Recent Comments

Alternatively, Termites are a great source of sustainable protein that was utilized by our ancestors for thousands of years. This fast growing breed might be perfect for domesticating.

Any chance Florida will be underwater before the termites make it off the peninsula? I don;t think underwater termites are an issue in most cases.

My favorite car theft deterrent is still the trunk monkey:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=geynA-JYDHE

kthxbye

Closer to the monitor?

Won't that worsen the eye-strain?

Oh, man, that would be great. A box of spinach in the freezer isle "Made from edible materials! Like Plants!". I'm really tempted to make those stickers and visit a couple grocery stores. Criminal mischief is still a misdemeanor right?

Hey, please give me an infusion of that conium maculatum, Socrates. Oh, and some of those pretty white berries of convallaria majalis. And some omphalotus olearius would be tasty.

Everything that has a sufficiently strong influence on a blast shock wave should be strong enough to make minced meat out of human flesh itself. So instead of a normal car alarm.... What you touched my car? *SPLATTER*

Cars for crowd control will be another, and a much more probable use case for this technique.

All natural! Plants! What could possibly go wrong

For use in things like glue bottles and paint cans, sign me up, but for food I think I'll wait a few years for everyone else to guinea pig this product for me. I guess I just like the food label to be more descriptive than "like plants."

Sure, but 'force field'? There was really no point in making the headline less accurate.

1. In physics, attenuation (in some contexts also called extinction) is the gradual loss in intensity of any kind of flux through a medium. For instance, sunlight is attenuated by dark glasses, X-rays are attenuated by lead, and light and sound are attenuated by water.

Was there some problem with saying "Boeing gets patent for a shockwave attenuation system?"

So it's not force nor field. It is a system for damping a shockwave.

I hope that pipedot readers can handle the big words. And for those that can't, I hope they don't submit articles.

Quite right - sorry about that.

If an explosive shockwave is simply a front of pressure differential traveling through air as it's medium, and thus effectively a very strong/coarse a sound wave, then it's subject to disruptive interference, right?

An alternate/reworded explanation -- if the invention can produce a relatively large volume of very low density (gas or plasma), then there is no medium for explosive shockwave propagation through the atmosphere (because there isn't any atmosphere in that volume). Shrapnel from the explosion will keep on coming...

So it's not force nor field. It is a system for dampening a shockwave.

Really? Where is the water for dampening? I think you meant "damping".
I don't make AC comments like this very often, but dampen/damp is a pet peeve...

Or squint! :)

I was nearly blind and couldn't see a thing, near or far, without a pretty hefty (7+ diopters) prescription. I'd classify my eyesight as "miserable" with constant daily maintenance of contacts and cleaning solutions.

Then I got LASIK. That was the best medical choice I've ever made. Now, I can actually read the alarm clock at night. I don't have to worry about my contacts falling out or misplacing my glasses. And wow; you don't realize the time savings and overall efficiency gains by not having contact maintenence chores every day.

I still post there once in a while, but that's because my sig gives some publicity to |., Soylent, and Usenet's comp.misc. You don't have to avoid /. like the plague you know, it's a good thing to help the rest of the world learn about the alternatives and eventually win them over.

If I'm interpreting the image correctly, it looks like maybe this is closer to reactive armor, than it is to force fields?

If an explosive shockwave is simply a front of pressure differential traveling through air as it's medium, and thus effectively a very strong/coarse a sound wave, then it's subject to disruptive interference, right?

They don't claim to eliminate the shockwave, but only attenuate it. Based on that, it seems like an opposing shockwave of comparable force might dampen or lessen the front of the shockwave, by way of disruptive interference.

Otherwise, would maybe just introducing turbulence or loud randomized noise into the path of a shockwave manage to "attenuate" it?

It is possible that just the loud crack of an electrical arc would be enough to reduce the intensity of a blast wave?

I agree. It is worse. Having had to wrangle with it for the last two months I am ready to quit rather than have to work with it. Absolute nightmare.

Perhaps, like a good number of us, he still has slashdot in his RSS. I do. I open an article once a month or so.

Given my level of solitary sexual activity I should be able to retire on medical grounds any day now

Hmm, they may have copied the headline from ABC (US), CNet, or Sky News...

Eat carrots, use an illuminated keyboard, don't spend quite so much time 'beating the bishop' and sit closer to the goddamned monitor :)

"shock wave attenuation system" just sounds like attaching a bit of padding... Nothing to indicate this is new and unusual. Headlines are necessarily going to be oversimplifications.

While I do remain skeptical, I don't see why this "obviously won't work". I'd like to see proof of it working, or a more in depth discussion of the physics and engineering involved. It kind of sounds like it would need a lot of electrical energy, which may render it unfeasible in the field.

Man, that was a tough moderation decision. On one hand, you did recognize the problem with what /. has become. On the other hand, you went there. So thats maybe a + 2 for the compliment, -1 for the betrayal.

In Firefox I use the NoSquint extension, which allows you to specify separate "Full Zoom" and "Text Zoom" settings. (It also allows you to override the link colours so you can distinguish visited and unvisited links on sites which annoyingly make them the same.)

In this case, the attacker doesn't necessarily need you to touch the keyboard or anything. Their attack scenario is the following:

1. they send you an email with specific content and encrypted using your public key.
2. your email client fetches the email
3. the moment the client decrypts it (e.g. using Enigmail in Thunderbird), they can infer your private key just from the CPU's EM radiations.
4. Profit !!

Besides, their hardware is very small (as in "fits in a pocket") and quite cheap (as in less than 300$) compared to what (they claim) existed before.

1. This is not anything like a force field
2. Force fields are Star Trek, not Star Wars
3. This obviously won't work anyway

First Lockheed pretends they can do fusion "any day now"; now Boeing thinks they can magically block explosions.

Over at slashdot it's "Boeing patents star wars style force field technology". Sheesh.

Internet explorer isn't as bad as it used to be. Heck it even got a built in ad blocker (sadly not on mobile).

i find the current font size and color scheme to be very easy on the eyes. i like the automatic expansion of threads, too. i can browse and use this site without javascript loaded which is a plus. i don't have to register or enable javascript for a 'classic' view (/.) or to expand further comments (reddit).

the post has all the resources for an editor to quickly whip up a story. they can cherry pick the urls they wish to use making it easy. it's not like pipedot has 500 submissions every day, this story submission should be a no brainer to rework and print within a few minutes.

I will second that, noting that when past UI changes caused a problem with mobile display Brian fixed it within a day. If you see a bug in Pipedot then report it: http://bugs.pipedot.org/

It is good to see articles like this, discussing recent developments of the web browser. In other news, Internet Explorer being killed off is the happiest news I have heard this year.

A better post would be a paragraph summarizing the release and then one or two links to the main site for the product and the release notes. No way I want to be looking at the post in it's current format on the front page. I would vote -1, but that option seems not be be available.

bsdguy

It may be an old attack vector but it's certainly news to me that in this day and age this can still be done with such low-grade hardware.
Also that new versions of the affected libraries are available.

My screen is 1920x1080 at 120dpi. On Pipedot, to achieve approx. 12-point on the screen, I have browser zoom at 150%. At site default, it's visually approx. 5 point.

Not sure what all the anger is about. Pipedot was readable before, generally (certainly more readable than Soylent, anyway with its tiny little buttons). Just experimented in Chrome and the Zoom feature not only scales up the text but when it reaches a certain size, the 'responsive' feature of the CSS kicks in and the sidebar gets shunted off to the bottom, like it should.

I for one am impressed.

it's absurd to have a site with tiny text. even the w3c recognized the tendency of web designers to make stupidly small text and put out an advisory telling people to use 1.0em for your text size! pipedot is in denial that it's an issue is and it's stupid. pipedot's response to this issue is effectively WORKSFORME WONTFIX!

Modern browsers, including nearly every mobile browser in Android and iOS, no longer support scaling the text separately and rely on the "Zoom" feature exclusively.

To tell you the truth "what makes this news" is the fact that it was in the queue, there hadn't been a story for a couple days, and I'm very busy at the moment...

I learned about doing this back in the Navy in the late 1970s. This is exactly why there are protocols over what electronics can be used when on a warship. Back in the 1980s it was possible to pick up random radiation to discover the position of a ship fairly far away, and if one had the right equipment even in those days keystrokes could be decoded based on the radiation from the keyboards and terminals.

So I have to say that those who do not read history are doomed to learn the lesson again.

bsdguy

I was thinking just about the same thing. But companies buy the $200+ Motorola radios because you can submerge them, bounce them off the pavement, stand on them, etc., and they'll keep working. That feature is worth quite a bit of extra money. A cellphone isn't nearly as durable or as reliable.

Maybe that's on par with prices for licensed radio equipment, don't know. I can't help but think there's a $2.99 app that does the same thing.

Not surprisingly, the CEO of Mars One says the company is really not a scam at all:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3004338/Mars-One-not-scam-red-planet-CEO-Bas-Lansdorp-insists.html

Look here [Stealing Keys from PCs using a Radio: Cheap Electromagnetic Attacks on Windowed Exponentiation].

I am fully updated on arch and have the fix.

From the paper (page 5):

Current Status. Following the practice of responsible disclosure, we worked with the authors
of GnuPG to suggest several countermeasures and verify their effectiveness against our attacks
(see CVE-2014-3591 [MIT14]). GnuPG 1.4.19 and Libgcrypt 1.6.3, resilient to these attacks, were
released concurrently with the public announcement of the results presented in this paper.

...nude.

...mud.

...dark.

...library with the lead pipe.

not only that, but I'm pretty sure that GMail actually generates tons of money (directly or indirectly) through targeted ads and user's profiling (aka Big Data).

People also tend to forget that there is a paying version of gmail for companies (I'm not putting the link but you can easily google it). I know some companies that use it. I don't know whether there ever was a paying version of google code though.