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Security

Submission + - Smart phones 'bigger security risk' than laptops (computerworld.com)

Submitted by
CWmike
CWmike writes: "A recent survey of 300 senior IT staff found that 94% fear PDAs present a security risk, just above the 88% who highlighted mobile storage devices as a worry. Nearly eight in 10 said laptops were an issue. Only four in 10 had encrypted data on their laptops, and the remainder said the information was "not worth" protecting. A key danger with PDAs was that over half of IT executives surveyed were "not bothering" to enter a password when they used their phone. Peter Mitteregger, European VP at the company, said: "Companies need to regain control of these devices and the data that they are carrying, or risk finding their investment in securing the enterprise misplaced and woefully inadequate." Is this just iPhone fear-factor stuff? Do you think the passwords execs could remember would help with securing PDAs and smart phones?"
Space

Submission + - SPAM: Ghostly ring found circling dead star

Submitted by
Roland Piquepaille
Roland Piquepaille writes: "An international team of scientists has found a strange ring around a dead star by using images taken by NASA's Spitzer space telescope. This star, called SGR 1900+14, belongs to a class of objects known as magnetars. According to NASA, a magnetar is 'a highly magnetized neutron star and the remnant of a brilliant supernova explosion signaling the death throes of a massive star.' So far, about a dozen magnetars have been found. An amazing thing about these stellar objects is their magnetic field. One of the researchers said that 'magnetars possess magnetic fields a million billion times stronger than the magnetic field of the Earth.' But read more for additional references and a spectacular picture showing this ghostly ring extending seven light-years across around the magnetar."
Software

Submission + - Why is Firehose so hostile? 15

Submitted by
NewYorkCountryLawyer
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes: "Can anyone explain to me why Slashdot's Firehose is made to be so unfriendly? It's a great idea, but in practice it's infuriating. If you see a submitted article, and click on one of the links, you can't go back to the story. You have to start all over again. If you set the filters to what you're interested in, you have to re-set them all over again. Even if you just RTFA you are punished by losing your settings. Why shouldn't Slashdot encourage people to participate in the Firehose. For a busy person, it's almost impossible to be involved. And this bizarre lack of 'stickiness' makes everything take 10 times as much times as it needs to."

Comment What I look for in an older subnotebook... (Score 5, Funny) 250

by mrbluze (#23456576) Attached to: What to Seek in an Older Subnotebook?
  • Likes to talk, humorous, friendly.
  • Likes movies, walks along the beach at sunset, and recharging by an open fireplace.
  • Likes cooking.
  • Has own job.
  • Light enough to carry with one hand.
  • Happy with all positions, including upside-down and backwards.
  • Color is not important to me, but dress sense is.
  • Looking for casual to long term commitment. Emphasis on fun.

Comment Re:Who really benefits? (Score 5, Funny) 240

by Anonymous Coward (#23451288) Attached to: Dag Wieers Scoffs at Coordinated Linux Release Proposal

try this lot [microsoft.com]. Their disto still seems fairly popular though

Tell me about it, been trying to get this one working for ages. Firstly, my friend tells me it's only available on bittorrent, instead of just downloading it from their site. Which is a bit weird, but whatever.

Where I'm really having trouble is with the package manager. How do I add a software repository in that add/remove programs thing? It doesn't seem to mention what type of packages are compatible with it either. Am guessing RPM or DEB, but which is it, maybe someone could enlighten me?

To be honest, I'm about to give up on this Windows thing, it's just not ready for the mainstream.
Software

Submission + - Who thinks Firehose software is working right? 6

Submitted by
NewYorkCountryLawyer
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes: "I find the Firehose software to be infuriating. It seems to have no 'stickiness' but constantly reverts to other views and searches than what I was looking at. I'm about ready to give up on it unless they tell me they recognize it's dumb and are doing something to make it work right. Am I the only one who feels this way?"
United States

Submission + - Personality Types Cluster Geographically

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "Drawing on a database of hundreds of thousands of individual personality surveys, psychologists have mapped the distribution of personality types across the United States and interestingly, America's psychogeography lines up reasonably well with its economic geography. Greater Chicago is a center for extroverts and also a leading center for sales professionals. The Midwest has a prevalence of conscientious types who work well in a structured, rule-driven environment. The South, and particularly the I-75 corridor, where so much Japanese and German car manufacturing is located, is dominated by agreeable and conscientious types who are both dutiful and work well in teams. Regions like Silicon Valley or the high-tech Route 128 corridor around Boston are home to concentrations of open-to-experience types who are drawn to creative endeavor, innovation, and entrepreneurial start-up companies. One potential explanation is that people migrate to places where their psychological needs are easily met or perhaps a process of selective migration drains the agreeable and conscientious regions of the most driven, most creative, and most mobile — only reinforcing their psychogeographic profiles, while magnifying the innovative edge in places where open-to-experience types concentrate."
The Courts

Submission + - SPAM: Telemarketers forced to surrender $5M in profits

Submitted by
coondoggie
coondoggie writes: "Canadian telemarketers who fraudulently pitched Visa and MasterCard credit cards have been ordered to pay back the nearly $5 million they garnered via the scheme. The Federal Trade Commission brought the charges and the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois said under the terms of the final order and judgment, the defendants — collectively known as Pacific Liberty — are barred from violating the FTC Act and the Commission's Telemarketing Sales Rule (TSR). They are liable as well for approximately five million dollars, the total net sales they made through the cross-border scheme. [spam URL stripped]"
Link to Original Source
Space

Submission + - Why Life on Mars May Foretell Our Doom 3

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "Nick Bostrom has a long article that is well worth reading with an interesting interpretation why on the failure of the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) for the past half a century is good news and why the discovery of life on Mars could foretell our doom. Bostrom postulates a "Great Filter," which can be thought of as a probability barrier and consists of one or more evolutionary transitions or steps that must be traversed at great odds in order for an Earth-like planet to produce a civilization capable of exploring distant solar systems. The Great Filter must be sufficiently powerful that even with many billions of rolls of the dice, one ends up with nothing: no aliens, no spacecraft, no signals. If the filter is in our past, there must be some extremely improbable step in the sequence of events whereby an Earth-like planet gives rise to an intelligent species and it follows that we are most likely the only technologically advanced civilization in our galaxy. But if the Great Filter is still ahead of us, that would mean that some great improbability prevents almost all civilizations at our current stage of technological development from progressing to the point where they engage in large-scale space colonization — perhaps some very powerful weapons technology that causes its extinction. If we discover life-forms on Mars, the effect would be to shift the probability against the hypothesis that the Great Filter is behind us. If Mars is found to be barren, we would have some grounds for hope that all or most of the Great Filter is in our past and in that case, we may have a significant chance of one day growing into something greater than we are now."
The Internet

Submission + - SPAM: FBI bulks up digital forensic network

Submitted by
coondoggie
coondoggie writes: "The FBI this week said it was opening two new US Regional Computer Forensics Laboratories where examiners are conducting a growing number forensic examinations of digital media, in support of an investigation and/or prosecution of a federal, state, or local crime. With the addition of the new facilities in Los Angeles and Albuquerque, the FBI will have 16 RCFLs nationwide. And they are needed: During 2007, RCFL experts conducted 4,634 exams, processing 1,288 terabytes of information. A total of 76,581 digital devices were examined (the most popular media by far — CDs, coming in at 37,424; followed by hard disk drives at 17,378; floppy disks at 11,781; and DVDs at 4,374). The number of CDs, cell phones, and flash media devices examined doubled from the previous year. [spam URL stripped]"
Link to Original Source
The Internet

Submission + - NYTimes.com "Hand Codes" HTML & CSS (nytimes.com) 1

Submitted by
eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes: "Recently, a developer (Khoi Vinh) at the New York Times has begun answering questions about how the New York Times runs their site. He was questioned about how the New York Times web site looks so consistently nice and polished no matter which browser or resolution it is accessed at. You might not believe it but the beginning of his response: "It's our preference to use a text editor, like HomeSite, TextPad or TextMate, to "hand code" everything, rather than to use a wysiwyg (what you see is what you get) HTML and CSS authoring program, like Dreamweaver. We just find it yields better and faster results.""
The Media

Submission + - Red scientology tomato rotting in Firehose? (slashdot.org) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A posting to the Slashdot Firehose related to a Wikinews story on Wikileaks and legal threats from Scientology, seems to be stuck in the Slashdot firehose red as a ripe tomato for more than 24 hours.
The story that covers a recent press release on Wikileaks relating to copyright claims made by the Church's legal representatives towards the published "Operating Thetan" cult manual, worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in scam money, already spawned a hot discussion on the Wikinews portal. With critics of cult-critics trying to shut the story down for hours, it finally went online. And now seems stuck in the Firehose. One can only hope not for the wrong reasons.
Power

Submission + - Petawatt Laser Unleashed in Texas 1

Submitted by
Ponca City, We love you
Ponca City, We love you writes: "The most powerful laser in the world was fired up at the University of Texas at Austin last week with a power rating of one petawatt, equal to the output of thousands of power plants during the 10th of a trillionth of a second the laser is activated and is brighter than sunlight on the surface of the sun. Researchers plan to use the massive laser to create and study matter at the most extreme conditions in the universe creating mini-supernovas, tabletop stars and very high-density plasmas that mimic brown dwarfs. "We can learn about these large astronomical objects from tiny reactions in the lab because of the similarity of the mathematical equations that describe the events," said Todd Ditmire, who heads the project. The Texas laser is nearing the 1.5 Petawatt peak performance of the Lawrence Livermore Petawatt laser that went into operation in 1996 and was closed down in 1999 to make room for the National Ignition Facility."
Security

Submission + - Police use Handgun Camcorder to Point and Shoot 2

Submitted by
Ponca City, We Love You
Ponca City, We Love You writes: "A new compact camcorder mounts under the barrel of almost any firearm to record up to a full hour of audio and video in a high-quality, secure digital format encrypted to prevent tampering, and with security software designed to provide rigorous chain-of-custody evidence documentation. PistolCam takes a page from now-standard "dashcams," which have proven to be a powerful legal and investigatory police tool. According to a 2002 International Association of Chiefs of Police study, officers were exonerated 93 percent of the time (pdf) in cases where video evidence was available. "Let's be honest here. Any punk with a cell phone can record an officer, upload it to the Internet and make it look horrible," says PistolCam spokesman Bill DeProspo. "But PistolCam can give you a leg up in the court and in the public arena. You'll have a clear, unbiased account of the incident on camera." The device could provide unprecedented training footage. "Imagine being able to show recruits use-of-force incidents from the firearm's perspective, particularly in drawn-out standoff situations," DeProspo added."

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Thus spake the master programmer: "After three days without programming, life becomes meaningless." -- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"

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