Kanan excerpts from a BBC report out of Scotland: "A study of sexually scrambled chickens suggests that sex in birds is determined in a radically different way from that in mammals. Researchers studied three chickens that appeared to be literally half-male and half-female, and found that nearly every cell in their bodies — from wattle to toe — has an inherent sex identity. This cell-by-cell sex orientation contrasts sharply with the situation in mammals, in which organism-wide sex identity is established through hormones." Kanan also supplies this link to some pictures of the mixed-cell birds. Read more of this story ... [Link]

Clues in McAfee blog post led researcher to existing exploit code which he analyzed to write his own code. [Link]

adeelarshad82 writes "T-Mobile announced that the webConnect Rocket USB Laptop Stick, the first HSPA+ device for the US, will be available beginning on Sunday, March 14. The device was originally announced at MWC in February. HSPA+ is interesting because it could enable 4G LTE-like speeds using existing 3G infrastructure and according to a hands-on, it smokes Wi-Max. Right now, it's still just for Philadelphia, although we should see several major cities light up with HSPA+ on both coasts well before the end of 2010." Read more of this story at Slashdot. [Link]

smooth wombat writes "Before the advent of iTunes and MP3s, EMI and Pink Floyd entered into a contract which stated that EMI could not unbundle individual songs from their original album settings. This was insisted upon by the members of Pink Floyd, who wanted to retain artistic control of their works, which they considered 'seamless' pieces of music. However, with the advent of digital downloads, EMI has been selling individual songs through its online store. Pink Floyd sued, claiming EMI was violating the contract, whereas EMI said the contract only applied to physical albums, not Internet sales. Judge Andrew Morritt ... [Link]

lord_rotorooter writes "Felix Ortiz, D-Brooklyn, introduced a bill that would ruin restaurant food and baked goods as we know them. The measure if passed would ban the use of all forms of salt in the preparation and cooking of food for all restaurants or bakeries. While the use of too much salt can contribute to health problems, the complete banning of salt would have negative impacts on food chemistry. Not only does salt enhance flavor, it controls bacteria, slows yeast activity and strengthens dough by tightening gluten. Salt also inhibits the growth of microbes that spoil cheese." Read more of ... [Link]

Lanxon writes "It's true: 'Effects of cocaine on honeybee dance behavior,' 'Fellatio by fruit bats prolongs copulation time,' and 'Are full or empty beer bottles sturdier and does their fracture-threshold suffice to break the human skull?' are all genuine scientific research papers, and all were genuinely published in journals or similar publications. Wired's presentation of a collection of the most bizarrely-named research papers contains seven other gems, including one about naval fluff and another published in The Journal of Sex Research." Read more of this story at Slashdot. [Link]

The latest word on the iPhone is that the 4.0 OS will finally have honest-to-goodness multitasking. This could hopefully lead to things like a real chat client, and dangerous battery consumption. I still hope it's true. Read more of this story at Slashdot. [Link]

Apple will include much-asked-for application multitasking functionality when they release the iPhone 4.0 update sometime this summer, according to all-things-Apple blog AppleInsider. Multitasking more specifically, the ability to run third-party applications in the background is one of those big pieces of functionality that separates the iPhone OS from Android, and while Apple's sort of worked around this problem with push notifications, there are instances when there's no substitute for multitasking. Fingers crossed that this one comes true. [AppleInsider via Gizmodo] More » [Link]

Kolargol00 writes "Heise online reports the availability of an exploit Google translation for the yet-unpatched MSA-981374 affecting Internet Explorer 6 and 7. It has already been spotted in the wild by McAfee and integrated into the Metasploit Framework." Read more of this story at Slashdot. [Link]

Hewlett-Packard is ready to go with a new series of ads intended to jazz up its image among businesses, consumers, and even its own employees. [Link]

div style="background-color: #B3B3B3; width: 160px; padding: 1px;">#dealhacker .Laptops, HDTVs, camcorders, and portable goodies of all sort await you in today's Dealhacker roundup. Come for the deals stay for the free St. Patrick's Day and Metal Month tunes. More » [Link]

A push by Net neutrality advocates to reclassify ISPs as telecommunications providers has dangerous implications, argues Stanford Law Fellow Larry Downes. [Link]

Worth $53.5 billion, Mexican mobile tycoon Carlos Slim Helu is now the world's richest man, according to Forbes, putting Bill Gates in second place with only $53 billion. [Link]

Barence writes "Speaking exclusively to PC Pro, Eugene Kaspersky has claimed Apple has repeatedly refused to deliver the software development kit necessary to design security software for the phone. 'We have been in contact for two years with Apple to develop our anti-theft software, [but] still we do not have permission,' said Kaspersky. Although he admits the risk of viruses infecting the iPhone is 'almost zero,' he claims that securing the data on the handset is critical, especially as iPhones are increasingly being used for business purposes. 'I don't want to say Apple's is the wrong way of behaving, or ... [Link]

Wyse's new thin clients include the Wyse Thin OS 6.5 OS that improves security across virtual clients. The new clients also offer a multimedia accelerator designed to improve the user experience. - As the momentum around thin-client computing grows this year, Wyse is working to update its product line. The indirect sales thin-client company has introduced two new thin clients, the C10LE and V10LE, which include Wyse's ThinOS 6.5, the most recent upgrade that is based on a software solution... [Link]

div style="background-color: #B3B3B3; width: 160px; padding: 1px;">#downloads Firefox/Chrome: Small netbook screens make you really appreciate every last pixel on your device. The Mini Wide userscript for Gmail adds a "netbook mode" shortcut to Gmail that removes navigation and ads for a streamlined, netbook-friendly, message-focused view of your inbox. More » [Link]

As usual, the recent RSA Conference in San Francisco presented the channel with a spate of new services ripe for up-selling opportunities. Channel Insider takes a look at some of the key announcements for which security solutions providers should keep on the lookout. - ... [Link]

div style="background-color: #B3B3B3; width: 160px; padding: 1px;">#readerpoll We're regularly asked, "Where's the best place to stow the Windows taskbar?" and while the answer is a boring, "Whatever works best for you," Windows 7's taskbar certainly adds new factors to the decision. Reader Richard writes: More » [Link]

The Barracuda Labs annual report took a deep dive into Twitter usage and attack trends along with its analysis of general Web and e-mail malware attack techniques for 2009. Read on for the results. - A new report out by Barracuda Networks this week confirms the security community's suspicion that the explosion in Twitter's user base in 2009 has lead to an incipient rise in cybercriminal activity at the social networking site. Released yesterday, the Barracuda Labs annual report took a deep ... [Link]

abartels writes "It seems like there's been nothing but bad news and resignations coming from Oracle since it finally managed to close the deal on Sun. Finally, there's good news in that Drizzle seems to have a bright future ahead. It just isn't with Oracle, but with the Rackspace Cloud." Read more of this story at Slashdot. [Link]

div style="background-color: #B3B3B3; width: 160px; padding: 1px;">#downloads Windows/Mac/Linux: If you would like to easily access, edit, and save files across multiple computers, free application FeelHome allows you to share files across operating systems and over the web. More » [Link]

Paul Congdon says as cloud computing matures, people will naturally ask what's next. Fueled by infrastructure convergence, that next big thing will be the rapid increase in distributed computing models. - HP ProCurve CTO Paul Congdon on enterprise networking in 2015 Post-cloud computing era will drive additional service opportunities for partners Channel partners can expect to have plenty more service opportunities as the cloud computing model continues to evolve, but by 2015 they should al... [Link]

tbcpp writes "The Khronos Group has announced the release of the OpenGL 4.0 specification. Among the new features: two new shader stages that enable the GPU to offload geometry tessellation from the CPU; per-sample fragment shaders and programmable fragment shader input positions; drawing of data generated by OpenGL, or external APIs such as OpenCL, without CPU intervention; shader subroutines for significantly increased programming flexibility; 64-bit double precision floating point shader operations and inputs/outputs for increased rendering accuracy and quality. Khronos has also released an OpenGL 3.3 specification, together with a set of ARB extensions, to enable as much OpenGL 4.0 ... [Link]

div style="background-color: #B3B3B3; width: 160px; padding: 1px;">#downloads iPhone/iPod touch: Web-based Twitter client Brizzly is just like Twitter's web site, except better in every way. Brizzly's free iPhone app is a similar experience upgrade, with web-synced lists and muting, news and search tracking, easy photo uploads, and more. More » [Link]

The cross-platform graphics interface adds support for tesselation and better general-purpose computation. [Link]