Quantum mechanics: Put three pigeons in two holes and none of them will be in the same hole.

We show that quantum mechanics violates one of the fundamental principles of nature: If you put three particles in two boxes, necessarily two particles will end up in the same box. We find instances when three quantum particles are put in two boxes, yet no two particles are in the same box, a seemingly impossible and absurd effect. This is only one of a host of related quantum effects which we discovered and which point to a very interesting structure of quantum mechanics that was hitherto unnoticed and has major implications for our understanding of nature. It requires us to revisit some of the most basic notions of quantum physics––the notions of separability, of correlations, and of interactions.

Source: Quantum violation of the pigeonhole principle and the nature of quantum correlations

Oxford Prof calulates how long it would take for large-scale conspiracies to reveal themselves

Dr Grimes initially created an equation to express the probability of a conspiracy being either deliberately uncovered by a whistle-blower or inadvertently revealed by a bungler. This factors in the number of conspirators, the length of time, and even the effects of conspirators dying, whether of old age or more nefarious means, for those conspiracies that do not require active maintenance.

Source: Equation shows that large-scale conspiracies would quickly reveal themselves

The equation was compared to known conspiracies to validate it. Turns out most conspiracies will make themselves known pretty quickly.

Skype finally hides IP adresses

Skype is fully committed to delivering as safe and secure of an experience as possible to our customers. We have recently introduced the ability to hide a Skype user’s IP address and we’ve set this as a default status in the latest versions of Skype. Starting with this update to Skype and moving forward, your…

Source: To our gamers: IP will now be hidden by default in latest update

About bloody time!

Microsoft struggles against self-inflicted Office 365 IMAP outage. 7 days and counting.

Microsoft engineers are struggling to fix a seven-day-old, self-inflicted Office 365 IMAP outage.

IMAP access to Office 365 tanked on January 18, meaning customers could not access emails using Exchange Online via IMAP or connect third-party mail clients via IMAP.

Microsoft told disgruntled Office 365 customers that the problem affected a limited number of licensees – but that those customers hit had a “large number of users.”

The culprit was found to be a botched Microsoft update that stopped the IMAP protocol automatically loading data from Exchange Online databases.

Source: Microsoft struggles against self-inflicted Office 365 IMAP outage

Cloud is a great idea. Not always.

Terrible infections, bad practices, unclean kit – welcome to hospital IT

Medicine is world’s worst industry for data security, it seems

Source: Terrible infections, bad practices, unclean kit – welcome to hospital IT

Hospitals running unpatched XP and 95, hardware vendors that ship 36 trojans with their patches, people running around pressing keyboard keys to make sure none of the PCs ever logs out, pacemakers with open debug routines that allow interruption of service, it’s quite an article.