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Facebook

+ - 123 Why Facebook's Network Effects are Overrated->

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "A lot of people interested in free software, and user autonomy and network services are very worried about Facebook. Folks are worried for the same reason that so many investors are interested: the networks effects brought by hundreds of millions of folks signed up to use the service.

Facebook is vulnerable to the next thing more than many technology firms that have benefited from network effects in the past. If users are given compelling reasons to switch to something else, they can with less trouble and they will.

That compelling reason might be a new social network with better features or an awesome distributed architecture that allows freedom for users and the ability of those users to benefit from new and fantastic things that Facebook's overseers would never let them have and without the things Facebook's users suffer through today. Or it might be a sexier proprietary box to store users' private information. It doesn't mean that I'm not worried about Facebook. I remain deeply worried. It's just not very hard for me to imagine the end."
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Wireless Networking

+ - 159 Internet for Condo association

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "I am on a committee to evaluate internet options for a medium sized condo association (80 units — 20 stories) in a major metropolitan area (chicago). What options are out there? What questions should one ask of the various sales representatives? How should access be distributed within the building (wireless AP's, ethernet cable). Does it make sense to provide any additional condo wide infrastructure (servers, services)? How much should it cost? How much dedicated bandwidth is required to support a community of this size?"

+ - 168 Flame used MS certificates intended for TS licensing->

Submitted by
yuhong
yuhong writes "From the article:
"What we found is that certificates issued by our Terminal Services licensing certification authority, which are intended to only be used for license server verification, could also be used to sign code as Microsoft. Specifically, when an enterprise customer requests a Terminal Services activation license, the certificate issued by Microsoft in response to the request allows code signing without accessing Microsoft’s internal PKI infrastructure."
Microsoft released an update adding the affected CAs to the Untrusted Certificate Store."
Link to Original Source
Science

+ - 169 Hide-and-Seek Goes Virtual->

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes "Hide-and-seek isn't just for kids anymore. For the first time, scientists have used virtual reality to analyze how adults conceal and find objects. The researchers were surprised to discover that people tend not to search in places where they might normally hide something, findings that could lead to better ways to suss out where terrorists and criminals have hidden bombs or contraband."
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Space

+ - 254 What Struck Earth in 775?->

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes "In 775 C.E., while Charlemagne was ruling his Frankish kingdom, something mysterious struck Earth. An analysis of the rings of two Japanese cedar trees reveals that from 774 to 775 C.E., the atmospheric level of radioactive carbon-14 jumped by 1.2%. This indicates that cosmic rays—high-speed, charged particles from space—bombarded our planet and converted some atmospheric nitrogen-14 into carbon-14. The scientists argue against two logical suspects: solar flares are too weak to do the job, and no supernova explosion was seen at the time, nor do any nearby supernova remnants date back to Charlemagne's time. So the cause remains a mystery, but whatever it was, something similar could presumably strike again."
Link to Original Source

+ - 121 College Freshman at Age 9, M.D. at 21 - A Real-World Doogie Howser-> 2

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "Sho Yano this week will become the yougnest student to get an M.D. from University of Chicargo. He was reading at age 2, writing by 3, and composing music by his 5th birthday. He graduated from Loyola University in three years — summa cum laude, no less. When he entered U. of C.'s prestigious Pritzker School of Medicine at 12, it was into one of the school's most rigorous programs, where students get both their doctorate and medical degrees.

Intelligence is not Yano's only gift — though according to a test he took at age 4, his IQ is too high to accurately measure and is easily above genius level. He is an accomplished pianist who has performed at Ravinia, and he has a black belt in tae kwon do. Classmates and faculty described him as "sweet" and "humble," a hardworking, Bach-adoring, Greek literature-quoting student. And in his own words, "I may not be the most outgoing person, but I do like to be around people." — unlike many self-proclaimed genius-level slashdoters."
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Linux

+ - 243 First Steps with the Raspberry Pi->

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "The Raspberry Pi received an extraordinary amount of pre-launch coverage. It truly went viral with major news corporations such as the BBC giving extensive coverage. Not without reason, it is groundbreaking to have a small capable computer retailing at less than the price of a new console game. There have been a number of ventures that have tried to produce a cheap computer such as a laptop and a tablet but which never materialised at these price points. Nothing comes close to the Raspberry Pi in terms of affordability, which is even more important in the current economic climate. Producing a PC capable of running Linux, Quake III-quality games, and 1080p video is worthy of praise."
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Security

+ - 290 AntiVirus Firms Out of their League with Stuxnet, Flame 2

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes "Mikko Hypponen, Chief Research Officer of software security company F-Secure, writes that when his company heard about Flame, they went digging through their archive for related samples of malware and were surprised to find that they already had samples of Flame, dating back to 2010 and 2011, that they were unaware they possessed. "What this means is that all of us had missed detecting this malware for two years, or more. That’s a spectacular failure for our company, and for the antivirus industry in general." Why weren't Flame, Stuxnet, and Duqu detected earlier? The answer isn't encouraging for the future of cyberwar. All three were most likely developed by a Western intelligence agency as part of covert operations that weren’t meant to be discovered and the fact that the malware evaded detection proves how well the attackers did their job. In the case of Stuxnet and DuQu, they used digitally signed components to make their malware appear to be trustworthy applications and instead of trying to protect their code with custom packers and obfuscation engines — which might have drawn suspicion to them — they hid in plain sight. In the case of Flame, the attackers used SQLite, SSH, SSL and LUA libraries that made the code look more like a business database system than a piece of malware. "The truth is, consumer-grade antivirus products can’t protect against targeted malware created by well-resourced nation-states with bulging budgets," writes Hypponen adding that it’s highly likely there are other similar attacks already underway that we haven’t detected yet because simply put, attacks like these work. "Flame was a failure for the antivirus industry. We really should have been able to do better. But we didn’t. We were out of our league, in our own game.""
Space

+ - 195 Ask Slashdot: Re-kickstarting our Kickstarter?-> 9

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "We are supporters of an old-school adventure game Kickstarter that is dealing with "Kickstarter fatigue". The project itself is a sarcastic/comedic, science-fiction adventure, with reknowned and proven talent behind it — now that Kickstarter's adventure game honeymoon period is seemingly over, the big gaming and news sites are not interested in the project, community sites are not interested in front paging articles about the project, and famous twitterers with sci-fi leanings have all but ignored our request for twitter help. Due to the reluctance of the big gaming sites in talking about Kickstarter projects, it is up to the fans to try and get this across the line in the next 8 days — what other avenues or sites can we use to get word about our project to a wider audience, without coming across as spammers?"
Link to Original Source
Security

+ - 127 UEFI Secure Boot, Linux, and Virtualization->

Submitted by thisNameNotTaken
thisNameNotTaken writes "Microsoft is implementing UEFI Secure Boot in the Windows 8 OS, [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Extensible_Firmware_Interface]. This will impact users who want to dual boot other distributions — Linux included. Garrett, a Red Hat employee who works on the Fedora distro, has a solution for the Fedora Linux distro. [http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/12368.html].

My question is how the the UEFI issue might effect a users ability to use QEMU [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QEMU] and/or Oracle VirtualBox. Garrett says UEFI will "be moving to requiring signed kernel modules and locking down certain aspects of kernel functionality. The most obvious example is that it won't be possible to access PCI regions directly from userspace, which means all graphics cards will need kernel drivers.".

Does this "signing" mean Windws 8 will not allow any type of vitalization? Are we now heading into an era where software , again, is so limited that an abacus now looks hi-tech."
Link to Original Source

+ - 136 Ask Slashdot: Best way to copy/sync files with remote server while on the road?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "Here's a scenario: you are on a vacation trip for a couple of weeks — on the road. Lots of pictures — 2-300 per day- maybe some text files with short notes etc. You have a camera with Eye-Fi, a PC, and a phone with WiFi and 3G. Files ends up on the PC (mobile storage), phone providesInternet connectivity. Now, if you wanted to upload all files pretty much as you go — given spotty access to Internet over G3 and WiFi — what would be the best way to do that automatically; set-it-and-forget-it style? I would like them to end up on my own server

rsync script?
ownCloud?
Some BitTorrent setup?
Other?

Which one would be the most robust solution? I'm thinking of interrupted file transfers due to no network, re-starts etc. And I would not want to loose any files; including scenarios where files gets deleted locally but that should not result in files getting automatically deleted on the server as well. Sure; I could perhaps use something like Dropbox but that would take the fun out of it :-)."

+ - 203 Another Step Forward in Small Scale Electrical Generators->

Submitted by NicknamesAreStupid
NicknamesAreStupid writes "Product Design & Development reports another breakthrough in small scale solid oxide fuel cells. This methane-fueled cell achieves about 50% efficiency at around 2kW, enough to power an average home. It does so by efficiently recycling its heat to perpetuate the process. Of course, this is not practical for most homes, which only have natural gas that contains nearly one fifth impurities. However, that could change if gas suppliers refined their product."
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Linux

+ - 199 [Videos] Linaro engineers talk about the status of Linux on ARM-> 2

Submitted by
Charbax
Charbax writes "Some of the worlds best developers work at Linaro optimizing the future of Linux on ARM. In this 4-hour video series several of them describe software solutions for the upcoming ARM big.LITTLE architecture (ARM Cortex-A15 and ARM Cortex-A7), demonstrate how Linaro Android 4.0.4 runs twice as fast as stock Android 4.0.4 on the TI OMAP4430 Pandaboard, talk about the future of Android, unify the ARM bootloader, combine multiple ARM SoCs into one Linux Kernel for ARM. Canonical works to support ARM Servers, Mark Shuttleworth talks about the opportunity that ARM constitutes for Ubuntu on Laptops and Servers. The CTO of Linaro talks about the next billions of ARM Powered devices that they are working to optimize Linux for."
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Television

+ - 233 DirecTV CEO Doubts Apple TV Can Beat His Set-Tops 1

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes "In a move that evokes memories of Steve Ballmer's initial pooh-poohing of the iPhone threat, DirecTV Chairman Michael White downplayed the Apple TV hype, expressing doubts that 'Apple's interface will be so much better than DirecTVs' that people will be willing to pay for an extra box. So, will White's statement — 'It’s hard to see (it) obsoleting our technology' — come back to haunt him?"

+ - 95 DVD to NAS to tablet: how to do it? 1

Submitted by andre.david
andre.david writes "We have two toddlers learning 3 languages: mine, my wife's, and our common language.
Since I am not home during the day, my wife shows some DVD titles to them in my language.
It's becoming cumbersome to load the DVD: we have no TV, so this uses up her laptop's screen...
So I was wondering if anyone had already gone through the process of ripping the DVD to some digital format, put it in a NAS and then the kids can themselves watch it in a tablet.
Given my setup at home there are 3 items that need to align properly:
1) ripping the DVD to some file format using a Mac (Hanbrake?)
2) streaming it from Western Digital My Book World Edition that is using FeaturePacks (Twonky?) and
3) and a streaming client for the iPad2 (no idea!)."
Education

+ - 180 Udacity Announces Certification Option ->

Submitted by mikejuk
mikejuk writes "Online "digital university" Udacity has announced a partnership with Pearson VUE that enables them to offer students the option of a certified credential.
Students will only need to undertake this additional step, which will involve "a nominal fee":
"if they wish to pursue Udacitiy's "official credential and be part of [its] job placement program."
Including an extra final test overcomes one of problems faced by online education — was it really the student who's name appears on the certificate that completed the course and took the test?
Was it that student's own unaided work?
By going to a Pearson Vue testing center your identity can be checked. And by sitting a test your knowledge can be established. However, as the first round of tests for Udacity courses are only 90 minutes, with a multiple choice format and no programming they are not a substitute for the course assessment that currently takes place — and, of course, this is not the intention. The idea is that your identify is checked and the fact that you do know enough for it to be reasonable that you actually took the more difficult online exam is the rational."
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PC Games (Games)

+ - 233 The Adventure Bundle: Old-School Adventuring in the Underground?

Submitted by gh0stnaV
gh0stnaV writes "A very young and fresh generation of old-school point-and-click adventures seems to be quietly brewing in hiding among the grass roots. Several developers have recently organized themselves into yet another bundle, dubbed the Bundle-in-a-Box. Some of the games here are already well-known, e.g. Gemini Rue (Wadjet Eye Games) or Ben There, Dan That! (Size Five Games), but there's also the newcomer The Sea Will Claim Everything (Jonas Kyratzes) as well as a couple of games for those who choose to pay above the current average. Most of the offerings come from one-man teams, as true to the indie tag as can get. The question remains, though: will this underground development model prove viable? And does the world of point-and-click belong only to heavy hitters like Double Fine? Right now, the numbers point to an affirmative on the second question, while the first one hangs in the balance."

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