Carnegie Mellon University researchers have found that within the brain’s neocortex lies a subnetwork of highly active neurons that behave much like people in social networks. Like Facebook, these neuronal networks have a small population of highly active members who give and receive more information than the majority of other members, says Alison Barth, associate professor of biological sciences at [...]

Physicists at Ohio State University have discovered that tiny defects inside a computer chip can be used to tune the properties of key atoms in the chip. The technique, which they describe in the journal Science, involves rearranging the holes left by missing atoms to tune the properties of dopants — the chemical impurities that give the semiconductors in computer [...]

The Threat: A new Trojan affecting Android devices has recently emerged in China. Dubbed “Geinimi” based on its first known incarnation, this Trojan can compromise a significant amount of personal data on a user’s phone and send it to remote servers. The most sophisticated Android malware we’ve seen to date, Geinimi is also the first Android malware in the wild [...]

The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to announce that Julien Ridoux and Darryl Veitch at the University of Melbourne have been awarded a grant to implement support of feed-forward clock synchronization algorithms. The Network Time Protocol (NTP) is widely used for synchronization over the network and the ntpd daemon is the current reference synchronization algorithm. The system clock in FreeBSD is [...]

You know when you’re watching a pirated film downloaded from the Internet — there’s no mistaking the fuzzy footage, or the guy in the front row getting up for popcorn. Despite the poor quality, pirated video is a serious problem around the world. Criminal copyright infringement occurs on a massive scale over the Internet, costing the film industry — and [...]

A new service developed by a researcher at the University of Southampton makes it possible for users to maintain multiple online accounts using a scan of their fingerprint as a password. The new service, FingerID , has been developed by Sara Alotaibi, who has just completed a Masters degree in Web Technology at the University’s School of Electronics and Computer [...]

This following is the email exchange between Theo de Raadt and Gregory Perry. Theo is the lead coder of OpenBSD, and Gregory was a former contributor to the project. This segment is Theo’s alarm to the community: I have received a mail regarding the early development of the OpenBSD IPSEC stack. It is alleged that some ex-developers (and the company [...]

The Italian region Puglia will make the use of open source software and open standards mandatory for its public administrations. A law, adopted on 2 December by the regional administration, instructs regional and local public administrations to use open formats for the electronic disseminations of documents, and wherever possible use free and open source software. According to the law, public [...]

Genetically modified cells can be made to communicate with each other as if they were electronic circuits. Using yeast cells, a group of researchers at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, has taken a groundbreaking step towards being able to build complex systems in the future where the body’s own cells help to keep us healthy. The study was presented recently [...]

Sweden’s highest court has rejected an application by an anti-piracy group which would force an ISP to hand over the identity of a file-sharing site operator. Antipiratbyrån wants TeliaSonera to reveal who is behind the SweTorrents BitTorrent tracker but the ISP has refused and taken its case all the way to the Supreme Court. That Court has now decided that [...]

It’s illegal for businesses and law enforcement to profile a person based on their race, gender, or ethnicity, yet millions of Americans are being profiled every day based on their online consumer behavior and demographics. Known as consumer profiling for behavioral advertising purposes, this type of profiling is largely unregulated. The result, according to two recent articles in the journal [...]

Today we’re announcing a new version of the Android platform — Android 2.3 (Gingerbread). It includes many new platform technologies and APIs to help developers create great apps. Some of the highlights include: Enhancements for game development: To improve overall responsiveness, we’ve added a new concurrent garbage collector and optimized the platform’s overall event handling. We’ve also given developers native [...]

The Web surfing history saved in your Web browser can be accessed without your permission. JavaScript code deployed by real websites and online advertising providers use browser vulnerabilities to determine which sites you have and have not visited, according to new research from computer scientists at the University of California, San Diego. “JavaScript is a great thing, it allows things [...]

Researchers from North Carolina State University and IBM have invented a way to update computer systems packaged in virtual machines in a computer “cloud” — even when those programs are offline. The new cloud computing patch tool developed by NC State and IBM is called Nuwa and protects virtual machines (VMs) from cyber-attacks by ensuring that they always receive important [...]

ownCloud 1.1 has been released. I´m really happy with this release. Not only because we have a lot of new features and bugfixes but also because the ownCloud development team is growing and more and more people are contributing to ownCloud. I gave several presentation about ownCloud in the last few month and I´m trilled by the positive reactions I [...]

Public administrations in Norway are increasingly turning to open source, says Martin Bekkelund, business developer at Friprog, the country’s open source competence centre. This year, all ninenteen county administrations are using open source in some form, compared to 76 percent in 2005. Uses varies from server operating systems , content management systems to OpenOffice. A recent example is procurement of [...]