Pat Attack writes "I think most of the people who read Slashdot know that if it has circuitry, it can be hacked. Well, the good folks over at CNN have an article about the potential for your car to be hacked. This article lists the potential damage that could be done, proof of concept work, as well as a few scary scenarios. 'With vehicles taking up to three years to develop, [security strategist Brian Contos] says manufacturers will struggle to keep abreast of rapidly-evolving threats unless they organize regular software updates. Instead, he says, any installed technology should be given a so-called "white list" of permissible activities beyond which any procedures are blocked.' My mom reads CNN and is a Luddite. I expect to hear from her today. She'll probably tell me my new car with bluetooth is unsafe."
MBtronics writes "I work at an embedded hardware/software company and we are currently moving all our products for Windows CE to Linux. Our core development team already uses their favorite distro for development, but the rest of the developers are still working on Windows. We are going to give a series of Linux lessons (from 'what is Linux' to installing, using and developing) for everybody in the company who is interested (including non-developers). They will be allowed to choose their own distro, but we will certainly get requests for recommendations. My question to the Slashdot crowd: what distro (and window manager) do you think is the best to teach Linux to the generic public? We are currently thinking of Ubuntu, Fedora or Mint."
New submitter dommer2029 writes "A few years back, Sony bought up a small company running an online collectible card game called Star Chamber: The Harbinger Saga. Two days ago, they announced that the servers will be shutting down on March 29, 2012. All of our virtual collectible cards? Poof. It's not surprising — the user base is small and dwindling — but it's proof that any server-based digital goods you 'own' can vanish on a corporation's whim."
alphadogg writes "The little cameras in your home are multiplying. There are the ones you bought, perhaps your SLR or digital camera, but also those that just kind of show up in your current phone, your old phone, your laptop, your game console, and soon your TV and set-top box. Varun Arora, founder of startup GotoCamera in Singapore, wants you to turn them all on and let his company's algorithms analyze what they show, then sell the results as marketing data, in a sort of visual version of what Google and other firms do with search results and free email services."
New submitter S810 writes "According to an article in Discovery News, oxygen was found by the Cassini spacecraft around Dione, one of Saturn's large moons. 'It is thought the oxygen is being produced via interactions between Saturn's powerful radiation belts and Dione's water ice. The radiation breaks the water molecules down, liberating oxygen into the moon's exosphere.' Hopefully this will open the door for more funding of research int the moons of Saturn and Jupiter."
Hugh Pickens writes "The BBC reports on how millions of people struggle to understand a payslip or a train timetable, or pay a household bill. Government figures show that almost half the working population of England have only primary school math skills, and research suggests that weak math skills are linked with an array of poor life outcomes such as prison, unemployment, exclusion from school, poverty and long-term illness. 'We are paying for this in our science, technology and engineering industries but also in people's own ability to earn funds and manage their lives,' says Chris Humphries. He is the chairman of National Numeracy, an organization seeking to emulate the success of the National Literacy Trust, which has helped improve reading and writing standards since it was set up nearly 20 years ago. The Department for Education wants the vast majority of young people to study math up to 18 within a decade to meet the growing demand for employees with high level and intermediate math skills. 'It is simply inexcusable for anyone to say "I can't do maths,"' adds Humphries. "
An anonymous reader writes "Alcubierre warp-drives (theoretically) allow rocket ships to travel faster than the speed of light, while staying within the rules of Einstein's general theory of relativity. New research (PDF) has shown that as such warp-drives zip through the universe, they gather up particles and radiation, releasing them in a burst as the warp-drive slows down. This is bad news for family and friends waiting for the ship to arrive, as this intense burst will fry them."
silentbrad points out an article about the gradual shift of video games from being 'goods' to being 'services.' They spoke with games lawyer Jas Purewal, who says the legal interpretation is murky: "If we're talking about boxed-product games, there's a good argument the physical boxed product is a 'good,' but we don't know definitively if the software on it, or more generally software which is digitally distributed, is a good or a service. In the absence of a definitive legal answer, software and games companies have generally treated software itself as a service – which means treating games like World of Warcraft as well as platforms like Steam or Xbox LIVE as a service." The article continues, "The free-to-play business model is particularly interesting, because the providers of the game willingly relinquish direct profits in exchange for greater control over how players receive the game, play it, and eventually pay for it. This control isn't necessarily a bad thing either. It can help companies to better understand what gamers want from their games, and done properly such services can benefit both gamers and publishers. Of course, the emphasis here is on the phrase 'done properly.' Such control can easily be abused."
garthsundem writes "As described in the NY Times Economix blog, the mattress chain Sleepy's analyzed data from the National Health Interview Survey to find the ten most sleep deprived professions. In order, they are: Home Health Aides, Lawyer, Police Officers, Doctors/Paramedics, Tie: (Economists, Social Workers, Computer Programmers), Financial Analysts, Plant Operators (undefined, but we assume 'factory' and not 'Audrey II'), and Secretaries."
dcblogs writes "The science and engineering workforce in the U.S. has flatlined, according to the Population Reference Bureau. As a percentage of the total labor force, S&E workers accounted for 4.9% of the workforce in 2010, a slight decline from the three previous years when these workers accounted for 5% of the workforce. That percentage has been essentially flat for the past decade. In 2000, it stood at 5.3%. The reasons for this trend aren't clear, but one factor may be retirements. S&E workers who are 55 and older accounted for 13% of this workforce in 2005; they accounted for 18% in 2010. 'This might imply that there aren't enough young people entering the S&E labor force,' said one research analyst."
An anonymous reader writes "A privately employed solar scientist named Pete Riley estimates there's a 12 percent chance of a massive solar storm comparable to the Carrington Event in 1859 which resulted in breathtaking aurorae across the United States and other temperate regions of the globe. The electromagnetic surge from the 1859 event caused failures of telegraph systems across Europe and North America. A similar storm today could knock out power grids, GPS and communication satellites, data centers, transportation systems, and building and plumbing infrastructures and wreak $1 trillion or more of economic damage in the first year alone, according a 2008 report from the National Academy of Sciences."
New submitter rullywowr writes "After many users expressed anger, AT&T has moved the slowdown throttling bottleneck from 3GB of data to 5GB of data for users of 4G LTE smart phones. 'Previously, AT&T slowed speeds for subscribers who reached the top 5% of data users for that billing cycle and geographic location. Customers were outraged, arguing that the percentage method meant they had no way to know what the limit was — until AT&T informed them via text message that they were in danger of exceeding it.' AT&T still maintains the position that less than 5% of its users exceed the 3GB threshold each month."
theodp writes "The USPTO's Thursday publication of Google's patent application for Inferring User Interests was nicely-timed, coinciding with what ZDNet called Google's privacy policy doomsday. The inventors include Google Sr. Staff Research Scientist Shumeet Baluja, the author of The Silicon Jungle, a cautionary tale of data mining's promise and peril, which Google's Vint Cerf found 'credible and scary.' No doubt some will feel the same about Beluja's patent filing, which lays out plans for mining 'user generated content, such as user interests, user blogs, postings by the user on her or other users' profiles (e.g., comments in a commentary section of a web page), a user's selection of hosted audio, images, and other files, and demographic information about the user, such as age, gender, address, etc.'"
Facebook's work to address its self-identified weakness in mobile is meant to signal to investors that the company still has plenty of iterative innovation left.
Astronomers have found an enormous and strange clump of dark matter left behind following a violent collision of galaxy clusters.
The more intimately your code is connected to your creation the better both will be. That's the thinking behind developer Chris Granger's new real-time game-editing demo.
In the emailed invitation for its March 7 press event, Apple included an image that's provoked intense speculation. Some observers suggest the hardware in the image doesn't relate to an iPad at all, but rather a touchscreen television. It's an interesting thought, but it's not going to happen.
When a vibration in an aircraft's wing or tail matches the natural frequency of that structure, the results of that "flutter" can be catastrophic. If the vibration isn't dampened over time, it can grow, causing the structure to flex uncontrollably and potentially fail. That's why the Air Force, NASA and Lockheed Martin are teaming up for new ways to fight flutter with a new experimental drone. Meet the X-56A.
While software is Silicon Valley's darling, hardware hacking is still a big theme at this year's Technology Entertainment and Design conference in Long Beach, a week-long expo of big thinkers and even bigger ideas.
Everyone's talking about free-to-play games. But for the biggest game franchises, the future might be pay-to-play.
February's spectacular planetary show continues. After Venus and Jupiter lined up in the night sky last week, the distance between Earth and Mars is now shrinking to its smallest amount in more than two years.
The online game giant Zynga is getting its game on as it prepares to roll out its internal cloud-based Zynga Platform, which it outlined on Thursday. Zynga's zCloud move got attention here at Cloudline for its shift away from Amazon Web Services (AWS) to shoulder the heavy compute lifting, and now the attention is turning to whether zCloud can play up in the big league with Zynga.com as gaming platform.
Between our wireless phone company, the company that we use for e-mail, our smartphone company and the companies that provide the apps on our phones, there exists a detailed, expansive record of everywhere we've been, every website we've visited and everyone we've called, e-mailed and texted and what we've said ? often going back years and years. I believe that consumers have a fundamental right to know what information is being collected about them. I believe that they have a right to decide whether they want to share that information, and with whom they want to share it and when. And I believe that consumers have a right to expect that companies that store their personal information will store it securely.
Are employees at Apple already using the so-called iPad 3?possibly running iOS 6?to surf the web ahead of its expected announcement on March 7? We're not sure, but the Ars Technica magic 8-ball says "signs point to yes."
Researchers at MIT have refined a software-based chip simulator that tests chip designs with large numbers of cores for flaws, adding the ability to measure designs' potential power consumption, as well as processing times for tasks, memory access, and core-to-core communications patterns. The team from MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science is using the simulator to test possible designs for a new processor targeted for fabrication later this year?one that they hope will have over 100 cores.
A crocodile that lived in Texas 95 million years ago probably crushed its reptilian prey like a giant nutcracker. Laelaps blogger Brian Switek pieces together the evidence of this gruesome yet efficient behavior.
"The future of education is a platform," CEO Mehdi Maghsoodnia told me in an interview. "But whose platform is it? Will there be an iTunes or Facebook that can address 500 universities and one million students?"
Imagine an SUV pulls off the road and rolls down its passenger-side window. Out blasts a missile, careening as far as 60 miles. This is how the U.S. military's elite Special Operations Command imagines the counterterrorist car chases of the future.
Susan Cain is a lawyer and negotiations consultant. She is also an introvert who has noticed that institutions like business and education are stacked against people like her. So for the past seven years, she has been writing , a book on that subject. It was published earlier this year. She knew that to promote it she would have to undertake something difficult for introverts: lots of public speaking. She braced herself for 'a year of speaking dangerously.' Her dream venue was scariest stage of all: TED, which has become for intellectuals and artists the equivalent of what Johnny Carson's couch once was for comedians.
Sure, the military's got plenty of crazy robots in development. But only one of 'em can take phone calls and carry your luggage -- all by itself.
Want to turn in your neighbor to the Department of Homeland Security, with no accountability? Yeah, there's an app for that.
Forget the two-second rule of conventional wisdom. Who has that kind of time? These days, say experts, your site has just 400 milliseconds to load or your visitors will go elsewhere.
The current rate of ocean acidification puts Earth on a track that, if continued, would likely be unprecedented in last 300 million years.
How much energy must aspiring ninja warriors use to beat the acrobatic salmon ladder? Dot Physics blogger Rhett Allain crunches the numbers in a video analysis.
Many security pros don't use antivirus software. And they believe that many businesses are spending too much money on AV software and other security tools. The fact is that most criminals are smart enough to test their attacks against popular antivirus products. There's even a free website called Virus Total that lets you see whether any of the most popular malware scanning engines will spot your Trojan program or virus. So when new attacks pop up on the internet, it's common for them to completely evade antivirus detection.
Rick Lax sets out to disprove Dunbar's number.
From Kooora to Kijiji to VKontakte, alternatives to the web's US stars are overshadowing the big guys.
After spending more than $140 million, the Air Force is poised to pull the plug on its ambitious project to send a king-sized, all-seeing spy blimp to Afghanistan. Which is a bit of a strange move: Not only is the scheduled first flight of the 370-foot-long "Blue Devil Block 2" airship less than six weeks away, but just yesterday, a top Air Force official bragged to Congress about the blimp's predecessor, the "Blue Devil Block 1" program.
Electronic shifting finally comes to city bikes with a system works smoothly, swiftly and intuitively.
The creators of get their hands on Dr. Seuss with enjoyable, family-appropriate results.
Google's daily brainteaser helps hone your search skills.