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An international team of mathematicians announced in May that they had factored a 307-digit number—a record for the largest factored number and a feat that suggests Internet security may be on its last legs. “Things are becoming less and less secure,” says Arjen Lenstra, a computer scientist at the École Polytechnique Fédérale (EPFL) in Switzerland, who organized the effort. Messages in cyberspace are encrypted with a random 1,024-bit number generated by multiplying two large primes together. But if hackers using factorization can break the number into its prime multipliers, they can intercept the message. Factorization currently takes too long to...

Here's a video of the iPhone Firmware 1.1.3, with confirmation that the leak is real from Natetrue, famed iPhone hacker. Like before, the update breaks unlocks and third-party apps, patching previous vulnerabilities at the same time. The video shows how to move icons around in the Springboard, wobbling to indicate they can be dragged and dropped around, which is kind of an Apple-meets-Nintendo touch: [video available on website] We had some doubts, but now we can tell you we are sure: the new firmware 1.1.3 is real. Or as Nate puts it: "if it is a hoax, they did a...

A company called MPK is designing a light source that will glow continuously for more than 12 years without any additional energy. The material, dubbed "Litrosphere," can cover a standard sheet of paper for a cost of about 35 cents, and comes in a variety of colors. It´s also flexible, and can take the form of either paint or injection-molded plastic. The material is not affected by the heat or cold, can withstand 5,000 pounds, and stays on constantly. According to the company's patent, the material is based on betavoltaics and uses the radioactive gas tritium as the power...

Toshiba have stunned the world with their announcement of what's pretty much the holy grail in Lithium battery technology – the Super Charge ion Battery, which recharges up to 90% of its energy in just five minutes, and has a lifespan of over 10 years. Slow charging has been the key hurdle to public acceptance of battery-electric vehicles as viable distance travelers, so this breakthrough has all sorts of implications for the automotive industry as well as being a very welcome upgrade to a whole host of other portable devices. The first of Toshiba's groundbreaking SCiB packs will ship in...

JOSH SHENKLE knew that he couldn’t hook up any old PC to the 106-inch Panasonic projection television in his home theater. Most computers come with buzzing fans, whirring disk drives and whining capacitors that compete with the sound system. “After a while, the noise gets to you during quiet scenes,” he said. “It overwhelms you and takes you away from the movie.” Computer users who want silent offices and living rooms are starting to ask for quiet computers. Manufacturers are taking notice. Some new computers like the Apple iMac or the Alienware Area-51 7500 are marketed for their silence. A...

Zetix is a fabric so strong it will resist multiple car bomb blasts without breaking. It absorbs and disperses the energy from explosions thanks to an inner structure so adamantiumtastic it can be used in body armor, window covering, military tents and hurricane defenses—it might even be able to fend off my ex-wife. When not shielding from explosions, it can be used as medical sutures that won't damage body tissue. All of this is thanks to a property that apparently defies the laws of physics: Zetix is built around the principle of auxetics: objects that actually get fatter the more...

I got a great deal on an Emachine about 16 months ago, so great one of the guys in my office got one the same day. He emailed me over the weekend his power supply went out - not normally a big deal, just a simple replacement - the down side is that when this power supply goes, it changes the polarity of the motherboard - so when it goes, the motherboard goes. He found out from the Geek squad this is becoming a huge problem. Well, today my son's PS went out taking the motherboard with it so now,...

Windows XP trounced Windows Vista in all tests, regardless of the versions used or the amount of memory running on the computer, says Devil Mountain Software.In the latest Mac versus PC ad, that put-upon Windows guy quietly concedes he's "downgrading" from Vista to XP. He may have good reason: new tests show that the older XP runs common productivity tasks significantly faster than Microsoft's newest operating system. Researchers at Devil Mountain Software, a Florida-based developer of performance management tools, have posted data from their most recent Windows performance tests -- and Vista, even after it's been upgraded to the new...

BLACKSBURG -- Several thousands people gathered on Virginia Tech’s Drillfield this morning to form a giant message of thanks to the world for its support after the April 16 massacre. Photos of the event are posted on hokiesthanktheworld.org. Dressed in the school colors of maroon and orange, and surrounded by fall foliage of the same hues along the Blue Ridge Mountains, the crowd was arranged to form Tech’s "VT" logo, and under it, "THANKS YOU." At 11:10 a.m., a satellite aimed to capture the image as the thousands waved up at the sky.

I'm at work and I am operating Windows XP Professional version 2002 with Service Pack 2 on an Intel Pentium 4 CPU with 2.6GHz and .98GB of RAM. I keep getting the error message, after my computer has been on a while, even after I'm closed out of most of my programs, that states: Network drive:\ not accessable. Insufficient system resources exist to complete the requested service. And other times I get an error message that there isn't enough memory to complete the command/operation.

Physicists in Arizona State University have designed a revolutionary laser technique which can destroy viruses and bacteria such as AIDS without damaging human cells and may also help reduce the spread of hospital infections such as MRSA. The research, published on Thursday November 1 in the Institute of Physics' Journal of Physics: Condensed Matter, discusses how pulses from an infrared laser can be fine-tuned to discriminate between problem microorganisms and human cells. Current laser treatments such as UV are indiscriminate and can cause ageing of the skin, damage to the DNA or, at worst, skin cancer, and are far from...

Virginia Tech officials gave out more than $8.5 million on Monday to people who were wounded, lost loved ones or survived the shootings at the Blacksburg campus on April 16. The "bulk" of the money, according to university President Charles Steger, was being disbursed "to 79 families and individuals." "There is no right way to disburse these monies, but we believe the best way to continue the healing is to put as much as possible in the hands of those who have suffered most," ... some of the recipients will get "the disbursements over time in the form of free...

I need some help from the Techies and Computer Nerds. I am the proud owner of a Power Mac G5 2.5Ghz. I want to upgrade the memory to 8G. I have a limited budget so I have been shopping around a little and have come across Ramjet.com which is offering 4G for $259. Edge memory goes for $273 for 4G Kingston $385 for 4G (I have had a Apple store employee tell me that Kingston works well in Macs). Simple Tech $1,969 for 4G (what did I say? STAGGERING). Does anyone have any experience with the memory sold by Ramjet...

By mimicking a brick-and-mortar molecular structure found in seashells, University of Michigan researchers created a composite plastic that's as strong as steel but lighter and transparent. It's made of layers of clay nanosheets and a water-soluble polymer that shares chemistry with white glue. Engineering professor Nicholas Kotov almost dubbed it "plastic steel," but the new material isn't quite stretchy enough to earn that name. Nevertheless, he says its further development could lead to lighter, stronger armor for soldiers or police and their vehicles. It could also be used in microelectromechanical devices, microfluidics, biomedical sensors and valves and unmanned aircraft. Kotov...

A team of astronomers have taken pictures of the stars that are sharper than anything produced by the Hubble telescope, at 50 thousandths of the cost. The researchers, from the University of Cambridge and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), used a technique called “Lucky Imaging” to take the most detailed pictures of stars and nebulae ever produced – using a camera based on the ground. Images from ground-based telescopes are usually blurred by the Earth’s atmosphere - the same effect that makes the stars appear to twinkle when we look at them with the naked eye. The Cambridge/Caltech...

sea_stuart writes with a story from the Tidbinbilla space tracking station, outside Canberra, Australia. It is still communicating with the two Voyager spacecraft 30 years after they were launched and 18 years after Voyager 2 passed close by Neptune. Here's a little background on Voyager 1 and Voyager 2. "The bank of computers that would look at home in black-and-white episodes of Doctor Who cannot be junked... [T]he 1970s hardware is now our world's only means of chatting with two robot pioneers exploring the solar system's outer limits. Today Voyager 1 is humanity's most remote object, 15.5 billion kilometers from...

I have started using craigslist recently in regards to my job, quick question, is there a way to embed youtube video's in craigslist postings? or even in village voice backpages.com postings?On craigslist (or village voice backpages) is there any way to upload video in the ads or postings in any way?Or can you only link to a video instead of embed one in there?Before anyone asks, I work in real estate, and this would be really usefull.

ISPs in the U.S. experienced a service slowdown Monday after fiber-optic cables near Cleveland were apparently sabotaged by gunfire. TeliaSonera, which lost the northern leg of its U.S. network to the cut, said that the outage began around 7 p.m. Pacific Time on Sunday night. When technicians pulled up the affected cable, it appeared to have been shot. "Somebody had been shooting with a gun or a shotgun into the cable," said Anders Olausson, a TeliaSonera spokesman. The damage affected a large span of cable, more than two-thirds of a mile [1.1 km] long, near Cleveland, TeliaSonera said. The company...

Two students, 15 others hospitalized on day shooting memorial dedicated

What keeps you busy? With all of our so called “technological” advances, you don’t really have more time for yourself, do you? Admit it! None of us do. Most of the blessings of Western Civilization don’t feel like blessings. When your boss calls you on your cell phone on a Saturday for a status report, you flinch at your caller ID. When the “self checkout kiosk” at your local Home Depot can’t seem to read the bar code on your new ceiling fan, you sigh at the clerk. “A little help over here!” you say, with a tone of superior...