest and bankruptcy in Austria. A year ago, Mangan told European aviation authorities that he believed there were problems with a computer chip on the Airbus A380, the biggest and costliest commercial airliner ever built." -
Practical Exploits of Broken MD5 Algorithm
jose parinas writes "A practical sample of an MD5 exploit can be found, with source code included,in codeproject, a site for .Net programmers. The intent of the demos is to demonstrate a very specific type of attack that exploits the inherent trust of an MD5 hash. It's sort of a semi-social engineering attack. At Microsoft, the MD5 hash functions are banned. The main problem is that the attack is directed to the distribution of software process, as you can understand reading the paper, Considered Harmful Someday. Some open source programs, like RPM, use MD5, and in many open source distributions MD5 is used as check sum." -
Black Hole in Search of a Home
jose parinas writes "Interesting news from the ESO observatory on Paranal about black holes that travel. From the article: 'For 19 of [the low redshift quasars], they found, as expected, that these super massive black holes are surrounded by a host galaxy. But when they studied the bright quasar HE0450-2958, located some 5 billion light-years away, they couldn't find evidence for an encircling galaxy. This, the astronomers suggest, may indicate a rare case of collision between a seemingly normal spiral galaxy and a much more exotic object harbouring a very massive black hole.'" More from the article: "Has the host galaxy been completely disrupted as a result of the collision? It is hard to imagine how that could happen. Has an isolated black hole captured gas while crossing the disc of a spiral galaxy? This would require very special conditions and would probably not have caused such a tremendous perturbation as is observed in the neighbouring galaxy. Another intriguing hypothesis is that the galaxy harbouring the black hole was almost exclusively made of dark matter." Update: 09/17 00:15 GMT by Z : Edited for clarity. -
Listening for Deuterium
jose parinas writes "Researchers at MIT made the first radio detection of deuterium, an atom that the scientists claim is key to understanding the beginning of the universe." It turns out the actual detection wasn't the key, but filtering out all of the RF 'pollution' produced by nearby gadgets.