Slashdot Mirror

Wired reports on a find described September 24 in a note at Nature and the day after at the annual meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology: a dinosaur fossil bearing true feathers on four limbs. The fossil was discovered in northeastern China, in strata believed to have been deposited between 151 million and 161 million years ago. If that estimate is correct, the newly discovered Anchiornis huxleyi is at least one million years older than the believed age of the more famous winged dinosaur Archaeopteryx.

bughunter passes on a report from Wired Threat Level about the effort by Democratic lawmakers to roll back some provisions of the Patriot Act. Three of its provisions expire at the end of this year, and the reform attempt is expected to be attached to legislation to renew them. "Lawmakers are considering key changes to the Patriot Act and other spy laws — proposals that could give new life to lawsuits accusing the nation's telecommunications companies of turning over Americans' electronic communications to the government without warrants. On Oct. 1, the Senate Judiciary Committee likely will consider revoking that immunity legislation as it works to revise the Patriot Act and other spy laws with radical changes that provide for more government transparency and more privacy protections." Among the other likely goals of reform efforts, according to Wired, are limiting the government's power to issue National Security Letters, and limiting "black bag" searches to cases of spying or terrorism — 65% of past searches were authorized in drug cases.

Rophuine writes "Google has launched a product called SideWiki. It takes the form of a plug-in to Firefox and Internet Explorer which allows users to mark up the web by adding comments which can be seen by anyone else running SideWiki." Google's version joins a long line of attempts to impose a layer of comments on the Web, including Microsoft's Smart Tags and Third Voice.

An anonymous reader writes 'Newly declassified documents show that the FBI is developing a data-mining system to uncover terror sleeper cells. Among the 1.6 billion records in the National Security Analysis Center — tens of thousands of travel records, including hotel and airline records. Other revelations in the documents uncovered by a Wired.com FOIA request show that the feds want to expand the system for use in cyber-crime investigations, and it's already been used to scrutinize helicopter pilots and Philly cab drivers. The system has eerie resemblances to DARPA's once-banned Total Information Awareness program."

An anonymous reader points out a story in Wired introducing us to the Doomsday Machine built by the Soviet Union in the 1980s — and that remains active to this day. It was called "Perimeter." The article explains why the device was built, and why the Soviets considered it to be something that kept the peace, even though they never told the US about it. "[Reagan's] strategy worked. Moscow soon believed the new US leadership really was ready to fight a nuclear war. But the Soviets also became convinced that the US was now willing to start a nuclear war. ... A few months later, Reagan... announced that the US was going to develop a shield of lasers and nuclear weapons in space to defend against Soviet warheads. ... To Moscow it was the Death Star — and it confirmed that the US was planning an attack. ... By guaranteeing that Moscow could hit back, Perimeter was actually designed to keep an overeager Soviet military or civilian leader from launching prematurely during a crisis. The point, [an informant] says, was 'to cool down all these hotheads and extremists. No matter what was going to happen, there still would be revenge. Those who attack us will be punished.'"

AthanasiusKircher sends in a Wired writeup on what should surely be a contender in the next Improbable Research competition: wiring a dead salmon into an fMRI machine and showing it pictures of humans designed to evoke various emotions. "When they got around to analyzing the voxel... data, the voxels representing the area where the salmon's tiny brain sat showed evidence of activity. In the fMRI scan, it looked like the dead salmon was actually thinking about the pictures it had been shown. ... The result is completely nuts — but that's actually exactly the point. [Neuroscientist Craig] Bennett... and his adviser, George Wolford, wrote up the work as a warning about the dangers of false positives in fMRI data. They wanted to call attention to ways the field could improve its statistical methods. ... Bennett notes: 'We could set our threshold [of significance] so high that we have no false positives, but we have no legitimate results.... We could also set it so low that we end up getting voxels in the fish's brain. It's the fine line that we walk.'" The research has been turned down by several publications, according to Wired, but a poster is available (PDF).

An anonymous reader writes "The DHS's color-coded terrorism risk warning system has often been criticized on a number of grounds. However, it seems that at last DHS has taken note of these criticisms and is finally planning to fix one of its problems. Which one? Well, since the two lowest levels have never been used in the history of the program, the solution is obvious: just get rid of them! In the new system, the lowest level would be yellow, 'guarded,' representing 'A constant state of vigilance to protect against a terrorist attack.' While it's nice that they're at least no longer maintaining a pretense of it being for anything other than fear-mongering, I don't think this was the kind of change most people were hoping for."

Hugh Pickens writes "Wired reports that scientists have discovered that insects from cockroaches to caterpillars all emit the same stinky blend of fatty acids when they die and that the death mix may represent a universal, ancient warning signal to avoid their dead or injured. 'Recognizing and avoiding the dead could reduce the chances of catching the disease,' says Biologist David Rollo of McMaster University 'or allow you to get away with just enough exposure to activate your immunity.' Researchers isolated unsaturated fatty acids containing oleic and linoleic acids from the corpses of dead cockroaches and found that their concoction repelled not just cockroaches, but ants and caterpillars. 'It was amazing to find that the cockroaches avoided places treated with these extracts like the plague,' says Rollo. Even crustaceans like woodlice and pillbugs, which diverged from insects 400 million years ago, were repelled leading scientists to think the death mix represents a universal warning signal. Scientists hope the right concoction of death smells might protect crops. Thankfully, human noses can't detect the fatty acid extracts. 'I've tried smelling papers treated with them and don't smell anything strong and certainly not repellent,' writes Rollo in an e-mail. 'Not like the rotting of corpses that occurs later and is detectable from great distances.'"

SpuriousLogic writes "After receiving injections of genes that produce color-detecting proteins, two color-blind monkeys have seen red and green for the first time. Except in its extreme forms, color blindness isn't a debilitating condition, but it's a convenient stand-in for other types of blindness that might be treated with gene therapy. The monkey success raises the possibility of reversing those diseases, in a manner that most scientists considered impossible. 'We said it was possible to give an adult monkey with a model of human red-green color blindness the retina of a person with normal color vision. Every single person I talked to said, absolutely not,' said study co-author Jay Neitz, a University of Washington ophthalmologist. 'And almost every unsolved vision defect out there has this component in one way or another, where the ability to translate light into a gene signal is involved.' The full-spectrum supplementation of the squirrel monkeys' sight, described Wednesday in Nature, comes just less than a year after researchers used gene therapy to restore light perception in people afflicted by Leber Congenital Amaurosis, a rare and untreatable form of blindness."

Matt_dk writes "The confirmation of the nature of CoRoT-7b as the first rocky planet outside our Solar System marks a significant step forward in the search for Earth-like exoplanets. The detection by CoRoT and follow-up radial velocity measurements with HARPS suggest that this exoplanet has a density similar to that of Mercury, Venus, Mars and Earth, making it only the fifth known terrestrial planet in the Universe. The search for a habitable exoplanet is one of the holy grails in astronomy. One of the first steps towards this goal is the detection of terrestrial planets around solar-type stars. Dedicated programs, using telescopes in space and on ground, have yielded evidence for hundreds of planets outside of our Solar System. The majority of these are giant, gaseous planets, but in recent years small, almost Earth-mass planets have been detected, demonstrating that the discovery of Earth analogues — exoplanets with one Earth mass or one Earth radius orbiting a solar-type star at a distance of about 1 astronomical unit — is within reach."

Xerfas writes "If you ever dreamed of owning your own dinosaur, here's your chance. Possibly the most impressive natural history auction ever is set to take place Oct. 3 at the Venetian Casino in Las Vegas. Here you can find everything from the T.rex to a duck-billed dinosaur and a mammoth skeleton."

Soychemist writes "Walk into the Taser headquarters in Scottsdale, Arizona and it may seem like you are on an episode of Get Smart. The foyer is like a fortress, with giant steel doors and biometric identification systems. Inside, factory workers meticulously assemble the less-lethal weapons by hand and then put them through a battery of safety tests. In addition to making pistol-shaped devices, the company also produces the electronic equivalent of a claymore mine, which hurls dozens of electrified needles at the push of a button and electronic shotgun cartridges that deliver a powerful jolt."

A Schneier blog post notes that three would-be bombers were recently convicted in the UK thanks in large part to e-mail communication that was intercepted by the US National Security Agency. This was the second time the men had faced criminal charges; in the first trial, the prosecution was unable to make part of their case because they didn't yet have the e-mail evidence. "Although British prosecutors were eager to use the e-mails in their second trial against the three plotters, British courts prohibit the use of evidence obtained through interception. So last January, a US court issued warrants directly to Yahoo to hand over the same correspondence." The BBC posted a number of e-mails used as evidence in the trial. The communication is coded, and some of it looks like what you might find in your spam folder, but the article also provides the prosecution's explanation of what they mean.

newscloud writes "A twitter-savvy, gluten-free pizza shop nabbed missing Wired magazine writer Evan Ratliff in New Orleans early on Tuesday to win the $5,000 Vanish contest. Ratliff was ensnared in part by repeated non-TOR visits to our Facebook application, launched to support the contest's tracker community, and his secret travel journal on Twitter. 'The Vanish Team application became part of the game — essentially a trap for Evan — one he stumbled into each day knowingly and willingly. This is something that we would never do with our Facebook technology if Evan hadn't asked us to pursue him - but it's a useful reminder of "relative" anonymity on the Web.'"

Wired is reporting that the well-known "placebo effect" seems to be increasing as time goes on. Fewer and fewer medications are actually making it past drug trials since they are unable to show benefits above and beyond a placebo. "It's not only trials of new drugs that are crossing the futility boundary. Some products that have been on the market for decades, like Prozac, are faltering in more recent follow-up tests. In many cases, these are the compounds that, in the late '90s, made Big Pharma more profitable than Big Oil. But if these same drugs were vetted now, the FDA might not approve some of them. Two comprehensive analyses of antidepressant trials have uncovered a dramatic increase in placebo response since the 1980s. One estimated that the so-called effect size (a measure of statistical significance) in placebo groups had nearly doubled over that time."

Glyn Moody writes "Sony has never been much of a friend to hackers, and its infamous rootkit showed what it thought of users. But by omitting the option to install GNU/Linux on its new PS3, it has removed the final reason for the open source world to care about Sony. Unless, of course, you find Google's new distribution alliance with Sony to pre-install Chrome on its PCs exciting in some way."

Hugh Pickens writes "Studies of reproduction in space have previously been carried out with sea urchins, fish, amphibians and birds, but Brandon Keim writes in Wired that Japanese biologists have discovered that although mammalian fertilization may take place normally in space, as mouse embryos develop in microgravity their cells have trouble dividing and maturing. The researchers artificially fertilized mouse eggs with sperm that had been stored inside a three-dimensional clinostat, a machine that mimics weightlessness by rotating objects in such a way that the effects of gravity are spread in every direction. Some embryos were ultimately implanted in female mice and survived to a healthy birth, but at lower numbers than a regular-gravity control group. Part of the difference could be the result of performing tricky procedures on sensitive cells, but the researchers suspect they also reflect the effect of a low-gravity environment on cellular processes that evolved for Earth-specific physics. '"These results suggest for the first time that fertilization can occur normally under G environment in a mammal, but normal preimplantation embryo development might require 1G," concludes the report. "Sustaining life beyond Earth either on space stations or on other planets will require a clear understanding of how the space environment affects key phases of mammalian reproduction."'"

himitsu writes "In an article titled 'The Good Enough Revolution: When Cheap and Simple Is Just Fine,' Wired claims that the future of technology, warfare and medicine will be filled with 'good enough' solutions; situations where feature-rich and expensive products are replaced with bare-bones infrastructures and solutions. 'We now favor flexibility over high fidelity, convenience over features, quick and dirty over slow and polished. Having it here and now is more important than having it perfect. These changes run so deep and wide, they're actually altering what we mean when we describe a product as "high-quality."'"

Mike Sauter sends in a piece from Wired profiling research by Andrea Lunsford, a professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford, from which she concludes that we don't need to worry about computers and the Internet causing a decline in general literacy. "[Lunsford] has organized a mammoth project called the Stanford Study of Writing to scrutinize college students' prose. From 2001 to 2006, she collected 14,672 student writing samples — everything from in-class assignments, formal essays, and journal entries to emails, blog posts, and chat sessions. Her conclusions are stirring. 'I think we're in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven't seen since Greek civilization,' she says. For Lunsford, technology isn't killing our ability to write. It's reviving it — and pushing our literacy in bold new directions."

An anonymous reader writes "A group of hardware hackers has created a motherboard prototype that uses separate modules, each of which has its own processor, memory and storage. Each square cell in this design serves as a mini-motherboard and network node; the cells can allocate power and decide to accept or reject incoming transmissions and programs independently. Together, they form a networked cluster with significantly greater power than the individual modules. The design, called the Illuminato X Machina, is vastly different from the separate processor, memory and storage components that govern computers today."

carp3_noct3m writes "A freelance Wired magazine journalist has decided to see what it is like to disappear from normal life, all while staying on the grid. The catch, is that he is challenging anyone and everyone to find him, take a picture, and speak a special codeword to him. If you can do that, you can make 5000 dollars, which happens to come out of his paycheck for the article he'll be writing. Oh, and to top it all off, whoever finds him gets pictures and interviews in Wired. He has been posting to his Twitter, using TOR for internet, and the Wired website will be posting his credit card transactions."

ScentCone and other readers let us know about an indictment just unsealed in federal court for stealing 130 million credit cards and other data useful in identity theft, or just plain money theft. The breaches were at payment processor Heartland (accounting for the bulk of the 130M), Hannaford, 7-11, and two unnamed "national retailers." Interestingly, the focus of the indictment, Albert "Segvec" Gonzalez, is currently awaiting trial for masterminding the TJX break-in, which until Heartland counted as the largest credit-card theft ever. The indictment cites SQL injection attacks as the entry vector. Two unnamed Russia-based conspirators were also indicted. Securosis has analysis of the security implications of the breach ("These appear to be preventable attacks using common security controls. It's possible some advanced techniques were used, but I doubt it") and the attackers' methodology.

cloude-pottier writes "What do you do when zombies attack? Turn to a mathematician to come up with a model for the spread of a zombie infestation, of course! Students at Carleton University and the University of Ottawa have published a paper in a book titled Infectious Disease Modelling Research Progress detailing how to model the spread of a zombie population and various complications in managing the spread of the infestation. They even give humans a fighting chance in some cases! The original paper (PDF) can be found at their professor's website."

DikSeaCup writes "Arbor Network's Jose Nazario, an expert on botnets, discovered what looks to be the first reported case of hackers using Twitter to control botnets. 'Hackers have long used IRC chat rooms to control botnets, and have continually used clever technologies, such as peer-to-peer strategies, to counter efforts to track, disrupt and sometimes decapitate the bots. Perhaps what's surprising then is that it's taken so long for hackers to take Twitter to the dark side.' The next step, of course, is to code the tweets in such a way that they aren't so suspicious."

Hugh Pickens writes "In a few weeks, tens of thousands of creative people will make their yearly pilgrimage to Nevada's Black Rock desert for Burning Man, an annual art event and temporary community celebrating radical self expression, self-reliance, creativity and freedom, but EFF reports that the event's Terms and Conditions include 'a remarkable bit of legal sleight-of-hand.' As soon as 'any third party displays or disseminates' your photos or videos in a manner that the Burning Man Organization (BMO) doesn't like, those photos or videos become the property of the BMO. BMO's Terms and Conditions also limits your own rights to use your own photos and videos on any public websites obliging you to take down any photos to which BMO objects, for any reason; and forbidding you from allowing anyone else to reuse your photos. This 'we automatically own all your stuff' magic appears to be creative lawyering intended to allow the BMO to use the streamlined 'notice and takedown' process enshrined in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to quickly remove photos from the Internet giving BMO the power of fast and easy online censorship. 'Burning Man strives to celebrate our individuality, creativity and free spirit,' writes Corynne McSherry. 'Unfortunately, the fine print on the tickets doesn't live up to that aspiration.'"

mattOzan writes "Judge Marilyn Hall Patel was unswayed by RealNetworks' defense of their product under the Fair Use Doctrine, as she declared RealDVD illegal and barred its distribution. As she said in her ruling, 'So while it may well be fair use for an individual consumer to store a backup copy of a personally owned DVD on that individual's computer, a federal law has nonetheless made it illegal to manufacture or traffic in a device or tool that permits a consumer to make such copies.' She also said RealNetworks was aware of the conflict between their agreement and their plans for the software: 'Real did not elect to return (or destroy, with appropriate certification) the CSS General Specifications after it received them, as Real had a right to do under the agreement... This behavior indicates that Real understood it to be bound by the CSS General Specifications as well as the other technical specifications received after execution of the CSS License Agreement.'"

Nearly a year after we discussed the privacy implications of Flash cookies, they are in the news again as the US government considers revising its cookie policy. Wired covers a study out of UC Berkeley exposing questionable practices used by many of the Internet's most-visited Web sites (abstract). The most questionable activity the report exposes is known as "respawning": after a user has deleted browser tracking cookies, some sites will use information in Flash cookies to recreate them. The report names two companies, Clearspring and QuantCast, whose technologies reinstate cookies for other Web sites. "Federal websites have traditionally been banned from using tracking cookies, despite being common around the web — a situation the Obama administration is proposing to change as part of an attempt to modernize government websites. But the debate shouldn't be about allowing browser cookies or not, according Ashkan Soltani, a UC Berkeley graduate student who helped lead the study. 'If users don't want to be tracked and there is a problem with tracking, then we should regulate tracking, not regulate cookies,' Soltani said."

JamJam writes "Besides my beer gut, which I'm sure has some purpose, Wired is running a story on the 10 Worst Evolutionary Designs. Ranging from baby giraffes being dropped 5-foot during birth to Goliath bird-eating spiders that practically explode when they fall from trees."

Every 15 Earth years, Saturn has its equinox — the time during which its rotational axis is perpendicular to the rays from the sun, so that the sun is always directly "overhead" of Saturn's equator. This is significant because Saturn's rings orbit over the equator, so during the equinox, light from the sun hits them edge-on. This means that any objects wider than the rings, or orbiting above or below them, cast long shadows and are much easier to see. For the first time, we're able to get detailed images of these objects, thanks to Cassini. A moonlet, perhaps 1,300 feet in diameter, has been discovered in the B-ring, and the Bad Astronomy blog points out another object that seems to be bursting through the F-ring. Quoting: "The upward-angled structure is definitely real, as witnessed by the shadow it's casting on the ring material to the lower left. And what's with the bright patch right where this object seems to have slammed into the rings? Did it shatter millions of icy particles, revealing their shinier interior material, making them brighter? Clearly, something awesome and amazing happened here.

d0rp writes with news that Tesla Motors has reported earning a profit for the first time in its six-year history. Sales of the $109,000 Roadster earned the company $20 million in revenue, which settled out to $1 million in profits. "Most of that money rolled in after Tesla delivered cars customers had already placed deposits on. Although the company has, according to spokeswoman Rachel Konrad, seen a 'surge' in orders for the Roadster and the higher-performance Roadster Sport (price: $127,500), it isn't likely to keep rolling cars out so quickly. Konrad says Tesla is 'definitely on pace' to meet its goal of 1,000 to 1,200 cars a year but didn't say when that might happen. Tesla has so far delivered about 609 Roadsters since production started in March, 2008." The company is working on a new 'Model S' sedan, with the help of $465 million in government loans, and has also entered into a partnership with Daimler to help the German auto company produce electric Smart cars.

d0rp writes with news that Tesla Motors has reported earning a profit for the first time in its six-year history. Sales of the $109,000 Roadster earned the company $20 million in revenue, which settled out to $1 million in profits. "Most of that money rolled in after Tesla delivered cars customers had already placed deposits on. Although the company has, according to spokeswoman Rachel Konrad, seen a 'surge' in orders for the Roadster and the higher-performance Roadster Sport (price: $127,500), it isn't likely to keep rolling cars out so quickly. Konrad says Tesla is 'definitely on pace' to meet its goal of 1,000 to 1,200 cars a year but didn't say when that might happen. Tesla has so far delivered about 609 Roadsters since production started in March, 2008." The company is working on a new 'Model S' sedan, with the help of $465 million in government loans, and has also entered into a partnership with Daimler to help the German auto company produce electric Smart cars.

PainMeds writes "Apple's stepped-up and controversial rejections are helping to foster competition in the app store marketplace. According to an article by Wired, developers aren't taking AppStore rejection lying down, but are turning to the hacking community's repository system for the iPhone to launch an app store of their own. The 4-month-old Cydia store is yielding notably higher sales for a few application developers than Apple's AppStore, and is reportedly running on over 4 million Apple iPhone devices, with perhaps 350,000 connected at any one time. In this store, developers are distributing applications they've written that push the limits of Apple's normal AppStore policies, with software to add file downloads to Safari, trick applications into thinking they're on Wi-Fi (for VoIP), and enhance other types functionality. You'll also find the popular Google Voice application, which was recently rejected by Apple. Third party application development has been around since 2007, when the iPhone was originally introduced, and became so popular that O'Reilly Media published a book geared toward writing applications before an SDK was available. The Cydia store acts as both a free package repository and commercial storefront to third-party developers."

FourthAge writes "Federal agents at the Defcon 17 conference were shocked to discover that they had been caught in the sights of an RFID reader connected to a web camera. The reader sniffed data from RFID-enabled ID cards and other documents carried by attendees in pockets and backpacks. The 'security enhancing' RFID chips are now found in passports, official documents and ID cards. 'For $30 to $50, the common, average person can put [a portable RFID-reading kit] together,' said security expert Brian Marcus, one of the people behind the RFID webcam project. 'This is why we're so adamant about making people aware this is very dangerous.'"

Q-Hack! writes "Citing security concerns, the United States Marine Corps has issued an order banning access to social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter on its network for the next year. The Pentagon is now reviewing its social networking policy for the entire Department of Defense, which should be completed by the end of September, according to a report from CNN. The policy for the entire military is somewhat fragmented, as the Army ordered military bases to allow access to social media sites in May."

Soychemist writes "Print some thermochromic ink onto a sheet of paper, put metal heating elements on the other side, and you have a rudimentary color-changing display. Chemists in the Whitesides Group at Harvard think that the devices could be used to provide a simple readout from cheap medical tests and kits that check water for pollutants. In the past year, the same scientists have made a three-cent medical test and improvised a centrifuge with an egg beater. Their aim is to invent useful gizmos with everyday materials."

Soychemist writes "Print some thermochromic ink onto a sheet of paper, put metal heating elements on the other side, and you have a rudimentary color-changing display. Chemists in the Whitesides Group at Harvard think that the devices could be used to provide a simple readout from cheap medical tests and kits that check water for pollutants. In the past year, the same scientists have made a three-cent medical test and improvised a centrifuge with an egg beater. Their aim is to invent useful gizmos with everyday materials."

Sabre Runner writes to mention that a new British start-up, Aesir, has acquired the assets of a defunct drone company and is working on evolving a working model from several prototypes of "flying saucer" drones. "Aesir's first prototype, named 'Embler' [...] demonstrates the so-called 'Coanda effect,' where air speeds up as it 'sticks' to a curved surface. Aesir's drones take advantage of the Coanda effect to direct air down, away from the drone, boosting lift. Aesir doesn't appear to have any paying customers yet — and is reportedly bankrolled by a single investor."

Hugh Pickens writes "PC World reports that at the Black Hat security conference this week, security researchers say that it is pretty easy for a technically savvy hacker to make a fake payment card that gives them unlimited free parking on San Francisco's smart parking meter system. 'It wasn't technically complicated and the fact that I can do it in three days means that other people are probably already doing it and probably taking advantage of it,' says Joe Grand. 'It seems like the system wasn't analyzed at all.' To figure out how the payment system worked, Grand hooked up an oscilloscope to a parking meter and monitored what happened when he used a genuine payment card. Grand discovered the cards aren't digitally signed, and the only authentication between the meter and card is a password sent from the former to the latter. Examining the meters themselves could yield additional vulnerabilities that might allow someone to conduct other kinds of attacks, such as propagating a virus from meter to meter via the smart cards or a meter minder's PDA."

eldavojohn writes "Two researchers, Dan Kaminsky and Moxie Marlinspike, came up with exact same way to fake being a popular website with authentication from a certificate authority. Wired has the details: 'When an attacker who owns his own domain — badguy.com — requests a certificate from the CA, the CA, using contact information from Whois records, sends him an email asking to confirm his ownership of the site. But an attacker can also request a certificate for a subdomain of his site, such as Paypal.com\0.badguy.com, using the null character \0 in the URL. The CA will issue the certificate for a domain like PayPal.com\0.badguy.com because the hacker legitimately owns the root domain badguy.com. Then, due to a flaw found in the way SSL is implemented in many browsers, Firefox and others theoretically can be fooled into reading his certificate as if it were one that came from the authentic PayPal site. Basically when these vulnerable browsers check the domain name contained in the attacker's certificate, they stop reading any characters that follow the "\0 in the name.'"

eviltangerine writes "A new article from LiveScience suggests that marine creatures, such as the jellyfish, may contribute as much to ocean mixing as wind and tides. Wired is also covering the story and includes a video of the jellyfish in action. From the article, 'The mere act of swimming implies that some water travels with the swimmer,' said CalTech engineer Kakani Katija, co-author of the study in Nature Wednesday. 'Drift applies to all animals, to anything with a body.' No word yet on when the jellyfish blender is to debut."

AHuxley writes "Apple suggests that the nation's cellphone networks could be open to 'potentially catastrophic' cyberattacks by iPhone-using hackers at home and abroad if iPhone owners are permitted to legally jailbreak their wireless devices. The Copyright Office is currently considering a request by the Electronic Frontier Foundation to legalize the widespread practice of jailbreaking. Apple has responded to the request by saying that if the 'baseband processor' software — which enables a connection to cell phone towers — is exposed, then a user could crash the tower software, or use the Exclusive Chip Identification number to make calls anonymously. Apple also thinks its closed business model is what made the iPhone a success. The Vodafone scandal from a few years back showed how a network could be compromised, but that was from within. So, what do you think? Is Apple playing the 'evil genius' hacker card or can 'anyone' with a smartphone and a genius friend pop a US cell tower?"

AHuxley writes "Apple suggests that the nation's cellphone networks could be open to 'potentially catastrophic' cyberattacks by iPhone-using hackers at home and abroad if iPhone owners are permitted to legally jailbreak their wireless devices. The Copyright Office is currently considering a request by the Electronic Frontier Foundation to legalize the widespread practice of jailbreaking. Apple has responded to the request by saying that if the 'baseband processor' software — which enables a connection to cell phone towers — is exposed, then a user could crash the tower software, or use the Exclusive Chip Identification number to make calls anonymously. Apple also thinks its closed business model is what made the iPhone a success. The Vodafone scandal from a few years back showed how a network could be compromised, but that was from within. So, what do you think? Is Apple playing the 'evil genius' hacker card or can 'anyone' with a smartphone and a genius friend pop a US cell tower?"

Several readers sent us updates from the Boston courtroom where, mere hours before the start of trial, a federal judge ruled out fair use as a defense. Wired writes that "the outcome is already shaping up to resemble the only other file sharing trial," in which the RIAA got a $1.92M judgement against Jammie Thomas-Rassert. The defendant, Joel Tenenbaum, has already essentially admitted to sharing music files, and the entire defense put together by Harvard Prof. Charles Nesson and his students turned on the question of fair use. The judge wrote that the proposed defense would be "so broad it would swallow the copyright protections that Congress has created." Jury selection is complete and opening arguments will begin tomorrow morning. Here is the Twitter feed organized by Prof. Nesson's law students.

runyonave writes "There are some things in this world that will never be forgotten, this week's 40th anniversary of the moon landing for one. But Moore's Law and our ever-increasing quest for simpler, smaller, faster and better widgets and thingamabobs will always ensure that some of the technology we grew up with will not be passed down the line to the next generation of geeks. That is, of course, unless we tell them all about the good old days of modems and typewriters, slide rules and encyclopedias."

JohnSmedley sent in a story about what might be the last SciFi film worth caring about this summer. He writes "Wired has an interesting piece up on the upcoming District 9 release. District 9 rose from the ashes of a failed Halo movie and expands on 'Alive in Jo'Burg' which is a South African short film by Blomkamp. Both the short and full feature films expand and explore a premise in which aliens in space are treated as badly as illegal immigrants and the underclass. The story begins as a damaged alien craft lands in Africa. The foreign race is quarantined in a remote area called District 9, and from there are subjected to xenophobia, and the desire of a multi-national conglomerate to steal their technology. The film is an exploration of what would happen in terms of segregation between an alien race and humans, subjecting the stranded visitors to the very human condition of greed, fear, and exploitation. District 9 will be in theatres on August 14'th, and you can view the trailers from the viewpoint of Multi-National United."

An anonymous reader writes "In a Wired news article, iPhone Forensics expert Jonathan Zdziarski explains how the much-touted hardware encryption of the iPhone 3Gs is but a farce, and demonstrates how both the passcode and backup encryption can be bypassed in about two minutes. Zdziarski also goes on to say that all data on the iPhone — including deleted data — is automatically decrypted by the iPhone when it's copied, allowing hackers and law enforcement agencies alike access the device's raw disk as if no encryption were present. A second demonstration features the recovery of the iPhone's entire disk while the device is still passcode-locked. According to a similar article in Ars Technica, Zdziarski describes the iPhone's hardware encryption by saying it's 'like putting privacy glass on half your shower door.' With the iPhone being sold into 20% of Fortune-100s and into the military, just how worried should we be with such shoddy security?"

Back in January we covered the Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot, or EATR. The EATR gets its energy by "engaging in biologically-inspired, organism-like energy-harvesting behavior which is the equivalent of eating. It can find, ingest, and extract energy from biomass in the environment ..." So many news outlets picked up the story and ran it with titles alluding to the robot "eating flesh" or even "eating corpses" that a company spokesperson put out a press release saying, "This robot is strictly vegetarian." The statement says in part, "RTI's patent pending robotic system will be able to find, ingest and extract energy from biomass in the environment. Despite the far-reaching reports that this includes 'human bodies,' the public can be assured that the engine Cyclone has developed to power the EATR runs on fuel no scarier than twigs, grass clippings and wood chips — small, plant-based items for which RTI's robotic technology is designed to forage. Desecration of the dead is a war crime under Article 15 of the Geneva Conventions, and is certainly not something sanctioned by DARPA, Cyclone or RTI."

Wired has a feature on noctilucent clouds, once seen only at high latitudes but increasingly visible now lower down the globe. The clouds result from ice crystals at altitudes of 50 miles, higher than five 9s of the atmosphere. What water ice is doing up there, in a region 100 million times drier than the Sahara desert, is only one of the mysteries associated with the clouds. They are a recent phenomenon: the first scientific description of noctilucent clouds was penned in 1885. For a time it was believed that the clouds were an effect resulting from the eruption of the Krakatoa volcano two years before. Since 2002, the clouds have been sighted — and photographed — as far south as Oregon, Colorado, and Utah. Some scientists believe that human-caused climate change is playing a role, but others doubt this. Two satellites are in orbit to study the clouds; NASA's AIM generated this day-by-day movie of clouds in the vicinity of the North Pole during 2008.

leetrout writes "I attended a media briefing held by NASA at the Newseum in Washington, D.C. this morning where they released restored video of the Apollo 11 mission. The clips released are about 40% of the total footage to be restored by September by Lowry Digital in Burbank, CA. Wired has all the clips. A couple remarkable comments made during the briefing included the opinion from the original footage search committee that the original slow scan footage (stored as a single track on telemetry tapes) has been lost forever as the tapes were likely recycled by the mid '80s (apparently common NASA practice). Also, that someone from the applied physics laboratory was in Australia converting the slow scan directly to video. This differs from NASA's goal of merely broadcasting the event, at which it was successful. Unfortunately, no one knows where those tapes of approximately two hours of footage are located."

jtcm writes "Three men have been charged with conspiring to violate the Digital Millennium Copyright Act after federal investigators found that they allegedly offered a cracker more than $250,000 to assist with breaking Dish Network's satellite TV encryption scheme: '[Jung] Kwak had two co-conspirators secure the services of a cracker and allegedly reimbursed the unidentified person about $8,500 to buy a specialized and expensive microscope used for reverse engineering smart cards. He also allegedly offered the cracker more than $250,000 if he successfully secured a Nagra card's EPROM (eraseable programmable read-only memory), the guts of the chip that is needed to reverse-engineer Dish Network's encryption.' Kwak owns a company known as Viewtech, which imports and sells Viewsat satellite receiver boxes. Dish Network's latest encryption scheme, dubbed Nagra 3, has not yet been cracked by satellite TV pirates."