Zlib buffer overflow and patch; antimatter drives; solid sun; ELT

[unixronin]

Whitedust.net reports briefly on a zlib security hole that impacts a wide variety of applications on multiple platforms, including XFree86, Windows Messenger and MS Office.  The buffer overflow is not known to have been exploited yet, but it's only a matter of time.  (More info at secunia.com.)  A patch is available from FreeBSD.org.

In other news, Positronics Research LLC of Santa Fe, NM is reportedly working on an antimatter drive which they plan to power by producing positrons in huge quantities.  (Storing that much charge density ought to be interesting.)

Next, a site claiming (based solely on image data from NASA's SOHO program and the Trace and Yohkoh programs, plus a whole lot of wild speculation) that the Sun, far from being a ball of gas, actually has a "hard and rigid ferrite surface below the photosphere" that conducts electricity.  The author claims the Sun rotates uniformly every 27.3 days.  Luminary, or loon?  You be the judge.  Me, I'm firmly voting "Loon".

And last but not least, another step has been taken towards constructing the Extremely Large Telescope, a 100m optical telescope with fifty times the resolving power of Hubble.  If built, the ELT would be able to resolve 2m features on the Moon, roughly the same as the high-resolution imagery of Google Earth.

Comments

[ilcylic.livejournal.com]

Well, hopefully Santa Fe is far enough away that when that blows up, the radiation won't fry me here in Albuquerque.

-Ogre

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Three orders of magnitude more energy density than fission or fusion ....
Y'know, it'd be interesting if we ended up skipping fusion altogether and went directly to amtimatter reactors. Though the article implies this is going to be effectively an energy storage medium, just like hydrogen-fuelled cars, rather than energy generation.

[rbos.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure I want to be on this planet when antimatter bombs go into production.

Lemme off please.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

If you know another place to go -- and, more importantly, have a way to get there -- let me know.
Seriously, though, I don't see antimatter bombs as either more or less likely to bring about the End Of The World As We Know It than fission or fusion weapons. But I'll bet it's a hell of a lot harder to build an antimatter bomb in a suitcase or backpack than to do the same with a pony nuke. All you need to transport, say, plutonium is a lead box or a volunteer who doesn't mind dying of cancer; a portable antimatter containment system is likely to be an orders-of-magnitude more difficult problem.

[rbos.livejournal.com]

I don't know; it depends. Antimatter bombs could be mechanically much MUCH simpler. It could basically amount to a small plastic box with a vacuum chamber and a couple of magnets. Or it could be an epaulet with little bubbles in it. Certainly it seems mechanically simpler than dealing with creating a critical mass at the right time and place; for that, you need to fiddle around with timed explosions packing a critical mass, or a fission bomb as a primer for a fusion reaction, or simply ramming a rod into a torus to achieve critical mass, or what have you. It seems to me that antimatter bombs could be cranked out in a quantity and at a price far lower than fusion or fission bombs, once you have the facilities in place.

It might even revolutionize the small arms industry; hand grenades, explosive rounds, maybe. A nanogram of antimatter embedded in a chemically-triggered magnetic field? expose it to oxygen, loses its magnetic charge, blam? I don't know, I'm pretty ignorant of the engineering, but I'm confident that if the antimatter was there, the weaponization would soon follow.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

It could basically amount to a small plastic box with a vacuum chamber and a couple of magnets.

I doubt it's quite that simple. We're not talking about electrically neutral antimatter, we're talking about a pure positron fluid. The charge density, and the internal repulsive forces, would be staggering. I'll confess I haven't done the math, but I suspect even a few micrograms would require a superconducting magnetic bottle to contain, with all the associated cryogenic refrigeration apparatus and the power to run it. Rare-earth-ceramic high-temperature superconductors wouldn't work due to the intensity of the necessary field; magnetic quenching would shut them down before you ever got the containment field up.