Comment Yes, please. (Score 1) 293
Pretty please?
Comment What about NoScript? AdBlockers? (Score 4, Insightful) 375
Can I not telnet to facebook.com on port 80 and make a request by hand? Sorry, but their copyright ends after they distribute a URI over HTTP. What I do with the response is my prerogative. My browser does anything it wants to with your data... even if I'm not using a browser to connect to tcp/80 at the time.
Comment Re:They're not seeing a primary source. (Score 1) 112
We have had a request out for a Security Researcher with a clearance for over a year now. Not a single candidate with a military background has come through yet with the right skillset for exploitation development. The Military is only cranking out operations people, which aren't really that hard to come by.
Comment Re:Training? (Score 1) 112
I've seen the NSA recruiting at Defcon and making it a point to say that you would still be accepted even if you had drug convictions. Playing to the crowd for sure :P
Comment Looking in the wrong places (Score 1) 112
About 20% of the best people I know employed as Security Researchers did not even graduate high school, including myself. I see this trending downward as more and more schools now have something of a security curriculum, but its still very much an industry of self-motivated voodoo programming. Universities have always been decent at training operational security people (configuring/monitoring security appliances and policy issues), but I've yet to hear of a school with a good program on vulnerability discovery, exploitation, and reverse engineering code. For me, at least, its much more of a mindset thing more than a skillset thing, which is a lot harder to teach.
Comment Neat! I'd really like to try that out. However... (Score 1) 198
I'm not so keen on my IDE being reliant on all those static code analysis tools to determine your code's structure. For the most part they find all your methods just fine, but so many times they fall short, especially when you are not using Java.
Comment link (Score 2, Informative) 185
This is a great site with a good bit of introductory information. I implemented their LED flasher tutorials when I was playing with my Xylinx Spartan board. fpga4fun.com
Comment What this really says. (Score 1) 117
"New startup makes it easier and standard practice to legitimize the practice of patent trolling."
Just fix the damn system already!
Just fix the damn system already!
Submission + - Free software group files copyright lawsuits (computerworld.com.au)
Arashtamere writes: The Software Freedom Law Center, an organization focused on protecting open-source and free software, has filed copyright lawsuits against two US companies, alleging that they are redistributing software in violation of the GNU GPL (General Public License).
The SFLC filed lawsuits Monday on behalf of the developers of BusyBox against High-Gain Antennas of Parker, Colorado, and Xterasys of City of Industry, California. The lawsuits, filed in US District Court for the Southern District of New York, allege that the companies are distributing BusyBox illegally, without meeting the GPL requirement of providing access to the source code of their implementation.
BusyBox, available since November 1999, is a lightweight set of standard Unix utilities commonly used in embedded systems licensed under GPL version 2. The two companies are distributing "BusyBox, or a modified version of BusyBox that is substantially similar to BusyBox," the lawsuits allege. The lawsuits ask the court to give the BusyBox developers the profits from that software, plus other damages.
But Richard Bruckner, CEO of High-Gain Antennas, said the SFLC is mistaken about the GPL violation. The company, which makes wireless broadband antennas and related products, uses firmware from a company called Edimax, not BusyBox, and makes the source code available, at the request of customers, he said.
Bruckner said he tried to explain the situation in a conference call with SFLC officials but was hung up on. During that first conversation SFLC was "already asking for money," he said. "What they need to do is get their act together and read the source code."
If the SFLC doesn't end its threats, High-Gain Antennas may file a countersuit, Bruckner added.
Maryland To Tax Custom Programming and Computer Services 395
mcwop writes "Early this morning Maryland passed legislation to apply a new 6% sales tax to 'custom computer programming' and other computer- and hardware-related services. Computer industry groups lobbied hard against the measure to no avail. Purchasers of IT services may find that in-house IT and buying out-of-state become attractive options, as well as cutting money out of other projects."
Submission + - AT&T Censors Pearl Jam's Anti-Bush Lyrics (forbes.com)
VE3OGG writes: "Numerous news agencies are reporting that Pearl Jam's recent Lollapalooza concert has met with some controversy. According to the news reports, when Eddie Vedder sang: "George Bush leave this world alone. George Bush find yourself another home." AT&T censored the lyrics on its webcast. AT&T has said that this was an accident on the part of Davie-Brown Entertainment and should never have happened as it is against their policies of editing political messages out of webcasts and has posted an apology and is taking steps to publish the songs in their entirety on its Blue Room website, however Pearl Jam has gone on record as saying "AT&T's actions strikes at the heart of the public's concerns over the power that corporations have when it comes to determining what the public sees and hears through communications media.""
Submission + - Intro to Reverse Engineering, No Assembly Required (ethicalhacker.net)
ddonzal writes: "Great intro to reverse engineering for someone with no experience whatsoever on the subject. In this continuing series on coding essentials for those programmatically-challenged InfoSec Pros (ethical hackers), we build on the knowledge learned in the first article, "Intro to C." No prior knowledge of Assembly is Required!
http://www.ethicalhacker.net/content/view/152/2/"
Submission + - AT&T censors PerlJam--Band fires back (arstechnica.com)
kramer2718 writes: Recently, AT&T censor Pearl Jam for some anti-Bush comments during a performance.
The band fired back saying, "This, of course, troubles us as artists but also as citizens concerned with the issue of censorship and the increasingly consolidated control of the media. What happened to us this weekend was a wake-up call, and it's about something much bigger than the censorship of a rock band."
Other public interest groups have used this censorship as an argument for net-neutrality.
Ars Technica has more. What do slashdotters think?
The band fired back saying, "This, of course, troubles us as artists but also as citizens concerned with the issue of censorship and the increasingly consolidated control of the media. What happened to us this weekend was a wake-up call, and it's about something much bigger than the censorship of a rock band."
Other public interest groups have used this censorship as an argument for net-neutrality.
Ars Technica has more. What do slashdotters think?
Submission + - Escaping the Malthusian Trap (hughpickens.com)
Hugh Pickens writes: "The New York Times is running a story on Dr. Gregory Clark's book "A Farewell to Alms" that explains how the Industrial Revolution came about after thousands of years when most people on earth lived in abject poverty, first as hunters and gatherers, then as peasants or laborers. Dr. Clark, an economic historian at UC Davis, contends that prior to the industrial revolution, the economy was locked in a Malthusian trap — each time new technology increased the efficiency of production a little, the population grew, the extra mouths ate up the surplus, and average income fell back to its former level. After researching medieval economic data for the past 20 years, Clark has come to the conclusion that the surge in economic growth that occurred in England around 1800 came about because of the new behaviors of nonviolence, literacy, long working hours and a willingness to save that he says were transmitted either culturally or genetically. According to Clark, between 1200 and 1800, the rich had more surviving children than the poor and this caused constant downward social mobility as the poor failed to reproduce themselves and the progeny of the rich took over their occupations. Around 1790, a steady upward trend in production efficiency first emerged that made possible England's escape from the Malthusian trap and the emergence of the Industrial Revolution."
Submission + - Education slows learning (in babies)
mcgrew writes: "New Scientist reports that
Well DUH, why do you think they call it the 'boob tube'?"Educational DVDs may hinder rather than help a young child's learning. Infants who watch DVDs such as "Brainy Baby" and "Baby Einstein" know fewer words than those who do not watch such programmes, a new study suggests.
In recent years the popularity of such infant programmes has soared, particularly in the US. Parents hope the programmes, which typically consist of brief dialogue and picture sequences, will boost the learning ability of children as young as eight months old, even though the American Academy of Pediatrics has recommended that youngsters not watch television until two years of age.
