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"all you have to do is go in the lab, apply more technology, and you should be able to make a bigger quantum computer" So the only thing preventing a more general purpose quantum computer is money and enough engineers... Hmm... (POLL-AT-LINK) Via: PC World: Much of the encryption world today depends on the challenge of factoring large numbers, but scientists now say they've created the first five-atom quantum computer with the potential to crack the security of traditional encryption schemes. In traditional computing, numbers are represented by either 0s or 1s, but quantum computing relies on atomic-scale units, or...

Earlier this month, infamous hacker collective Anonymous declared "war" on Donald Trump who they accuse of being a fascist and seeking to institute a dictatorship in America. We're not sure how many people took them seriously and we're almost positive Trump himself got a good, hearty laugh at the threat (after all, the group also declared "war" on Bakr al-Baghdadi) but on Thursday, the group claims it has released Trump's phone number and social security number.

It was an intense competition between man and machine, and in the end, the machine took home the title. On Tuesday, Google's AlphaGo artificial intelligence program won the fifth and final round game of Go in a bout with Lee Sedol, one of the greatest Go players in the world. AlphaGo took four out of the five games in a contest that marked a noteworthy leap forward for computer smarts. That's not to say the computer was perfect. After losing the fourth game, AlphaGo hit a rough patch in game five, but continued on to defeat Lee, who resigned 280...

Matt WeinbergerMarch 15, 2016Microsoft's aggressive campaign to get customers to Windows 10 is raising some eyebrows, with scattered reports that some people's PCs are automatically upgrading from Windows 7 — without their explicit permission. For instance, in a post titled "My PC Upgraded To Windows 10 Without Asking, Then Immediately Broke," Kotaku's Patrick Klepek shares the story of how, last week, his Windows 7 PC installed the Windows 10 update automatically overnight. "Maybe I forgot to push back the upgrade schedule, maybe I accidentally scheduled it by clicking the wrong button. Whatever the case, I definitely did not intend to...

Lee Sedol started with a bow, a traditional Korean gesture of respect for an opponent who could neither see him nor sense his presence. The world champion at Go – an ancient Chinese board game – looked nervous. His eyes darted from side to side. He took a sip of water, and made his first move. Lee could be forgiven some nerves: his opponent was AlphaGo, an artificial-intelligence program designed by Google DeepMind, their five-game series billed as a landmark face-off between human and computer. “History is really being made here,” said commentator Chris Garlock, as the first game in...

Heat doesn't kill hard drives. Here's what does"Free-cooled" datacenters use ambient outside air instead of air conditioning. That lets us see how environment affects system components. Biggest surprise: temperature is not the disk drive killing monster we thought. Here's what is. At last months Usenix FAST 16 conference, in the Best Paper award winner Environmental Conditions and Disk Reliability in Free-cooled Datacenters, researchers Ioannis Manousakis and Thu D. Nguyen, of Rutgers, Sriram Sankar of GoDaddy, and Gregg McKnight and Ricardo Bianchini of Microsoft, studied how the higher and more variable temperatures and humidity of free-cooling affect hardware components. They reached...

Ok good linuxian folks, Here's what I'd like to do IF possible- Dual boot windows 10 and linux mint cinnamon BUT have windows 10 run again in linux under a virtual machine (yes I know it sounds redundant, but i have a reason for this setup if possible) I'm not sure if I coudl install windows 10 twice on one machine or not, but let's for now just assume i could- (windows 10 is 'free' and you can download the iso for it and use it without activating it legally- the iso is direct from MS- and while I don't...

SlySoft Inc. is a software company registered in the Carribean country of Antigua and Barbuda. For the past few years, the firm has been a thorn in the side of Hollywood studios and game makers by creating and releasing software that would circumvent DRM and copyright protections on CDs and DVDs. Its product line includes tools like AnyDVD, AnyDVD HD, Clone CD, CloneDVD mobile, Virtual Clone Drive, Game Jackal, and Game Jackal Enterprise. With no doubt, the company's most known product is AnyDVD, a device driver used by many movie, game, and software piracy groups (and even home users) to...

They broke in like it was nothing. They could have wiped my hard drive, stolen my files, or practically anything nefarious you can do with a computer. All because I had a wireless mouse dongle plugged into my laptop. And all they needed was a simple antenna that costs as little as $15 at Amazon. Thankfully, "they" were a pair of security researchers from a company called Bastille, and every company that builds wireless mice and keyboards has already been alerted to the issue. If you have a Logitech Unifying receiver, there's already a fix. (Here is a link to...

Wes Clark, the computer engineer whose work largely influenced the design of DEC minicomputers, CAD software, graphical user interfaces, and the ARPAnet, died Monday. Wesley Allison Clark, a revered computer engineer whose work from the 1950s through 1970s underpinned the revolutions in personal computing, computer graphics, and the internet, died Monday. He was 88. Clark trained in physics at the University of California / Berkeley and joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Lincoln Laboratory in 1952. His first computer job was to test the nascent memory technology for MIT's Whirlwind, which was a vacuum tube computer for the U.S. Navy....

Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center on Wednesday announced that it paid approximately US$17,000 to resume normal operations after digital extortionists knocked its computer systems offline. The Los Angeles hospital discovered its computer network infected with ransomware earlier this month. Ransomware is a form of malware that scrambles data and key files on a system and demands a ransom be paid for a digital key to unscramble the data. After paying a ransom of 40 bitcoins, or $17,000, to the extortionists, the hospital was able to bring its electronic medical record system online, HPMC said. Bitcoins are a digital currency favored by...

I'm looking to purchase a new computer and would like some advice.

Imagine downloading Game of Thrones - all seasons, in HD - within a single second. That's what a next-generation optical transmission system developed by University College London scientists could do. Their system can handle a rate of 1.125 terabit per second - that's 50,000 times faster than the average "superfast" broadband connection in the UK. The team set the record for the fastest ever data rate for digital information. The infrastructure itself isn't revolutionary. The system uses optical fibres, which are already used to carry binary code as light signals through thousands of kilometres of wire. What has made the...

54 models affected. Toshiba has issued a recall for Li-Ion battery packs sold with certain models of its laptops and notebooks due a risk of the device catching fire. The hardware company yesterday advised customers to immediately turn off their PC and remove their battery to check whether their device was affected. The vendor is offering free replacement battery packs for customers with affected units. Around 54 different PC models are affected, sold nationally from retail stores like Harvey Norman and JB Hi-Fi from June 2011 to September 2015. A full list can be found here. "There is a risk...

Unmanageable deadlines and disastrous IT wrecked this top US retailer's attempt at international expansion. The moral of the story: IT drives the enterprise. Business school case studies tend to fall into two categories: epic wins and oh-my-gosh-how-could-they-possibly-have-been-so-stupid epic failures. This article discusses a real-world billion dollar story that falls into the second category. As epic failures go, this one is worthy of the history books. . . EVERYTHING WENT TERRIBLY, TERRIBLY WRONG . . .

Oracle has released new Java installers to fix a well-known security issue (CVE-2016-0603) that also affects a plethora of other applications, from Web browsers to antivirus products, and from file compressors to home cinema software. The problem is called DLL hijacking (or DLL side-loading) and refers to the fact that malware authors can place DLLs of the same name in specific locations on the target's filesystem and have it inadvertently load the malicious DLL instead of the safe one. DLL hijacking is a very well-known issue This type of attack is very old and has been known to many software...

I've been watching late night movies lately, especially spy spoofs. I like twists and misdirection. The most obvious example was when James Bond learned that Goldfinger really was not trying to take the gold out, but to make Ft. Knox useless. Try explaining that to your boss James.....he would hand you a tin foil hat. But it was genius. Several years ago I argued at length with a friend about the yellow cake story out of Iran. I had read that the British intelligence community, that Bush quoted, had revealed that the Iraqi government was buying nuclear material. Well, everybody...

A San Francisco startup has created a $15 computer. Pine 64 is now taking pre-orders for its Quad core 64-Bit expandable single board supercomputer, which will ship in May. The product can be combined with a keyboard and mouse to function as a full Android 5.1 computer. The company recently raised $1,731,465 on a Kickstarter campaign that had a goal of $31,416.

Microsoft and its hardware partners have revealed the list of Intel Skylake-based PCs that will lose support after 18 months if the computers are downgraded from Windows 10 to Windows 7 or 8.1. The software giant along with Dell, HP, Lenovo and NEC today outlined a list of 100 PCs that will fall victim to a policy change outlined by Microsoft earlier this month. The company previously said it would support downgrades to Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 until January 2020 and January 2023. But on January 16, Microsoft backtracked on its pledge for newer hardware featuring Intel's Skylake processors....

Are there any Linux gurus here? I've looked around online and asked some questions in various forums, but I'm not getting anywhere. I've found explanations of how to set it up, but no examples. I have yet to get it working. I am trying to configure an environment with several Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1 virtual machines. All of these machines need to be NTP clients of my NTP server. The NTP server uses MD5 authentication, and I need to have the Linux clients authenticate the NTP traffic. Can someone please post a working "ntp.conf" and "keys" file so that...