alphadogg writes "The Windows 8 feature that logs users in if they touch certain points in a photo in the right order might be fun, but it's not very good security, according to the inventor of RSA's SecurID token. 'It's cute,' says Kenneth Weiss, who now runs a three-factor authentication business called Universal Secure Registry. 'I don't think it's serious security.' The major downside of the picture password is that drawing a finger across a photo on a touch screen is easy to video record from a distance — making it relatively easy to compromise, he says."
An anonymous reader writes "Researchers at Notre Dame have created a nanoparticle paste, which acts as the main ingredient in solar cells that are very easy to construct. In a short video clip, they can be seen assembling a functional solar cell with little more than a heat gun, tape, and some binder clips. The paste is made from a mix of t-butanol, water, and a mix of cadmium selenide with cadmium sulfide nanoparticles. So far, the experimental devices are not nearly as efficient as standard solar cells, but they were just developed. If the materials were slightly less toxic, it might even be a project that kids could do at home."
jrepin writes "Just in time for some holiday testing, the KDE SC 4.8 Release Candidate is now available. The final release of KDE 4.8 is about one month away, but now the release candidate is available to ensure it shapes up to be a solid release. Among the features of KDE Software Compilation 4.8 is support for Qt Quick in Plasma Workspaces, quite visible improvements to the Dolphin file-manager, KSecretService is now available as a shared password storage pool, and there's many performance improvements. Lots of bug fixes (measured in hundreds) can also be found in KDE 4.8."
bs0d3 writes "The U.S. Government has classified some of the largest websites on the Internet as examples of sites which sustain global piracy. The list released by the United States Trade Representative draws exclusively on input from rightsholders. It includes popular torrent sites such as The Pirate Bay, file-hosting service Megaupload, and Russia's leading social network VKontakte. VKontakte says that company's copyright problems are in the past after a deal was made with the USTR. Also, for the first time in many years, China's leading search engine Baidu has been removed from the list. However, China's widely used online consumer and business-oriented online shopping service Taobao remains listed. The full report can be viewed here. It has no legal implications whatsoever, but may be referred to by policy makers regarding future legislation (e.g. SOPA)."
MrSeb writes "According to new research from HTTP Archive, which regularly scans the internet's most popular destinations, the average size of a single web page is now 965 kilobytes, up more than 30% from last year's average of 702KB. This rapid growth is fairly normal for the internet — the average web page was 14KB in 1995, 93KB by 2003, and 300KB in 2008 — but by burrowing a little deeper into HTTP Archive's recent data, we can discern some interesting trends. Between 2010 and 2011, the average amount of Flash content downloaded stayed exactly the same — 90KB — but JavaScript experienced massive growth from 113KB to 172KB. The amount of HTML, CSS, and images on websites also showed a significant increase year over year. There is absolutely no doubt that these trends are attributable to the death throes of Flash and emergence of HTML5 and its open web cohorts." If you have a personal home page, how big is it?
astroengine writes "The sungrazing comet that survived the plunge deep into the solar corona, only to escape after swinging behind the sun last week, has posed for an extraordinary photograph. Space station commander Dan Burbank caught Comet Lovejoy and its impressive tail hanging above the Earth's horizon as it begins its long journey back into deep space."
bricko writes with a description of NOAA's Gaea supercomputer, being assembled at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. It's some big iron: 1.1 petaflops, based on 16-core Interlagos chips from AMD, and built by Cray. "The system, which is used for climate modeling and resource, also includes two separate Lustre parallel file systems 'that handle data sets that rank among the world's largest,' ORNL said. 'NOAA research partners access the system remotely through speedy wide area connections. Two 10-gigabit (billion bit) lambdas, or optical waves, pass data to NOAA's national research network through peering points at Atlanta and Chicago.'"
Roblimo writes "My phone is as stupid as a phone can be, but you can drop it or get it wet and it will still work. My cellular cost per month is about $4, on average. I've had a cellular phone longer than most people, and I assure you that a smart phone would not improve my life one bit. You, too, might find that you are just as happy with a stupid phone as with a smart one. If nothing else, you'll save money by dumbing down your phone." I stuck with a dumb phone for a long time, but I admit to loving the versatility of my Android phone, for all its imperfections.
Shivetya writes with a list of prices for upcoming models from Tesla, noting that "they aren't cheap and the prices are listed assuming the $7500 tax credit. A 160-mile range S will set you back $49,900, the 230-mile is at $59,000, and the 300-mile range S will cost $69,000. Battery sizes are 40, 60, and 85kwh respectively. For your money these cars also include a very large seventeen-inch touchscreen. Is this the electric car you've been waiting for or another rich person's toy?"
MojoKid writes "Rumors of AMD's Southern Island family of graphics processors have circulated for some time, though today AMD is officially announcing their latest flagship single-GPU graphics card, the Radeon HD 7970. AMD's new Tahiti GPU is outfitted with 2,048 stream processors with a 925MHz engine clock, featuring AMD's Graphics Core Next architecture, paired to 3GB of GDDR5 memory connected over a 384-bit wide memory bus. And yes, it's crazy fast as you'd expect and supports DX11.1 rendering. In the benchmarks, the new Radeon HD 7970 bests NVIDIA's fastest single GPU GeForce GTX 580 card by a comfortable margin of 15 — 20 percent and can even approach some dual GPU configurations in certain tests." PC Perspective has a similarly positive writeup. There are people who will pay $549 for a video card, and others who are just glad that the technology drags along the low-end offerings, too.
paxcoder writes "Gnome Shell ... is different. Very much so. The fallback was inadequate. I suspect that many people, like me, turned to the alternatives. My choice was LXDE, which worked ok, until (lx-)panel broke in the unstable branch of the distro that I use. Tired of using the terminal to run stuff, I replaced the standard panel with the one from Xfce. That made me realize that we really don't need a packaged desktop environment, there are pieces ready for assembly. If you customize your graphical environment, what elements do you use? Which window manager, file manager, panel(etc.) would you recommend? Do you have a panel with a hardware usage monitors, how do you switch between workspaces? Anything cool we might not know about?"
gzipped_tar writes "The 'Chinese Software Developer Network' (CSDN), operated by Bailian Midami Digital Technology Co., Ltd., is one of the largest networks of software developers in China. A text file with 6 million CSDN user credentials including user names, password, emails, all in clear text, got leaked to the Internet. The CSDN has issued a letter of apology to its users. In the letter, it is explained that passwords created before April 2009 had been stored in plain text, while later passwords were encrypted. Users created between September 2010 and January 2011 may still suffer from email address leaks. A summary of the most frequent passwords without the corresponding usernames is available at GitHub. Somewhat surprisingly, the cryptic sounding password 'dearbook' ranks 4th with 46053 accounts using it."
First time accepted submitter m4ktub writes "A team of researchers working with the ATLAS experiment at the LHC have published an article in arXiv where they describe what is believed to be the first observation of a new particle: the boson Chi-b (3P). Professor Roger Jones, Head of the Lancaster ATLAS group, said 'While people are rightly interested in the Higgs boson, which we believe gives particles their mass and may have started to reveal itself, a lot of the mass of everyday objects comes from the strong interaction we are investigating using the Chi-b.'"
bonch writes "After a historical reputation for not monetizing breakthrough technologies (including the mouse and desktop GUI), Xerox PARC is now focused on making money from its inventions. CEO Anne Mulcahy vowed in 2001 to return the company to profitability, encouraging 'open innovation' and mandating that research turned a profit. The latest innovation is thin-film printed electronics, intended for a variety of products, from RFID readers to price labels."
netbuzz writes "The purchase of newtgingrich.com by a Democratic Super PAC — and the use of it to highlight Newt Gingrich's political weaknesses — is either amusing or a dirty trick, depending on your politics and your view of the Republican presidential hopeful. In either case, however, it is a cautionary tale about the importance of controlling your brand online, a task that is about to get more difficult for everyone thanks to the impending expansion of generic top-level domains."
The first trailer for Ridley Scott¿s Alien spinoff Prometheus wastes no time pushing ¿What the hell?¿ buttons: A spaceship floats through space, someone in a spacesuit lifts a glob of goo, a woman collapses to her knees screaming, and ¿ in case that doesn¿t catch your attention ¿ Charlize Theron does push-ups.
Buried beneath the leathery skin of an elephant's foot lies one of anatomy's unappreciated mysteries. Three hundred years ago, a surgeon claimed elephants had six toes instead of the usual five, setting off a debate about whether an extra digit was really possible. Modern anatomists scoffed at the idea, insisting instead that the extra toe was really just a big lump of cartilage. Now a study of scores of elephant feet shows that the lump really does turn into bone. The digit is not a true toe ¿ it's more like a panda's faux thumb. But it nonetheless helps support the pachyderm's mighty girth.
New research suggests that fossils thought to represent some of the earliest multicellular life are instead single-celled, amoeba-like organisms. But even if they're not quite full-blown animals, they may hint at how animals came into being.
The sci-fi music video, premiering exclusively on Wired.com, is loaded with hypnotic 2-D and 3-D animations, from the requisite monoliths to Ralph Bakshi-inspired rotoscoping.
In closing arguments, the government continued to add evidence linking former intelligence analyst Bradley Manning to WikiLeaks, as Manning's attorney protests that the Army is overcharging his client in an attempt to get at WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
As the internet expands -- and businesses bring more and more data online -- it's more important the ever that data centers keep their power consumption down. This not only saves money, it eases the burden on the environment. Raising temperatures is one rather easy way to save power, but many data operators are afraid to dial up the savings. They're afraid of damaging equipment. They're afraid of voiding warranties. They're afraid of change. Theses fears appear to be unwarranted, but there's been little in the way of hard data to dispel them. That's beginning to change, however, as the large data center operators such as Amazon and Facebook study the problem internally and equipment makers such Intel conduct experiments and educate customers
Researchers studying a neurological disease caused by genes inherited from mom find a way to activate genes inherited from dad. Hopefully they'll balance each other out.
It seems increasingly likely that next year won¿t just bring modest updates to smartphones, tablets and e-readers but genuine, revolutionary transformations.
Mobile web development means supporting more than just the headline-grabbing iOS and Android web browsers. Developer Brad Frost argues why you should support, if not optimize, for the entire world of mobile browsers.
On the surface, the cause of the disastrous November U.S. helicopter mission that left 24 Pakistani soldiers dead was faulty maps and miscommunication. But the official U.S. investigation into the disaster points to deeper causes: the U.S. doesn't think it can trust its Pakistani counterparts with intel on its missions; and the Pakistanis stonewall the U.S. about their own operations.
The Christmas tree gets a high-tech addition: electric light. It's the beginning of a long, tangled story, or rather a story about long tangles.
A special rig allows scientists to study the surprisingly rich ecosystem of microorganisms miles below the ocean surface without destroying them.
Researchers at the University of Michigan analyzed the interaction in nearly 1,400 cold calls before pinpointing the powers of persuasion.
Dropbox¿s success is now at a critical moment. Providing a way to give users access to everything they do on a computer from everywhere has become the brass ring for digital services. And Dropbox is the one to beat. After years of remaining largely below the radar of the world¿s biggest computing companies, Dropbox is now faced with a host of very prominent competitors. The most immediate, of course, is Apple, whose iCloud service launched in October.
As far back as the late 1940s, long before the "uncanny valley," Uncle Walt was working on willies-inducing automated puppets.
The U.S. has left Iraq -- and with it, the memory of the Baghdad Country Club, the one bar in the heart of the highly fortified Green Zone. During the worst years of the insurgency, contractors, aid workers and diplomats headed to the Club for a pint -- and to hear Blackwater mercenaries cover Nickleback jams.
The dose of radiation you get from airport X-ray scanners is very low. But whether it is low to be harmless remains a lingering question.
Meet a young mom who lost her feet, an arm and her sight to a largely unknown syndrome called sepsis that affects 750,000 Americans each year and kills between one quarter and one half of them.
Google's daily brainteaser helps hone your search skills.
The combination of MobileMe's galleries and Apple's diminutive set-top box let anyone with a Mac publish videos and photos to anyone with an AppleTV. But now that iCloud has done away with the galleries feature, it's going to take the launch of an App Store for AppleTV to bring back the missing functionality.
Despite all the tales of Chinese hackers breaking into U.S. computer systems, the top security threat of 2011 turned out to be hacktivists with technical chops, proving political points by infiltrating companies, according to an exclusive preview of Verizon's annual threat report.
Satellite images of Nigeria's coastline show the new Shell oil spill covering a 356-square-mile patch of ocean. By Deepwater Horizon mega-disaster benchmarks, it's not so big -- but it might be in the Exxon Valdez ballpark, and underscores the risks of a new deepwater oil-gathering technique that's coming soon to the Gulf of Mexico.
When attempting to diagnose depression, it turns out that we don't need to ask people lots of questions or measure stress levels or investigate their mood. Rather, we might only need to show them a picture of their mom. Frontal Cortex blogger Jonah Lehrer explains.
Five to 10 years ago, the most powerful force in web browsing was the maker of the operating system — then, overwhelmingly Microsoft. Today, it's the search and advertising engine — now, overwhelmingly Google.
Since the turn of the century, director Brad Bird has galvanized Hollywood with animated masterpieces to become the year's finest action film.
Just when you think you can't throw another punch, this 'human punching bag' insults your mother or, worse, says you hit like his mother.
Nothing puts a damper on your holiday cheer more than being stuck in gridlock. Thankfully now a bevy of gizmos and apps exist to help us plot shorter routes.
One downside to trucking a wrapped-up version of a killer drone from one side of the country to another: locals are going to think they've seen a captured UFO. Nope, just a futuristic X-47B, a flying robot the Navy hopes will one day take off and land on an aircraft carrier. You know, the kind you see every day on the highway.