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Google Releases Chrome For Android Beta
An anonymous reader writes "Today Google announced the availability of a beta version of its Chrome browser for Android. Unfortunately, it's limited to Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) devices. Google is trying to keep Chrome fast and easy to use, and part of that involved redesigning tabs so they work more naturally with touchscreens. 'You can flip or swipe between an unlimited number of tabs using intuitive gestures, as if you're holding a deck of cards in the palm of your hands, each one a new window to the web.' They've also including synchronization functionality that allows you to move from desktop browsing to phone or tablet browsing and pick up right where you left off."Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
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The 20th IOCCC Winners Announced
An anonymous reader writes "The 20th International Obfuscated C Code Contest ended on February 5th, 2012, and the list of winners has been announced. According to the page, the source code for all the winning entries 'has not been released yet.' It will be available alongside code from previous years 'in late-February to mid-March.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
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Programming Error Doomed Russian Mars Probe
astroengine writes "So it turns out U.S. radars weren't to blame for the unfortunate demise of Russia's Phobos-Grunt Mars sample return mission — it was a computer programming error that doomed the probe, a government board investigating the accident has determined."
According to the Planetary Society Blog's unofficial translation and paraphrasing of the incident report, "The spacecraft computer failed when two of the chips in the electronics suffered radiation damage. (The Russians say that radiation damage is the most likely cause, but the spacecraft was still in low Earth orbit beneath the radiation belts.) Whatever triggered the chip failure, the ultimate cause was the use of non-space-qualified electronic components. When the chips failed, the on-board computer program crashed."Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
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Honeywell Vs Nest: When the Establishment Sues Silicon Valley
An anonymous reader writes with this quote from an article at TechCrunch:
"Honeywell filed a multi-patent infringement lawsuit against Nest Labs and Best Buy yesterday. The suit alleges that Nest Labs is infringing on seven Honeywell patents. Honeywell is not seeking licensing fees. The consumer electronic conglomerate wants Nest Labs to cease using the technology and is actually looking to collect damages caused by the infringement. Damages? Bull****. This is about killing the competition."Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
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DARPA Investing In Electric Brain Stimulation To Train Snipers Quickly
New submitter Morganth writes "According to New Scientist, researchers at DARPA are investing efforts in transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) machines to cut the time it takes to train snipers. From the article: 'a 2-milliamp current will run through the part of the brain associated with object recognition — an important skill when visually combing a scene for assailants.' The story also gives a nice explanation on the psychology of 'flow' — the state that experts tend to enter (e.g. programmers, tennis players, pianists) when focusing on their work." We covered similar research done on mice to improve their memory in September.Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
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Delayed Outrage Over A Censored Site; What's a Better Way To Spread News?
Bennett Haselton is back with a thought provoking essay about not just an incident of Internet censorship on an American university campus, but a proposed method of propagating news, so that relevant stories aren't buried as easily by chance or time. Bennett writes: "The real scandal in the story of Arizona State University blocking students' access to the Change.org website, is not just that it happened, but that the block persisted for two months without being mentioned in the media. As a card-carrying member of the 'outrage grapevine,' I surely think we need a way to respond faster." Read on for the rest.Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
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Nouveau Open-Source NVIDIA Driver Achieves OpenCL Support
An anonymous reader writes "The Nouveau driver project that's been writing an open-source NVIDIA graphics driver via reverse-engineering has moved forward in their support. The Nouveau driver now has OpenCL acceleration support to do GPGPU computing on the open-source community driver for several generations of GeForce GPUs."Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
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Proposed Law Would Give DHS Power Over Privately Owned IT Infrastructure
CelticWhisper writes "H.R. 3674, the Promoting and Enhancing Cybersecurity and Information Sharing Effectiveness Act (PRECISE Act), would allow the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to require improved security practices from those businesses managing systems whose disruption could prove detrimental to critical life-sustaining or national-security initiatives." As the article points out, this is just "one of 30 or so such bills currently percolating on the Hill."Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
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Australian Scientists Discover 'Oldest Living Thing On Earth'
New submitter offsafely writes "Scientists in Australia have discovered the oldest living life-form to date: a small patch of Ancient Seagrass, dated through DNA sequencing at 200,000 years old."
Says the linked article: "This is far older than the current known oldest species, a Tasmanian plant that is believed to be 43,000 years old." What I want to know is, How does it taste?Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
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No More SSL Revocation Checking For Chrome
New submitter mwehle writes with this bit from Ars Technica: "Google's Chrome browser will stop relying on a decades-old method for ensuring secure sockets layer certificates are valid after one of the company's top engineers compared it to seat belts that break when they are needed most. The browser will stop querying CRL, or certificate revocation lists, and databases that rely on OCSP, or online certificate status protocol, Google researcher Adam Langley said in a blog post published on Sunday. He said the services, which browsers are supposed to query before trusting a credential for an SSL-protected address, don't make end users safer because Chrome and most other browsers establish the connection even when the services aren't able to ensure a certificate hasn't been tampered with."Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
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