Roland Piquepaille writes "What do you think astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) ate for Thanksgiving? Roasted turkey? Wrong answer. In "Orbital Thanksgiving," NASA tells us they had tortillas and gives details about food in space. If the dining view, 200 miles over the Earth, is great, preparing meals is quite a challenge. For example, there is no refrigerator or freezer aboard the Station, so food must remain good for long periods at room temperature. And you need to avoid crumbs which could float around. This is why tortillas are favored over bread. This overview contains additional references and includes a picture of a cosmonaut preparing food in the ISS galley."

wjsteele writes "Seems that the Space Station has had a minor fender bender. Sounds kind of scary... being in a space craft and hearing metal crunching (like an aluminum can.) Apparently some 'Minor' space debris struck the station around 2:30am this morning, while the astronauts were eating their wheaties." Update: 11/27 16:31 GMT by M : Looks like an experiment may be to blame.

Maktoo writes "All proper geeks know Fusion is the Way of the Future. Dec 16th is the date set for selection of the site of the new International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (Iter). A collaboration between the EU, Japan, the U.S., Canada, China, South Korea and Russia, 'ITER would be the world's largest international cooperative research and development project after the International Space Station.' Their goal over the next decade? '[T]o produce 500 megawatts of fusion power for 500 seconds or longer during each individual fusion experiment and in doing so demonstrate essential technologies for a commercial reactor.'"

Roland Piquepaille writes "Some days bring big surprises. Like many people, I always believed that it was impossible to write in space with ordinary pens because ink would not flow. So imagine my astonishment when I read Pedro Duque's diary from space this morning. Pedro Duque is an astronaut since 1992. Now, he's on board of the International Space Station (ISS) since October 18, 2003. And he's writing -- from space -- with a cheap ballpoint pen, like Russians apparently always did: 'So I also took one of our ballpoint pens, courtesy of the European Space Agency (just in case Russian ballpoint pens are special), and here I am, it doesn't stop working and it doesn't "spit" or anything.' Isn't it amazing? This summary contains more details and a photograph of Pedro Duque on board ISS." Note that NASA didn't go crazy developing a pen for space. Surface tension is the important factor for all pens, not gravity.

Atryn writes "New Scientist is reporting concerns over deteriorating equipment on ISS. ISS will celebrate another anniversary on Nov 2 marking its 3rd complete year. This story was also covered on CNN International and covered on Space.com."

WayneConrad writes "SpaceRef has a summary of a leaked Johnson Space Center white paper (pdf) that severely criticizes NASA's Life Science program. According to the paper, science is being done without proper controls, with too-small sample groups, and is often not relevant to the ISS's stated bioscience mission (to develop countermeasures against the deleterious effects of microgravity). The paper states,'NASA's founding fathers would turn in their proverbial graves at the sight of such a convoluted organization' and 'Voodoo science is not worth the cost. The limb of the fault tree Life Sciences is perched upon is perilously close to breaking.'"

Guinnessy writes "Neal Lane, the ex-science advisor to President Clinton, has written an article in Physics Today magazine, that explains why he thinks Benjamin Franklin, was an early American prototype of a civic scientist, i.e. someone who would 'probably address many of today's concerns with wisdom, practicality, and a deep sense of civic responsibility.' Ironically the same issue has an example of a modern day civic scientist, a profile of Richard Meserve, a physicist who became a lawyer. Interesting stuff."

t482 writes "Dr. Michelle Thaller has a nice article describing the current thoughts on gravity. Why is it so weak? Detecting gravity waves has turned into a bit of a cottage industry. "We are close," says MIT physicist Rainer Weiss, a pioneer in gravity wave research for more than 30 years. "I think sometime in the next two or three years we will see something.""

nuke-alwin writes "The Kansas City Star is reporting that a Russian unmanned space ship has brought fresh supplies to the International Space Station. Since the grounding of the space shuttle fleet the ISS depends on the Russians to get supplies. The crew have also received satellite telephones for the first time."

BSD Forums writes "On March 3rd, 2003, Internet Security Systems, in cooperation with the Department of Homeland Security, issued a warning regarding a hole found in Sendmail. The warning, echoed by CERT, warned system admins that any version lower than 8.12.8 was vulnerable to a serious root exploit. Sendmail has a long history of security holes, most of which have been thoroughly documented on security sites. While Sendmail runs half the mail servers in the world, there are smaller and easier-to-use mail transfer agents (MTAs). Network administrator Glenn Graham demonstrates how Postfix gives you most of the power with a fraction of the pain."

Eric Stats writes "Working as a Network Engineer for web-hosting company that prides itself on uptime and network availability, and moonlighting as a part-time Linux administrator, my managers and clients are starting to expect a level of information security knowledge from me. I decided that if I wanted to take my career to the next level, I needed to develop some security-specific skills. I heard a lot about the open source Intrusion Detection System (IDS), Snort from friends and co-workers (mostly that it was a pain to get running, and an even bigger pain to understand what it was doing)." To get past those frustrations, Eric looked at two more books on Snort (and compares them to the already-reviewed Intrusion Detection with Snort ); read on below for his take on what each offers.

FTL writes "NASA's next big step in space (after getting the remaining Shuttles flying again) is the construction of the Orbital Space Plane. It is a small vehicle designed to transport people to and from ISS. Jeffrey Bell takes a close look at OSP in this article and comes to the conclusion that it will result in yet another crippled vehicle. Sounds like what people were saying about the Shuttle's problems back when it was being designed."

LooseChanj writes "Ed Lu, a member of the Expedition 7 crew of the ISS has been sending back some extremely well written and interesting commentary about his mission, and some of the things one has to deal with in space. This is exactly the kind of stuff we need to see more of out of NASA!"

espo812 writes "This analysis of the 55808 trojan that has been circling the internet was just posted on Bugtraq . The good news (i guess?) is that apparentally it is just a proof of concept distributed scanner. The bad news is they think they just caught a copycat version of the origional trojan. ISS also has an analysis."

You asked nmap creator Fyodor many excellent questions, and his answers (below) are just as excellent. You'll want to set aside significant time to read and digest this interview, because Fyodor didn't just toss off a few words, but put some real time and energy into his answers.

physicsnerd writes "According to CNN the Soyuz capsule from the International Space Station has landed in Kazakhstan. This is the first time US Astronauts have ever landed outside of the US."

0biJon writes "The BBC says 'For as little as $20,000, you could soon have a letter sent to a new "post office" aboard the International Space Station (ISS) and back care of the Russian space agency.' Maybe Lance Bass can mail himself up?"

javifs writes "Do you remember TAMU's security tools? If so you might remember a tool that was developed when COPS, SATAN, and ISS were (back in 1994): Tiger. You might think it was dead, well it's not. Tiger has resurrected at Savannah and even has a new webpage and logo! (cool, isn't it?) Tiger has some interesting features that merit its resurrection, including a modular design that is easy to expand, and its double edge: an audit tool and a host intrusion detection system tool. Free Software intrusion detection is currently going many ways, however, from network IDS (with Snort), to the kernel (LIDS, or SNARE for Linux and Systrace for OpenBSD, for example), not mentioning file integrity checkers (many of these: aide, integrit samhain, tripwire...) and logcheckers (even more of these, check Counterpane's Log Analysis pages). Also, free software Linux/*BSD distributions have a miriad of security tools to do local security checks: Mandrake's msec, OpenBSD's /etc/security, SUSE's Seccheck... maybe Tiger could substitute them at some point in the future. Do you think Tiger has a place in the toolkit of the security professional? (I might be biased, though, after all I'm the upstream developer for Tiger now :-) ) In any case, have you downloaded and tested the latest release candidate for Tiger version 3.2?"

Kathy Miles writes "The International Space Station was boosted into a 3 mile higher orbit in preparation for an April 26 launch of TMA-2. The Soyuz capsule will carry two new crew members to the ISS for Expedition 7. Expedition 6 will return in May. And on April 8, there is a planned EVA for Expedition 6 crew of Commander Ken Bowerson and Science Officer Don Pettit. The two will be continuing the ongoing outfitting of the International Space Station."

prostoalex writes "The Industrial Physicist sums up the recent advances and developments in the world of computer vision. They mention an application for human-computer interfacing using a Webcam, Philips Research Lab Seeing with Sound product, which augments vision for visually impaired, as well as various frontal face detection applications."