Archive for July 21st, 2009

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Tai­wan sci­en­tists unveil new weapon in swine flu fight

July 21st, 2009

The com­pound, which the researchers call NTU-VirusBom, can destroy viruses such as A(H1N1) swine flu and avian influenza and stop the spread of bac­te­ria includ­ing those respon­si­ble for staph infections.

It could be used widely in , deter­gents and air fil­ters, as well as face-masks and pro­tec­tive gear, the researchers from National Tai­wan Uni­ver­sity said.

Researchers said the inven­tion was of spe­cial sig­nif­i­cance amid signs that swine flu had started to develop resis­tance to , the world’s major anti-viral flu drug.

Against this back­drop, “this sig­nif­i­cant inven­tion is sure to effec­tively help con­trol the ,” pro­fes­sor Lin Shih­ming, a mem­ber of the research team, told reporters.

The team had started research on devel­op­ing the anti-viral com­pound back in 2006 in response to the deadly H5N1 strain of .

The tech­nol­ogy has been trans­ferred to a local com­pany to mass pro­duce prod­ucts incor­po­rat­ing it.

Full story at http://www.physorg.com

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Law­suit: Cops tasered 3 kids, threat­ened one with sodomy

July 21st, 2009

policetaser Lawsuit: Cops tasered 3 kids, threatened one with sodomy

A shel­ter for ado­les­cents in south­ern Illi­nois is suing the local sheriff’s office for what it describes as an unpro­voked attack by two police offi­cers on four chil­dren, three of whom were tasered, and one of whom was threat­ened with sodomy by a sheriff’s deputy.

The South­ern Thirty Ado­les­cent Cen­ter near Mount Ver­non, IL, filed the law­suit on behalf of three chil­dren in its cus­tody, who the law­suit says were tasered by Jef­fer­son County sheriff’s deputies who had been called to help sub­due two mis­be­hav­ing chil­dren, aged 11 and 12. Nei­ther of those chil­dren were among those who were tasered dur­ing what one news ser­vice described as a police “rampage.”

The inci­dent took place on July 4, 2008. The fed­eral law­suit was filed in an East St. Louis court on Fri­day. In the suit the chil­dren are named only by their ini­tials: B.B., R.E., and Z.P.

Accord­ing to the legal fil­ing, quoted in the Mount Ver­non Reg­is­ter, one deputy “phys­i­cally pushed R.E. towards his bunk and shocked him repeat­edly with a taser. … R.E. was tased mul­ti­ple times to mul­ti­ple loca­tions on his per­son, includ­ing, but not lim­ited to, his neck. Deputy Bow­ers shouted to B.B. to lie down in his bunk and phys­i­cally forced him to lie down.

Full story at http://rawstory.com

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Mac OS X gets rootkit cod­ing manual

July 21st, 2009

Over the past decade, the world has seen advances in rootk­its run­ning on Win­dows and Unix oper­at­ing sys­tems that few would have thought pos­si­ble. Now, it’s Mac OS X’s turn, as a secu­rity researcher plans to share a vari­ety of tech­niques for devel­op­ing the ultra-stealthy pro­grams for the Apple platform.

At a talk titled Advanced Mac OS X rootk­its at the Black Hat secu­rity con­fer­ence in Las Vegas next week, researcher Dino Dai Zovi plans to dis­cuss spe­cific fea­tures in the OS that make it pos­si­ble to write rootk­its that are vir­tu­ally impos­si­ble for untrained users to detect.

“Most of the exist­ing research (into) rootk­its for OS X essen­tially take older Unix-based ideas and port them to OS X,” Dai Zovi told The Reg­is­ter. “Mine pri­mar­ily uses the unique fea­tures of OS X and this makes it harder to detect the tra­di­tional tools and techniques.”

Full story at http://www.theregister.co.uk

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Fan­Duel turns fan­tasy sports bet­ting into a social game

July 21st, 2009

fanduel FanDuel turns fantasy sports betting into a social game

The peo­ple that brought you Hub­Dub, the pre­dic­tion site that effec­tively turns news con­tent into a game, have had a new idea. Fan­Duel is a pre­mium, paid-for game focused on fan­tasy sports. Run­ning in pri­vate beta for the last month, the game opens up today. The site is totally focused on U.S. sports (base­ball, NFL).

Although the com­pet­i­tive space for daily fan­tasy sports is fairly new, there’s clearly an oppor­tu­nity there — some 20m peo­ple play fan­tasy games, mak­ing it a $2bn indus­try. Cur­rently big play­ers such as Yahoo, CBS and ESPN dom­i­nate the market.

But if you play Mafia Wars and other social games on Face­book, going back to play­ing tra­di­tional fan­tasy sports on CBS feels like going back to when dinosaurs walked the earth. There’s clearly a gap wait­ing for some­thing bet­ter and more social.

The trou­ble is most fan­tasy sports require a lot of time com­mit­ment as you have to play for the whole sea­son, mean­ing a long time to get any­thing out of it.

Full story at http://uk.techcrunch.com

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