Free Republic

A WHOPPING 77 PER CENT less power is needed for Toshiba's 40nm scale CMOS flip-flop circuit compared to earlier flip-flops, the Japanese company claims.

Once America had allies. Now it has Facebook friends. Google News turns up more than 5,000 news reports including the search terms "Facebook", "Egypt" and "revolution". The same soap-bubble of global youth culture that gave us the Internet stock bubble in the 1990s has returned, this time as the solution to the problems of the Arab world. With the last bubble, people got poor. This time people will get killed. As a reality check: the search terms "Egypt", "revolution" and "genital mutilation" turn up just seven stories in Google News (including a previous essay by this writer). Many Egyptian women...

It's a move that reeks of extreme confidence, bordering on the reckless. Google is so certain its Chrome browser is unhackable it has promised to award £12,500 ($20,000) and a notebook to the first person who proves them wrong. The company laid down the gauntlet ahead of the fifth annual Pwn2Own hacking competition next month.

Computer engineers at North Carolina State University have developed hardware that allows programs to operate more efficiently by significantly boosting the speed at which the "cores" on a computer chip communicate with each other. The core, or central processing unit, is the brain of a computer chip; most chips currently contain between four and eight cores. In order to perform a task more quickly using multiple cores on a single chip, those cores need to communicate with each other. But there are no direct ways for cores to communicate. Instead, one core sends data to memory and another core retrieves...

Verizon has filed an appeal against the FCC's newly enacted net neutrality regulation, arguing that the agency has no authority to regulate bits on the Internet. Though Verizon practically co-drafted the FCC’s new Net Neutrality regulation, it now plans to sue the agency for overstepping its bounds. The broadband and mobile operator argues that the FCC doesn’t actually have the authority to require Internet service providers to regulate how traffic flows on their networks. “We are deeply concerned by the FCC’s assertion of broad authority for sweeping new regulation of broadband networks and the Internet itself,” said Michael E. Glover,...

I'll leave it as link-only because I'm unaware of their sharing policies.

AUGUSTA, Ga. -- Georgia authorities are investigating the discovery of six loaded shotguns aimed at a food plot that were rigged to be fired through a network of Web-controlled cameras. The Augusta Chronicle reported the guns were discovered last fall on Georgia Power Company right of way in rural south Georgia. The set up was discovered by a utility contractor and it was reported to the U.S. Office of Homeland Security. The newspaper reported that a bulletin circulated by the Office of Homeland Security said it appeared that the rig was only intended for illegal hunting in an area known...

The Dimona complex in the Negev desert is famous as the heavily guarded heart of Israel’s never-acknowledged nuclear arms program, where neat rows of factories make atomic fuel for the arsenal. Over the past two years, according to intelligence and military experts familiar with its operations, Dimona has taken on a new, equally secret role — as a critical testing ground in a joint American and Israeli effort to undermine Iran’s efforts to make a bomb of its own.

WASHINGTON -- Israel has tested a computer worm believed to have sabotaged Iran's nuclear centrifuges and slowed its ability to develop an atomic weapon, The New York Times reported Saturday. In what the Times described as a joint Israeli-U.S. effort to undermine Iran's nuclear ambitions, it said the tests of the destructive Stuxnet worm had occurred over the past two years at the heavily guarded Dimona complex in the Negev desert.

When will the mockery of the Catholic Church cease? Not anytime soon it seems. Penance – the new free iPhone application that allows users to anonymously “confess” their sins to other users, and to give “absolution,” makes a mockery not only of the Church and the Sacrament of Reconciliation, but also of the Church’s structure. By “confessing” and “absolving,” users are able to accrue “horns” or “halos.” The more notable “confessors” are ranked with titles such as “Saints” to “Bishops,” “Cardinals,” and “Holy Father/Mother of the Church.” The highest ranking users are allowed to issue week-long edicts to those below...

In a groundbreaking achievement that could help scientists "build" new biological systems, Princeton University scientists have constructed for the first time artificial proteins that enable the growth of living cells. The team of researchers created genetic sequences never before seen in nature, and the scientists showed that they can produce substances that sustain life in cells almost as readily as proteins produced by nature's own toolkit.

(PhysOrg.com) -- A Japanese scientist who "likes alcohol very much" has discovered that soaking samples of material in hot party drinks for 24 hours turns them into superconductors at ambient temperature. The scientist, Dr. Yoshihiko Takano of the National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS) in Tsukuba, Japan, made the discovery after a party, soaking samples of a potential superconductor in hot alcoholic drinks before testing them next day for superconductivity. The commercial alcoholic beverages, especially wine, were much more effective than either water or pure alcohol.

Government agencies around the world make billions of bits of raw data available to the public each day, but this data is often in difficult formats or so widely spread around the Web it is virtually unusable to the public and scientists who seek to use this valuable information in their research. Computer scientists within the Tetherless World Research Constellation at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have developed an application to help solve the problem. A collaboration with scientific publisher Elsevier, the application utilizes the U.S. government data warehouse, Data.gov, to provide scientists with easy and direct access to government data sets...

IDG News Service - Authorities in the U.S. and Germany have raided Internet Service Providers in hopes of tracking down the hackers who launched distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against Web sites such as Visa.com, PayPal.com, and Mastercard.com earlier this month. In documents posted Wednesday to the Smoking Gun Web site, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation describes the complex path its investigation has taken as it has searched for the computers that served as a central meeting point for the attacks.

Another mammoth Microsoft security update will fix the final bug that allowed the Stuxnet d. But as news that Stuxnet r problem in Iran, Congress n warned that it could be a cyber warfare. update has 17 bull

Officials looking into NASA's “sanitisation and disposal processes” said they discovered that 10 machines containing potentially classified information had been sold on, while another four were only properly processed once an emergency investigation caught them leaving the facility. -snip- The report said that although it was impossible to know what was on the ten computers released from the site, an inspection of the four PCs that were caught at the last minute showed at one contained material that would be subject to International Traffic in Arms Regulations.

RVINE, Calif.—David Norris wants to collect the digital equivalent of fingerprints from every computer, cellphone and TV set-top box in the world. He's off to a good start. So far, Mr. Norris's start-up company, BlueCava Inc., has identified 200 million devices. By the end of next year, BlueCava says it expects to have cataloged one billion of the world's estimated 10 billion devices. -snip- It might seem that one computer is pretty much like any other. Far from it: Each has a different clock setting, different fonts, different software and many other characteristics that make it unique. Every time a...

In a highly anticipated report, the Federal Trade Commission advocated safeguards, including a "do not track" list that would give consumers the option of keeping their Web surfing private. It has similar intent to the do-not-call list that helped curb telemarketing phone calls. While the purpose of "do not track" is similar to "do not call," it's unlikely to be a centralized registry maintained by the government. Instead, it would be a function of Web browsers that would send notice to Web site trackers, essentially saying, "Leave me alone." It might be a feature on browsers to be turned on...

WikiLeaks, the website that published a quarter-million sensitive diplomatic cables on Sunday, is using Amazon.com Inc. servers in the U.S. to help deliver its information. It sounds like an odd choice, but it could make sense. The site cablegate.wikileaks.org, which WikiLeaks is using for the diplomatic documents, is linked to servers run by Amazon Web Services in Seattle, as well as to French company Octopuce. Wikileaks.org, the site’s front page, links back to Amazon servers in the U.S. and in Ireland. Several Internet watchers, including technologist Alex Norcliffe, reported earlier on WikiLeaks’ use of Amazon services. Amazon and WikiLeaks did...

Despite Iranian claims in October that their nuclear systems were cleansed of the Stuxnet virus, Iranian sources confirm that the invasive malworm is still making trouble. It shut down uranium enrichment at Natanz for a week from Nov. 16 to 22 over breakdowns caused by mysterious power fluctuations in the operation of the centrifuge machines enriching uranium at Natanz. The shutdown was reported by the director of the International Atomic Energy Agency Yukiya Amano to the IAEA board in Vienna on Tuesday, Nov. 23. Rapid changes in the spinning speed of the thousands of centrifuges enriching uranium to weapons-grade can...