Xerfas - Slashdot User

Submission + - Can Anonymous Really 'Kill' Facebook? 1

Submitted by adeelarshad82 on Thursday August 11, 2011 @11:27AM

adeelarshad82 writes: Recent news about Anonymous taking down Facebook on Nov. 5 has gotten a lot of attention. While the entire Anonymous team may not agree with the plan, the real question is whether they can take it down even with everyone on board with the plan. Sophos senior security adviser, Chester Wisniewski, sheds some light on the issue talking about previous attempts, the type of attacks, new tools Anonymous could possibly use and whether there is a chance that they'll succeed.

Submission + - IBM: At 30 Years, The PC Is Dying (conceivablytech.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 11, 2011 @11:17AM

An anonymous reader writes: The IBM PC will turn 30 tomorrow and can look back at an astonishing accomplishment that has changed billions of lives. Yet IBM believes that the PC is already dying and will soon share its fate with the typewriter.

Submission + - Iron Man-like Exoskeleton Nears Production (technologyreview.com)

Submitted by fangmcgee on Thursday August 11, 2011 @11:13AM

fangmcgee writes: By now, with films like Iron Man, its sequel, and Avatar, Hollywood has made us thoroughly familiar with the idea of the robotic exoskeleton. Less well known, however, is that researchers are actually building robotic exoskeletons like the ones envisioned by Hollywood and the comic book visionaries from whom Hollywood pilfers its most lucrative ideas. Among the developers of real-life Iron Man suits (of which there are many, the world over) is a group called Raytheon Sarcos. And as IEEE Spectrum reports in this month's issue, its impressive second-generation exoskeleton robotics suit, dubbed the XOS 2, is nearing production.

Submission + - London police post riot suspect photos on Flickr (computerworlduk.com)

Submitted by DMandPenfold on Wednesday August 10, 2011 @07:39AM

DMandPenfold writes: The Metropolitan Police has begun posting on Flickr a set of photos from CCTV cameras of suspected London rioters, as it prepares a full-on bid to have the criminals identified by local people.

After days of rioting in London and the spread of violence to other UK cities including Manchester, Salford, Liverpool, Nottingham and Birmingham, the police have vowed to make public the images of those responsible.

Submission + - Software More Valuable Than Oil (computerworld.com)

Submitted by smitty777 on Wednesday August 10, 2011 @07:08AM

smitty777 writes: Software has become more valuable than oil. At least briefly on Wall Street, according to this article in Computer World. From the article"Apple saw its stock price rise enough — gaining more than 5% — that it briefly surpassed Exxon Mobil, as the most valuable company in the U.S., according to an Associated Press analysis of its market cap...Most of the other major tech companies — Intel, IBM, Dell, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard — all finished in positive territory yesterday, as markets made up ground lost in the big sell-off on Monday that also hit oil prices and other commodities".

Submission + - Australian research network plans for 100Gbps (computerworld.com.au)

Submitted by

angry tapir

on Wednesday August 10, 2011 @03:05AM

angry tapir writes: "The Australian Academic and Research Network (AARNet) has announced a wide range of initiatives around network upgrades, collaboration, and mobility as part of a new five-year plan. The plan includes delivering a 100Gbps backbone to its education and research customers, to ensure sufficient "headroom" for major projects such as the Square Kilometre Array radio telescope, which Slashdot has previously discussed."

Submission + - Sonys Face to Avatar system uses autonomous blimp (suasnews.com)

Submitted by garymortimer on Wednesday August 10, 2011 @02:45AM

garymortimer writes: Sony are creating the first real world drone avatar.

“We want cloud interface, not cloud computing,” said Hiroaki Tobita, a researcher at the Sony Computer Laboratory.

That sentence didn’t make much sense. It seemed like the by product of a language barrier.

Then a giant, cloud-like robot blimp floated by, sporting video of a human face, and that pronouncement became much clearer.

Submission + - IBM Plays SimCity with Portland Oregon

Submitted by

Hugh Pickens writes

on Tuesday August 09, 2011 @11:46PM

Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Greg Lindsay reports that Portland Oregon will be the first city to use IBM's new app called Systems Dynamics for Smarter Cities containing 3,000 equations which collectively seek to model cities’ emergent behavior and help them figure out how policy can affect the lives of their citizens. The program seeks to quantify the cause-and-effect relationships between seemingly uncorrelated urban phenomena. "What’s the connection, for example, between ...obesity rates and carbon emissions?" writes Lindsay. "To find out, simply round up experts to hash out the linkages, translate them into algorithms, and upload enough historical data to populate the model. Then turn the knobs to see what happens when you nudge the city in one direction." One of the drivers of the “Portland Plan” is the city’s commitment to a 40 percent decrease in carbon emissions by 2030, which necessitates less driving and more walking and biking. Running the model planners discovered a positive feedback loop: More walking and biking would lead to lower obesity rates for Portlanders. In turn, a fitter population would find would find walking and biking a more attractive option. But as the field of urban systems gathers steam, it’s important to remember that IBM and its fellow technology companies aren’t the first to offer a quantitative toolkit to cities. In the 1970's RAND built models they thought could predict fire patterns in New York, and then used them to justify closing fire stations in NYC's poorest sections in the name of efficiency, a decision that would ultimately displace 600,000 people as their neighborhoods burned."

Submission + - JavaScript Gameboy emulator, detailed in 8 parts (imrannazar.com)

Submitted by Two9A on Friday November 05, 2010 @06:13PM

Two9A writes: JavaScript has shed its image of being a limited language, tied to DOM manipulation in a browser; in recent years, new engines and frameworks have given JS a reputation as a language capable of bigger things. Mix this in with the new elements of HTML 5, and you have the capacity to emulate a game console or other system, with full graphical output. This series of articles looks in detail at how an emulator is written in JavaScript, using the example of the Gameboy handheld: starting at the CPU, and (as of part 8) running a copy of Tetris.

Submission + - End of the Road for Apple's Xserve (automatica.com.au)

Submitted by

PhunkySchtuff

on Friday November 05, 2010 @06:07PM

PhunkySchtuff writes: "Apple announced recently that they are killing the Xserve.
In their Transition Guide, they mention the replacement options of the Mac Pro or the Mac mini with Snow Leopard Server as replacement options. Neither are anything like a direct replacement — the Mac Pro is considerably larger and uses more power (largely due to the more powerful graphics card as a standard configuration) and the Mac mini is a small and energy efficient workgroup server that can't handle anywhere near the same workload.

In the past few years, Apple have been making inroads into larger enterprise businesses, largely thanks to the success of the iPhone and the ever-growing range of software available (for instance, Autodesk have recently committed themselves to the Mac platform) and now there's no longer going to be a real enterprise server offering."

Major Security Holes Found In Mobile Bank Apps 107

Posted by Soulskill on Friday November 05, 2010 @06:04PM from the and-you-can-take-that-to-the-uh-nevermind dept.

NeverVotedBush writes with this excerpt from CNet: "A security firm disclosed holes today in mobile apps from Bank of America, USAA, Chase, Wells Fargo and TD Ameritrade, prompting a scramble by most of the companies to update the apps. ... Specifically, viaForensics concluded that: the USAA's Android app stored copies of Web pages a user visited on the phone; TD Ameritrade's iPhone and Android apps were storing the user name in plain text on the phone; Wells Fargo's Android app stored user name, password, and account data in plain text on the phone; Bank of America's Android app saves a security question (used if a user was accessing the site from an unrecognized device) in plain text on the phone; and Chase's iPhone app stores the username on a phone if the user chose that option, according to the report. Meanwhile, the iPhone apps from USAA, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and Vanguard and PayPal's Android app all passed the security tests and were found to be handling data securely."

Submission + - Europe simulates total cyber war (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by Tutter on Friday November 05, 2010 @05:47PM

Tutter writes: The first-ever cross-European simulation of an all out cyber attack was planned to test how well nations cope as the attacks slow connections.

The simulation steadily reduced access to critical services to gauge how nations react. The exercise also tested how nations work together to avoid a complete shut-down of international links. Neelie Kroes, European commissioner for the digital agenda, said the exercise was designed to test preparedness and was an "important first step towards working together to combat potential online threats to essential infrastructure". The exercise is intended to help expose short-comings in existing procedures for combating attacks. As the attacks escalated, cyber security centres had to find ever more ways to route traffic through to key services and sites. The exercise also tested if communication channels, set up to help spread the word about attacks, were robust in the face of a developing threat and if the information shared over them was relevant.

Submission + - Bringing Business Intelligence to the Masses (ecrmguide.com)

Submitted by storagedude on Friday November 05, 2010 @05:23PM

storagedude writes: Business intelligence for the masses has been talked about for at least 25 years yet appears to be no closer to reality today, as demand for greater complexity keeps BI software from achieving the goal of consumer-like ease of use. Among the ideas the author offers that could make BI for the masses a reality: adding exploratory data analysis to Google; and better hierarchical navigation and data integration for FileMaker.

From the article:

"Google is lousy at exploratory data analysis because it is 'data dumb' — it can find metadata and individual pieces of data, but it can't detect patterns in the data, so you have to do it yourself. ... The answer to this seems straightforward enough: add 'guess-type' data analysis capabilities to Google. And, by the way, if you're at work, make the first port of call your company's data warehouse data store, full of data you can't get anywhere else.

NASA's Stunning Close-Up Photos of Comet Hartley 2 62

Posted by Soulskill on Friday November 05, 2010 @05:21PM from the for-sufficiently-distant-values-of-close dept.

Several readers have sent word that NASA's EPOXI spacecraft performed a close approach to comet Hartley 2 yesterday, taking pictures within roughly 700km of the nucleus. Bad Astronomer Phil Plait has a collection of some fantastic photographs, and you can check out a ton of other images on the mission website. The Planetary Society blog put together a neat animation of the flyby. NASA's mission fact sheet (PDF) explains EPOXI's background — it's the supplemental mission of the Deep Impact craft that smashed a small probe into a different comet back in 2005 — and why Hartley 2 was chosen for this flyby (they couldn't find their original target).

Submission + - Lamebook sues Facebook (tekgoblin.com)

Submitted by tekgoblin on Friday November 05, 2010 @05:20PM

tekgoblin writes: Well here is another lawsuit for ya. The small company called Lamebook is suing Facebook over trademark infringement. Supposedly Facebook has been threatening any website or company that has "book" in its name or sounds like Facebook. Instead of waiting for Facebook to sue them, Lamebook has taken the initiative and sued Facebook so the courts can expedite the decision.

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