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Submission + - Rest In Peace Robin "Roblimo" Miller (1952-2018) (wikipedia.org)

Submitted by rootmon
rootmon writes: Our thoughts/prayers are with the family and friends of long time open source writer/journalist Robin "Roblimo" Miller who passed away this morning.

Robin "Roblimo" Miller (born October 30, 1952) was the Editor in Chief of Open Source Technology Group, the company that owned Slashdot, SourceForge.net, freshmeat, Linux.com, NewsForge, and ThinkGeek from 2000 to 2008.

Miller formerly owned Robin's Limousine, a small limo company based in Elkridge, Maryland, the origin of his online nickname. Miller is best known for his involvement with Slashdot,[1] where he was not only the corporate editorial overseer but also Interview Editor.

As a freelancer, Miller wrote for a number of print and online publications including Time.com, Baltimore City Paper, American Medical News, Innkeeping World, Machine Design, The Baltimore Sun, and Rewired.com. Miller is the author of three books: The Online Rules of Successful Companies, Point & Click Linux!, and Point & Click OpenOffice.org, all published by Prentice Hall.[citation needed] His latest[when?] ventures revolve around Internet-delivered video, including video software "tours" and tutorials on Linux.com and his recent "side" venture, Internet Video Promotion, Inc.

Miller has been a judge for the Lulu Blooker Prize and is on the online advisory board of the Online Journalism Review of the Annenberg Center for Communication at the University of Southern California.

  He is married with three grown children and three stepchildren. Robin lived in Bradenton, Florida for over a decade before recently moving to Forest Park, Georgia.

It was my privilege to have known Robin personally and have met him on several occasions including a trip to Liberty City in Miami where our LUG setup a K12LTSP (Linux Terminal Server network) computer lab for neighborhood children.

(Biographical Info Quoted in Part from Wikipedia)

Comment Python Library For Alexa Skills Kit (Score 2) 138

by rootmon (#54356171) Attached to: 'This Isn't AI'
John Wheeler created a Flask extension for those who prefer to code their Alexa Skills in Python.

https://github.com/johnwheeler...

The project contains helpful links to get you started.

Also, please be aware that Alexa is not an AI, it is basically a voice recognition remote control robot - you program the phrases and the actions, Alexa does not learn new skills, they are explicitly programmed to appear like a natural language conversation. The intelligence is in the speech recognition and the cleverness of the skill developers.

Submission + - Newspaper chain CEO is 'pleased' to announce IT plan, then fires tech staff (computerworld.com)

Submitted by dcblogs
dcblogs writes: The McClatchy Company, which operates a major chain of newspapers in the U.S., is moving IT work overseas. The number of affected jobs, based on employee estimates, range from 120 to 150. The chain owns about 30 newspapers, including The Sacramento Bee, where McClatchy is based; The Fresno Bee, The News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C., The State in Columbia, S.C. and the Miami Herald. In a letter sent to the chain’s IT employees in late March, McClatchy CEO Patrick Talamantes detailed all the improvements a contract with the outsourcing firm, India-based Wipro, will bring, but buries, well down in the letter what should have been in its lead paragraph: There will be cutbacks of U.S. staff. The letter received by McClatchy’s IT employees from Talamantes begins by telling them it is “pleased to unveil our new IT Transformational Program, a program designed to provide improved service to all technology users, accelerated development and delivery of technology solutions and products, variable demand-based technology resources and access to modern and cutting-edge skills and platforms.” Seven paragraphs down in the letter, he lowers the boom: "As we embark on the implementation phase, there will be a realignment of resources requiring a reduction in McClatchy technology staff." IT employees thought they were part of the solution to McClatchy's tech direction, not the problem. Said one IT employee: "This has taken us all by surprise. I'm not saying that we felt untouchable as they have been doing layoffs for the past 10 years, but being part of IT we felt that we had a big part in what happens" in the company. Employees are now training their replacements.

Submission + - Security Expert Jailed for Reporting Vulnerabilities in Lee County, FL Elections (theregister.co.uk)

Submitted by rootmon
rootmon writes: Information Security Professional David Levin was arrested 3 months after reporting un-patched SQL injection vulnerabilities in the Lee County, Florida Elections Office run by Sharon Harrington, the Lee County Supervisor of Elections. Harrington's office has been in the news before for voting systems problems (for example in during the 2012 election, 35 districts in Lee County had to remain open 3 hours past the closing of polls due to long lines and equipment issues , wasting $800,000 to $1.6 million of taxpayer money incompatible iPads for which her office is facing an audit. Rather than fix the issues with their systems, they chose to charge the whistle blower with three third-degree felonies. The News Press also has several related interviews.

Comment You can't teach some of these skills! (Score 1) 553

by rootmon (#48224895) Attached to: Employers Worried About Critical Thinking Skills

Common sense is not so common these days. People are sheep.

Teachers can't teach skills they don't have. Very few teachers or professors have what it takes to be successful business people or problem solvers. There are some, and those are the ones who stick out among a mediocre flock of public servants who can barely keep the kids in their seats and keep them from talking during class.

Schools should be teaching children how to educate themselves but the system was designed around the turn of the previous century to turn out compliant factory workers and is not up to the modern challenges.

Comment What outage? (Score 1) 105

by rootmon (#43657127) Attached to: CenturyLink's Nationwide Outage Affects Millions

I have been working since 8 AM Eastern Time as a telecommuter and my CenturyLink DSL has been up without so much as an SSH session disconnecting all day. I live in SW Florida and my colleagues tell me they're having problems but perhaps the outage is not as widespread as publicized or it's affecting DNS and I use OpenDNS instead of my ISP's DNS for filtering sites I don't want my kids to browse such as adult content.

In my experience, Cable modems were far less stable than DSL. I had Comcast for a while and it was much worse. So please don't listen to the cable modem trolls. Overall DSL is a more reliable technology and I've been using Spring/Embarq/CenturyLink for 12 years now with very few hiccups which they did address quickly, except for a move where I used DirectWay/Hughes and then Comcast for a while. DirectWay/Hughes was good if you have no other options but satellite just has too much latency for some apps like voip or skype, and Comcast was terrible especially during peak hours.
Censorship

Submission + - Is Facebook (or G+ or MySpace) Popularity the Next American Idol? (facebook.com)

Submitted by
rootmon
rootmon writes: "Could the "Like" or "+" button replace the toll free numbers that everyone calls in to vote for on American Idol and other talent shows? Since it requires a person to be logged in, there isn't the same level of anonymity — you can ensure each identify can only vote one — so it's harder to "stuff the ballot box". It might also lead to further discussion in social circles via comments and shares. Do you /.'s out there think this is more or less democratic and fair or judging talent? Is thsi the end ::gasp:: for Simon? Will this lead more to fads and trends (a la memes) or will this lead to indie bands that the people really enjoy becoming more popular than the toy boy manufactured bands and repackaged beats that the RIAA has tried to force feed each new generation? Please share your thoughts my friends. Disclaimer: I included a link to my friend Sonny who is participating in such an experiment? I'll send a Free Cowboy Neal fanboy t-short to the guy who most accurately guesses (in the comments below) the final number of votes Sonny gets from all social media in the next 4 days, or if you're a local member of the /. meetup I'll buy ya a beer next meetup."
Facebook

Submission + - How Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook status updated shut down a website (networkworld.com)

Submitted by colinneagle
colinneagle writes: At 10:31 p.m. on Sunday evening, Mark Zuckerberg updated his Facebook status. He was grilling a steak, and noticed that the iOS app he was using to monitor the meat's temperature had integrated Facebook to inform users' Friends what they were cooking. Having become excited by the discovery that the site he founded had organically popped up in a product he was using, he wanted to inform his 15.5 million subscribers about it.

The app, called iGrill, is run by a small Connecticut-based company called iDevices, the CEO of which told the Hartford Courant that Facebook integration was supposed to be a "quiet release." By 10:33 p.m. that night, a commenter replied to Zuckerberg's status, reporting that the website was down due to overwhelming traffic. He was telling the truth.

"We were caught totally off guard by Mark Zuckerberg’s post and the immediate influx of traffic," Chris Allen, the CEO of iDevices, said, according to the Courant. "We had quietly released this update for our users earlier this month and were waiting for it to gain traction, but this obviously gives us a huge head start."

According to the report, iDevices incorporated additional servers and bandwidth to stay online. Also, although he said he would welcome the opportunity if Zuckerberg was interested, Allen denied rumors that Zuckerberg was investing in the company and had simply used Facebook for his own profit.
Space

Submission + - Astronomers catch a star in the act of devouring a planet (io9.com)

Submitted by jamstar7
jamstar7 writes: Astronomers have witnessed the first evidence of a planet's destruction by its aging star as it expands into a red giant.

"A similar fate may await the inner planets in our solar system, when the Sun becomes a red giant and expands all the way out to Earth's orbit some five-billion years from now," said Alex Wolszczan, from Penn State, University, who led a team which found evidence of a missing planet having been devoured by its parent star. Wolszczan also is the discoverer of the first planet ever found outside our solar system.

The planet-eating culprit, a red-giant star named BD+48 740 is older than the Sun and now has a radius about eleven times bigger than our Sun.

The evidence the astronomers found was a massive planet in a surprising highly elliptical orbit around the star — indicating a missing planet — plus the star's wacky chemical composition.

5 billion years or so is a long way off, so it's likely none of us has to worry about it, but still, watching a star eating its own planets is not only cool in its own right, but gives you food for thought as to how to keep the human species going long after the Sun starts going off the main sequence into red gianthood. And of course, some more cash into astronomers' and physicists' hands now can give us a closer ballpark number of when this event is going to happen. It's all in the math...
Security

Submission + - After Hacker Exposes Hotel Lock Insecurity, Lock Firm Asks Hotels To Pay For Fix (forbes.com)

Submitted by Sparrowvsrevolution
Sparrowvsrevolution writes: In an update to an earlier story on Slashdot, hotel lock company Onity is now offering a hardware fix for the millions of hotel keycard locks that hacker Cody Brocious demonstrated at Black Hat were vulnerable to being opened by a sub-$50 Arduino device. Unfortunately, Onity wants the hotels who already bought the company's insecure product to pay for the fix.

Onity is actually offering two different mitigations: The first is a plug that blocks the port that Brocious used to gain access to the locks' data, as well as more-obscure Torx screws to prevent intruders from opening the lock's case and removing the plug. That band-aid style fix is free. A second, more rigorous fix requires changing the locks' circuit boards manually. In that case, Onity is offering "special pricing programs" for the new circuit boards customers need to secure their doors, and requiring them to also pay the shipping and labor costs.

Submission + - Single handed keyboard options for coding?

Submitted by dubbreak
dubbreak writes: I was recently injured in a car accident which will limit the use of hand for 6 weeks or so. I'll be taking a little time off but deadlines march on and I'll need to be (semi) productive after my initial recuperation. What is you experience with single handed keyboards or other input option that require one hand at most?

The current project is mainly C#, so I've need to be able to type brackets, semicolons and parentheses quick and painlessly.
Security

Submission + - Email Hacks Are the Key to Targeted Attacks (threatpost.com)

Submitted by Trailrunner7
Trailrunner7 writes: For attackers looking to take control of a victim's online presence, there is no better place to start than the target's email account. If you own the email, you own the person. That's never been more true than today, with so many social networks, services and shopping sites attached to users' email addresses. New research done by Lucas Lundgren of IOActive shows just how simple it can be to get control of a target's email account, and from there, everything else.

For many people, their personal email account is where they store their lives. Bank statements, bills, personal correspondence, work files, anything you can get in electronic form can often be found in a given target's email inbox. And a large number of email systems protect users' inboxes with nothing more complicated than a simple password. Gmail is one notable exception, with its two-factor authentication option that enables users to employ a mobile app to generate one-time codes that they use in addition to their passwords. But, that's an option and not mandatory, and for many users just looks like an annoyance on the way to getting their email.

Knowing all of this, and knowing a lot more about security than most people do, Lundgren decided to run a little research project to see how easily he could get into some volunteers' email accounts. Targeting friends and family members who had agreed to the experiment, Lundgren found that with just the data he gathered online from Facebook and other sites, he had little trouble getting into the inboxes. The best mechanism, in most cases, was the password-reset function on various sites and email services.

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Crazee Edeee, his prices are INSANE!!!

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