Gov't, certificate authorities conspire to spy on SSL users?
SSL is the cornerstone of secure Web browsing, enabling credit card and bank details to be used on the 'Net with impunity. We're all told to check for the little padlock in our address bars before handing over any sensitive information. SSL is also increasingly a feature of webmail providers, instant messaging, and other forms of online communication.
Recent discoveries by Wired and a paper by security researchers Christopher Soghoian and Sid Stamm suggests that SSL might not be as secure as once thought. Not because SSL itself has been compromised, but because governments are conspiring with Certificate Authorities, key parts of the SSL infrastructure, to subvert the entire system to allow them to spy on anyone they wish to keep tabs on.
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
Doublesex gene puts sex on the brain of fruitflies
At first glance, the differences between males and females seem obvious, since gentalia, morphology, and courtship behavior often vary greatly between the two sexes. However, the biological mechanisms that create these sex differences are still poorly understood in many species. A new study in Nature Neuroscience looks into how the gene doublesex (dsx) may help wire sex differences into the brain of the fruitfly Drosophila melanogaster.
Using a marker that targets dsx-expressing cells, researchers were able to determine that it is expressed in many body tissues that are physically different in males and females. Furthermore, by manipulating dsx expression, they could alter the flies' morphological development; overexpression of the female-specific dsx isoform created males that outwardly resembled females, and overexpression of the male-specific isoform created highly masculinized females.
The researchers also show that dsx expression has significant effects on the structure of flies' brains. The brains of male and female fruit flies differ in neuronal numbers, axonal projections, synaptic densities, and the directionality of neural pathways. A previously identified gene called fruitless (fru) helps establish the full set of dsx-expressing neurons, and dsx dictates their specific sexual identity. These dsx-expressing neurons dictate courtship behavior in both male and female fruit flies. Inhibiting dsx expression severely affected both males' and females' courtship behavior, reduced following behavior and song production in males, and caused females to reject potential mates and resist copulation.
dsx is part of a group of genes which are highly conserved across species. Since dsx plays an important role in shaping sex-specific physiological, neural, and behavioral differences in fruit flies, it’s likely that these genes play important roles in the development of a wide variety of other species.
Nature Neuroscience, 2010. DOI: 10.1038/nn.2515 (About DOIs).
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
It no longer does everything: no more Linux on PlayStation 3
The PlayStation 3 Sony launched has very little in common with the system you can buy now. The PS3 launched when rumble was a last-generation feature, backwards compatibility was a core part of the hardware strategy, and the ability to install Linux on the hardware was attractive for those who liked to tinker with their hardware. So what happened?
Well, rumble was added back as Sony admitted there was more of a legal problem than a technological issue, backwards compatibility became something that no one cared about around the same time the company needed to cut costs, and now Linux support is being stripped from existing hardware. This is the new age of gaming hardware: what the manufacturer giveth, the manufacturer taketh away.
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
iPad preorders ship, new preorders delayed, Best Buy on board
Customers who preordered iPads from Apple's websites are receiving shipping notifications today. The iPads are shipping directly out of China—as usual for Apple—and do not yet show a delivery date in the shipping system. Don't go thinking you'll get lucky and have your iPad at your door early—when Apple has done Saturday launches in the past, it has had FedEx or UPS hold early deliveries until the official launch day. We're guessing you'll get your iPads on Saturday, just like everybody else.
Customers who were late to preorder iPads will either have to wait in line on April 3 or until the following Friday, though. As we briefly noted over the weekend, Apple's website now says that new iPad preorders won't ship until April 12. Some believe this is an indicator that Apple has already botched the manufacturing schedule while others hail this as a victory for the "sold out" iPad.
If you do plan to wait in line on Saturday, the Apple Store won't be your only option. Apple has confirmed that Best Buy will be selling the iPad too, though an insider speaking to TUAW has said that they won't be available at all locations and won't be sold online. The stores that will have them will only have 15 per store—ouch—though iPad accessories will be there. Best Buy is also expected to receive new iPad shipments on April 11.
Does anyone have a countdown clock going yet?
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
Windows Live Wave 4 Milestone 2 leaked, screenshots galore
Screenshots of Windows Live Wave 4 have been leaking for quite some time, but now a build of Essentials has finally leaked. The build number is 15.2.2585.0122, where the first two suggests it is part of the Milestone 2 branch. This is an old build. We have already heard about 15.3.2659.319, which means Windows Live Wave 4 is at least at Milestone 3 right now. Rumors peg a Milestone 3 build being released on May 18, 2010, a beta build being compiled by June 3, 2010, and a beta build being available to the public on June 7, 2010. The dates are very specific dates so we remain skeptical about them.
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
Yahoo wants two-faced DNS to aid IPv6 deployment
Many systems that purport to have connectivity to the IPv6 Internet, well, don't. According to measurements done by Google 18 months ago, about a third of a percent of all Web users' systems think they have IPv6, with huge regional differences. In reality, it doesn't work for 27 percent of those users. Last week at the IETF meeting in Anaheim, engineers from Yahoo proposed to solve this problem by only exposing a server's IPv6 addresses if a DNS query comes in over IPv6.
Today, the 0.09 percent of Web users with broken IPv6 suffer significant timeouts if they, for instance, aim their Web browser at an IPv6-enabled site. The browser will first try to connect over IPv6 for upwards of a minute before giving up and retrying over IPv4. This is a big problem for important Web destinations such as Google and Yahoo, because they don't want to lose 0.09 percent (or more, as IPv6 use increases) of their visitors and therefore, revenue.
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
feature: The state of 4G: it's all about congestion, not speed
Most of the talk about future fourth-generation (4G) mobile broadband networks appears to focus on speed. These networks will be far, far faster than current 3G networks. But speed isn't actually the main reason why every carrier in the developed world is trying to extend the life of 3G networks by speeding them up, and build 4G networks as fast as equipment and financing is available. It's all about congestion and capacity, not speed. (In the developing world, 2G networks are being boosted to 3G speeds, too.)
"They're not really for speed, they're not really for voice, they're for capacity," said Allen Nogee, a principal analyst at the In-Stat research firm. Overwhelmed network operators need to handle more devices, each of them owned by high-revenue customers.
Regardless, this year we have already seen significant 3G network upgrades by AT&T and T-Mobile, the mass-market expansion of Clearwire's 4G WiMax network, and the commercial launch of Verizon's 4G LTE (Long Term Evolution) network.
What's the road to 4G look like? So far, it's remarkably free of missteps; delay has been the watchword instead of disaster.
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
Pretty penguin: five great themes for the GNOME desktop
The GNOME desktop environment and its underlying Gtk+ widget toolkit—which provide a user interface and a standard set of applications for Linux—have an elaborate theme system that enables users to customize the appearance of their desktop.
GNOME has attracted a vibrant community of open source artists who are collaborating to produce aesthetically sophisticated visual styles for the desktop environment. Many custom GNOME themes are published in online galleries so that they can be downloaded and installed by regular end users. The most popular of these repositories is the GNOME-Look.org website, which has become the de facto standard home of downloadable GNOME theming content.
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
Jury deliberating UNIX ownership in ongoing SCO trial
SCO's fate has been placed in the hands of 12 Utah jurors who will resume deliberations on Tuesday. They are tasked with deciding whether the UNIX SVRX copyrights were transferred from Novell to SCO in a 1995 asset purchase agreement.
SCO's legal battle began in 2003 when the company claimed that Linux includes code that was misappropriated from UNIX. Novell claims that SCO does not have standing to pursue litigation relating to SVRX copyright infringement because it does not own the relevant copyrights. A bench trial that concluded in 2007 ruled in Novell's favor but was later overturned. The case was put before a jury, which heard the closing arguments on Friday.
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
iPhone OS still dominates mobile web; Android on the way up
The latest Mobile Metrics Report from mobile advertising firm AdMob confirms what we've been seeing over the last year or so: the smartphone market largely belongs to Apple and Google from a platform perspective. It also reveals that "feature" phones have capitulated to smartphones for mobile ad requests, reflecting the growth of smartphones as they slowly begin a march toward dominating the overall mobile market. However, non-phone mobile Internet devices, like the forthcoming iPad, are beginning to be an increasingly important part of the mobile landscape.
According to AdMob's data, smartphone traffic grew 193 percent over the last 12 months, accounting for half the traffic on its network. Feature phones—what most of us think of as a "regular cell phone"—increased traffic 31 percent in the same time frame, but dropped down from 58 to 35 percent of traffic overall. Traffic from mobile Internet devices, including handheld game consoles, e-readers, and other similar Internet-capable devices, grew a whopping 403 percent, and now accounts for 17 percent of the traffic overall.
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
Fragile Dreams on the Wii: originality has its price
There isn't another game quite like Fragile Dreams: Farewell Ruins of the Moon on the market. Recently published by XSEED here in the States, it's a blend of adventure, role-playing, and survival horror genres that is simultaneously fascinating and tedious. It's a title with stellar production values, an excellent story, and play mechanics that hover somewhere between solid and tedious. As a result, this is a game that—if nothing else—is truly a unique experience.
The game's story stars a young man named Seto, one of a small group of survivors in a post-apocalyptic world. As opposed to other post-apocalyptic settings, the game's world is mostly abandoned; humans still exist, but they're few and far between. After the old man Seto was living with dies, the boy sets off to find other people living amongst the ruins of civilization. Along the way, Seto begins to learn the story of what caused humanity to disappear and why this ruined world is populated by ghosts and demons. It's a slow-paced plot, but it is smart, interesting, and engaging.
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
Appeals court strikes down another generic biotech patent
Last week, the full US Appeals Court for the Federal Circuit upheld an earlier ruling by a partial panel, invalidating a biotech patent that originated in research at MIT and Harvard. The patent covered any of three ways to disable a signaling pathway involved in the immune response, and would have enabled its licensee, Ariad Pharmaceuticals, to go after companies that already have drugs on the market. The court held, however, that simply specifying different ways of interfering with a protein without any written description of how to do so constituted insufficient grounds for granting a patent.
This case, and a similar one (University of Rochester v. Pharmacia) that served as precedent, both followed a similar pattern. In each case, basic research in a university context identified a key protein involved in inflammatory responses. For Rochester, it was the enzyme Cox-2; drugs that inhibit it included Celebrex and Vioxx, both painkillers with lower risk of stomach irritation than aspirin. In the new case, it was the NF-kappaB signaling pathway, which is involved in the immune response to pathogens. Excessive activation of the NF-κB creates chronic inflammation. In this case, Eli Lilly had two drugs already on the market.
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
No comments:
Post a Comment