In a new report, The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) notes 23 "open issues" regarding the cloud computing, including computing performance, cloud reliability, economic goals, compliance and information security.FierceGovernmentIT reports that issues highlighted in NIST Special Publication 800-146 (PDF) "are traditional distributed computing topics that have remained open for decades" but have become ...
Scientists officially name two new elements on the periodic table: Flerovium and Livermorium.
Normally fan fiction about U.K. boy-band One Direction is not anything new on the internet. But when that fanfic is a video created by the lead animator of raunchy spy cartoon , features an evil leader named Lord Faptaguise and a secret weapon called the "pussy magnet" (not what you think), and has gotten nearly a million views in less than two days, it's worth noting.
DOJO, a small San Francisco-based ad agency, has gone into game development with its first iPad game . Here's why.
The first private space flight to the International Space Station has ended with a successful splashdown in the Pacific Ocean.
of racing games: great production values married to great design. But its overreliance on cliched iOS design tropes is a big turnoff.
Larry Ellison has bought a lot of companies in his 35 years as Oracle's chief executive, but he says that none has turned out better than his 2010 acquisition of Sun Microsystems.
Mathematicians now suspect quirks in energy-cloaking metamaterials could be exploited to create powerful quantum probes called "Schrödinger's hats." Such probes might record extremely subtle signals that would otherwise be scrambled by any attempt to measure them.
Considering switching to a standing desk? Here are your best options.
The Air Force's secret space plane is about to return from its second clandestine mission after an incredible 453 days in orbit (as of today).
Windows users are one step closer to getting a major system facelift -- and if today's release of Microsoft's latest OS build tells us anything, it's that the company is putting the system's strongest focus on lean and mean Metro apps.
It was the most Googley of propositions. The most successful company in the history of the internet said it would reinvent corporate computing by selling subscriptions to streamlined machines that moved all data and applications inside a web browser. A year later, Google has adjusted this audacious pitch, but the change in tack show that Google is intent on building a business around these machines -- something that many pundits have questioned over the last year.
Mike Brown began receiving lot of hate mail after he "killed" Pluto as a planet. But to his surprise this week, Brown was awoken with a prestigious Kavli Prize in Astrophysics. Astrobiologist and Extremo Files blogger Jeffrey Marlow asks Brown about his work, his passions and how it feels to be a winner.Brown shares the award with Jane Luu of MIT and David Jewitt of UCLA. I caught Brown on his way to the airport to discuss his prize-winning work.everywhere.
Google's online storefront, Google Play, now sells accessories alongside the Galaxy Nexus smartphone.
House lawmakers debated Thursday the Obama administration's request that they reauthorize legislation granting the government broad, warrantless electronic surveillance powers. The members appeared likely that they eventually would give the administration what it wants.
Microsoft is offering the feds their very own version of Office 365, the suite of online office tools the software giant introduced last year, reports Wired Enterprise's Caleb Garling.On Wednesday, Redmond trumpeted the arrival of Office 365 for Government, which mimics the standard incarnation of Office 365 but lives on a separate set of servers ...
State Farm is expanding its Drive Safe and Save usage-based insurance program to include cars equipped with Ford?s Sync telematics system. Also known as ?pay as you go,? usage-based insurance programs look at how many miles drivers put on their cars and calculate premiums accordingly.
New time-lapse video shows of strange radiant phenomena such as airglow and auroras from space.
Larry Ellison has never been one to go quietly into the night. On Wednesday, at the annual All Things D Conference in Los Angeles, the Oracle boss was asked about the company's ongoing legal battle with Google over the Android mobile operating system, and although Oracle's claims of patent and copyright infringement are now hanging by a thread, Ellison sees the court case as a victory.
Watch as SpaceX's Dragon capsule undocks and departs from the International Space Station in the video above.
Users who pay for the full game in advance can even download the data in advance of the June 7 release date.
Apple has been pushing to get its phones into the hands of the masses, particularly those in the low-end market looking to make their first smartphone purchase. That initiative takes on a new direction today as Cricket Wireless announced it would be selling the iPhone 4 and 4S prepaid for the first time.
Animal Planet recently aired a science fiction-inspired special trumpeting pseudoscience about aquatic apes. Laelaps blogger Brian Switek argues that the show embodies the end of good science television.
Goal-line technology, something soccer has sorely needed for ages, gets its biggest test this weekend ahead of the governing body's decision on whether it will enter the 21st century.
The Obama administration is set to argue to a federal appeals court Friday that the government may breach, with impunity, domestic spying laws adopted in the wake of President Richard M. Nixon's Watergate scandal.
Two new studies are filling crucial gaps in the tumultuous, volcanic histories of the Mount St. Helens and Long Valley. Volcanologist and Eruptions blogger Erik Klemetti explains how small crystals helped reconcile hundreds of thousands of hidden history.
Learning to code can be difficult, so sometimes it helps to watch someone else do it first. That's exactly what Code Player does -- show you the code as it?s written.
The ghost of Steve Jobs haunts All Things D.
Laser printers are a great addition to the home office. They may not be capable of the glossy photo paper printouts that inkjets can pull off, but they also last longer than 200 pages between cartridge fill-ups. In fact, that's one of the great joys of owning a laser printer: You can literally go a year and sometimes longer between needing to replace the toner.
Dot Physics blogger Rhett Allain analyzes a new video of a bubble-wrapped man leaping from a tall building. Is it real or fake and, in any case, could someone survive the drop?
MrSeb writes "Microsoft has announced the immediate availability of Windows 8 Release Preview. Unfortunately there isn't a Consumer Preview > Release Preview upgrade path — you'll have to format and perform a clean installation. After downloading the ISO, simply burn Windows 8 RP onto a USB stick or DVD, reboot, and follow the (exceedingly quick and easy) installer. Alternatively, if you don't want to format a partition, ExtremeTech has a guide on virtualizing Windows 8 with VirtualBox. After a lot of fluster on the Building Windows 8 blog, the Release Preview is actually surprisingly similar to the Consumer Preview. Despite being promised a new, flat, Desktop/Explorer UI, Aero is still the default theme in Windows 8 RP. The tutorial that will introduce new users to the brave new Start buttonless Windows 8 world is also missing. Major features that did make the cut are improved multi-monitor support — it's now easier to hit the hot corners on a multi-monitor setup, and Metro apps can be moved between displays — and the Metro version of IE10 now has a built-in Flash plug-in. There will be no further pre-releases of Windows 8: the next build will be the RTM."
MojoKid writes "Renowned Overclocker HiCookie used a Gigabyte Z77X-UD3H motherboard to achieve a fully validated 7.03GHz clock speed on an Intel Core i7 3770K Ivy Bridge processor. As it stands, that's the highest clockspeed for an Ivy Bridge CPU, and it required a steady dose of liquid nitrogen to get there. HiCookie also broke a record for the highest memory speed on an Ivy Bridge platform, pushing his G.Skill Trident X DDR3-2800 memory kit populated in four DIMM slots to 3,280MHz. Not for the faint of heart, the record breaking CPU overclock required that HiCookie pump 1.956V to the processor, according to his CPU-Z screenshot. The CPU multiplier was set at x63."
benfrog writes "New York City comptroller John Liu has accused HP of overcharging New York City $163 million on upgrades to its 911 system. According to a statement put out by Liu, an audit of the project revealed that HP did not perform up to spec on the contract between April 2005 and April 2008 and did not bill the city correctly for time and materials on its portion of the contract to upgrade the 911 system. According to Liu's reading, the contract was supposed to cost no more than $378 million over five years, but the in January the city projected it would have already spent $307 by mid-April and had to award Northrop-Grumman an additional $286m to do a second part of the original contract, ballooning the cost to $632m, and Liu's office is now estimating that cost overruns beyond this could be as high as an additional $362m. NYC's deputy mayor for operations was quoted defending the contract."
VVrath writes "Following Tuesday's story about MuseScore releasing its open source recording of the Goldberg Variations, the Musopen project has released ProTools files from its open source recording project. The final edited recordings are still being worked on but it seems we're living in very interesting times regarding open source classical music."
ToriaUru writes "Fedora is going to pay Microsoft to let them distribute a PC operating system. Microsoft is about to move from effectively owning the PC hardware platform to literally owning it. Once Windows 8 is released, hardware manufacturers will be forced to ship machines that refuse to run any software that is not explicitly approved by Microsoft — and that includes competing operating systems like Linux. Technically Fedora didn't have to go down this path. But, as this article explains, they are between a rock and a hard place: if they didn't pay Microsoft to let them onto the PC platform, they would have to explain to their potential users how to mess with firmware settings just to install the OS. How long before circumventing the secure boot mechanism is considered a DMCA violation and a felony?" Note that the author says this is likely, but that the entire plan is not yet "set in stone."
An anonymous reader writes "I'm in charge of getting some phones for my company to give to our mobile reps. Security is a major consideration for us, so I'm looking for the most secure off-the-shelf solution for this. I'd like to encrypt all data on the phone and use encryption for texting and phone calls. There are a number of apps in the android market that claim to do this, but how can I trust them? For example, I tested one, but it requires a lot of permissions such as internet access; how do I know it is not actually some kind of backdoor? I know that Boeing is producing a secure phone, which is no doubt good — but probably too expensive for us. I was thinking of maybe installing Cyanogenmod onto something, using a permissions management app to try and lock down some backdoors and searching out a trustworthy text and phone encryption app. Any good ideas out there?"
ideonexus writes "Republicans in North Carolina are floating a bill that would force planners to only consider historical data in predicting the sea-level rise (SLR) for the state as opposed to considering projections that take Global Warming into account. NC-20, the pro-development lobbying group representing twenty counties along the NC coast, is behind the effort and asserts that the one-meter prediction would prohibit development on too much land as opposed to SLR predictions of 3.9 to 15.6 inches." Scientific American has an acerbic take on the bill.
First time accepted submitter dintech writes "The Wall Street Journal reports that while Sony considered online-only content distribution for its next-generation Playstation, the manufacturer has decided that the new console will include an optical drive after all. Microsoft is also planning to include an optical disk drive in the successor to its Xbox 360 console as the software company had concerns about access to Internet bandwidth."
wiredmikey writes "Simurgh, a privacy tool used in Iran and Syria to bypass Internet censorship and governmental monitoring, is being circulated with a backdoor. The compromised version has been offered on P2P networks and via web searches. Research conducted by CitizenLab.org has shown that the malicious version isn't available from the original software source, only through third-party access, so it appears that Simurgh has been repackaged. The troubling aspect of the malicious version is that while it does install the proxy as expected, it then adds a keylogging component, and ships the recorded information off to a server hosted in the U.S. and registered to a person in Saudi Arabia. In response to this attack, the team that develops Simurgh has instituted a check that will warn the user if they are running a compromised version of the software. At present, it is unknown who developed the hijacked version of Simurgh, or why they did so."
judgecorp writes "The up-market London borough of Kensington and Chelsea has lost its chance for BT fast fibre. After residents objected to the ugly fibre cabinets, and the council repeatedly refused permission to install them in historic sites, BT has said the borough will not get its fast BT Infinity product at all. The borough says it doesn't need BT, as Richard Branson's Virgin Media has got it more or less covered."
First time accepted submitter ArmageddonLord writes " Small, out-of-pocket cash exchanges are still the stuff of everyday life. In 2010, cash transactions in the United States totaled US $1.2 trillion (not including extralegal ones, of course). There will come a day, however, when you'll be able to transfer funds just by holding your cellphone next to someone else's and hitting a few keys — and this is just one of the ways we'll wean ourselves off cash. In 'The Last Days of Cash', a special report on the future of money, we describe the various ways that technology is transforming how we pay for stuff; how it's boosting security by linking our biometric selves with our accounts; and how it's helping us achieve, at least in theory, an ancient ideal — money that cannot be counterfeited."
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from NetSecurity.org: "A Chinese computer programmer that was charged with stealing the source code of software developed by the U.S. Treasury Department pleaded guilty to the charge on Tuesday. The 33-year-old Bo Zhang, legally employed by a U.S. consulting firm contracted by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, admitted that he took advantage of the access he had to the Government-wide Accounting and Reporting Program (GWA) in order to copy the code onto an external hard disk and take it home." Just such things make me think that the default setting for software created with public money should be released with source code anyhow, barring context-specific reasons that it shouldn't be.
An anonymous reader writes "NYC residents may soon be unable to buy big gulps. In an effort to curb obesity, New York City's Mayor Bloomberg is seeking a ban on oversized sodas in restaurants, movie theaters and stadiums officials said on Wednesday. 'Obesity is a nationwide problem, and all over the U.S., public health officials are wringing their hands saying, "Oh, this is terrible,"' Mayor Bloomberg said. 'New York City is not about wringing your hands; it's about doing something. I think that's what the public wants the mayor to do.'"