Archive for June, 2011

Anonymous Leaks New Batch of Data

Thursday, June 30th, 2011

Orome1 writes "Anonymous has made available for download another batch of data, including those belonging to the Zimbabwean government, Mosman Municipal Council, Universal Music Group Partners (umusic.com's usernames/passwords and other data), Viacom (internal mapping of Viacom and its servers) and Brazilian Government (dumps and passwords)." ...

Microsoft Says Reinstall Overkill In Removing Rootkit

Thursday, June 30th, 2011

CWmike writes "Microsoft has clarified the advice it gave users whose Windows PCs are infected with a new, sophisticated rootkit dubbed Popereb that buries itself on the hard drive's boot sector, noting Wednesday that a complete OS reinstall is not necessary. 'If your system is infected with Trojan:Win32/Popureb.E, we advise ...

Bizarre Expanding Light Halo Seen By Hawaii Webcam

Thursday, June 30th, 2011

The Bad Astronomer writes "A webcam mounted at the CFHT observatory in Hawaii caught a strange, expanding halo of light on the night of June 22. Announced on the Starship Asterisk forum, readers quickly honed in on the likely culprit: the terminal charge from the third stage of a Minuteman ...

NYC Mayor Demands $600M Refund On Software Project

Thursday, June 30th, 2011

alphadogg writes "New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg is demanding that systems integrator Science Applications International Corporation reimburse more than $600 million it was paid in connection with the troubled CityTime software project, a long-running effort to overhaul the city's payroll system. 'The City relied on the integrity of SAIC as ...

Future Actions Predicted From Brain Activity

Thursday, June 30th, 2011

An anonymous reader writes "Bringing the real world into the brain scanner, researchers say they can now determine the action a person was planning, mere moments before that action is actually executed. In the study at the University of Western Ontario, human subjects had their brain activity scanned using functional ...

Early UNIX Contributor Robert Morris Dead at 78

Thursday, June 30th, 2011

dtmos writes "Robert Morris, a major contributor to the Unix password and security features while at Bell Labs, has passed at the age of 78. His interesting life was made even more interesting by his son, Robert Tappan Morris, who invented the computer worm." ...

Office 365: Suffer 18 Days’ Outage, Still Pay Half Price

Thursday, June 30th, 2011

rtfa-troll writes "Microsoft is preparing its customers for plenty of outage time according to the Register, with a scheme for Office 365 which will give customers some money back. The offer seems to be Microsoft's answer to Google offering a '100% uptime guarantee' (they even pay for maintenance time) The ...

UAV Hoisted Tower Powered By Laser Over Fiberoptic

Thursday, June 30th, 2011

carstene writes "LaserMotive, winners of the 2009 NASA power beaming contest, has a new invention, a virtual comm or surveillance tower. It's a quadcotper that can run indefinitely, powered by laser beam over a fiber optic cable. This allows the "tower" to reach great heights and avoids most laser safety ...

Cisco’s Tablet Act Like a Desktop

Thursday, June 30th, 2011

holy_calamity writes "Cisco's Cius tablet, due next month, is bulkier than the iPad 2 and has a smaller screen but it also brings tricks other tablets don't have. It can be connected to a keyboard, monitor and mouse to act like a desktop. Using an app to connect to a virtual ...

Climate Skeptic Funded By Oil and Coal Companies

Thursday, June 30th, 2011

Honken writes with a report from The Guardian that "'One of the world's most prominent scientific figures to be sceptical about climate change has admitted to being paid more than $1m in the past decade by major US oil and coal companies.' This somewhat contradicts that [Harvard researcher Willie] Soon ...