hahiss writes “Apparently, NoScript has taken to adding its own whitelist updates to Adblock Plus — so that the ads on the NoScript page show up — without notifying users. (It is described on the NoScript addon page, however.) This was a part of the last update to NoScript. Wladimir Palant, the main developer of Adblock Plus, describes the situation in an informative blog post.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
wjousts writes “IEEE Spectrum has an interesting article on ’25 Microchips That Shook the World,’ including such classics as the Signetics NE555 Timer, MOS Technology 6502 Microprocessor (Apple II, Commodore PET and the brain of Bender) and the Intel 8088 Microprocessor. Quoting: ‘Among the many great chips that have emerged from fabs during the half-century reign of the integrated circuit, a small group stands out. Their designs proved so cutting-edge, so out of the box, so ahead of their time, that we are left groping for more technology clichés to describe them. Suffice it to say that they gave us the technology that made our brief, otherwise tedious existence in this universe worth living.'”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Along with China, Russia, India, and Chile, the US Trade Representative’s annual report gave some extra love to our neighbors to the north by elevating Canada from the regular “Watch List” to the “Priority Watch List” in adequacy of IP protections against piracy for the first time.
StudiVZ is a Facebook-style operation and it’s Germany’s largest web-based social networking site. With the European Parliament elections in sight, the website recently opened up to established political parties for election campaigning. Not for all parties though, as they chose to ban the Pirate Party.
In this article you’ll discover some terrific and unique JavaScript-powered navigation techniques and examples.
A team of scientists at the Max Planck Institute of Microstructure Physics in Germany has been experimenting with ways to infuse biopolymers with different kinds of metals. Finding some success with their tests on spider silk, the team was able to improve the tensile strength of the fibers, increasing the amount of energy required to break a strand as much as ten times. “Spider silk is not a practical engineering material, but materials scientists are trying to produce artificial fibers that mimic its properties. If they succeed, the result could be super-tough textiles. Knez thinks the technique has more immediate potential for toughening other biomaterials such as collagen. ‘Mechanically improving collagen using our technique might open several new possible applications, like artificial tendons.'”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
ScienceDaily is reporting that an electronic nose developed by NASA for monitoring potential leaks on the ISS may be able to sniff out brain cancer. “The electronic nose, which is to be installed on the International Space Station in order to automatically monitor the station’s air, can detect contaminants within a range of one to approximately 10,000 parts per million. In a series of experiments, the Brain Mapping Foundation used NASA’s electronic nose to sniff brain cancer cells and cells in other organs. Their data demonstrates that the electronic nose can sense differences in odor from normal versus cancerous cells. These experiments will help pave the way for more sophisticated biochemical analysis and experimentation.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
An anonymous reader writes “Supercomputer software models predict that swine flu will likely go pandemic sometime next week, but flu chips capable of detecting the virus within four hours are already rolling off the assembly line. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which has designated swine flu as the ‘2009 H1N1 flu virus,’ is modeling the spread of the virus using modeling software designed by the Department of Defense back when avian flu was a perceived threat. Now those programs are being run on cluster supercomputers and predict that officials are not implementing enough social distancing–such as closing all schools–to prevent a pandemic. Companies that designed flu-detecting chips for avian flu, are quickly retrofitting them to detect swine flu, with the first flu chips being delivered to labs today.” Relatedly, at least one bio-surveillance firm is claiming they detected and warned the CDC and the WHO about the swine flu problem in Mexico over two weeks before the alert was issued.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
An anonymous reader writes to tell us that as the European Parliament elections loom, StudiVZ, Germany’s largest social networking site, has opened up to political parties for election campaigning. That is, if you aren’t the Pirate Party. “The other political parties were allowed to have a special account to show they are an organization and not an individual. The Pirate Party, however, was not allowed to have one and instead operated on a standard user account registered by an individual. StudiVZ noticed that the Pirate Party account was not a “real person” and despite it having a thriving network with hundreds of followers, it was summarily deleted. This means that it is impossible for the Pirate Party to have a presence at all on the largest social networking site in Germany.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
coondoggie writes to tell us that the Federal Trade Commission has backed off of the new Red Flag Rule designed to protect consumer information yet again. Complaining about cost of implementation, the enforcement date of the rule has been pushed back to August 1, 2009 to give businesses and institutions time to implement identity theft prevention programs. “The FTC, federal bank regulatory agencies, and the National Credit Union Administration (NCUA) issued the Red Flags Rules as part of the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions (FACT) Act of 2003. The final rules require financial and credit institutions that hold any consumer account, or other account for which there is a reasonably foreseeable risk of identity theft, to develop and implement an Identity Theft Prevention Program for combating identity theft in connection with new and existing accounts, the FTC said.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
