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Submission + - John McAfee, antivirus pioneer, arrested by Belize police (techworld.com)

Submitted by concertina226
concertina226 writes: McAfee antivirus founder John McAfee is reportedly taking legal advice after a raid on his Belize home by police resulted in the software entrepreneur’s arrest and the death of his pet dog.

The raid in the early morning of 1 May by the country’s armed ‘Gang Suppression Unit’ (GSU) allegedly involved the doors to McAfee’s house being smashed down, his property ransacked, and his dog shot.

After searching the house for drugs and firearms and handcuffing him and his 12 employees, the police detained McAfee for a number of hours before releasing him at 2am the following morning.
Google

Submission + - Google makes $1bn a year in Australia; pays just $74k tax (delimiter.com.au)

Submitted by daria42
daria42 writes: Looks like Apple isn't the only company with interesting offshore taxation practices. The financial statements for Google's Australian subsidiary show the company told the Australian Government it made just $200 million in revenue in 2011 in Australia, despite local industry estimating it actually brought in closer to $1 billion. The rest was funnelled through Google's Irish subsidiary and not disclosed in Australia. Consequently the company only disclosed taxation costs in Australia of $74,000. Not bad work if you can get it — which Google apparently can. About that 'don't be evil' motto? Yeah. Not so much.
Android

Submission + - Apple's Share of Tablet Market Surges to 68% as Kindle Fire Shipments Plummet (idc.com)

Submitted by coinreturn
coinreturn writes: IDC today released its data on worldwide tablet shipments for the first quarter of 2012, revealing that despite a quarterly drop in iPad shipments of over 20%, Apple's share of the tablet market rose to 68% from last quarter's 54.7%. Apple's boost came at the expense of Android-based tablets, most notably Amazon's Kindle Fire which appears to have seen its shipments collapse from 4.8 million units in the fourth quarter of 2011 to less than 750,000 units last quarter.
Security

Submission + - Osama Bin Laden didn't encrypt his files (sophos.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: If you're running a terrorist organisation, it might make sense to encrypt your files.

Clearly Osama Bin Laden didn't realise that — as some of the documents seized during the raid on his hideout in Pakistan have been made public for the first time.

17 electronic documents, which were found on USB sticks, memory cards and computer hard drives after US Navy Seals killed the terrorist chief in the May 2011 raid, are being released in their original Arabic alongside English translations by the Combating Terrorism Center, reports Sophos.
PHP

Submission + - Serious Remote PHP Bug Accidentally Disclosed (threatpost.com)

Submitted by Trailrunner7
Trailrunner7 writes: A serious remote-code execution vulnerability in PHP was accidentally disclosed Wednesday, leading to fears of an outbreak of attacks on sites that were built using vulnerable versions of PHP. The bug has been known privately since January when a team of researchers used it in a capture the flag contest and then subsequently reported it to the PHP Group. The developers were still in the process of building the patch for the flaw when it was disclosed Wednesday.

The vulnerability is a simple one but it has serious consequences. Essentially, the researchers found that when they passed a specific query string that contained the -s command to PHP in a CGI setup, PHP would interpret the -s as the command line argument and result in the disclosure of the source code for the application. They extended their testing and found they could pass whatever command-line arguments they wanted ot the PHP binary.
NASA

Submission + - A quick look a the SpaceX blast into history (networkworld.com)

Submitted by
coondoggie
coondoggie writes: "If all goes smoothly – and it hasn’t so far — Space Exploration Technologies or SpaceX will this month send its Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon space capsule into low earth orbit on the first public resupply mission to the International Space Station. The Dragon will stay about 18 days and deliver a little over 1,000 pounds of cargo. A successful mission will go a long way toward bolstering the idea of non-NASA spacecraft ferry equipment and ultimately astronauts to the space lab. It won’t be an easy task by any means. “This is a really tough flight. What we’re asking them to do is amazing,” NASA’s William Gerstenmaier said during one recent news meeting. Here we take a look at the components of this historic space flight."
Google

Submission + - Feds wondered who funded Google Street View critics (washingtontimes.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Top officials at the Federal Trade Commission wondered whether Google's competitors were funding a group that filed a privacy complaint about Google's Street View program, according to a news story relying on records obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.

Submission + - Stefan Küng (TortoiseSVN) loses it over site ads (tigris.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: After several complaints about misleading ads on the TortoiseSVN (a popular graphical frontend for SVN) website, Stefan Küng (project leader) decided the correct way to respond is to delete the complaint from the mail list archive (see link) and ban people who dare to bring up the issue. While without influence on the ad content, it was suggested many times he marks the ads with some kind of framing and text.
As the discussion was deleted on the mail list archive/forum, try googling for it by the thread title "RE: tortoisesvn.net spyware ".

Submission + - The time has finally come: leaving Slashdot

Submitted by
vikingpower
vikingpower writes: "As a member since 1999, I was for over a decade held in thrall by Slashot's legacy. How strongly and fondly can I think back of Cmd Taco. Slowly but gradually, I gathered "excellent karma". Some time in 2009 or 2010, I linked my profile to my very personal poetry site and yes, the trafic from Slashdot did count. Yes, the discussions with other geeks were, in part, memorable. Memorable, too, was being involved in blocking SOPA and PIPA. Memorable was the feedback I got on some posted submissions.

And yet. The screaming from the kids. The bashing on blacks. The increased americano-centrism. The deep-rooted, irrational and anti-scientific skepticism toward climate change. I hate it, hate it. Then came Slashdot TV. And now: SlashBI. I get the gut feeling of being part of a mass audience that is slowly sucked into a larger media corporations' "portfolio", how ugly that word may be.

Thus and therefore, although the decision was suprisingly hard to take: I am out. As of today. Goodbye, goold old Slashdot. I will occasionally check on you, like on an old girlfriend to see if she is still beautiful. But you have taken a direction I came to dislike more and more.

Goodbye, Slashdot !"
Botnet

Submission + - Attackers Setup Botnet C&C Servers in Enterprise Walls (securityweek.com)

Submitted by wiredmikey
wiredmikey writes: Skilled attackers are burrowing their command and control (C&C) servers inside the networks of compromised businesses in order to circumvent security measures, according to a security expert familiar with the innovative new attack method.The advantage is that none of that C&C traffic is passing through perimeter firewalls or intrusion detection systems — so it is very unlikely to be detected. While the attacker still needs to send that single communication per day with any stolen data / issuing new commands, this is trickier to detect.

In many cases, the compromised servers being used for C&C were compromised in previous attacks and hackers were able to maintain access.

Also interesting, is that attackers conducting these types of attacks have been seen applying software patches to the compromised systems in an effort to ensure other attackers are kept out.

The new attack tactic adds two more steps to forensic investigation, as now investigators must conduct a penetration test from inside out in order and identify the service wherein a syscall proxy has been embedded in the memory space.

Submission + - EC2 Performance and Hadoop Scalability (jesse-anderson.com)

Submitted by
eljefe6a
eljefe6a writes: "Putting some numbers and data behind the Hadoop hype took a few months of research. I ran 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 10 and 20 node Hadoop clusters using Elastic MapReduce to check its scalability. As expected, Hadoop scales very well. I also run performance tests on EC2 instances. Then, I break down the ROI of Spot Instance market and cost per unit."
Hardware

Submission + - Sony uses NFC to charge for using a power outlet (geek.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: If you're used to using a free power outlet to charge your gadgets, be it at work, in a coffeehouse, or at the airport. The days of free power may be numbered. Sony has added an IC chip to its latest power outlet design, which can check to see who is connected and charge them accordingly.

It sees the intelligent power outlets being deployed across a range of public locations. For consumers, it means yet another cost to using (and charging) your gadgets when you're out and about.
Windows

Submission + - Windows Phone 7 App Easily Ported to Windows 8 (youtube.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Video of game AlphaDrops ported from Windows Phone 7 in 2 weeks, using 90% of the code. Seems like it will be pretty easy to move applications from Windows Phone to Windows 8!
Politics

Submission + - Obama Budget Asks for 1% Boost in Research (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: One of the big three research agencies appears to be lagging behind its doubling peers in the president's 2013 budget request released this morning. The $4.9 billion budget of the Department of Energy's Office of Science would rise by 2.4%, to $5 billion. In contrast, the National Science Foundation would receive a nearly 5% boost, to $7.37 billion, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology a hike of 13%, to $860 million. These three agencies were originally singled by President George W. Bush in 2006 for a 10-year budget doubling, a promise that President Barack Obama and Congress have repeatedly endorsed despite the current tough economic times.
Security

Submission + - Cryptome Hit by Blackhole Exploit Kit (securityweek.com)

Submitted by wiredmikey
wiredmikey writes: Whistleblower site Cryptome has been hacked and infected by the Blackhole exploit kit. Just how the breach occurred has not been said. Cryptome co-founder John Young however told SecurityWeek that the site is in the process of cleaning everything up, and that process should be finished by the end of the day. Founded in 1996, Cryptome publishes thousands of documents, including many related to national security, law enforcement and military. On Feb. 12, a reader advised the site that accessing a file had triggered a warning in their antivirus about the Blackhole exploit kit. Cryptome examined the file and found this command at its end: . Subsequent analysis found thousands of files on the site had been infected. That a reader notified the site of the problem is in keeping with a recent finding from Trustwave, which reported that of the data breaches they investigated in 2011, only 16 percent of the victimized organizations were able to detect the breach themselves.

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