Slashdot Mirror

Kyle Jacoby writes "The NSA was right when it postulated that the mere knowledge of the existence of their program could weaken its ability to function. Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), which serve to mask the source and destination of data by routing it through a third-party server, have been a popular method for maintaining internet anonymity for the paranoid and prudent. However, the all-but-silent fall of secure email server Lavabit, and VPN provider CryptoSeal, have shown us just how pervasive the government's eye on our communications is. These companies chose to fold rather than to divulge customer data entrusted to them, which raises the million-dollar question: how many have chosen to remain open and silently hand over the keys to your data? Google has decided to put the private back in VPN by supporting uProxy, a project developed at the University of Washington with help from Brave New Software. Still using a VPN schema, their aim is to keep the VPN amongst friends (literally). Of course, you'll need a friend who is willing to let you route your net through their tubes. Their simple integration into Firefox and Chrome will lower the barrier, creating a decentralized VPN architecture that would make sweeping pen register orders more difficult, and would also make blocking VPNs a rather difficult task for countries like China, who block citizens' access to numerous websites. On a related note, when will the public finally demand that communications which pass encrypted through a third party still retain an reasonable expectation of privacy (rendering them pen register order-resistant)?"

Kyle Jacoby writes "The NSA was right when it postulated that the mere knowledge of the existence of their program could weaken its ability to function. Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), which serve to mask the source and destination of data by routing it through a third-party server, have been a popular method for maintaining internet anonymity for the paranoid and prudent. However, the all-but-silent fall of secure email server Lavabit, and VPN provider CryptoSeal, have shown us just how pervasive the government's eye on our communications is. These companies chose to fold rather than to divulge customer data entrusted to them, which raises the million-dollar question: how many have chosen to remain open and silently hand over the keys to your data? Google has decided to put the private back in VPN by supporting uProxy, a project developed at the University of Washington with help from Brave New Software. Still using a VPN schema, their aim is to keep the VPN amongst friends (literally). Of course, you'll need a friend who is willing to let you route your net through their tubes. Their simple integration into Firefox and Chrome will lower the barrier, creating a decentralized VPN architecture that would make sweeping pen register orders more difficult, and would also make blocking VPNs a rather difficult task for countries like China, who block citizens' access to numerous websites. On a related note, when will the public finally demand that communications which pass encrypted through a third party still retain an reasonable expectation of privacy (rendering them pen register order-resistant)?"

Bob the Super Hamste writes "The New York Times is reporting that the TSA is now doing background investigations on passengers before they arrive at the airport. The publicly stated reason for this is that it is to streamline the security procedures at airports allowing more passengers to receive less scrutiny while at the air port but this new authority allows the TSA additional information about each traveler. The prescreening that is being performed for domestic travel now uses a simiar standard to that of foreign individuals who where entering the US. The new measures go beyond what is used in the Secure Flight program and while light on details mentions that the passengers passport number will be used. The article does however point out the data sources that are available to the TSA to conduct these pre-screening with such as tax identification number, past travel itineraries, property records, physical characteristics, and law enforcement or intelligence information. Also mentioned is that individuals who do not have a passport will not be subjected to the rules and from my reading will not be eligible for lesser screening at that airport. The stated goal of this program is to have 25% of all airline passengers in the US receive lighter screening at the airport so that they don't have to take their shoes off, remove jackets, or remove laptops from bags. Additionally passengers who are in higher risk categories can receive additional screenings. Also mentioned is that all passengers are currently prescreened and that airlines are required to share your passport data with the TSA if they have it." One thing I've noticed as a passenger is that the most dangerous-feeling aspect of flying right now seems to be the winding security line itself.

Kristian vonBengtson writes "A DIY, manned space program like Copenhagen Suborbitals is kept alive by keeping total independence, cutting the red tape and simply just doing it all in a garage. We basically try to stay below the radar at all time and are reluctant in engagements leading to signing papers or do things (too much) by the books. But now there might be trouble ahead. (Saul Goodman! We need you...) During the last 5 years we have encountered many weird legal cases which does not make much sense and no one can explain their origin. If we were to fix up a batch of regular black gunpowder (which we use for igniters) we are entitled for serving time in jail. Even a few grams. But no one give a hoot about building a rocket fueled with 12 tonnes of liquid oxygen and alcohol. Thats is perfectly legal. If Copenhagen Suborbitals fly a rocket into space for the first time there are likely legal action that must be dealt with. At my time at the International Space University we had lectures and exams in space law and I remember the Outer Space Treaty which is the most ratified space treaty with over 100 countries including Denmark and U.S. And here is the matter – in which I seek some kind of advice or what you may call it: Outer Space Treaty, Article 6 states: 'the activities of non-governmental entities in outer space, including the Moon and other celestial bodies, shall require authorization and continuing supervision by the appropriate State Party to the Treaty.' Does this mean that Denmark (or any other country for that matter – if it was your project) suddenly have to approve what we are doing and will be kept responsible for our mission, if we launch into space?" von Bengston adds a related article about the organization's testing process. They had originally intended to burn Nitrocellulose as a way to open lids and deploy parachutes. It worked fine in the garage, but upon testing in low-pressure situations, they found that the chemical reaction slowed too much to be useful. The article includes videos of their tests.

KentuckyFC writes "The problem of free will is one of the great unsolved puzzles in science, not to mention philosophy, theology, jurisprudence and so on. The basic question is whether we are able to make decisions for ourselves or whether the outcomes are predetermined and the notion of choice is merely an illusion. Now a leading theoretical physicist has outlined a 'Turing Test' for free will and says that while simple devices such as thermostats cannot pass, more complex ones like iPhones might. The test is based on an extension of Turing's halting problem in computer science. This states that there is no general way of knowing how an algorithm will finish, other than to run it. This means that when a human has to make a decision, there is no way of knowing in advance how it will end up. In other words, the familiar feeling of not knowing the final decision until it is thought through is a necessary feature of the decision-making process and why we have the impression of free will. This leads to a simple set of questions that forms a kind of Turing test for free will. These show how simple decision-making devices such as thermostats cannot believe they have free will while humans can. A more interesting question relates to decision-makers of intermediate complexity, such as a smartphone. As the author puts it, this 'seems to possess all the criteria required for free will, and behaves as if it has it.'"

Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Many of New York City's subway cars are well past their prime and due for fleet replacement, most strikingly those on the C line, known by their model number, R32, and for the tin-can siding that will continue rolling beneath Eighth Avenue for at least a few more years. Now the NYT reports that transit planners have urged the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to consider articulated subway cars for any future fleet upgrades. Articulated cars, already adopted in cities like Berlin, Paris, and Toronto, have no doors between cars, allowing unrestricted flow throughout the length of the train that could increase capacity by 8 percent to 10 percent. Adam Lisberg, the authority's chief spokesman, says that increased capacity could also improve 'dwell time' — the period during which a train is stopped in a station, often because of overcrowding — and allow more trains to run. 'We're one of the largest systems in the world that doesn't do it,' says Richard Barone, the director of transportation programs at the Regional Plan Association. 'Our trains don't function right now to allow people to circulate.' Articulation also has the benefit of making empty trains feel safer. By allowing passengers the ability to move between cars easily and to see passengers throughout the train, the isolation that can sometimes feel dangerous on a late-night subway is less of an issue, simply because the whole train is joined together like one huge car. But not everyone embraces the idea. Elizabeth Kubany who works in the Flatiron district, expressed a fondness for the current configuration, suggesting that the separated cars were more 'intimate' binding passenger to passenger in an increasingly antisocial age. Then she reconsidered. 'You don't really want to be intimate with people on the train.'"

vinces99 writes "A quick glance at a world precipitation map shows that most tropical rain falls in the Northern Hemisphere. The Palmyra Atoll, at 6 degrees north, gets 175 inches of rain a year, while an equal distance on the opposite side of the equator gets only 45 inches. Scientists long believed that this was a quirk of the Earth's geometry – that the ocean basins tilting diagonally while the planet spins pushed tropical rain bands north of the equator. But a new University of Washington study shows that the pattern arises from ocean currents originating from the poles, thousands of miles away. The findings, published (paywalled) Oct. 20 in Nature Geoscience, explain a fundamental feature of the planet's climate, and show that icy waters affect seasonal rains that are crucial for growing crops in such places as Africa's Sahel region and southern India."

BartlebyScrivener writes "I am a author, screenwriter, law prof, and a hobbyist programmer. I love MacVim and write almost everything in it: Exams, novels, even screenplays now that Fountain is available. I use LaTeX and WordPress and so on, but several years ago I discovered Markdown and the wonderful Pandoc. I searched Slashdot expecting to find lively discussions of both Markdown and Pandoc, but found nothing. Do Slashdotters look down their noses at these tools and do their work in HTML and LaTeX? I can't imagine computer geeks using Word instead of their favorite text editors. If not Markdown and Pandoc, what tools do Slashdotters use when they create documents that probably need to be distributed in more than one format: HTML, PDF, EPUB or perhaps even docx?" And then there's DocBook, LyX, and a host of other markup languages. What do you use, in what context?

New submitter Enokcc writes "In a series of research articles it was claimed that a famous system of nonlinear differential equations originally used to model atmospheric convection can also be used to model changes in human emotions over time. It took an amateur in psychology with a computer science background to notice how extraordinary these claims were, and with the help of experts on psychology he has now published a critique. The latest of the questionable research articles (with 360 citations) is now 'partially withdrawn.'" Notably, skeptic Nick Brown's paper is co-authored by Alan Sokal, famous for exposing nonsense by less diplomatic means.

slack_justyb writes "In a blog post, Mark Shuttleworth sends his congrats to the Ubuntu developers for the recent release of 13.10 and talks about 14.04's codename (Trusty Tahr). He also takes aim at what he calls 'The Open Source Tea Party.' He writes, 'Mir is really important work. When lots of competitors attack a project on purely political grounds, you have to wonder what their agenda is. At least we know now who belongs to the Open Source Tea Party ;)' He cites all the complaints about Mir and even calls out Lennart Poettering's systemd, who is the past has pointed out Canonical's tendency to favor projects they control. Shuttleworth continues, 'And to put all the hue and cry into context: Mir is relevant for approximately 1% of all developers, just those who think about shell development. Every app developer will consume Mir through their toolkit. By contrast, those same outraged individuals have NIH’d just about every important piece of the stack they can get their hands on most notably SystemD, which is hugely invasive and hardly justified. What closely to see how competitors to Canonical torture the English language in their efforts to justify how those toolkits should support Windows but not Mir. But we'll get it done, and it will be amazing.' However, not all has earned Mark's scorn. He even goes so far to show some love for Linux Mint: 'So yes, I am very proud to be, as the Register puts it, the Ubuntu Daddy. My affection for this community in its broadest sense – from Mint to our cloud developer audience, and all the teams at Canonical and in each of our derivatives, is very tangible today.'"

KentuckyFC writes "Epidemiologists know that modern diseases can spread almost simultaneously in different parts of the planet because an individual who becomes infected in Hong Kong, for example, can infect friends in New York the following day. This is known as the small world effect. It is the same property that allows any individual to link to another individual anywhere in the world in just a few steps. But in the 14th century, the Black Death spread in a very different way, moving slowly across Europe at a rate of about 2 kilometers a day. Now network theorists have simulated this spread and say it is only possible if the number of long distances travelers in those days was vanishingly small. In other words, people in medieval society were linked almost exclusively to others nearby and so did not form a small world network. That raises an interesting question. If society in 14th century Europe was not a small world but today's society is, when did the change occur? The researchers say the finger of blame points to the invention of railways and steamships which allowed large numbers of people, and the diseases they carried, to travel long distances for the first time."

cartechboy writes "It looks like an investor group led by Hong Kong tycoon (and early Fisker investor) Richard Li is the likely winner of a government loan owed by Fisker Automotive, the dormant maker of plug-in hybrid sports cars. Buying the loan would allow Li to try and restructure the company even as it's still at risk for bankruptcy. The originally company won a $529 million government loan in 2009, took venture capital investment, and created a lot of buzz around its flagship car, the $100,000 Karma plug-in hybrid. But the company had delays launching the car, struggled financially and has not built any cars since July of 2012. Is Li the new savior?"

Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "AP reports that U.S. airlines are taking out old, bulky seats in favor of so-called slimline models that take up less space from front to back, allowing for five or six more seats on each plane. This gives airlines two of their favorite things: more paying passengers, and a smaller fuel bill (the seats are slightly lighter). Whether the new seats are really closer together depends on how you measure. By the usual measure, called 'pitch,' the new ones are generally an inch closer together from front to back as measured at the armrest. The seats Southwest has put on nearly its entire fleet are 31 inches apart, about an inch less than before, allowing them to to add an extra row of six seats to each plane. International passengers are feeling crowded, too. As recently as 2010, most airlines buying Boeing's big 777 opted for nine seats across. Now it's 10 across on 70 percent of newly-built 777s, Boeing says. American's newest 777s are set up 10-across in coach, with slightly narrower seats than on its older 777s. Airlines say you won't notice. And the new seats are designed to minimize this problem. Airplane seats from 30 years ago looked like your grandmother's BarcaLounger, says Jami Counter, senior director at SeatGuru.com, which tracks airline seats and amenities. 'All that foam cushion and padding probably didn't add all that much comfort. All that's been taken out,' he said. 'You haven't really lost all that much if the airline does it right.'"

fsagx writes "Steve Gibson has proposed a new standard method for website authentication. The SQRL system (pronounced 'squirrel') eliminates problems inherent in traditional login techniques. The website's login presents a QR code containing the URL of its authentication service, plus a nonce. The user's smartphone signs the login URL using a private key derived from its master secret and the URL's domain name. The Smartphone sends the matching public key to identify the user, and the signature to authenticate it. It may be used alongside of traditional username/password to ease adoption."

Jeremiah Cornelius writes "Rapture of the Nerds co-author Charlie Stross hates Microsoft Word, worse than you do. Best of all, he can articulate the many structural faults of Word that make his loathing both understandable and contagious. 'Steve Jobs approached Bill Gates... to organize the first true WYSIWYG word processor for a personal computer -- ...should it use control codes, or hierarchical style sheets? In the end, the decree went out: Word should implement both formatting paradigms. Even though they're fundamentally incompatible... Word was in fact broken by design, from the outset — and it only got worse from there.' Can Free Software do any better, than to imitate the broken Microsoft model? Does document formatting even matter this much, versus content?"

barlevg writes "Two of the three scientists sharing this year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry have Israeli citizenship, with Dr. Arieh Warshel having been born and educated in Israel, yet both are based at universities in the United States. These two scientists are perhaps the highest profile examples of a growing problem in the so-called "start-up nation," which is known for its high-tech tech companies and scientific innovation, and yet which loses more researchers to emigration than any other western nation. The problem? Large salary gaps between US and Israeli institutions. As Daniel Hershkowitz, president of Bar-Ilan University put it, 'I don't see Israel being able to compete with what they offer in the United States.'"

elashish14 writes "The Nobel Prize Committee has chosen to award the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapon (OPCW) with this year's Peace Prize. The OPCW conducts inspections and oversees the destruction of chemical weapon arsenals. They were established in 1997 and 190 nations have agreed to the treaty. The Nobel Committee's decision was a surprise to many however, who expected Pakistani education activist Malala Yousafzai to receive the award."

elashish14 writes "The Nobel Prize Committee has chosen to award the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapon (OPCW) with this year's Peace Prize. The OPCW conducts inspections and oversees the destruction of chemical weapon arsenals. They were established in 1997 and 190 nations have agreed to the treaty. The Nobel Committee's decision was a surprise to many however, who expected Pakistani education activist Malala Yousafzai to receive the award."

cartechboy writes "Ahh Twitter. Sometimes when you combine lightning fast information distribution and humans, minor (or not-so-minor) chaos can ensue. Yesterday, the Israeli military tweeted a commemoration of the 40th anniversary of the Yom Kippur war, which took place in 1973. But the tweet referenced the bombing of Syrian airports by Soviets, and oil traders, already an antsy group, assumed the tweet referred to an attack occurring that very moment. As you can imagine, this had some impact. Within an hour, the global price of oil jumped more than $1, from $110.40 to $111.50 as trading volumes soared. In the end, the traders missed a few things that would identify the tweet as historical vs imminent: Yom Kippur was weeks ago, the Soviet Union is no more, and most important, #checkthehashtag."

KentuckyFC writes "One of the frustrating problems with microelectromechanical (MEM) devices is that the machinery can sometimes stick fast, causing them to stop working. One of the culprits is the Casimir effect — an exotic force that pushes metallic sheets together when they are separated by tiny distances. Now physicists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico have worked out and demonstrated how to suppress the Casimir force. The trick is to create a set of deep grooves and ridges in the surface of one sheet so that the other only comes close to the tips of the ridges. These tips have a much smaller surface area than the flat sheet and so generate much less force. That could help prevent stiction in future MEMs devices. But why would a nuclear weapons lab be interested? MEM devices are invulnerable to electromagnetic pulse weapons that fry transistor-based switches, and so could be used as on-off switches for nuclear devices."

schwit1 writes "M. Scott Carpenter, whose flight into space in 1962 as the second American to orbit the Earth was marred by technical glitches and ended with the nation waiting anxiously to see if he had survived a landing far from the target site, died on Thursday in Denver. He was 88 and one of the last two surviving astronauts of America's original space program, Project Mercury." NASA has a nice biography of Carpenter, too, and scottcarpenter.com has much more besides.

The intro for yesterday's video interview with Don Marti started out by saying, "Don Marti," says Wikipedia, "is a writer and advocate for free and open source software, writing for LinuxWorld and Linux Today." As we noted, Don has moved on since that description was written. In today's interview he starts by talking about some things venture capitalist Mary Meeker of Kleiner Perkins has said, notably that people only spend 6% of their media-intake time with print, but advertisers spend 23% of their budgets on print ads. To find out why this is, you might want to read a piece Don wrote titled Targeted Advertising Considered Harmful. Or you can just watch today's video -- and if you didn't catch Part One of our video conversation yesterday, you might want to check it out before watching Part 2.

"Don Marti, says Wikipedia, "is a writer and advocate for free and open source software, writing for LinuxWorld and Linux Today." This is an obsolete description. Don has moved on and broadened his scope. He still thinks, he still writes, and what he writes is still worth reading even if it's not necessarily about Linux or Free Software. For instance, he wrote a piece titled Targeted Advertising Considered Harmful, and has written lots more at zgp.org that might interest you. But even just sticking to the ad biz, Don has had enough to say recently that we ended up breaking this video conversation into two parts, with one running today and the other one running tomorrow.

jones_supa writes "A new major version of the classic GNU Make software has been released. First of all, Make 4.0 has integration support for GNU Guile Scheme. Guile is the extension system of the GNU project that is a Scheme programming language implementation and now in the Make world will be the embedded extension language. 4.0 also features a new 'output-sync' option, 'trace-enables' for tracing of targets, a 'none' flag for the 'debug' argument, and the 'job server' and .ONESHELL features are now supported under Windows. There are also new assignment operators, a new function for writing to files, and other enhancements. It's been reported that Make 4.0 also has more than 80 bug-fixes. More details can be found from their release announcement on the mailing list."

First time accepted submitter eekee writes "The targets are high, but so is the goal: releasing Verilog source code for a GPU implementation. The source will be open source, LGPL-licensed, and suitable for loading onto an FPGA. The first target is for a 2D GPU with PCI interface; perhaps not terribly interesting in itself, but the first stretch goal is much more exciting: full OpenGL and Direct3D graphics." Unlike the Open Graphics Project, this is starting from a working 2D accelerator and mostly working 3D accelerator cloning the features of the Number Nine Ticket to Ride hardware. If they get a meelion bucks they'll overhaul the chip to support something other than PCI (although you can bridge between PCI and PCIe) and implement a modern programmable rather than fixed-function chip. Also unlike OGP, they do not appear interested in producing hardware, instead focusing entirely on the core itself for use in FPGAs (anyone want to dust off the OGD1 design?)

First time accepted submitter eekee writes "The targets are high, but so is the goal: releasing Verilog source code for a GPU implementation. The source will be open source, LGPL-licensed, and suitable for loading onto an FPGA. The first target is for a 2D GPU with PCI interface; perhaps not terribly interesting in itself, but the first stretch goal is much more exciting: full OpenGL and Direct3D graphics." Unlike the Open Graphics Project, this is starting from a working 2D accelerator and mostly working 3D accelerator cloning the features of the Number Nine Ticket to Ride hardware. If they get a meelion bucks they'll overhaul the chip to support something other than PCI (although you can bridge between PCI and PCIe) and implement a modern programmable rather than fixed-function chip. Also unlike OGP, they do not appear interested in producing hardware, instead focusing entirely on the core itself for use in FPGAs (anyone want to dust off the OGD1 design?)

An anonymous reader writes "NASA's Juno mission to Jupiter will perform a close 'fly-by' of the Earth in a few hours. To assist with its radio and plasma wave experiment, the mission is asking amateur radio operators to send a 'Morse Code' message to the probe as it passes." The page has all the info you need: "The activity will begin at 18:00 UTC on October 9, 2013 and continue until 20:40 UTC. This page will clearly indicate when you should key up or key down to transmit 'HI' to Juno in Morse Code (see examples below). The Morse code pattern below can also act as a guide. The 'HI' message will be repeated every 10 minutes, beginning at 18:00, 18:10, 18:20, etc. "

KentuckyFC writes "The idea that every physical event is a computation has spread like wildfire through science. That has triggered an unprecedented interest in unconventional computing such as quantum computing, DNA computing and even the ability of a single-celled organism, called slime mold, to solve mazes. However, that may need to change now that physicists have worked out a formal way of distinguishing between systems that compute and those that don't. One key is the ability to encode and decode information. 'Without the encode and decode steps, there is no computation; there is simply a physical system undergoing evolution,' they say. That means computers must be engineered systems based on well understood laws of physics that can be used to predict the outcome of an abstract evolution. So slime mold fails the test while most forms of quantum computation pass."

mysqlbytes writes "The BBC is reporting the National Ignition Facility (NIF), based at Livermore in California, has succeeded in breaking even — 'During an experiment in late September, the amount of energy released through the fusion reaction exceeded the amount of energy being absorbed by the fuel — the first time this had been achieved at any fusion facility in the world.'"

MajikJon writes "The BBC junking policies of the '60s and '70s resulted in the loss of hundreds of episodes of the classic series in its earliest years. Through the work of ardent fans over the succeeding decades, dozens of these lost episodes have been painstaking recovered and added back into the BBC archives. Now, it seems, the searchers have struck the mother lode. According to the Wikipedia, there are currently 106 missing episodes of the serial. If reports are correct, we may finally get to see all the episodes."

An anonymous reader writes "Today, the latest victim of the U.S. government shutdown, the National Radio Astronomy Observatory shut its doors and essentially mothballed all three of its radio telescope facilities: the Very Large Array or VLA (think Jodie Foster, Contact); the Green Bank Telescope, and the Very Long Baseline Array or VLBA. While the ALMA telescope is not yet affected (mainly due to it being run by a consortium of European, Japanese, Chilean and U.S. organizations), the U.S. funds for that will soon also dry up. Not only does this furlough most of the ~550 employees, it has also thrown a monkey wrench into many long-term carefully planned observations (to the tune of wasting half a million dollars and a year's worth of work). Emily Lakdawalla of the Planetary Society also has a commentary on the closure — and a plea to 'stop the madness.'"

An anonymous reader writes "Today, the latest victim of the U.S. government shutdown, the National Radio Astronomy Observatory shut its doors and essentially mothballed all three of its radio telescope facilities: the Very Large Array or VLA (think Jodie Foster, Contact); the Green Bank Telescope, and the Very Long Baseline Array or VLBA. While the ALMA telescope is not yet affected (mainly due to it being run by a consortium of European, Japanese, Chilean and U.S. organizations), the U.S. funds for that will soon also dry up. Not only does this furlough most of the ~550 employees, it has also thrown a monkey wrench into many long-term carefully planned observations (to the tune of wasting half a million dollars and a year's worth of work). Emily Lakdawalla of the Planetary Society also has a commentary on the closure — and a plea to 'stop the madness.'"

An anonymous reader writes "Today, the latest victim of the U.S. government shutdown, the National Radio Astronomy Observatory shut its doors and essentially mothballed all three of its radio telescope facilities: the Very Large Array or VLA (think Jodie Foster, Contact); the Green Bank Telescope, and the Very Long Baseline Array or VLBA. While the ALMA telescope is not yet affected (mainly due to it being run by a consortium of European, Japanese, Chilean and U.S. organizations), the U.S. funds for that will soon also dry up. Not only does this furlough most of the ~550 employees, it has also thrown a monkey wrench into many long-term carefully planned observations (to the tune of wasting half a million dollars and a year's worth of work). Emily Lakdawalla of the Planetary Society also has a commentary on the closure — and a plea to 'stop the madness.'"

necro81 writes "Due to the ongoing shutdown of the U.S. Government, NASA is largely grounded. This is bad for all kinds of reasons, but one particularly bad outcome would have been missing the launch window for the MAVEN spacecraft, due to launch 18 November. The next launch window would not have been until 2016. MAVEN, thankfully, has been given the go-ahead, in large part because this orbiter will serve as a vital communications link for the Opportunity and Curiosity rovers currently on the surface. Currently, these rovers are served by two aging orbiters: Mars Odyssey (launched 2001) and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (launched 2005). Maintaining communications with the rovers is considered essential, hence the preparations and launch will proceed. (NASA's official mission website is currently offline.)"

necro81 writes "Due to the ongoing shutdown of the U.S. Government, NASA is largely grounded. This is bad for all kinds of reasons, but one particularly bad outcome would have been missing the launch window for the MAVEN spacecraft, due to launch 18 November. The next launch window would not have been until 2016. MAVEN, thankfully, has been given the go-ahead, in large part because this orbiter will serve as a vital communications link for the Opportunity and Curiosity rovers currently on the surface. Currently, these rovers are served by two aging orbiters: Mars Odyssey (launched 2001) and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (launched 2005). Maintaining communications with the rovers is considered essential, hence the preparations and launch will proceed. (NASA's official mission website is currently offline.)"

necro81 writes "Due to the ongoing shutdown of the U.S. Government, NASA is largely grounded. This is bad for all kinds of reasons, but one particularly bad outcome would have been missing the launch window for the MAVEN spacecraft, due to launch 18 November. The next launch window would not have been until 2016. MAVEN, thankfully, has been given the go-ahead, in large part because this orbiter will serve as a vital communications link for the Opportunity and Curiosity rovers currently on the surface. Currently, these rovers are served by two aging orbiters: Mars Odyssey (launched 2001) and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (launched 2005). Maintaining communications with the rovers is considered essential, hence the preparations and launch will proceed. (NASA's official mission website is currently offline.)"

First time accepted submitter wmr89502270 writes "Doctor Who is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. The special The Day of The Doctor will be broadcast simultaneously in over 75 countries and hundreds of cinemas in the UK. Across the world the hotly anticipated special episode will be screened simultaneously in full 3D. According to Copyright law of the United Kingdom, the copyright in a broadcast program expires 50 years from the end of the year in which it is broadcast, which means the first episodes will fall to public domain next year."

Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Madison Park and Dayu Zhang report on CNN that swarms of aggressive hornets are inflicting a deadly toll in a central China killing 42 people and injuring 1,675 people in three cities in Shaanxi province since July. Government authorities say these attacks are from a particularly venomous species, the world's largest hornet, known as the Asian giant hornet or vespa mandarinia. The giant hornet extends about 3.5 to 3.9 centimeters in length, roughly the size of a human thumb and has an orange head with a black tooth used for burrowing. The Asian giant hornet is intensely predatory; it hunts medium- to large-sized insects, such as bees, other hornet species, and mantises. The pain of the Asian Giant Hornet is described as a hot nail piercing the skin and lasts about 4 hours with instant swelling. One victim told local media earlier this month that "the more you run, the more they want to chase you." Some victims described being chased about 200 meters (656 feet) by a swarm. Local authorities have deployed thousands of police officers and locals to destroy about 710 hives but ""It's very difficult to prevent the attacks because hornet nests are usually in hidden sites," says Shunichi Makino, director general of the Hokkaido Research Center for Forestry and Forest Products Research Institute. Makino, who specializes in entomology, warned that the sting from an Asian giant hornet was severe compared with those of other insects. "The venom of an Asian giant hornet is very special compared with other hornets or yellow jackets," says Makino. "The neurotoxin — especially to mammals including humans — it's a special brand of venom." Asian Giant Hornets have been spotted in the United States."

Robotron23 writes "Further charges have been made against Silk Road founder Ross William Ulbricht, aka 'Dread Pirate Roberts'. Yesterday saw the shutdown of Silk Road, a website Ulbricht founded which specialized in the sale of illegal items such as recreational drugs. As well as paying for a hit on a forum member, Ulbricht later requested an undercover agent murder an arrested employee of Silk Road, terming it 'the right move.' Upon receiving staged photos of torture and eventually the corpse, Ulbricht paid in full."

New submitter u38cg writes Ross William Ulbricht, known as 'Dread Pirate Roberts,' was arrested in San Francisco yesterday and has been charged with one count each of narcotics trafficking conspiracy, computer hacking conspiracy, and money laundering conspiracy, according to a court filing. Silk Road has been shut down and some $3.6m in Bitcoin (26,000 Btc) seized. The question is — how?" onyxruby submitted a link to the criminal complaint (PDF; coral cache might work better). The court filing indicates that they seized the actual servers and recovered their contents, making numerous references to the private messaging system. Also according to the court filing, the Silk Road was used to sell ~$1.2 billion in illicit goods since being founded in 2011.

An anonymous reader writes "Major newspapers in Germany (FAZ, Die Welt, SZ, ...) and the Huffington Post report that the author Ilja Trojanow has been prevented from boarding a plane from Salvador da Bahia to the U.S. where he was invited to attend a conference. He had ESTA documents showing that his visit was approved as part of the Visa Waiver Program and was last year given a visa to teach at the university of Saint Louis. Trojanow was one of the initiators of an open letter (Google translation to English) urging Chancellor Merkel to take actions against NSA surveillance in Germany."

darthcamaro writes "In March of this year, we saw the first ever 100 Gigabit DDoS attack, which was possible due to a DNS Reflection Amplification attack. Now word is out that a new 100 Gigabit attack has struck using raw bandwidth, without any DNS Reflection. 'The most outstanding thing about this attack is that it did not use any amplification, which means that they had 100 Gigabits of available bandwidth on their own,' Incapsula co-founder Marc Gaffan said. 'The attack lasted nine hours, and that type of bandwidth is not cheap or readily available.'"

richi writes "Kevin Warwick: His name raises extremes of opinion. For more than a decade, this highly controversial cybernetics professor has been making waves. His high-profile experiments — and even higher-profile claim that he's the first living cyborg — earned him column inches and unflattering nicknames. In this Forbes interview, 'Captain Cyborg' talks about exploding motorcycles, wireless power, and fish and chips."

judgecorp writes "A sinkhole has taken a quarter of the bots out of the ZeroAcess botnet which was making money for its operators through click fraud and Bitcoin mining. This particular Bitcoin mining operation was only profitable through the use of stolen electricity — according to Symantec, which operated the sinkhole, ZeroAccess was using $561,000 of electricity a day on infected PCs, to generate about $2000 worth of Bitcoin."

MTorrice writes "A new type of headphone heats up carbon nanotubes to crank out tunes. The tiny speaker doesn't rely on moving parts and instead produces sound through the thermoacoustic effect. When an alternating current passes through the nanotubes, the material heats and cools the air around it; as the air warms, it expands, and as it cools, it contracts. This expansion and contraction creates sound waves. The new nanotube speaker could be manufactured at low cost in the same facilities used to make computer chips, the researchers say." And it exists in the real world: "The Tsinghua researchers integrated these thermoacoustic chips into a pair of earbud headphones and connected them to a computer to play music from videos and sound files. They’ve used the headphones to play music for about a year without significant signs of wear, Yang says. According to him, this is the first thermoacoustic device to be integrated with commercial electronics and used to play music."

theodp writes "This week's NY Times Magazine cover story, We Like You So Much and Want to Know You Better, is an adaptation from The Circle, the soon-to-be-published novel by Dave Eggers which tells the tale of Mae Holland, a young woman who goes to work at an omnipotent technology company and gets sucked into a corporate culture that knows no distinction between work and life, public and private. The WSJ calls it a The Jungle for our own times. And while Eggers insists he wasn't thinking of any one particular company, the NYT excerpt evokes memories of Larry Page's you-will-be-social edict and suggests what the end-game for Google Glass might look like."

Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Having spent the last decade wreaking havoc in Russia, a flesh-eating drug called Krokodil has arrived in Arizona, reports Eliza Gray at Time Magazine. The Banner Poison Control Center has reported the first two users of the drug which makes user's skin scaly and green before it rots away [Warning: Graphic Images]. Made of codeine, a painkiller often used in cough syrup, and a mix of other materials including gasoline, paint thinner, and alcohol, Krokodil become popular in Russia because it costs 20 times less than heroin and can be made easily at home. Also known as Desomorphine, Krokodil has sedative and analgesic effects, and is around 8-10 times more potent than morphine. When the drug is injected, it rots the skin by rupturing blood vessels, causing the tissue to die. As a result, the skin hardens and rots, sometimes even falling off to expose the bone. 'These people are the ultimate in self-destructive drug addiction,' says Dr. Ellen Marmur. 'Once you are an addict at this level, any rational thinking doesn't apply.' The average life span of a Krokodil user is two to three years, according to a 2011 TIME investigation of the drug's prevalence in Russia."

mask.of.sanity writes "Researchers are closing in on a means to detect previously undetectable stealthy malware that resides in peripherals like graphics and network cards. The malware was developed by the same researchers and targeted host runtime memory using direct memory access provided to hardware devices. They said the malware was a 'highly critical threat to system security and integrity' and could not be detected by any operating system."

Out in the Northeast Texas town of Ft. Worth, a company called CircuitCo started making something they called the BeagleBoard -- an open source hardware single-board computer for educators and experimenters. Now, with help and support from Intel, they're making and supporting the Atom-based MinnowBoard, which is also open source, and comes with Angstrom Linux to help experimenters get started with it. David Anders is the Senior Embedded Systems Engineer at CircuitCo. Slashdot's Timothy Lord met David at LinuxCon North America 2013 in New Orleans and made this video of him talking about the recently-released MinnowBoard and the more mature BeagleBoard.

Out in the Northeast Texas town of Ft. Worth, a company called CircuitCo started making something they called the BeagleBoard -- an open source hardware single-board computer for educators and experimenters. Now, with help and support from Intel, they're making and supporting the Atom-based MinnowBoard, which is also open source, and comes with Angstrom Linux to help experimenters get started with it. David Anders is the Senior Embedded Systems Engineer at CircuitCo. Slashdot's Timothy Lord met David at LinuxCon North America 2013 in New Orleans and made this video of him talking about the recently-released MinnowBoard and the more mature BeagleBoard.