Science & TechnologyS


Laptop

VeriSign SSL certs open to tampering, competitor warns

Dan Goodin
The Register
Thu, 24 Jun 2010 07:02 UTC
Bank of America attacks made easy

VeriSign and one of its partners have come under fire for publicly exposing webpages used to process customer security certificates, a practice a competitor claims puts some of the biggest names on the web at risk of serious targeted attacks.

According to Melih Abdulhayoglu, CEO of internet security firm Comodo, publicly accessible pages such as those here and here needlessly disclose sensitive internal information about VeriSign customers Bank of America and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts respectively. By exposing the email address of the organizations' security certificate managers and providing a comprehensive list of web addresses that use secure sockets layer protection, VeriSign puts them at risk of targeted phishing attacks, he said.
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Network

Security fears slow government Web 2.0 adoption

Dan Worth
V3
Thu, 24 Jun 2010 06:12 UTC
LondonvView
© V3Web 2.0 uptake remains slow in the government sector
Analysts say government departments fear data loss through use of social media sites

The government's take-up of Web 2.0 technologies is being slowed by fears over security, according to Ovum.

The analyst firm's Business Trends: understanding your government customer 2010 report found that 50 per cent of respondents in Europe cited security issues as their greatest concern about the implementation of social media technologies, compared to 46 per cent in North America.

"With more stringent regulations in the EU than the US, and more of a culture of privacy in Europe, it's perhaps not surprising it's a bigger concern than in North America," said Jessica Hawkins, associate analyst at Ovum, who compiled the report.
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Sherlock

Lake Michigan Shipwreck Found After 112 Years

Dinesh Ramde
The Associated Press
Thu, 24 Jun 2010 16:12 UTC
Image
© AP Photo/Great Lakes Shipwreck ResearchThe gangway under the boiler house of the wooden steamship L.R. Doty found off the Milwaukee, Wis. shoreline.
A great wooden steamship that sank more than a century ago in a violent Lake Michigan storm has been found off the Milwaukee-area shoreline, and divers say the intact vessel appears to have been perfectly preserved by the cold fresh waters.

Finding the 300-foot-long L.R. Doty was important because it was the largest wooden ship that remained unaccounted for, said Brendon Baillod, the president of the Wisconsin Underwater Archaeology Association.

"It's the biggest one I've been involved with," said Baillod, who has taken part in about a dozen such finds. "It was really exhilarating."

The Doty was carrying a cargo of corn from South Chicago to Ontario, Canada in October 1898 when it sailed into a terrible storm, Baillod said. Along with snow and sleet, there were heavy winds that whipped up waves of up to 30 feet.
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Cell Phone

Data roaming megabill clampdown starts next week

Team Register
The Register
Wed, 23 Jun 2010 03:59 UTC
Roaming pornmeisters beware

From next week travellers using mobile data in Europe will be cut off from the internet if they hit a €50 bill limit.

New EU regulations designed to prevent huge surprise bills come into force on 1 July.

Mobile operators will be required to warn customers when they reach 80 per cent of the bill ceiling. Those who want to continue using mobile data abroad will have to call to have it lifted.
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Bulb

Big EU imports of Sahara sun-power coming soon ?

Lewis Page
The Register
Tue, 22 Jun 2010 02:49 UTC
Headlines to which the answer is no

The European Union might subsidise "interconnector" undersea power lines beneath the Mediterranean for the purpose of importing solar energy from the Sahara desert, according to reports.

"I think some models starting in the next 5 years will bring some hundreds of megawatts to the European market," European Energy Commissioner Guenther Oettinger told Reuters on Sunday, following a meeting with energy ministers from Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia.
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Rocket

Huge new airships for US Army: designed in Blighty

Lewis Page
The Register
Tue, 22 Jun 2010 03:09 UTC
British engineers are to partner with a major US defence contractor to build a large "optionally manned" robot spy airship, intended to lurk for three weeks at a time in the skies above Afghanistan.

US army floating robot
© The RegisterNow that's a big robot.
American arms'n'aerospace goliath Northrop Grumman announced the deal last week, revealing that the US Army has ordered "up to three" Long Endurance Multi-Intelligence Vehicle (LEMV) ships in a $517m deal. Northrop will lead a consortium of several firms on LEMV, but it is acknowledged that the actual airships will be based on Brit company Hybrid Air Vehicles' 300-foot-long HAV304 design.
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Info

Psychopathy - Academic Battle Delays Publication by 3 Years

Benedict Carey
New York Times
Fri, 11 Jun 2010 00:51 UTC
Academic disputes usually flare out in the safety of obscure journals, raising no more than a few tempers, if not voices. But a paper published this week by the American Psychological Association has managed to raise questions of censorship, academic fraud, fair play and criminal sentencing - and all them well before the report ever became public.

The paper is a critique of a rating scale that is widely used in criminal courts to determine whether a person is a psychopath and likely to commit acts of violence. It was accepted for publication in a psychological journal in 2007, but the inventor of the rating scale saw a draft and threatened a lawsuit if it was published, setting in motion a stultifying series of reviews, revisions and legal correspondence.

"This has been a really, really troubling process from the beginning," said Scott O. Lilienfeld, a psychologist at Emory University and a collaborator with one of the paper's authors. "It has people wondering, 'Do I have to worry every time I publish a paper that criticizes someone that I'll get slapped with a lawsuit?' " The delay in publication, he said, "sets a very dangerous precedent" and censors scientific discourse.
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Telescope

Space Rock Watch: Next Generation of Near-Earth Asteroid Lookout Comes Online

John Matson
Scientific American
Tue, 22 Jun 2010 00:37 UTC
Pan-STARRS 1
© Rob RatkowskiWide-eyed: The Pan-STARRS 1 telescope in Hawaii samples a large area of the sky at once, which should enable it to spot large numbers of near-Earth asteroids and other transient objects
The first of four planned Pan-STARRS telescopes in Hawaii should boost asteroid detection rates over the next few years

A new sentry is on guard atop the Haleakala volcano in Hawaii, scanning the skies for potentially threatening asteroids and comets. The first of four telescopes planned for the Pan-STARRS project, short for Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System, began a dedicated survey of the sky May 13.

Pan-STARRS 1 (PS1) is a modest-size telescope, just 1.8 meters in diameter, but it has an extremely wide field of view, making it an ideal instrument for surveying. Its view encompasses seven square degrees at once - about 35 times the area of the full moon and more than four times as much sky as is visible to the telescope used in the influential Sloan Digital Sky Survey, which began in 2000. "In terms of survey power, we're the biggest telescope in the world," says PS1's director, Ken Chambers, an astronomer at the University of Hawaii's Institute for Astronomy (IfA). Pan-STARRS' operators predict that the telescope will complete a survey of the sky visible from Hawaii - about three quarters of the entire sky - three times a month.

Comment: For our readers to get an idea of what lies ahead and what we truly need to worry about, read Laura Knight-Jadczyk's comprehensive SOTT editorial: Meteorites, Asteroids, and Comets: Damages, Disasters, Injuries, Deaths, and Very Close Calls

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Info

World's Largest Dinosaur Graveyard Linked to Mass Death

Charles Q. Choi
Live Science
Wed, 23 Jun 2010 13:54 UTC
Dinosaur Graveyard
© Royal Tyrrell Museum.A herd of centrosaurs (a type of horned dinosaur) drowning in a flood millions of years ago in what is now Alberta, as depicted in this illustration. They left behind what could be the world's largest dinosaur graveyard.
Scientists have revealed what may be the world's largest dinosaur graveyard.

The dinosaurs may have been part of a mass die-off resulting from a monster storm, comparable to today's hurricanes, which struck what was then a coastal area.

The findings could help solve a mystery concerning why the badlands of western Canada are so rich in dinosaur fossils.

The roughly 76-million-year-old fossil beds apparently hold thousands of bones over an area of at least 568 acres (2.3 square km), skeletons that belonged to a roughly cow-sized, plant-eating horned dinosaur known as Centrosaurus. This treasure trove provides the first solid evidence that some horned dinosaur herds were much larger than previously thought, with numbers easily in the high hundreds to low thousands, said senior research scientist David Eberth, a palaeontologist and geologist at the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Alberta.
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Telescope

Venus Express shows off new findings at major conference


European Space Agency
Wed, 23 Jun 2010 21:26 UTC
Image
© ESA Venus Express in orbit around Venus
Thanks to data from Venus Express we have the best idea yet of how Venus' atmosphere works, but there is still a long way to go, delegates at this year's International Venus Conference will be told. At the event, taking place this week (20-26 June) in Aussois, France, scientists are outlining how a better understanding of our nearest planetary neighbour can help us probe our own planet, as well as other bodies in our Solar System, and beyond.

Venus has long been a mysterious place. A runaway greenhouse effect has rendered the surface invisible, as thick clouds of sulphuric acid and a dense atmosphere dominated by carbon dioxide engulf a planet only marginally smaller than Earth. With surface temperatures averaging about 464 ºC (737 K), and surface pressures about 100 times that on Earth, Venus was a prime target for early space exploration. However, it then lost favour with space agencies, subsequently being labelled the "forgotten planet".
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