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Science

The Proton Just Got Smaller 289

Posted by samzenpus from the size-does-matter dept.
inflame writes "A new paper published in Nature has said that the proton may be smaller than we previously thought. The article states 'The difference is so infinitesimal that it might defy belief that anyone, even physicists, would care. But the new measurements could mean that there is a gap in existing theories of quantum mechanics. "It's a very serious discrepancy," says Ingo Sick, a physicist at the University of Basel in Switzerland, who has tried to reconcile the finding with four decades of previous measurements. "There is really something seriously wrong someplace."' Would this indicate new physics if proven?"
Privacy

Submission + - Why Online Privacy Is Broken (threatpost.com)

Submitted by Trailrunner7
Trailrunner7 writes: One of the more trite and oft-repeated maxims in the software industry goes something like this: We're not focusing on security because our customers aren't asking for it. They want features and functionality. When they ask for security, then we'll worry about it. Not only is this philosophy doomed to failure, it's now being repeated in the realm of privacy, with potentially disastrous effects. A quick search of recent news on the privacy front reveals that just about all of it is bad. Facebook is exposing users' live chat sessions and other data to third parties. Google is caught recording not only MAC address and SSID information from public Wi-Fi hotspots, but storing data from the networks, as well.

But the prevailing attitude among corporate executives in these cases seems to be summed up by Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who famously said this not too long ago: "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."
If you look beyond the patent absurdity of Schmidt's statement for a minute, you'll find another old maxim hiding underneath: Blame the user.

You want privacy? Don't use our search engine/photo software/email application/maps. That's our data now, thank you very much. Oh, you don't want your private chats exposed to the world? Sorry, you never told us that.
Moon

Submission + - Citizen Scientists Help Explore the Moon

Submitted by
Pickens
Pickens writes: "NPR reports that NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is doing such a good job photographing every bit of the moon's surface that scientists can't keep up, so Oxford astrophysicist Chris Lintott is asking amateur astronomers to help review, measure and classify tens of thousands of moon photos streaming to Earth using the website MoonZoo, where anyone can log on, get trained and become a space explorer. "We ask people to count the craters that they can see ... and that tells us all sorts of things about the history and the age of that bit of surface," says Lintott. Volunteers are also asked to identify boulders, measure the craters and generally classify what is found in the images. If one person does the classification — even if they're an expert — then anything odd or interesting can be blamed on them but with multiple independent classifications the team can statistically calculate the confidence in the classification and that's a large part of the power of Moon Zoo and Lintott adds the British and American scientists heading up the LRO project have been randomly checking the amateur research being sent in and find it as good as you would get from an expert. "There are a whole host of scientists ... who are waiting for these results, who've already committed to using them in their own research.""
Science

Submission + - Physicists Do What Einstein Thought Impossible (discovermagazine.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Einstein worked on Brownian motion (the movement of small particles in a fluid as they collide with water molecules) in 1905, but said it would be "impossible" to determine the speed and direction of a single particle during this dance. Now researchers have gone and done it, by suspending a dust-sized glass sphere in air (which slowed down its dance moves, since it had fewer collisions with spaced-out air molecules than it would have with water molecules). The researchers held the sphere in place with "laser chopsticks," and then watched how the glass bead bounced around to determine its direction and speed.
The Internet

Submission + - Adobe founders on Flash and internet standards

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: An interview with the founders of Adobe (and creators of PostScript) Charles Geschke and John Warnock. Three interesting quotes:

"It is so frustrating that this many years later we're still in an environment where someone says if you really want this to work you have to use Firefox. The whole point of the universality of the Web would be to not have those kind of distinctions, but we're still living with them. It's always fascinating to see how long it takes for certain pieces of historical antiquity to die away. The more you put them in the browsers you've codified them as eternal, and that's stupid".

"With Flash what we're trying to do is both beef it up and make it robust enough so that at least you can get one language that's platform-independent and will move from platform to platform without hitting you every time you turn around with different semantics".

"You can see why, to a certain extent, Apple and Microsoft view that as a challenge because they would like you to buy into their implementation of how the seamless integration with the Web goes. What we're saying is it really shouldn't matter. That cloud ought to be accessible by anybody's computer and through any sort of information sitting out on the Web."

Submission + - Emergency dispatcher fired for facebook drug joke (news.com.au)

Submitted by kaptink
kaptink writes: Dana Kuchler, a 21-year veteran of the West Allis' Dispatch Department, was fired from her job for making jokes on her Facebook page about taking drugs. She appealed to an arbitrator, claiming the Facebook post was a joke pointing out she had written "ha" in it and urine and hair samples tested negative for drugs. But the arbitrator said she should be entitled to go back to work after a 30-day suspension, but the City of West Allis complained that was not appropriate.
Is posting bad jokes on Facebook a justifiable reason to give someone the boot?
Games

Submission + - Brief History of Social Games (radoff.com)

Submitted by Tarinth
Tarinth writes: Social games (such as Farmville, etc.) are hardly new--because games have been part of recorded history for thousands of years. An infographic has integrated many of the key games from history (starting with Egypt's Senet game from 3100BC) to present, showing major milestones along the way such as play-by-mail, Dungeons and Dragons and Magic the Gathering. Today's social games phenomena, which might better be better called "social network games" is the confluence of several trends ranging from asynchronous gameplay, social play and virtual economies--all of which are shown within the infographic.
Security

Submission + - Facebook bug lets hackers delete friends (cio.com.au)

Submitted by swandives
swandives writes: There's lot of talk about Facebook and privacy at the moment, but a bug in Facebook's website lets hackers delete Facebook friends without permission. Steven Abbagnaro, a student from Marist College in Poughkeepsie, New York reported the flaw, writing proof-of-concept code that scrapes publicly available data from users' Facebook pages and deletes all of their friends, one by one. The victim first has to click on a malicious link while logged into Facebook.

Abbagnaro's code exploits the same underlying flaw that was first reported by Alert Logic security analyst, M.J. Keith, who discovered cross-site request forgery bug, where the website doesn't properly check code sent by users' browsers to ensure that they were authorized to make changes on the site.
Security

More Mac Vulnerabilities Than Windows In 2007? 329

Posted by Zonk from the dogs-and-cats-living-together-mass-hysteria dept.
eldavojohn writes "A ZDNet blog reports stats from Secunia showing OSX averaged 20.25 vulnerabilities per month while XP & Vista combined averaged 3.67/month. Is this report card's implication accurate, or is this a symptom of one company turning a blind eye while the other concentrates on timely bugfixes? 'While Windows Vista shows fewer flaws than Windows XP and has more mitigating factors against exploitation, the addition of Windows Defender and Sidebar added 4 highly critical flaws to Vista that weren't present in Windows XP. Sidebar accounted for three of those additional vulnerabilities and it's something I am glad I don't use. The lone Defender critical vulnerability that was supposed to defend Windows Vista was ironically the first critical vulnerability for Windows Vista.'"
Music

Submission + - Next for Apple: Lossless iTunes Store (cnet.co.uk)

Submitted by DrJenny
DrJenny writes: C|net has an interesting piece running at the moment about why Apple developed their own lossless codec, and more importantly that iTunes will become a download store for lossless audio, potentially from all the major labels. This would be a massively positive move for people who spend hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars on hi-fi gear, but refuse to give money to stores that only offer compressed music. It's a big FLAC, DRM, ALAC and GB discussion, but it's a very exciting perspective, and surely one that'll pan out meaning audiophiles will finally be able to take advantage of legal digital downloads.
Security

Submission + - SquirrelMail Repository Poisoned (beskerming.com)

Submitted by
SkiifGeek
SkiifGeek writes: "Late last week the SquirrelMail team posted information on their site about a compromise to the main download repository for SquirrelMail that resulted in a critical flaw being introduced into two versions of the webmail application (1.4.11 and 1.4.12).

After gaining access to the repository through a release maintainer's compromised account (it is believed), the attackers made a slight modification to the release packages, modifying how a PHP global variable was handled. As a result, it introduced a remote file inclusion bug — leading to an arbitrary code execution risk on systems running the vulnerable versions of SquirrelMail.

The poisoning was identified after it was reported to the SquirrelMail team that there was a difference in MD5 signatures for version 1.4.12.

Version 1.4.13 is now available."

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