deglr6328 writes 'The OMEGA EP laser at the University of Rochester's Laboratory for Laser Energetics was dedicated today at the Robert L. Sproull Center for Ultra High Intensity Laser Research. The new laser, which has been in design since ~2002 will, at 1 kilojoule per 1 picosecond pulse, be the highest energy petawatt scale laser ever created by far. For a fleeting fraction of a second, it will deliver a beam of infrared light at 1054 nm that is more powerful than the total energy consumption of all human activity on the planet, to a tiny spot the size of the head of a pin. Previous petawatt scale lasers such as the one created at Lawrence Livermore labs in the late 90's (and dismantled in 1999) were capable of only several hundred joules per pulse. The new OMEGA EP laser will be able to manifest power densities sufficient to examine Unruh and Hawking radiation-like phenomena in the laboratory and will have the capability to directly produce nuclear reactions through ultra high electric field initiated photodisintegration.'

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DesScorp writes 'Popular Science has a piece on some outrageous ideas for weapons; some came to fruition, and other's didn't. And while some of the weapons (atom bombs, chemical weapons, bats with bombs strapped to them that seek out homes and buildings at night) are truly frightening, some of them are also kind of silly, such as the Gay Bomb, and the Frisbee bomb that was labeled the 'Modular Disc-Wing Urban Cruise Munition.''

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alphadogg writes to tell us that the NSF is researching chain letters and how they travel. The results aren't quite what one might expect, showing a pattern of more selective and circuitous travel. 'One surprising finding was that messages often took meandering routes between people who knew each other, often through as many as 100 intermediaries. Many email users also received copies from multiple social groups. The researchers concluded that because messages come from many directions, there's ample opportunity for the messages to be edited along the way.'

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A group of U.S. Senators are asking the FBI to explain a recent controversial National Security Letter sent to the Internet Archive. The Internet Archive was able to defeat the request with help from the EFF and the ACLU this past April. 'The Internet Archive's case is only the third known legal challenge to NSLs, despite the fact that the the FBI issues tens of thousands a year -- more than 100,000 such letters were issued in 2004 and 2005 combined. But despite the lack of legal challenges from recipients at ISPs, telephone companies and credit bureaus, successive scathing reports from the Justice Department's Inspector General have found illegal letters and a willy-nilly culture within the bureau towards tracking their usage.'

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esocid writes to tell us that researchers from Taiwan have created a new baseball cap complete with embedded -bio-signal monitoring system. The purpose was to give a neural interface that could be useful in everyday life. 'The cap contains five embedded dry electrodes on the wearer's forehead, and one electrode behind the left ear, that acquire EEG signals. Then, the EEG signals are wirelessly transmitted to a data receiver, where they are processed in real-time by a dual-core processor. The BCI system includes Bluetooth transmission for distances of 10m or less (e.g., for driving applications), as well as RF transmission for distances up to 600m (e.g., for potential sports applications). Next, the processed signals are transmitted back to the cap, where the data can be stored, displayed in real-time on a screen, or be used to trigger an audio warning, if necessary.'

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Dr. Eggman writes 'Oscar Pistorius, a 21-year-old South African double-amputee sprinter, has won his appeal filed with the Court of Arbitration for Sport. This overturns a ban imposed by the International Association of Athletics Federations, and allows Mr. Pistorius the chance to compete against other able-bodied athletes for a chance at a place on the South African team for the Beijing Olympics. He currently holds the 400-meter Paralympic world sprinting record, but must improve on his time by 1.01 seconds to meet the Olympic qualification standard. However, even if Pistorius fails to get the qualifying time, South African selectors could add Oscar to the Olympic 1,600-meter relay squad.'

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The BBC is reporting that Sugar Labs is planning on taking 'Sugar', the XO laptop's innovative interface, to the next level and distribute to a broader audience. 'Sugar is a user interface that allows children to collaborate even when working on different machines. For example, they can write documents or make music together. The open source software also contains a journal and automatically saves and backs up all data. [...] Sugar Labs will work closely with developers from the open source community to develop the user interface for other computers and operating systems. It has already been bundled with the most recent releases of the Ubuntu and Fedora Linux operating systems.'

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D Ninja writes 'Yesterday, Lockheed Martin was awarded the $1.4 billion Air Force contract to build the next-generation global positioning satellite system. This occurred after a series of delays as the Air Force decided between Lockheed and the competing bidding contractor, Boeing Co. 'GPS III, will give new navigation warfare (NAVWAR) capabilities to shut off GPS service to a limited geographical location while providing GPS to US and allied forces. GPS III will offer significant improvements in navigation capabilities by improving interoperability and jam resistance. The procurement of the GPS III system is planned for multiple blocks, with the GPS IIIA portion currently underway. GPS IIIA includes all of the GPS IIF capability plus up to a ten-fold increase in signal power, a new civil signal compatible with the European Union's Galileo system, and a new spacecraft bus that will allow a growth path to future blocks.''

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A Bill that could allocate more than $1 billion over the next eight years to combat those who trade in child pornography has been unanimously approved by a Senate panel. 'The Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday voted to send an amended version of the Combating Child Exploitation Act, chiefly sponsored by Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.), to the full slate of politicians for a vote. [...] An amendment adopted Thursday also adds new sections to the original bill that would rewrite existing child pornography laws. One section is designed to make it clear that live Webcam broadcasts of child abuse are illegal, which the bill's authors argue is an 'open question.' Another change is aimed at closing another perceived loophole, prohibiting digital alteration of an innocent image of a child so that sexually explicit activity is instead depicted.'

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Stony Stevenson writes to tell us that in a recent interview, Marc Henauer has revealed that security researchers are falling behind now that malware is starting to be able to change its signature every few hours. 'Unfortunately the know-how and construction kits used to create this shape-shifting threat are now readily available and are unleashing a wave of malware based on social engineering techniques. [...] Sweeney believes that a non rules-based monitoring process must be set up to defend all ingress and egress points covering SMTP, DNS, HTTP(s), IM etc.'

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Peer writes 'The dutch government has officially decided that it will no longer use voting machines (Babel Fish Translation) for elections. So it's pencil and paper from now on. Activists have been campaigning against the use of voting machines for some time.'

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holy_calamity writes 'The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency was founded in 1958 after the Soviets shocked the world by launching Sputnik. New Scientist recounts the history of the agency charged with protecting the US from 'technological surprise' and lists some of its most spectacular successes and failures.'

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cyteen02 writes 'We run a data processing and tracking system for a customer in the UK. We provide a simple Web site where the customer can display the tracking data held in our Oracle database. From these screens they can query based on a combination of 15 different data fields, so it's pretty flexible. We also provide a csv report overnight of the previous day's data processing, which they can load into their own SQL Server database and produce whatever reports they want. Occasionally they also want one-off specific detailed reports, so we write the SQL for that and send them the results in an Excel format spreadsheet. This all ticks along happily. However they have now asked for direct read-only access to our Oracle database, to be able to run ad-hoc queries without consulting us. As a DBA, my heart sinks at the thought of amateurs pawing through my database. Unfortunately, 'because you are stupid' is not considered a valid business reason to reject their request. So can any Slashdotters assist me in building my case to restrict access? Have you experienced a similar situation? Have you had to support this sort of end user access? How would you advice me to keep my customer away from my precious tables?'

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mystermarque alerts us to an announcement by Honeywell, JetBlue Airways, International Aero Engines, and Airbus about a program to develop jet fuel from algae and other biomass. They hope to supply nearly 1/3 of the demand for jet fuel from these sources by 2030. A Wall Street Journal blog points out that even if this program's goals are met, we will be worse off by 2030 in terms of jet kerosene released into the atmosphere, assuming that the rapid growth in the aviation sector continues apace.

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Diomidis Spinellis writes 'Earlier today I presented at the 30th International Conference on Software Engineering a research paper comparing the code quality of Linux, Windows (its research kernel distribution), OpenSolaris, and FreeBSD. For the comparison I parsed multiple configurations of these systems (more than ten million lines) and stored the results in four databases, where I could run SQL queries on them. This amounted to 8GB of data, 160 million records. (I've made the databases and the SQL queries available online.) The areas I examined were file organization, code structure, code style, preprocessing, and data organization. To my surprise there was no clear winner or loser, but there were interesting differences in specific areas. As the summary concludes: '..the structure and internal quality attributes of a working, non-trivial software artifact will represent first and foremost the engineering requirements of its construction, with the influence of process being marginal, if any.''

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atrocious cowpat passes along a call for help from symmetry magazine, the joint publication of Fermilab and SLAC, noting: 'Could be just plain gibberish, it could be something like those wonderfully weird letters to the Mount Wilson observatory, or it could be a message from aliens who just happened to have gotten their hands (tentacles/exoskeleton) on a fax machine.' 'A little over a year ago, the Fermilab Office of Public Affairs received a curious letter in code (4.4-MB image here). It has been sitting in our files all that time and we haven't had much of a chance to look into breaking the code, nor are we particularly expert at this!'

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An anonymous reader writes 'I've recently acquired a few old P2/P3 laptops. Most either work properly but are slow, or have various problems with power supplies and/or batteries. Attempting to sell them would probably earn less than the cost of shipping, so that's out of the question. I was hoping the Slashdot crowd could give me some ideas on what to do with these old computers. As somebody who already has ~10 computers lying around the house there is certainly no need for an additional computer to 'experiment' with, so I was hoping for some more creative suggestions.'

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SecureThroughObscure writes 'Security blogger and researcher Nate McFeters blogged about a 0-day exploit affecting IE7 and IE8 beta on XP that was released by noted security researcher Aviv Raff. The flaw is a 'cross-zone scripting' flaw that takes advantage of the fact that printing HTML web pages occurs in the Local Machine Zone in IE rather than in the Internet Zone. Quoting McFeters's post: 'This is currently unpatched and in all of its 0-day glory, so for the time being, beware printing using the 'print table of links' option when printing web pages.' McFeters and others will be presenting at Black Hat on the link between cross-site scripting and cross-zone. Rob Carter has been hitting this hard over at his blog, pointing out cross-zone weaknesses in Azureus, uTorrent, and the Eclipse platform.'

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biscuitfever11 writes 'Bletchley Park, the home of Station X, Britain's secret code-breaking base during World War II, barely scraping by financially, as shown in these images compiled by ZDNet this week. The site has undergone major redevelopment as an act of remembrance for the Allied efforts to break the German Enigma code, but now its future is clouded — among others, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation turned them down for financial assistance (since it doesn't have to do with the Internet). Its director estimates that Bletchley Park's funds will be exhausted in three years. Hungry land developers are circling. This is an insightful look at what's happened to Bletchley Park these days and the pain it's going through.'

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An anonymous reader brings news that Verizon Wireless has announced plans to use a Linux-based software platform for phones on its network. Verizon is the first US mobile carrier to join the Linux Mobile Foundation, the goal of which is to 'collaboratively develop a comprehensive Linux-based mobile software stack that can be modified easily and used at no cost on a wide range of hardware devices.' Many had expected Verizon to go with Android, but according to the Register, Verizon feels Android 'isn't as open as it would prefer.' Continuing: 'Yes, Google bills Android as open. And, yes, it's backed by the Open Handset Alliance, another industry consortium calling for the open development of mobile apps. But [Verizon spokesman Jeffrey] Nelson argues that at this point, Google is calling the shots. 'Google said 'Here's the plan. Sign on the dotted line if you support.' It may end up being collaborative. It may end up being collegial. But it need not be.' He actually has a point. But maybe Verizon just wants more control over the situation. It should be noted that the company made sure it has a place on the LiMo board. In any event, Verizon says that customers will be free to attach any device and any application to its network by the end of the year - provided those devices and applications met certain minimum specifications. So, in theory, you'll have free rein to attach an Android phone even if you don't buy it from Verizon.'

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