psone - Slashdot User

Microsoft Says No To Paying Bug Bounties 148

Posted by timothy on Friday July 23, 2010 @08:07AM from the like-mel-gibson-in-ransom dept.

Trailrunner7 writes "In the wake of both Mozilla and Google significantly increasing their bug bounties to the $3,000 range, there have been persistent rumors in the security community that Microsoft soon would follow suit and start paying bounties as well. However, a company official said on Thursday that Microsoft was not interested in paying bounties. 'We value the researcher ecosystem, and show that in a variety of ways, but we don't think paying a per-vuln bounty is the best way. Especially when across the researcher community the motivations aren't always financial. It is well-known that we acknowledge researcher's contributions in our bulletins when a researcher has coordinated the release of vulnerability details with the release of a security update,' Microsoft's Jerry Bryant said."

Submission + - Darth Vader Robs Bank (gothamist.com)

Submitted by RevWaldo on Friday July 23, 2010 @08:07AM

RevWaldo writes: A man in a Darth Vader costume (plus camo pants?) robbed a Chase in Setauket, Long Island at gunpoint. Obviously someone with an ARM that decided to alter the deal. Pray he doesn't alter it any further!

Comment Re:Good Luck With That (Score 1) 204

by psone on Friday July 23, 2010 @07:48AM (#33001492) Attached to: Digital Act Could Spur Creation of Pirate ISPs In UK

... about as likely as the British people rising up in mass revolt against the government.

You mean, with the help of a Dutch invasion like in 1688?

Comment Re:Dark matter? (Score 1) 117

by psone on Friday July 23, 2010 @07:37AM (#33001432) Attached to: Buckyballs Detected In Space

"First category" was meant for 'baryonic matter' — which vanished between my brain and fingers.

Comment Re:Dark matter? (Score 4, Informative) 117

by psone on Friday July 23, 2010 @05:16AM (#33000850) Attached to: Buckyballs Detected In Space

There are several theoretical candidates for Dark Matter. Non-Baryonic Dark Matter (aka matter not made of quarks, protons, neutrons and not interacting with electrons and photons) is expected to contribute for the greater part to it. Fullerenes fall in the first category. Additionally, the observations of stars (gravitational interactions) are in accordance with the standard model and that pleads for the absence of Dark Matter in or around stars. However the cohesion or consistency of galaxies is not expectable if the only mass present in them comes from stars and stellar systems. That pleads for the presence of dark mater in the halo of galaxies and in clusters of galaxies.

Submission + - Brother’s Vibration Energy Cell batteries (gizmag.com) 1

Submitted by ElectricSteve on Friday July 23, 2010 @04:57AM

ElectricSteve writes: A number of kinetic energy chargers have been hitting the market in recent years including the nPower PEG and the Etive. Now Brother Industries Ltd., a company better known for its printers, has put the technology into a form factor that should prove much more versatile — a battery. Its Vibration Energy Cell batteries are designed to replace AA or AAA batteries in some low power devices that can then be powered with a shake.

Submission + - A list of commercial products that included malwar (rationallyparanoid.com)

Submitted by

Ant

on Friday July 23, 2010 @02:03AM

Ant writes: "rationallyPARANOID has a list of commercial products that included malware since 2000.

Seen in Doctor Olds' "How does malware get onto OEM and promotional hardware??" security forum reply/post."

Submission + - Comic Con rejects Fred Phelps (comicsalliance.com) 2

Submitted by djconrad on Thursday July 22, 2010 @11:56PM

djconrad writes: Anti-Gay preacher Fred Phelps decided to picket Comic Con today, because of their worship of super heroes. This is the participants' response. My favorite signs are "God needs a starship" and "Is this thing on?"

Submission + - The Scalability of Linus 1

Submitted by

Hugh Pickens

on Thursday July 22, 2010 @11:53PM

Hugh Pickens writes: "Katherine Noyes writes at LinuxInsider that it may be time for Linus Torvalds to share more of the responsibility for Linux that he's been shouldering. "If Linux wants to keep up with the competition there is much work to do, more than even a man of Linus's skill to accomplish," argues one user and the "scalability of Linus," is the subject of a post by Jonathan Corbet wondering if there might there be a Linus scalability crunch point coming. "The Linux kernel development process stands out in a number of ways; one of those is the fact that there is exactly one person who can commit code to the 'official' repository," Corbet writes. A problem with that scenario is the potential for repeats of what Corbet calls "the famous 'Linus burnout' episode of 1998" when everything stopped for a while until Linus rested a bit, came back, and started merging patches again. "If Linus is to retain his central position in Linux kernel development, the community as a whole needs to ensure that the process scales and does not overwhelm him," Corbet adds. But many don't agree. "Don't be fooled that Linus has to scale — he has to work hard, but he is the team captain and doorman. He has thousands doing most of the work for him. He just has to open the door at the appropriate moment," writes Robert Pogson adding that Linus "has had lots of practice and still has fire in his belly.""

Submission + - Hyperfast Star Was Booted from Milky Way (hubblesite.org)

Submitted by Thorfinn.au on Thursday July 22, 2010 @08:10PM

Thorfinn.au writes: A hundred million years ago, a triple-star system was traveling through the bustling center of our Milky Way galaxy when it made a life-changing misstep. The trio wandered too close to the galaxy's giant black hole, which captured one of the stars and hurled the other two out of the Milky Way. Adding to the stellar game of musical chairs, the two outbound stars merged to form a super-hot, blue star.

This story may seem like science fiction, but astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope say it is the most likely scenario for a so-called hypervelocity star, known as HE 0437-5439, one of the fastest ever detected. It is blazing across space at a speed of 1.6 million miles (2.5 million kilometers) an hour, three times faster than our Sun's orbital velocity in the Milky Way. Hubble observations confirm that the stellar speedster hails from our galaxy's core.

Submission + - Google exec frustrated by Java, C++ complexity (idg.com.au)

Submitted by

angry tapir

on Thursday July 22, 2010 @07:46PM

angry tapir writes: "Today's commercial-grade programming languages — C++ and Java, in particular — are way too complex and not adequately suited for today's computing environments, Google distinguished engineer Rob Pike argued in a talk at the O'Reilly Open Source Conference. Pike made his case against such "industrial programming languages" during his keynote at the conference in Portland, Oregon."

Submission + - Java, C++ Too Complex for Google (infoworld.com)

Submitted by

snydeq

on Thursday July 22, 2010 @07:35PM

snydeq writes: "Google distinguished engineer Rob Pike ripped the use of Java and C++ during his keynote at OSCON, saying that these 'industrial programming languages' are way too complex and not adequately suited for today's computing environments. 'I think these languages are too hard to use, too subtle, too intricate. They're far too verbose and their subtlety, intricacy and verbosity seem to be increasing over time. They're oversold, and used far too broadly,' Pike said. 'How do we have stuff like this [get to be] the standard way of computing that is taught in schools and is used in industry? [This sort of programming] is very bureaucratic. Every step must be justified to the compiler.' Pike also spoke out against the performance of interpreted languages and dynamic typing."

Safari Privacy Bug May Be Leaking Your Data 152

Posted by timothy on Thursday July 22, 2010 @05:18PM from the problem-with-software-is-that-it-sucks dept.

richi writes "If you use Safari, your browser may be leaking your private information to any website you visit. Jeremiah Grossman, the CTO of WhiteHat Security, has discovered some Very Bad News. I have some analysis and other reactions over at my Computerworld blog. The potential for spam and phishing is huge. A determined attacker might even be able to steal previously-entered customer data." In short, autofill for Web forms is enabled by default in Safari 4 / 5 (and remotely exploitable), and the data that this feature has access to includes the user's local address book — even if the information has never been entered into a Web form.

Submission + - World’s First Molten Salt Solar Plant Opens (inhabitat.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 22, 2010 @03:18PM

An anonymous reader writes: Sicily has just announced the opening of the world’s first concentrated solar power (CSP) facility that uses molten salt as a heat collection medium. Since molten salt is able to reach very high temperatures (over 1000 degrees Fahrenheit) and can hold more heat than the synthetic oil used in other CSP plants, the plant is able to continue to produce electricity long after the sun has gone down. The Archimede plant has a capacity of 5 megawatts with a field of 30,000 square meters of mirrors and more than 3 miles of heat collecting piping for the molten salt. The cost for this initial plant was around 60 million Euros.

Submission + - Open source GSM cracking software released (idg.com.au)

Submitted by

angry tapir

on Thursday July 22, 2010 @12:03AM

angry tapir writes: "The GSM technology used by the majority of the world's mobile phones will get some scrutiny at next week's Black Hat security conference. An open source effort to develop GSM-cracking software has released software that cracks the A5/1 encryption algorithm used by some GSM networks. Called Kraken, this software uses new, very efficient, encryption cracking tables that allow it to break A5/1 encryption much faster than before."

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