Slashdot Mirror

m.ducharme writes "Slashdot's recently departed editor and Fearless Leader muses about the security implications of Amazon's Silk, which uses Amazon's massive cloud computing services to provide 'pre-caching' for the new Fire devices." Another potential downside to bear in mind (depending on exactly how much Silk relies on the AWS infrastructure) is that it provides a single point of failure, and sometimes cloud services go down.

m.ducharme writes "Slashdot's recently departed editor and Fearless Leader muses about the security implications of Amazon's Silk, which uses Amazon's massive cloud computing services to provide 'pre-caching' for the new Fire devices." Another potential downside to bear in mind (depending on exactly how much Silk relies on the AWS infrastructure) is that it provides a single point of failure, and sometimes cloud services go down.

eldavojohn writes "The National Physical Laboratory has published research in Nature that could lead to redefining two of our most commonly used metrics. There's been a lot of trouble stemming from defining an exact Kilogram as some lump of platinum-iridium sitting in a glass case somewhere, so the proposal was put forth to study the quantum hall effect with different materials. Enter the Nobel prize winning, super strong, silicon usurping graphene. NPL now says you can add quantum resistance metrology to the list of graphene's many conquests as they say the quantum hall effect in graphene is 'very robust and easy to measure.' With this at their disposal, the Kilogram may be redefined in terms of h, the Planck constant, and the Ampere may be redefined in terms of e, the electron charge (alias Elementary charge or the charge of a proton). You can find the full paper here."

eldavojohn writes "The National Physical Laboratory has published research in Nature that could lead to redefining two of our most commonly used metrics. There's been a lot of trouble stemming from defining an exact Kilogram as some lump of platinum-iridium sitting in a glass case somewhere, so the proposal was put forth to study the quantum hall effect with different materials. Enter the Nobel prize winning, super strong, silicon usurping graphene. NPL now says you can add quantum resistance metrology to the list of graphene's many conquests as they say the quantum hall effect in graphene is 'very robust and easy to measure.' With this at their disposal, the Kilogram may be redefined in terms of h, the Planck constant, and the Ampere may be redefined in terms of e, the electron charge (alias Elementary charge or the charge of a proton). You can find the full paper here."

eldavojohn writes "The National Physical Laboratory has published research in Nature that could lead to redefining two of our most commonly used metrics. There's been a lot of trouble stemming from defining an exact Kilogram as some lump of platinum-iridium sitting in a glass case somewhere, so the proposal was put forth to study the quantum hall effect with different materials. Enter the Nobel prize winning, super strong, silicon usurping graphene. NPL now says you can add quantum resistance metrology to the list of graphene's many conquests as they say the quantum hall effect in graphene is 'very robust and easy to measure.' With this at their disposal, the Kilogram may be redefined in terms of h, the Planck constant, and the Ampere may be redefined in terms of e, the electron charge (alias Elementary charge or the charge of a proton). You can find the full paper here."

eldavojohn writes "The National Physical Laboratory has published research in Nature that could lead to redefining two of our most commonly used metrics. There's been a lot of trouble stemming from defining an exact Kilogram as some lump of platinum-iridium sitting in a glass case somewhere, so the proposal was put forth to study the quantum hall effect with different materials. Enter the Nobel prize winning, super strong, silicon usurping graphene. NPL now says you can add quantum resistance metrology to the list of graphene's many conquests as they say the quantum hall effect in graphene is 'very robust and easy to measure.' With this at their disposal, the Kilogram may be redefined in terms of h, the Planck constant, and the Ampere may be redefined in terms of e, the electron charge (alias Elementary charge or the charge of a proton). You can find the full paper here."

angry tapir writes "While the Kindle Fire tablet consumed much of the focus at Amazon's launch event Wednesday in New York, the company also showed off a bit of potentially radical software technology as well, the new browser for the Fire, called Silk. Silk is different from other browsers because it can be configured to let Amazon's cloud service do much of the work assembling complex Web pages. The result is that users may experience much faster load times for Web pages, compared to other mobile devices, according to the company."

eldavojohn writes "As a web developer in the 'Agile' era, I find myself making (or recognizing) more and more important decisions being made in developing for the web. Scalability Rules cemented and codified a lot of things I had suspected or picked up from blogs but failed to give much more thought to and had difficulty defending as a member of a team. A simple example is that I knew state is bad if unneeded but I couldn't quite define why. Scalability Rules provided this confidence as each of the fifty rules is broken down in a chapter that is divided into what, when, how, why and key takeaways. A strength of the book is that these rules cover all aspects of web development; but that became a double edged sword as I struggled through some rules meant for managers or technical operators." Read below for the rest of eldavojohn's review. Scalability Rules: 50 Principles for Scaling Web Sites author Martin L. Abbot and Michael T. Fisher pages 272 publisher Addison-Wesley Professional rating 8/10 reviewer eldavojohn ISBN 978-0321753885 summary 50 Principles for Scaling Web Sites You might recognize the authors as two of the three partners of AKF Partners which means that the book pushes a lot of their concepts like the AKF Cube. A bonus is that they have a very long list of clients and aren't afraid to remind the reader that they have consulted to hundreds of companies so when they say they see these rules solving problems frequently, there's weight to that. Also, they have two books but don't confuse Scalability Rules with The Art of Scalability as the latter focuses on people, processes and technology instead of the rules of scaling.

First off this book gives you a primer of rules for you to start with depending on whether you are mostly a manager, software developer or technical operations personnel. I'll concentrate on the specifics of the software developer chapter and summarize the others at the end of this review. Also note that aside from some SQL, I only saw PHP code in this book. Luckily there's only a handful of snippets presented and they are easy to follow. Additionally each chapter ends with solid references (usually online resources) to back up the claims listed in those sets of rules.

The first chapter is devoted to reducing the equation and focuses on removing needless complexity from your solution. You can find this chapter here if you want to see how the layout looks. They give a lot of solid reasons for this and also a lot of good examples like understanding what your users care about. Why build a prompt to export a blog post as a PDF if 99% of the users don't care about it? Next up they say the rule to design to scale means designing for 20x capacity, implementing for 3x capacity and deploying to 1.5x capacity. A strength of the book are the grids that illustrate what is low, medium or high cost and impact through the chapters. Every time they discuss options at different parts of the solution development process, the user is given a chart to understand why. The next rule stresses that you can usually identify 80% of your benefit achieved from 20% of the work (80-20 rule). Rule 4 is strangely specific and implores the reader to simply reduce DNS lookups. However — and this is the first of many — they remind the reader that this rule must be balanced with putting your system all on one server just to reduce DNS lookups. Such a strategy can result in that becoming a choke point. Rule 5 quite simply instructs the reader to use as few objects as possible in your webpage.

The final rule of chapter one is the first one I disagree with in the book. The rule says "Don't mix the vendor networking gear." And this goes against every fiber of my being. Why even have networking standards if you are not to mix the vendor networking gear? Looking to upgrade one component? Better stick to brand X no matter how crappy they have become. This results in being nickeled and dimed and vendor lockin. If scalability is your sole goal than perhaps this is sound instructions. But I cannot understand how anyone would indicate lockin to a vendor — especially in today's networking gear.

Chapter two is incredibly short but potent. It covers some basic database concepts like why ACID properties of databases make them difficult to split. This chapter is spot on and calls upon the AKF cube for dimensions of scalability. Three dimensions are: You can clone things, split different things and split similar things (like by country region). This cube reappears throughout the book and it should be noted that the book does a good job of giving examples of when each dimension is a good choice for scaling and when it is a bad choice compared to the other two. In my line of work, massive scaling solutions have implemented all three.

Skipping to the next developer chapter on not duplicating your work, the text ranged from the incredibly obvious "Don't double check your work" to relaxing temporal constraints. The chapter is short like chapter two and didn't offer me a whole lot. A third rule was again oddly specific in saying not to do redirects and even getting down into the very fine specifics of what HTTP codes are and how they affect your response times.

The next chapter for developers is chapter ten on avoiding or distributing state. Rule 40 actually came in useful at my job as it simply states "Strive for Statelessness." There was an easy solution to a problem in one of our projects that involved storing an object in the session to keep track of what was being displayed to the user. Having read the book, I instead made this web application nearly stateless (except user authentication and the like). Later on, as we started testing the application in multi-tabbed browsing and users began opening many search tabs and viewed several objects at once to compare them, I was glad that I had not gone down this path. Doesn't have much to do with scalability but I think all web developers should read this chapter as it really does pay to avoid state when possible.

As the rules grew closer to 50, they lost their potency. The authors did a good job of trying to put a bit of ranking in the appearance to these rules. The final developer chapter on asynchronous communication and message buses is probably the most specific and was the least useful for me. While all the rules in this chapter are true, they again border on the banal with examples like "Avoid Overcrowding Your Message Bus."

Having read this book cover to cover, it is a very short book with extremely succinct and organized summaries (the final chapter is a short review of each rule). The manager and operations chapters didn't really do a lot for me overall but would occasionally have very interesting chapters that opened up a lot of the logic behind content delivery services to me. Occasionally I would take slight issue with some rules but the most egregious rule I read was Rule 28 "Don't Rely on QA to Find Mistakes" and then the chapter opens with calling the title of this rule "ugly and slightly misleading and controversial." Because it is and could probably be replaced with another sentence from the chapter: "You can't test quality into your system." Why rely on sensational headlines when I'm already holding your book? I think this book would have been a solid 9/10 if not for this oddity in the large rule set.

I've given each of these rules a decent amount of thought and will keep them at the back of my mind as I write code in an agile environment. Mistakes made early on can be very costly in scaling terms. This book will definitely be kept around at work when I need a solid argument for those design decisions that might take more work but save in the future when it needs to scale.

You can purchase Scalability Rules: 50 Principles for Scaling Web Sites from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

eldavojohn writes "As a web developer in the 'Agile' era, I find myself making (or recognizing) more and more important decisions being made in developing for the web. Scalability Rules cemented and codified a lot of things I had suspected or picked up from blogs but failed to give much more thought to and had difficulty defending as a member of a team. A simple example is that I knew state is bad if unneeded but I couldn't quite define why. Scalability Rules provided this confidence as each of the fifty rules is broken down in a chapter that is divided into what, when, how, why and key takeaways. A strength of the book is that these rules cover all aspects of web development; but that became a double edged sword as I struggled through some rules meant for managers or technical operators." Read below for the rest of eldavojohn's review. Scalability Rules: 50 Principles for Scaling Web Sites author Martin L. Abbot and Michael T. Fisher pages 272 publisher Addison-Wesley Professional rating 8/10 reviewer eldavojohn ISBN 978-0321753885 summary 50 Principles for Scaling Web Sites You might recognize the authors as two of the three partners of AKF Partners which means that the book pushes a lot of their concepts like the AKF Cube. A bonus is that they have a very long list of clients and aren't afraid to remind the reader that they have consulted to hundreds of companies so when they say they see these rules solving problems frequently, there's weight to that. Also, they have two books but don't confuse Scalability Rules with The Art of Scalability as the latter focuses on people, processes and technology instead of the rules of scaling.

First off this book gives you a primer of rules for you to start with depending on whether you are mostly a manager, software developer or technical operations personnel. I'll concentrate on the specifics of the software developer chapter and summarize the others at the end of this review. Also note that aside from some SQL, I only saw PHP code in this book. Luckily there's only a handful of snippets presented and they are easy to follow. Additionally each chapter ends with solid references (usually online resources) to back up the claims listed in those sets of rules.

The first chapter is devoted to reducing the equation and focuses on removing needless complexity from your solution. You can find this chapter here if you want to see how the layout looks. They give a lot of solid reasons for this and also a lot of good examples like understanding what your users care about. Why build a prompt to export a blog post as a PDF if 99% of the users don't care about it? Next up they say the rule to design to scale means designing for 20x capacity, implementing for 3x capacity and deploying to 1.5x capacity. A strength of the book are the grids that illustrate what is low, medium or high cost and impact through the chapters. Every time they discuss options at different parts of the solution development process, the user is given a chart to understand why. The next rule stresses that you can usually identify 80% of your benefit achieved from 20% of the work (80-20 rule). Rule 4 is strangely specific and implores the reader to simply reduce DNS lookups. However — and this is the first of many — they remind the reader that this rule must be balanced with putting your system all on one server just to reduce DNS lookups. Such a strategy can result in that becoming a choke point. Rule 5 quite simply instructs the reader to use as few objects as possible in your webpage.

The final rule of chapter one is the first one I disagree with in the book. The rule says "Don't mix the vendor networking gear." And this goes against every fiber of my being. Why even have networking standards if you are not to mix the vendor networking gear? Looking to upgrade one component? Better stick to brand X no matter how crappy they have become. This results in being nickeled and dimed and vendor lockin. If scalability is your sole goal than perhaps this is sound instructions. But I cannot understand how anyone would indicate lockin to a vendor — especially in today's networking gear.

Chapter two is incredibly short but potent. It covers some basic database concepts like why ACID properties of databases make them difficult to split. This chapter is spot on and calls upon the AKF cube for dimensions of scalability. Three dimensions are: You can clone things, split different things and split similar things (like by country region). This cube reappears throughout the book and it should be noted that the book does a good job of giving examples of when each dimension is a good choice for scaling and when it is a bad choice compared to the other two. In my line of work, massive scaling solutions have implemented all three.

Skipping to the next developer chapter on not duplicating your work, the text ranged from the incredibly obvious "Don't double check your work" to relaxing temporal constraints. The chapter is short like chapter two and didn't offer me a whole lot. A third rule was again oddly specific in saying not to do redirects and even getting down into the very fine specifics of what HTTP codes are and how they affect your response times.

The next chapter for developers is chapter ten on avoiding or distributing state. Rule 40 actually came in useful at my job as it simply states "Strive for Statelessness." There was an easy solution to a problem in one of our projects that involved storing an object in the session to keep track of what was being displayed to the user. Having read the book, I instead made this web application nearly stateless (except user authentication and the like). Later on, as we started testing the application in multi-tabbed browsing and users began opening many search tabs and viewed several objects at once to compare them, I was glad that I had not gone down this path. Doesn't have much to do with scalability but I think all web developers should read this chapter as it really does pay to avoid state when possible.

As the rules grew closer to 50, they lost their potency. The authors did a good job of trying to put a bit of ranking in the appearance to these rules. The final developer chapter on asynchronous communication and message buses is probably the most specific and was the least useful for me. While all the rules in this chapter are true, they again border on the banal with examples like "Avoid Overcrowding Your Message Bus."

Having read this book cover to cover, it is a very short book with extremely succinct and organized summaries (the final chapter is a short review of each rule). The manager and operations chapters didn't really do a lot for me overall but would occasionally have very interesting chapters that opened up a lot of the logic behind content delivery services to me. Occasionally I would take slight issue with some rules but the most egregious rule I read was Rule 28 "Don't Rely on QA to Find Mistakes" and then the chapter opens with calling the title of this rule "ugly and slightly misleading and controversial." Because it is and could probably be replaced with another sentence from the chapter: "You can't test quality into your system." Why rely on sensational headlines when I'm already holding your book? I think this book would have been a solid 9/10 if not for this oddity in the large rule set.

I've given each of these rules a decent amount of thought and will keep them at the back of my mind as I write code in an agile environment. Mistakes made early on can be very costly in scaling terms. This book will definitely be kept around at work when I need a solid argument for those design decisions that might take more work but save in the future when it needs to scale.

You can purchase Scalability Rules: 50 Principles for Scaling Web Sites from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

theodp writes "GeekWire reports that Microsoft and Samsung just announced a patent licensing agreement that gives Samsung legal coverage for its use of Google's Android OS in its smartphones. Under the deal, which covers both mobile phones and tablets, Microsoft says it will receive unspecified royalties for every Android device that Samsung sells. Microsoft previously struck a similar patent deal with HTC, under which Microsoft is reportedly receiving $5 for every Android handset that HTC sells. This latest deal leaves Motorola Mobility, with which Microsoft is currently in litigation, as the only major Android smartphone manufacturer in the U.S. without a license to Microsoft's patent portfolio."

theodp writes "GeekWire reports that Microsoft and Samsung just announced a patent licensing agreement that gives Samsung legal coverage for its use of Google's Android OS in its smartphones. Under the deal, which covers both mobile phones and tablets, Microsoft says it will receive unspecified royalties for every Android device that Samsung sells. Microsoft previously struck a similar patent deal with HTC, under which Microsoft is reportedly receiving $5 for every Android handset that HTC sells. This latest deal leaves Motorola Mobility, with which Microsoft is currently in litigation, as the only major Android smartphone manufacturer in the U.S. without a license to Microsoft's patent portfolio."

In his first accepted submission, lukemartinez sends in an excerpt from a ZDNet article on continuing developments about Microsoft's UEFI secure boot requirements: "The Linux Australia community began petitioning the ACCC this week after Microsoft aired plans to mandate the enabling of Unified Extensible Firmware Interface's secure boot feature for devices bearing the 'Designed for Windows 8' logo. This means that any software or hardware that is to run on the firmware will need to be signed by Microsoft or the original equipment manufacturer (OEM) to be able to execute. This would make it impossible to install alternative operating systems like Linux..." Delimeter has further information on the petititions, and Matthew Garret recently posted a follow-up to Microsoft's response to the concerns about secure boot, calling them out on their misinformation.

PolygamousRanchKid writes with an article in CNet about yet more dismal news for MeeGo. Quoting the article: "Like the Moblin operating system before it, Linux-based MeeGo will will be merged out of existence. MeeGo will become Tizen, Intel said today. 'Intel joined Linux Foundation and LiMo Foundation in support of Tizen, a new Linux-based open source software platform for multiple device categories,' the company said in a statement. 'Tizen builds upon the strengths of both LiMo and MeeGo and Intel will be working with our MeeGo partners to help them transition to Tizen,' Intel said. The initial release of Tizen is expected in Q1 2012, enabling the first devices in the market mid-2012..." PolygamousRanchKid adds "It seems one of those strengths is not actually making it into a product on the market yet." This on the heels of Nokia shipping the N9 (which is actually running a weird Maemo/Meego hybrid).

angry tapir writes "Australian academic supercomputing consortium iVEC has acquired another major supercomputer, Fornax, to be based at the University of Western Australia, to further the country's ability to conduct data-intensive research. The SGI GPU-based system, also known as iVEC@UWA, is made up of 96 nodes, each containing two 6-core Intel Xeon X5650 CPUs, an NVIDIA Tesla C2050 GPU, 48 GB RAM and 7TB of storage. All up, the system has 1152 cores, 96 GPUs and an additional dedicated 500TB fabric attached storage-based global filesystem. The system is a boost to the Australian-NZ bid to host the Square Kilometer Array radio telescope."

We've been following the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement for over three years, from its secretive beginnings, to the controversy and debate that followed, and to the document it eventually evolved into. Now, Japan has announced that the agreement will finally be signed on Saturday during a ceremony that follows an anti-piracy symposium on Friday. "The negotiation has been carried out among Australia, Canada, the European Union and its Member States, Japan, the Republic of Korea, Mexico, Morocco, New Zealand, Singapore, Switzerland, and the United States, and reached a general agreement at the negotiation meeting held in Japan in October 2010, followed by the completion of technical and translation work in April 2011. ... The signing ceremony will be attended by the representatives of all the participants in the ACTA negotiations, and those that have completed relevant domestic processes will sign the agreement. The agreement is open for signature until May 1, 2013."

We've been following the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement for over three years, from its secretive beginnings, to the controversy and debate that followed, and to the document it eventually evolved into. Now, Japan has announced that the agreement will finally be signed on Saturday during a ceremony that follows an anti-piracy symposium on Friday. "The negotiation has been carried out among Australia, Canada, the European Union and its Member States, Japan, the Republic of Korea, Mexico, Morocco, New Zealand, Singapore, Switzerland, and the United States, and reached a general agreement at the negotiation meeting held in Japan in October 2010, followed by the completion of technical and translation work in April 2011. ... The signing ceremony will be attended by the representatives of all the participants in the ACTA negotiations, and those that have completed relevant domestic processes will sign the agreement. The agreement is open for signature until May 1, 2013."

New submitter person46 writes "Bethesda's lawsuit against Mojang, developers of Minecraft, is going to court. As you may recall, Bethesda is claiming copyright infringement over the title of Mojang's upcoming CCG/board game Scrolls. Bethesda claims that the name and game concept are too similar to their well-known RPG franchise The Elder Scrolls. '[C]ourt documents show that Bethesda lawyers plan to use comments on Scrolls articles and videos from around the web to show how people will confuse Scrolls with The Elder Scrolls. He also added that they've captured screenshots of Scrolls' trailer as a way of showing how Mojang has copied Bethesda because both Skyrim and Scrolls contain mountains.' Mojang founder Notch had offered to settle the dispute with a friendly game of Quake 3, but apparently Bethesda wasn't up for that."

New submitter person46 writes "Bethesda's lawsuit against Mojang, developers of Minecraft, is going to court. As you may recall, Bethesda is claiming copyright infringement over the title of Mojang's upcoming CCG/board game Scrolls. Bethesda claims that the name and game concept are too similar to their well-known RPG franchise The Elder Scrolls. '[C]ourt documents show that Bethesda lawyers plan to use comments on Scrolls articles and videos from around the web to show how people will confuse Scrolls with The Elder Scrolls. He also added that they've captured screenshots of Scrolls' trailer as a way of showing how Mojang has copied Bethesda because both Skyrim and Scrolls contain mountains.' Mojang founder Notch had offered to settle the dispute with a friendly game of Quake 3, but apparently Bethesda wasn't up for that."

_xeno_ writes "It's taken a year since Final Fantasy XIV launched to what can at best be called unfavorable reviews, but Square Enix CEO Yoichi Wada is finally willing to admit that the (still subscription-free) MMO 'greatly damaged' the entire Final Fantasy brand. Despite this damage, Wada said Square Enix will continue to work on 'reviving' the game, with an upcoming patch promising to finally introduce such series staples as chocobos and airships. Even so, there's still no word on the PS3 release, which was delayed until the game was 'fixed,' nor is there any sign that Square Enix feels the game will be worth a subscription fee any time soon."

An anonymous reader writes "Michael Geist has followed up a recent release of internal government talking points on copyright with the full, internal clause-by-clause analysis of Bill C-32. A new copyright bill is expected as soon as this week and the government document confirms there is no defense to violations of the digital lock rules, noting 'a contravention of this prohibition is not an infringement of copyright and the defenses to infringement of copyright are not defenses to these prohibitions.' The government's own words on the digital lock provisions confirm that they may be unconstitutional since they fall outside the boundaries of copyright." Basically, if you break DRM even without violating copyright in the process you can still be held liable, and from this any defense based on copyright law (fair use, etc.) is not valid in such cases. On the flipside, several legal experts think that makes those provisions of the law less likely to stand up in court.

Trailrunner7 writes with an excerpt from an article in Threatpost: "Continuing its legal assault on botnet operators and the hosting companies that the criminals use for their activities, Microsoft has announced new actions against a group of people it contends are responsible for the operation of the Kelihos botnet. The company has also helped to take down the botnet itself and says that Kelihos's operators were using it not only to send out spam and steal personal information but also for some more nefarious purposes."

judgecorp writes "The patent dispute between Samsung and Apple has finally boiled down to clear understandable terms. Samsung says Apple has not been paying it royalties for use of patented 3G technology. Apple says Samsung smuggled that technology into the 3G standards, disclosing its IP demands later. The Dutch court will rule on 14 October." The issue at hand now seems to be whether Apple already has a license to the patents under the 3G "Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory" requirements for patented technology used in the standard. If Samsung really believes Apple needs a separate license, when can we expect them to sue everyone else?

An anonymous reader writes "Over the weekend, self-proclaimed hacker Nik Cubrilovic accused Facebook of tracking its users even if they log out of the social network. The company responded by denying the claims and offering an explanation as to why its cookies behave the way they do. Now, Cubrilovic says Facebook has made changes to the logout process, and detailed what each cookie is responsible for."

eldavojohn writes "Researchers at Purdue University's Birck Nanotechnology Center have released news of a proof of concept new ferroelectric transistor random access memory or 'FeTRAM.' This new technology is nonvolatile and the researchers claim it could use up to 99% less energy than current flash memory. Unlike most FeRAM technology that uses a capacitor, FeTRAM provides nondestructive readout by storing information using a ferroelectric transistor instead. From the article: 'The new technology also is compatible with industry manufacturing processes for complementary metal oxide semiconductors, or CMOS, used to produce computer chips. It has the potential to replace conventional memory systems.' So if they get this into production, you might not have to worry about your laptop cooking your genitals. They've been published in ACS (paywalled) and the professor leading the research has many patents filed relating to transistor nanotechnology."

An anonymous reader writes "The News-Gazette has an article about the troubled Blue Waters supercomputer project, providing some new information about why IBM and the University of Illinois parted ways back in August. Quoting: 'More than three dozen changes, most suggested by IBM, would have delayed the Blue Waters project by a year ... The requested changes caused friction as early as December 2010, eight months before IBM pulled out, leaving the project to look for a new vendor for the supercomputer. Documents released under the Freedom of Information Act show Big Blue and the Big U asserting their rights in lengthy and increasingly testy, but always polite, language. In the documents, IBM suggested that if changes were not made, the project would become overly expensive.'"

An anonymous reader writes "An Australian IT security company, Command Five Pty Ltd, has just released a detailed analysis (PDF) of the recent SK Communications hack in which the personal details of up to 35 million users were stolen. This new analysis gives details of the attackers' malicious infrastructure and contains as-yet unreported technical details of the malware used in the attack (including the fact that it has the capability to sniff raw network packets on infected machines). The report also identifies links with other malware and malicious infrastructure, demonstrating that the attack is likely to be part of a broader concerted effort by well organized attackers."

coondoggie writes "U.S. Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY) sent a letter to the Federal Trade Commission to get the agency to investigate recent changes navigation and emergency services company OnStar made to its privacy practices. Schumer said, 'By tracking drivers even after they’ve cancelled their service, OnStar is attempting one of the most brazen invasions of privacy in recent memory. I urge OnStar to abandon this policy and for FTC to immediately launch a full investigation to determine whether the company’s actions constitute an unfair trade practice.'"

astroengine writes "The first exoplanet ever to be directly imaged by the Hubble space telescope may not exist. In 2008, the world was in awe of the famous 'Eye of Sauron' image of the star Fomalhaut's dusty ring — plus a slowly moving object that was identified as Fomalhaut b, a gas giant world approximately three times the mass of Jupiter. However, due to a strange orbital misstep detected between 2008 and 2009 photographs, the validity of Fomalhaut b's detection is being questioned, generating some controversy in the exoplanet community."

A few weeks back, we posted a story here that described Koomey's Law, which (in the spirit of Moore's Law) identifies a long-standing trend in computer technology. While Moore's prediction centers on the transistor density of microprocessors, Jonathan Koomey focuses instead on computing efficiency — in a nutshell, computing power per watt, rather than only per square nanometer. In particular, he asserts that the energy efficiency of computing doubles every 1.5 years. (He points out that calling this a "law" isn't his idea, or his doing — but it's sure a catchy turn of phrase.) Koomey has agreed to respond to your questions about his research and conclusions in the world of computing efficiency. Please observe the Slashdot interview guidelines: ask as many questions as you want, but please keep them to one per comment.

A few weeks back, we posted a story here that described Koomey's Law, which (in the spirit of Moore's Law) identifies a long-standing trend in computer technology. While Moore's prediction centers on the transistor density of microprocessors, Jonathan Koomey focuses instead on computing efficiency — in a nutshell, computing power per watt, rather than only per square nanometer. In particular, he asserts that the energy efficiency of computing doubles every 1.5 years. (He points out that calling this a "law" isn't his idea, or his doing — but it's sure a catchy turn of phrase.) Koomey has agreed to respond to your questions about his research and conclusions in the world of computing efficiency. Please observe the Slashdot interview guidelines: ask as many questions as you want, but please keep them to one per comment.

surewouldoutlaw writes "After the astonishing news from CERN that the OPERA experiment had detected neutrinos traveling faster than light speed, challenging Einstein's theory of special relativity, there has been some skepticism over the results. Now Fermilab, near Chicago, has announced it will attempt to replicate the experimental results within four to six months."

fph il quozientatore writes "Mariastella Gelmini, the Italian minister of Public Education and Scientific Research, complimented the researchers for the recent (supposed) discovery of faster-than-light neutrinos. Her press release mentions that Italy funded the construction of a 'tunnel between the CERN [in Geneva] and Gran Sasso [the labs in Central Italy].' Google maps reports the distance between the two labs as over 900km — but of course once the tunnel is open to traffic the trip will be much faster."

Earlier in the week, we posted news of a vulnerability discovered in virtually all websites secured with theoretically outdated (but widespread) versions of SSL and TLS encryption. Luckily for all non-nefarious users, this vulnerability (called BEAST, short for Browser Exploit Against SSL/TLS) was discovered and disclosed by researchers Thai Duong and Juliano Rizzo, and browser makers are pushing out changes to nullify it. Many systems, though, will remain unpatched for a long time. Nick Mathewson (nickm) of the Tor project has posted an explanation of why Tor traffic, as he understands the attack, remains safe. As a side benefit for those of us who aren't security experts, his description explains in plain language just what the danger is.

An earlier report that debris from the recently deorbited UARS satellite had landed in Canada may have been premature. Apparently, the picture of when (and therefore where) the satellite deorbited is back to being clear as mud. Most likely, says NASA, the debris will never be found, but is thought to have landed in the Pacific Ocean. If you're an optimist interested in finding your very own piece of space debris, though, you might be interested in this map based on various re-entry scenarios (hat tip to Robert Woodcock); in the U.S., the Northwest is your best bet.

New York's had its turn; now, an anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from eWeek Europe: "Financial traders and law firms are set to benefit from a new low-latency network between London and Hong Kong, which can conduct data on a round trip from Europe to Asia in around 176 milliseconds. The cable network, run by UK-based trading technology company BSO Network Solutions, has been in place for some time, but previously had to route around large parts of Russia, due to difficulties laying fibre in that country. However, a new lower latency and higher availability 'Transit Mongolia' connection has helped to reduce the time of a round trip by more than 20 milliseconds during the last 12 months."

An anonymous reader writes "Currently, Facebook does not notify you when someone unfriends you on the social network. That may soon change with the upcoming Facebook Timeline feature, which will soon replace your current Facebook profile. Unless Facebook changes this, you can actually see who has unfriended you during any point in time while you've been on the social network."

First time accepted submitter JimmyQS writes "The Cornell Creative Machines Lab, which brought us chatbots debating God and unicorns, has developed Endlessforms.com, a site using evolutionary algorithms and crowdsourcing to design objects that can be 3D printed in materials such as silver, steel or silicone. MIT's Technology Review says 'The rules EndlessForms uses to generate objects and their variants resemble those of developmental biology — the study of how DNA instructions unfold to create an entire living organism. [The Media Lab's Mediated Matter research group director Neri Oxman notes] that this could ultimately have an impact on design similar to the impact that blogs and social media have had on journalism, opening the field to the general public.' The New Scientist has a quick video tour."

snydeq writes "Recent announcements from Google and Intel appear to have JavaScript headed toward a crossroads, as Google seeks to replace the lingua franca of the client-side Web with Dart and Intel looks to extend it with River Trail. What seems clear, however, is that as 'developers continue to ask more and more of JavaScript, its limitations are thrown into sharp relief,' raising the question, 'Will the Web development community continue to work to make JavaScript a first-class development platform, despite its failings? Or will it take the "nuclear option" and abandon it for greener pastures? The answer seems to be a little of both.'"

snydeq writes "Recent announcements from Google and Intel appear to have JavaScript headed toward a crossroads, as Google seeks to replace the lingua franca of the client-side Web with Dart and Intel looks to extend it with River Trail. What seems clear, however, is that as 'developers continue to ask more and more of JavaScript, its limitations are thrown into sharp relief,' raising the question, 'Will the Web development community continue to work to make JavaScript a first-class development platform, despite its failings? Or will it take the "nuclear option" and abandon it for greener pastures? The answer seems to be a little of both.'"

New submitter therealobsideus tips news that DISH Network has seized upon the uncertainty surrounding Netflix by taking the opportunity to roll out a Blockbuster-branded service for streaming movies and TV shows as well as renting media through the mail. Quoting Mashable: "The service, Dish Network with BlockBuster Movie Pass, is not a direct Netflix competitor per se. Instead, it’s a $10 monthly add-on for existing Dish Network subscribers that will offer them access to DVD and Blu-ray — as well as video game — rentals by mail, along with access to streaming movies and TV shows. It will debut on Oct. 1 and be accompanied by a big advertising campaign. In other words, this is a mashup of BlockBuster’s existing mail and online services with Dish Network’s current video-on-demand service. For Dish Network subscribers, this is a great deal. But we’re scratching our heads to find the value for everyone else. Dish does say it has plans to offer services for non-Dish Network subscribers."

CSHARP123 writes "A few days ago, Red Hat employee Matthew Garrett speculated that OEM machines shipping with copies of Windows 8 may lock out support for Linux installations. Garrett highlighted Microsoft's new Secure Build OEM requirements for Windows 8 systems. Microsoft chose to directly respond to confusion surrounding Windows 8's use of the UEFI Secure Boot feature on Thursday. Tony Mangefeste of Microsoft's Ecosystem team said, 'Microsoft supports OEMs having the flexibility to decide who manages security certificates and how to allow customers to import and manage those certificates, and manage secured boot. We believe it is important to support this flexibility to the OEMs and to allow our customers to decide how they want to manage their systems.'"

garymortimer tips this story at the Canberra Times, which starts: "Police have suggested that Canberra's new point-to-point speed cameras be linked to unmanned aerial surveillance drones and used to track vehicles of interest to authorities. The first of the cameras, which use automated number plate recognition technology to calculate a car's average speed and whether it is within the legal limit, are due to be switched on by the end of the year." I wonder how much surveillance by drone is already being done in the U.S., especially considering that even an (admittedly high-end) home-built drone is capable of hijinks that seem to parallel the cell-phone tracking activities the FBI has been shown to employ.

garymortimer tips this story at the Canberra Times, which starts: "Police have suggested that Canberra's new point-to-point speed cameras be linked to unmanned aerial surveillance drones and used to track vehicles of interest to authorities. The first of the cameras, which use automated number plate recognition technology to calculate a car's average speed and whether it is within the legal limit, are due to be switched on by the end of the year." I wonder how much surveillance by drone is already being done in the U.S., especially considering that even an (admittedly high-end) home-built drone is capable of hijinks that seem to parallel the cell-phone tracking activities the FBI has been shown to employ.

The BBC reports that "An amateur astronomer has recorded images of the out-of-control US satellite as it tumbles back to Earth. Theirry Legault, from Paris, captured the video as the satellite passed over northern France on 15 September. The six-tonne, 20-year-old spacecraft has fallen out of orbit and is expected to crash somewhere on Earth on or around 24 September. The US space agency says the risk to life from the Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite (UARS) is 1 in 3,200. Mr Legault, an engineer, used a specially designed camera to record the tumbling satellite through his 14-inch telescope, posting the footage on his Astrophotography website." (Previous, equally impressive work from Legault include his photos of Atlantis's final re-entry and the ISS, sun and moon in one shot.)

The BBC reports that "An amateur astronomer has recorded images of the out-of-control US satellite as it tumbles back to Earth. Theirry Legault, from Paris, captured the video as the satellite passed over northern France on 15 September. The six-tonne, 20-year-old spacecraft has fallen out of orbit and is expected to crash somewhere on Earth on or around 24 September. The US space agency says the risk to life from the Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite (UARS) is 1 in 3,200. Mr Legault, an engineer, used a specially designed camera to record the tumbling satellite through his 14-inch telescope, posting the footage on his Astrophotography website." (Previous, equally impressive work from Legault include his photos of Atlantis's final re-entry and the ISS, sun and moon in one shot.)

cylonlover writes "Practicality tends to take a back seat when you combine sci-fi cult status with custom chopper building — and there's no room for a pillion passenger on the Lightcycle. We first spied Parker Brothers Choppers Lightcycle project last year when it surfaced in gas-powered form, now the company has released video of a fully-electric version of the neon-packing two-wheeler in action. The electric motor may be quieter, but this one's still guaranteed to turn heads."

The proposed merger of AT&T with T-Mobile doesn't impress everyone as a good idea; in particular, Sprint has filed suit to stop the merger, and while hardly a disinterested party, they're not alone in claiming that the resulting megacompany would harm customers. Verizon is taking a different tack; tekgoblin passes along this excerpt: "Verizon Communications chief executive Lowell McAdam has announced that he is supporting the AT&T T-Mobile merger. He warned that the Government has no choice but to let the deal go though unless they want to fix the current spectrum problems. He went on to say 'We need to be very thoughtful on what the impacts would be to the overall industry if this is a way to regulate the industry without actually passing regulation.' The current telcos need more wireless spectrum to continue expanding and operating efficiently so they have resorted to acquiring other companies."

The proposed merger of AT&T with T-Mobile doesn't impress everyone as a good idea; in particular, Sprint has filed suit to stop the merger, and while hardly a disinterested party, they're not alone in claiming that the resulting megacompany would harm customers. Verizon is taking a different tack; tekgoblin passes along this excerpt: "Verizon Communications chief executive Lowell McAdam has announced that he is supporting the AT&T T-Mobile merger. He warned that the Government has no choice but to let the deal go though unless they want to fix the current spectrum problems. He went on to say 'We need to be very thoughtful on what the impacts would be to the overall industry if this is a way to regulate the industry without actually passing regulation.' The current telcos need more wireless spectrum to continue expanding and operating efficiently so they have resorted to acquiring other companies."

New submitter rescendent writes "In an interview with Massively, Illyriad Games developers Ben Adams and James Niesewand predict the death of Flash, the rise of HTML5, and a long-term shift away from installed games. Quoting: 'The major advantages that boxed set or download games have had over browser-based games are local storage and direct access to the graphics and audio engines. Those barriers are being smashed apart by HTML5. ... Especially for MMO game developers, I personally don't believe that developers have any real long-term choice about embarking on this path or not. Ultimately, I believe it's either browser-based or obsolescence. If you don't do it, your competitors will, and they'll be making games that work identically on more device platforms, on more browsers, on more operating systems. It's going to take a very long time to get there, though, but this change has begun now, and we firmly believe that HTML5 is the future.' With Microsoft joining the ranks of Apple and not supporting Flash in Windows 8, there's definitely a risk to Flash. But will browser-based games really replace installed games?"

OverTheGeicoE writes "It was reported Tuesday that researchers had found a way to break the most commonly used SSL/TLS encryption in browsers. According to the Register, Google is pushing out a patch to fix the problem. The patch doesn't involve adding support for TLS 1.1 or 1.2. FTFA: 'The change introduced into Chrome would counteract these attacks by splitting a message into fragments to reduce the attacker's control over the plaintext about to be encrypted. By adding unexpected randomness to the process, the new behavior in Chrome is intended to throw BEAST off the scent of the decryption process by feeding it confusing information.' The fix is supposedly in the latest developer version of Chrome."