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Submission + - Visa/MC Take fight to Scammers (krebsonsecurity.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In his latest story, Brian Krebs reports on a collaboration between brand holders and credit card companies to shut down payment processing for rogue online pharmacies, pirate software sellers and fake anti-virus scams. By conducting test purchases, they map out which banks are being used to accept payments for which scams. Writes Krebs, "Following the money trail showed that a majority of the purchases were processed by just 12 banks in a handful of countries, including Azerbaijan, China, Georgia, Latvia, and Mauritius." These results are then fed to Visa and Mastercard who typically shut down the merchant accounts "within one month after a complaint was lodged." If you can't accept payments, you can't make money and without money you can't pay the spammers who advertise your product. This effort is apparently quite effective and has led to much concern by those running such sites. Summing up this position is one rogue pharmacy affiliate who writes on a Russian-speaking underground forum, "IMHO, there is a general sad picture, fucking Visa is burning us with napalm.”
Google

Submission + - How Google Cools its 1 Million Servers (datacenterknowledge.com)

Submitted by 1sockchuck
1sockchuck writes: As Google showed the world its data centers this week, it disclosed one of its best-kept secrets: how it cools its custom servers in high-density racks. All the magic happens in enclosed hot aisles, including supercomputer-style steel tubing that transports water — sometimes within inches of the servers. How many of those servers are there? Google has deployed at least 1 million servers, according to Wired, which got a look inside the company's North Carolina data center. The disclosures accompany a gallery of striking photos by architecture photographer Connie Zhou, who discusses the experience and her approach to the unique assignment.
China

Submission + - US vs. UK: Free speech vs. fair speech, who's right? (cbsnews.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: China has the "Great Firewall." Russia just jailed a band for anti-religious songs. The UK jailed a man for an "offensive" Facebook status, while the US has the Westboro Baptist Church that are free to spew out vile, anti-everything hatred. Where's the balance? Between the U.S., Russia, China, and the U.K, which country has freedom of speech laws right?
Mars

Submission + - Scientists to Rebuild Martians in Earth Lab 2

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Karen Kaplan reports in the LA Times that Craig Venter is making plans to send a DNA sequencer to Mars and assuming that there is DNA to be found on the Red Planet – a big assumption, to be sure – to decode its DNA, beam it back to Earth, put those genetic instructions into a cell and then boot up a Martian life form in a biosecure lab. Venter’s “biological teleporter” (as he dubbed it) would dig under the surface for samples to sequence. If they find anything, “it would take only 4.3 minutes to get the Martians back to Earth,” says Venter, founder of Celera Genomics and the Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR). “Now we can rebuild the Martians in a P4 spacesuit lab.” It may sound far-fetched, but the notion of equipping a future Mars rover to sequence the DNA isn’t so crazy and Venter isn’t the only one looking for Martian DNA. MIT research scientist Christopher Carr is part of a group that’s “building a a miniature RNA/DNA sequencer to search for life beyond Earth,” according to the MIT website "The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Genomes". SETG will test the hypothesis that life on Mars, if it exists, shares a common ancestor with life on Earth. Carr told Tech Review that one of the biggest challenges is shrinking Ion Torrent’s 30-kilogram machine down to a mere 3 kg – light enough to fit on a Mars rover. “Top places to look include Mars, Enceladus, and Europa.”"
Hardware

Submission + - ACM Queue interview with Robert Watson on open source hardware and research (acm.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: ACM Queue interviews Cambridge researcher (and FreeBSD developer) Robert Watson on why processor designs need to change in order to better support security features like Capsicum — and how they change all the time (RISC, GPUs, etc). He also talks about the challenge of building a research team at Cambridge that could actually work with all levels of the stack: CPU design, operating systems, compilers, applications, and formal methods. The DARPA-sponsored SRI and Cambridge CTSRD project is building a new open source processor that can support orders of magnitude greater sandboxing than current designs.
Math

Submission + - Life Programmed In Life (i-programmer.info)

Submitted by mikejuk
mikejuk writes: Every programmer likes a good self reference, a recursion, a bootstrap — but this one is mind-boggling. We have an implementation of Conway's game of life in Conway's game of life. Or put more simply Life in Life.
It has long been known that Conway's life is Turing complete, that is you can use it to compute anything that a Turing machine can compute, but doing it is another matter. Now we have an video that really brings the idea home. Some years ago, around 2006, Brice Due created a metapixel — a unit cell that can be customized to behave like any cell in a Life like cellular automata. The metapixel uses 2048x2048 “real” Life cells and takes 35,328 generations to change state and it really is aware of the state of each of its neighbours. This makes it possible to create an implementation of Life in Life. But your mind has not been completely blown until you see the video of the smooth zoom, reminisent of the famous “powers of ten” video. It starts down at the single cell level and zooms out all the way until you can see Life being run by the metapixels. Life’s simple rules give rise to complex behaviours which are used to implement simple rules — the circle has closed.
Windows

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Secure Windows Laptop for your kid, when clueless about Windows? 1

Submitted by madsdyd
madsdyd writes: I am a long time user of Linux (1997) and have not been using Windows since 1998. All PCs at home (mine, wife, kids) runs Linux. I work professionally as a software developer with Linux, but the Windows installs at my workplace are quite limited, so my current/working knowledge of Windows is almost nil.

At home we have all been happy with this arrangements, and the kids have been using their nintendos, ps2/3's and mobile phones up until now. However, my oldest kid (12) now wants to play World of Warcraft and League of Legends with his friends.

I have spent more hours than I like to admit getting this to work with Wine, with limited success — seems to always fail at the last moment. I considered an Apple machine, but they seem to be quite expensive.

So, I am going to bite the bullet, and install Windows 7 on a spare Lenove T400 laptop, which I estimate will be able to run both Windows 7 and the games in question.

Getting Windows 7 from a shop is surprisingly expensive, but I have found a place where they sell used software (legally) and can live with that one-time cost. However, I understand that I need to protect the Windows installation against viruses and malware and whatnot. The problem is, I have no clue how. One shop wants to sell me a subscription based solution from Norton, but this cost will take a huge dip into my kids monthly allowance — he is required to cover the costs of playing himself, so given that playing WoW is not exactly free, this is a non-trivial expense for him. On the other hand, he has plenty of time, so I guess he could use that time to learn something, and protecting his system at the same time.

So, my questions are sometihng like this: how do other Slashdotters provide Windows installations for their kids? What kind of protection is needed? Are there any open source/free protection systems that can be used? Should the security issues be ignored, and instead dump the Windows install to an external disk, and restore every two weeks? Is there a "Windows for Linux users" guide somewhere? What should we do, given that we need to keep the cost low and preferably the steps simple enough for a 12 year old kid to perform?
Security

Submission + - Aussie researchers crack transport crypto, get free rides (scmagazine.com.au)

Submitted by mask.of.sanity
mask.of.sanity writes: Shoddy customised cryptography by a state rail outfit has been busted by a group of Australian researchers who were able to replicate cards to get free rides.

The flaws in the decades-old custom cryptographic scheme were busted using a few hundred dollars' worth of equipment.

The unnamed transport outfit will hold it's breath until a scheduled upgrade to see the holes fixed.

Submission + - Personal information of 13 million Chileans leaked on Tor hidden service 'Doxbin (onion.to)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: From the site: 'The Chilean Electoral Service dropped the ball and made the results of an audit (Roughly 13 million voter registration records) available on the Internet, and Google indexed most of it. Comically enough, the Chileans played shell games with the PDFs. First, they tossed up CAPTCHAs, and then they took down the page linking to all the PDFs.' This led to the PDFs being downloaded and converted, then released on the Tor darknet.
Spam

Submission + - Spammers Using Shortened .gov URLs (paritynews.com)

Submitted by hypnosec
hypnosec writes: Cyber-scammers have started using the 1.usa.gov links in their spam campaigns in a bid to fool gullible users into thinking that the links they see on a website or have received in their mail or newsletter are legitimate US Government website. Spammers have achieved these shortened URLs through a loophole in the URL shortening service provided by bit.ly. USA.gov and Bit.ly have collaborated thus enabling anyone to shorten a .gov or .mil URL into a trustworthy 1.USA.gov URL. Further, according to an explanation provided by HowTo.gov, USA.gov short URLs do not require any log in.
Canada

Submission + - Canadian Space Agency unveils prototype fleet of rovers (www.cbc.ca)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: "At its headquarters in Longueuil, Que. Friday, the Canadian Space Agency rolled out a fleet of about a half-dozen prototype rovers that are the forerunners of vehicles that may one day explore the moon or Mars. The agency said the terrestrial rovers bring it one step closer to developing the next generation for space exploration."

Submission + - Demonstrating a Weakly-Ordered CPU (preshing.com)

Submitted by Narnie
Narnie writes: Jeff Preshing provides a C++11 demonstration of using shared memory on a weakly-ordered CPU and the resulting memory reordering when not properly using memory_order_acquire and memory_order_release constraints. Preshing writes in his blog:

If there’s one thing that characterizes a weakly-ordered CPU, it’s that one CPU core can read values from shared memory in a different order than another core wrote them. That’s what I’d like to demonstrate in this post using pure C++11. For normal applications, the x86/64 processor families from Intel and AMD do not have this characteristic. So we can forget about demonstrating this phenomenon on pretty much every modern desktop or notebook computer in the world. What we really need is a weakly-ordered multicore device. Fortunately, I happen to have one right here in my pocket: The iPhone 4S fits the bill. It runs on a dual-core ARM-based processor, and the ARM architecture is, in fact, weakly-ordered.

As commenter Ross Smith posted, "a rash of bug reports in multithreaded libraries and applications (occurred) around April 2011--Just after the iPad2 was released. That was the first mass market hardware with a multicore ARM CPU, and it gave a lot of supposedly threadsafe code a workout it had never had before."

The blog comes complete with some psudo-code, C++11 snippets, and the resulting assembly generated by the compiler.
Security

Submission + - Real-Time Cyber-Attack Map (qz.com)

Submitted by anavictoriasaavedra
anavictoriasaavedra writes: In October, two German computer security researchers created a map that allows you to see a picture of online cyber-attacks as they happen. The map isn’t out of a techno-thriller, tracking the location of some hacker in a basement trying to steal government secrets. Instead, it’s built around a worldwide project designed to study online intruders. The data comes from honeypots. When the bots go after a honeypot, however, they’re really hacking into a virtual machine inside a secure computer. The attack is broadcast on the map—and the researchers behind the project have a picture of how a virus works that they can use to prevent similar attacks or prepare new defenses.
Power

Submission + - Ground under Fukushima Unit 4 sinking, structure on verge of complete collapse (naturalnews.com) 1

Submitted by overmoderated
overmoderated writes: Though the mainstream media has long since abandoned the issue, the precarious situation at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power facility in Japan is only continuing to worsen, according to a prominent Japanese official. During a recent interview, Mitsuhei Murata, the former Japanese Ambassador to both Switzerland and Senegal, explained that the ground beneath the plant's Unit 4 is gradually sinking, and that the entire structure is very likely on the verge of complete collapse.

Submission + - 21st IOCCC Source Code Released (ioccc.org)

Submitted by johntromp
johntromp writes: Source code for the 21st International Obfuscated C Code Contest has been released last weekend, following announcement of the winners on Sep 30, and just over a month after the submission window closed on Sep 14, a new speed record for the judges. Happy source code browsing!
Australia

Submission + - The Long Reach Of US Extradition (newmatilda.com)

Submitted by CuteSteveJobs
CuteSteveJobs writes: The New Matilda reports how the US is now able to extradite people for minor offences, and asks why foreign governments so willingly give up their nationals to the US to 'face justice' over minor crimes committed outside US borders? Lawyer Kellie Tranter writes "the long arm of the Government is using criminal enforcement powers to enforce commercial interests at the behest of corporations and their lobbyists." A Former NSW Chief Judge said it was bizarre "that people are being extradited to the US to face criminal charges when they have never been to the US and the alleged act occurred wholly outside the US". He said although copyright violations are a great problem, a country "must protect its nationals from being removed from their homeland to a foreign country merely because the commercial interests of that foreign country." Australia recently "streamlined" its laws to make extradition to the US even easier.
Science

Submission + - Electronic Tweezers Grab Nanoparticles (acs.org)

Submitted by
MTorrice
MTorrice writes: "A beam of electrons can pick up and carry nanoparticles, according to a new study. The so-called electronic tweezers could help scientists in diverse tasks, such as building up new materials nanoparticle by nanoparticle, and measuring the forces between nanoparticles and living cells, the researchers say. In the past, scientists have manipulated microsized particles, including single cells, using a beam of laser light called optical tweezers. But the force required to trap a particle with optical tweezers increases as the particle gets smaller, making grappling with nanoparticles difficult. Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory developed an alternative to optical tweezers by modifying a transmission electron microscope, which produces images by passing a stream of electrons through a sample."

Submission + - How to protect data and not be a doofus.

Submitted by
cellurl
cellurl writes: "I run wikispeedia, a database of speed limit signs. People approach us to Mirror our data, but I am quite certain it will become a one-way street. So my question is: How can I give consumers peace of mind in using our data and not give up the ship? We want to be the clearing house for this information, at the same time following our charter of providing Safety. Some thoughts that come to mind are creating a "Service Level Agreement" which they will no doubt reject, or Mysql-clustering or rsync. Any thoughts, technically, logistically, legally appreciated."

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