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

[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.