Sir Edward Heath, former British PM, dies at 89

Sunday, July 17, 2005 Sir Edward Heath, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1970-1974 and leader of the Conservative Party from 1965-1975, has died at his home in Salisbury just a week after his 89th birthday. Heath implemented the decimalization of the British coinage, led the United Kingdom into the European Economic Community, attempted to end industrial unrest with the Industrial Relations Act, initiated a failed power-sharing government in Northern Ireland, and, in order to cope with a coal strike on top of the 1973 fuel crisis, instituted a…

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Wikileaks crashes under cyber attack

Wednesday, August 31, 2011 Wikileaks today announced via twitter that its website has crashed under an apparent cyber-attack; this following the recent release of tens of thousands of US State Department cables. Sources in the US say the mass-disclosure of cables is causing diplomatic setbacks, and embarrassment, for the administration of Barack Obama. These previously unreleased cables are said to contain the names of sensitive sources that the authors asked higher bodies to “strictly protect”. The authenticity of the latest documents has not been confirmed but, US State Department spokeswoman…

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Chinese researchers crack major U.S. government algorithm used in digital signatures

Wednesday, February 16, 2005According to computer security expert Bruce Schneier, a widely-used cryptography algorithm, known as SHA-1, has been broken by three researchers at Shandong University in China. Designed by the US intelligence agency NSA, SHA-1 has been adopted as an official US government standard and has become widely-used in security applications worldwide, notably digital signatures. The three female researchers, Xiaoyun Wang, Yiqun Lisa Yin, and Hongbo Yu, have reduced the amount of time needed to find two documents with the same signature by a factor of more than 2000.…

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2008 COMPUTEX Taipei: Three awards, One target

Monday, June 23, 2008 2008 COMPUTEX Taipei, the largest trade fair since its inception in 1982, featured several seminars and forums, expansions on show spaces to TWTC Nangang, great transformations for theme pavilions, and WiMAX Taipei Expo, mainly promoted by Taipei Computer Association (TCA). Besides of ICT industry, “design” progressively became the critical factor for the future of the other industries. To promote innovative “Made In Taiwan” products, pavilions from “Best Choice of COMPUTEX”, “Taiwan Excellence Awards”, and newly-set “Design and Innovation (d & i) Award of COMPUTEX”, demonstrated the…

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Wikileaks crashes under cyber attack

Wednesday, August 31, 2011 Wikileaks today announced via twitter that its website has crashed under an apparent cyber-attack; this following the recent release of tens of thousands of US State Department cables. Sources in the US say the mass-disclosure of cables is causing diplomatic setbacks, and embarrassment, for the administration of Barack Obama. These previously unreleased cables are said to contain the names of sensitive sources that the authors asked higher bodies to “strictly protect”. The authenticity of the latest documents has not been confirmed but, US State Department spokeswoman…

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Witnesses saw truck “rev up and race” before recent Texas oil refinery blast

Friday, April 1, 2005File:Map of USA highlighting Texas.png Witnesses say a truck was idling near the scene of an explosion at a Texas refinery which killed 15 and injured over 100 others on March 23, according to U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Manager Bill Hoyle. “Witnesses saw vapor in the area of the truck and observed the engine begin to rev up and race,” Hoyle’s statement said. “This behavior by a diesel engine indicates the presence of a flammable atmosphere entering the air intake. A driver reported trying to…

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Keep your eyes peeled for cosmic debris: Andrew Westphal about Stardust@home

Sunday, May 28, 2006 Stardust is a NASA space capsule that collected samples from comet 81P/Wild (also known as “Wild 2) in deep space and landed back on Earth on January 15, 2006. It was decided that a collaborative online review process would be used to “discover” the microscopically small samples the capsule collected. The project is called Stardust@home. Unlike distributed computing projects like SETI@home, Stardust@home relies entirely on human intelligence. Andrew Westphal is the director of Stardust@home. Wikinews interviewed him for May’s Interview of the Month (IOTM) on May…

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Teen hacker admits to attack on scientology.org

Monday, October 20, 2008 A teenager, belonging to the anti-scientology group Anonymous, has admitted that he launched a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on the official website of the Church of Scientology, scientology.org. Dmitriy Guzner, aged 18, will admit to the charges related to carrying out the DDoS attack. He now faces a maximum sentence of ten years imprisonment. In response to incidents such as these, Scientology have called Anonymous “cyber-terrorists.” A DDoS attack occurs when multiple computers are used to attack a certain website with so much traffic…

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