sholde4 - Slashdot User

UK Government Can Demand You Hand Over Encryption Keys 426

Posted by Zonk on Tuesday October 02, 2007 @09:06AM from the shh-don't-give-them-ideas dept.

iminplaya writes "The UK government can now demand that citizens hand over their data encryption keys - or face jailtime for obstructing justice. The law only applies to data on UK shores, and doesn't cover information transmitted via UK servers across the internet. 'The law also allows authorities to compel individuals targeted in such investigation to keep silent about their role in decrypting data ... The Home Office has steadfastly proclaimed that the law is aimed at catching terrorists, pedophiles, and hardened criminals--all parties which the UK government contends are rather adept at using encryption to cover up their activities.'"

Meteorite Causes Illness in Peru 357

Posted by Zonk on Tuesday September 18, 2007 @12:05PM from the i've-read-a-book-about-this dept.

eldavojohn writes "A meteorite struck in Peru on Saturday leaving cinders, rock & water boiling out of the ground. Villagers nearby reported headaches & vomiting and attributed it to the event. From the article, 'Seven policemen who went to check on the reports also became ill and had to be given oxygen before being hospitalized, Lopez said. Rescue teams and experts were dispatched to the scene, where the meteorite left a 100-foot-wide (30-meter-wide) and 20-foot-deep (six-meter-deep) crater, said local official Marco Limache.' It's not yet clear whether this is from the meteorite, gas trapped underground that was released or a chemical reaction between the two."

Comment CNN really nailed this story. (Score 1) 385

by sholde4 on Thursday August 09, 2007 @11:10AM (#20170997) Attached to: Largest-Known Planet Befuddles Scientists

Good job checking your facts CNN. They obviously spoke with several astronomy experts before publishing this article. "New exoplanet 20 times Earth's size" And here's a little taste of the win and awesomeness contained within: "PHOENIX, Arizona (AP) -- Scientists have discovered the universe's largest known planet, a giant ball made of mostly hydrogen that is 20 times larger than Earth and circling a star 1,400 light-years away." http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/space/08/09/exoplanet .discovery.ap/index.html

Solar Cell Achieves 40% Efficiency 632

Posted by kdawson on Wednesday December 06, 2006 @02:36AM from the too-cheap-to-meter dept.

Fysiks Wurks found on the U.S. Department of Energy website news of a breakthrough in solar energy efficiency. From the article: "...with DOE funding, a concentrator solar cell produced by Boeing-Spectrolab has recently achieved a world-record conversion efficiency of 40.7 percent, establishing a new milestone in sunlight-to-electricity performance." A page linked from Wikipedia's article on solar energy calculates the land area that would need to be covered by solar collectors at 8% efficiency to meet the world's energy needs (using 2003 figures). At 40% efficiency, it looks like a square 265 miles on a side in the American southwest would do it.

AIDS Can Fight AIDS 276

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Tuesday November 07, 2006 @02:22AM from the numbers-games dept.

dptalia writes "Scientists at the University of Pennsylvania have announced that they have engineered a strain of the AIDS virus that fights AIDS. This strain of AIDS works like a vaccine and improved the immune system of the test subjects. After three years on this new therapy, no side effects have been observed."

The Cost of a Tiered Internet 246

Posted by Zonk on Thursday May 25, 2006 @04:07PM from the have-their-cake-and-eat-it-too dept.

An anonymous reader wrote in to mention a Popular Science article about the money issues involved in a tiered internet. From the article: "With a tiered Internet, such routing technology could be used preferentially to deliver either the telecoms' own services or those of companies who had paid the requisite fees. What does this mean for the rest of us? A stealth Web tax, for one thing. 'Google and Amazon and Yahoo are not going to slice those payments out of their profit margins and eat them,' says Ben Scott, policy director for Free Press, a nonprofit group that monitors media-related legislation. 'They're going to pass them on to the consumer. So I'll end up paying twice. I'm going to pay my $29.99 a month for access, and then I'm going to pay higher prices for consumer goods all across the economy because these Internet companies will charge more for online advertising.'" Update: 05/26 16:54 GMT by Z : The article is hosted on CNN, but is original material from Popular Science. Post updated to reflect this.

MPAA Being Sued For Allegedly Hacking Torrentspy 448

Posted by Zonk on Thursday May 25, 2006 @12:18PM from the shoe-is-on-the-other-camel's-foot dept.

goldaryn writes "Valence Media, the parent company of Torrentspy.com, one of the web's largest torrent search engines, has filed a lawsuit against the MPAA for allegedly hiring a hacker to steal e-mail correspondence and trade secrets. From the suit: 'The Motion Picture Association of America willfully and intentionally obtained without authority, conspired to obtain without authority, purchased, procured, used and disclosed private information that it knew was unlawfully obtained through unauthorized access to Plaintiffs' computer servers and private email accounts, in violation of United States and California privacy and computer security laws.'"

Wikipedia Reaches 1,000,000 Articles 257

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday March 01, 2006 @08:04PM from the where-were-you-when dept.

AndrewRUK writes "At 23:09 UTC, the one-millionth article was created in the English-language Wikipedia. The milestone was reached with the creation of an article about Jordanhill railway station in Scotland. Congratulations to all the Wikipedians, especially Nach0king who wrote the millionth article and Mészáros András who in November 2004 correctly predicted that it would be created today."

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