Hackers come in two flavours: white-hats who exploit system vulnerabilities to help companies figure out weak points, and black-hats who exploit systems for less than noble purposes. Contrary to the notion that “hacker” was a white-hat term corrupted by the media, the word’s first recorded use described the latter type. A 1963 issue of MIT’s The Tech newspaper reported on what we now call “phone phreaking,” the illegal use of a private phone system to make calls via voicemail systems and programming ports. Read full article here
Science
‘Ghostly’ neutrinos provide new path to study protons
In groundbreaking research, an international collaboration of scientists from the University of Rochester have used a beam of neutrinos to measure the size and shape of the protons that make up the nuclei of atoms. This feat, once thought impossible, provides scientists with a new way of looking at the small components of an atom’s nucleus and opens up a wealth of new information about the structure of an atom’s nucleus and the dynamics of the forces that affect neutrino interactions. The researchers solved the challenge of harnessing neutrinos in large numbers by using a neutrino detector containing a target of both hydrogen and carbon atoms, and over nine years of data collection at Fermilab’s accelerator. Read full article here
Merv
March 25, 2023
