Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Submission + - Is it time to seriously get into crypto-currency? And if so, which?

Submitted by Qbertino
Qbertino writes: German officials recently suggested to make all transactions larger than 5000 Euros illegal in cash. It's only a proposal, but definitely some back-room grey-suits machiavellian attempt to introduce the concept of ultimate transaction tracking in the long term. We all know how this goes. With all this and the ever-looming cyberpunk future in close proximity, I'm starting to wonder if it isn't time to get myself familiar with crypto currency as a means of trade.
Bitcoin is all the hype, but the blockchain has flaws, in that it isn't as anonymous as one would hope for — you can track past transactions. Rumors of Bitcoin showing cracks are popping up and also there are quite a few alternatives out there. So I have some questions: Is getting into dealing with crypto currency worthwhile already? Is bitcoin a way to go or will it falter under wide use / become easyly trackable once NSA and the likes adopt their systems to doing exactly that?
What digital currency has the technical and mind-share potential to superceed bitcoin? Are there feasible cryptocurrencies that have the upsides of bitcoin (such as a mathematical limit to their amount) but are fully anonymous in transactions? What do the economists and digi-currency nerds here have to contribute on that? What are your experiences with handling and holding cryptocurrency? And does bitcoin own the market or is it still flexible enough for an technology upgrade? May the discussion begin ...

Submission + - Julian Assange may surrender on Friday (twitter.com)

Submitted by bestweasel
bestweasel writes: As reported by The Guardian and others, Julian Assange has announced via Wikileaks that:

“Should the UN announce tomorrow that I have lost my case against the United Kingdom and Sweden, I shall exit the embassy at noon on Friday to accept arrest by British police as there is no meaningful prospect of further appeal. “However, should I prevail and the state parties be found to have acted unlawfully, I expect the immediate return of my passport and the termination of further attempts to arrest me.”

Submission + - Duplicate Login Details Enabled Hack Of More Than 20 Million Chinese Consumers (thestack.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: According to various Chinese sources including Techweb (Chinese language), police in Zhejiang held a conference on Monday announcing that 20.59 million users of the 'Chinese eBay', taobao.com, had their login details stolen by proxy, when hackers ran user/pass combos from a stolen database of 99 million other users and found that more than 20% were using the same login credentials across different ecommerce sites.

Submission + - Stephen Elop Assumes Position In McMaster University

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: Technology maven Stephen Elop is coming home. McMaster University has officially announced that the former alumnus and Microsoft and Nokia executive has been named the distinguished engineering executive in residence at the school's faculty of engineering. It is an advisory position, where he will give insights into new research and teaching opportunities, as well as helping to translating academic knowledge to a wider audience. He will also give lectures twice a year, as well as sit on the dean's advisory council and act as an advisor to the dean. Elop is an alumnus of the McMaster Computer Engineering and Management Program, where he graduated in 1986. The faculty also awarded him with an honorary doctor of science degree in 2009.

Submission + - Google to use ads in attempt to combat jihadi terrorists (betanews.com)

Submitted by Mark Wilson
Mark Wilson writes: Large swathes of the internet have taken it upon themselves to try to stem the flow of ISIS propaganda and other terrorist content. People working under the Anonymous banner are perhaps the most obvious, but now Google is getting involved as well.

In an overtly political move a senior Google executive, Dr Anthony House, has revealed measures that are being trialled to try to combat extremism. As well as making it easier to discover who is looking for extremist content online, the company is also piloting a scheme that uses its AdWords system to display anti-ISIS messages.

This is an interesting use of Google's technology, and stands in stark contrast to the blunt DDoS attacks employed by some anti-ISIS groups.

Submission + - Kid kicked out of school for having bad DNA.

Submitted by MouseTheLuckyDog
MouseTheLuckyDog writes: Colman Chadam turns out to be one unlucky kid. He turns out to be born with a congenital heart disease, During treatment he was tested genetically and found to have several marker genes for cystic fibrosis. However, he did not have the disease itself.

Eventually his school found out and kicked him out. Kids with cystic fibrosis are not supposed to be near each other due to the increased risk of spreading contagious diseases.

In some sense this story is old, because the school let him back in. The parents sued and their case was dismissed. Now the case is working it's way through the federal court system and could become a major case for determining how genetic information can be used.

Submission + - What Happened to Norse Corp.? Threat Intelligence Vendor Disappears (csoonline.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: Over the weekend, Brian Krebs reported that Sam Glines, CEO of threat intelligence vendor Norse Corp., was asked to step down by the board of directors and employees were told that they could report to work on Monday, but that there was no guarantee they'd be paid for their work. 'Less than a day after Krebs published his article, Norse Corp.'s website was offline, and attempts to email the company failed,' writes CSO's Steve Ragan. 'The ever-popular Norse attack map was online for some of the weekend, but that too had gone dark by Sunday evening.' In the aftermath of the company's disappearance, the topic of flawed data and assumptions once again resurfaced in a blog post written by ICS expert, Robert M. Lee.

Submission + - Windows 10 Passes 10% Market Share, Overtakes Windows 8.1 And Windows XP

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Six months after its release, Windows 10 has finally passed 10 percent market share. Not only that, but the latest and greatest version from Microsoft has also overtaken Windows 8.1 and Windows XP, according to the latest figures from Net Applications. Windows 10 had 9.96 percent market share in December, and gained 1.89 percentage points to hit 11.85 percent in January. Aside from its first month, Windows 10 has gained about 1 percentage point each month, though December was particularly strong, likely due to holiday sales. Later this year, Microsoft plans to make Windows 10 a “recommended update” so that Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 users are even more likely to install it.

Submission + - Graphene Optical Lens a Billionth of a Meter Thick Breaks the Diffraction Limit (gizmag.com)

Submitted by Zothecula
Zothecula writes: With the development of photonic chips and nano-optics, the old ground glass lenses can't keep up in the race toward miniaturization. In the search for a suitable replacement, a team from the Swinburne University of Technology has developed a graphene microlens one billionth of a meter thick that can take sharper images of objects the size of a single bacterium and opens the door to improved mobile phones, nanosatellites, and computers.

Submission + - VGA in Memoriam (hackaday.com) 1

Submitted by szczys
szczys writes: VGA is going away. It has been for a long time but the final nails in the coffin are being driven home this year. It was the first standard for video, and is by far the longest-lived port on the PC. The extra pins made computers monitor-aware; allowing data about the screen type and resolution to be queried whenever a display was connected. But the connector is big and looks antiquated. There's no place for it in today's thin, design minded devices. It is also a mechanism for analog signaling in our world that has embraced high-speed digital for ever increasing pixels and integration of more data passing through one connection. Most motherboards no longer have the connector, and Intel's new Skylake processors have removed native VGA functionality. Even online retailers have stopped including it as a filter option when choosing hardware.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Why are Major Companies Exiting the Spam Filtering Business (slashdot.org) 1

Submitted by broswell
broswell writes: For years we used Postini https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... spam filtering. Google bought Postini in 2007, operated it for 5 years and then began shutting it down.

Then we moved to MX Logic. McAfee bought MX Logic, and McAfee was purchased by Intel. Now Intel is shutting down the service http://it.slashdot.org/story/1...

Neither company chose to raise prices, or spin off the division.

Anyone want to speculate on the reasons?

Submission + - Marvin Minsky, Artificial Intelligence Pioneer, Dead at 88 (nytimes.com)

Submitted by Dave_Minsky
Dave_Minsky writes: Inventor, philosopher, scientist, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor emeritus Marvin Minsky passed away on January 24 in Boston at the age of 88.

Minsky is remembered for laying the groundwork for some modern theories and praxis on artificial intelligence. In 1951 he built SNARC, the first randomly wired neural network. He later became an advisor the Stanley Kubrick movie 2001: A Space Odyssey.

In the 1970s, Minsky developed the Society of Mind theory that tried to explain what we perceive as intelligence was simply an interaction between non-intelligent parts.

Friends remember Minsky as quirky as well as being a deep well for knowledge on AI.

"The Marvin that I knew was a wonderful mixture of serious and quirky," friend Stephn Wolfram wrote in a blog post dated January 26. "...he always kept true to his goal of figuring out how thinking works, and how to make machines do it."

Submission + - Rootkits: The next big security challenge

Submitted by storagedude
storagedude writes: Rootkits are becoming a critical security challenge, writes Henry Newman at Enterprise Storage Forum. The solution: a secure supply chain for firmware, and users need to be alert for any changes or insider threats.

'The only way I can see this working — and there is still risk — is if you have multiple employees inspecting the firmware to ensure it is indeed the manufacturer’s firmware. I would have at least two or more people get the firmware and validate the SHA256 hashes,' Newman writes.

Submission + - Elon Musk set to unveil Mars spacecraft later this year (foxnews.com)

Submitted by frank249
frank249 writes: Fox News is reporting that Space X and Tesla CEO Elon Musk expects to unveil plans for the spacecraft that would send humans to Mars within a decade. Speaking at an event in Hong Kong, Musk said he was 'hoping to describe the architecture' of the spacecraft at the International Astronautical Conference in Mexico in late September. “That will be quite exciting,” Musk said. 'In terms of the first flight to Mars, we are hoping to do that around 2025.' As for his plans to go into space, Musk said he was hoping to reach the International Space Station 'four or five years from now.'

Submission + - ACLU sues Anaheim police for public records on cell phone surveillance devices (scpr.org)

Submitted by Lacey Waymire
Lacey Waymire writes: The ACLU of Northern California is suing for a release of public records regarding Anaheim police's use of cell phone surveillance devices. "We don't think any surveillance devices, particularly these sorts of invasive cell phone surveillance devices, should ever be acquired or used without intense public debate and the adoption of safeguards to ensure they are only used in ways that follow our Constitution and laws," attorney Matt Cagle said.

Slashdot Top Deals

He has not acquired a fortune; the fortune has acquired him. -- Bion

Close