Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Education

Heart Monitors In Middle School Gym Class? 950

Posted by kdawson from the please-don't-sue-me dept.
An anonymous reader writes "My son brought home an order form from his middle school. Apparently the 7th (his grade) and 8th graders are being asked (required?) to purchase their own straps for the heart monitors they're to wear during gym class. I know nothing yet of the device in question, but have left a voice-mail with the assistant principal asking him to call me so I may ask some questions about the program and the device. My tinfoil-hat concern is that the heart rate data will be tied to each child, then archived and eventually used for/against them down the road when applying for insurance, high-stress jobs, etc. 'I see you had arrhythmia during 7th grade pickle ball? No insurance for you' Has anyone heard of such a program, or had their child(ren) take part in it? Does the device transmit to the laptop the overweight gym teacher will be watching instead of running laps with the kids? Perhaps data is downloaded from the device after the class? Or am I just being paranoid? Thanks for any insight."
Government

Congress Mulls Research Into a Vehicle Mileage Tax 792

Posted by kdawson from the just-get-on-the-bike dept.
BJ_Covert_Action writes to let us know that an Oregon congressman has filed legislation to spend $154.5M for a research project into tracking per-vehicle mileage in the US, and asks: "Do we really want the government to track our movement and driving habits on a regular basis?" "US Representative Earl Blumenauer (D-Oregon) introduced H.R. 3311 earlier this year to appropriate $154,500,000 for research and study into the transition to a per-mile vehicle tax system... Oregon has successfully tested a Vehicle Miles Traveled fee... the [Oregon] report urged a mandate for all drivers to install GPS tracking devices that would report driving habits to roadside RFID scanning devices." Here is the bill (PDF). The article notes that the congressman's major corporate donors would likely benefit with contracts if such a program were begun.
Security

DHS To Review Report On US Power Grid Vulnerability 138

Posted by kdawson from the like-dominos dept.
CWmike writes "The US Department of Homeland Security is looking at a report by a research scientist in China that shows how a well-placed attack against a small power subnetwork could trigger a cascading failure of the entire West Coast power grid. Jian-Wei Wang, a network analyst at China's Dalian University of Technology, used publicly available information to model how the West Coast grid and its component subnetworks are connected. Wang and another colleague then investigated how a major outage in one subnetwork would affect adjacent subnetworks. New Scientist magazine reported on this a week or so ago, and the paper has been available since the spring."
Security

SANS Report Says Organizations Focusing On the Wrong Security Threats 98

Posted by timothy from the here's-mud-in-yer-eye dept.
yahoi writes "Companies around the world are leaving themselves wide open to Web- and client-side attacks, according to a new report released today by the SANS Institute that includes real attack data gathered from multiple sources. SANS found that most organizations are focusing their patching efforts and vulnerability scanning on the operating system, but they're missing the boat: 60 percent of the total number of attacks occur on Web applications, and many attacks are aimed at third-party applications such as Microsoft Office, and Adobe Flash and other tools. Exacerbating the problem, they're taking twice as long to patch Microsoft Office and other applications than to patch their operating systems."
Programming

Con Kolivas Returns, With a Desktop-Oriented Linux Scheduler 333

Posted by timothy from the dare-not-speak-its-name dept.
myvirtualid writes "Con Kolivas has done what he swore never to do: returned to the Linux kernel and written a new — and, according to him — waaay better scheduler for the desktop environment. In fact, BFS appears to outperform existing schedulers right up until one hits a 16-CPU machine, at which point he guesses performance would degrade somewhat. According to Kolivas, BFS 'was designed to be forward looking only, make the most of lower spec machines, and not scale to massive hardware. i.e. [sic] it is a desktop orientated scheduler, with extremely low latencies for excellent interactivity by design rather than 'calculated,' with rigid fairness, nice priority distribution and extreme scalability within normal load levels.'"
United States

Submission + - Adviser to Obama Believes US Gov't Staged 9/11 (foxnews.com)

Submitted by
reporter
reporter writes: "According to a recent report by Fox News, Van Jones is a key adviser to Barack Hussein Obama. Jones is helping the president to create "green jobs", which protect the environment. Unfortunately for Obama, the sordid history of Van Jones has finally caught up with him. A "video surfaced of him referring to Republicans as 'assholes' and it was revealed that he once joined the '9/11 truther' movement, which contended that the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks might have been an inside job by the Bush administration."

Jones has achieved the distinction of being the highest ranking government official who actually believes that Washington staged the 9/11 terrorist attack.

Even more dirty laundry indicates that Jones joined a protest march in San Franciso in 1992. During that march, demonstrators "set trash cans afire, smashed car windows and threw rocks at passing motorists. But he clearly reveled in the protest."

A report by the "Wall Street Journal" provides further information about his political extremism.

According to a report issued today by CNN, Jones has resigned. "The Washington Post" provides additional information about the resignation."
Portables (Apple)

Submission + - Thieves Clear Out Apple Store In 31 Seconds 3

Submitted by
theodp
theodp writes: "An amazing surveillance tape of a burglary in progress at a NJ Apple Store (YouTube) shows five perps in masks smashing the plate-glass doors at 2:05 a.m., signaling to the security guard that they had a gun, and clearing off the display tables with the efficiency of a Indy 500 pit crew. The take: 23 MacBook Pros, 14 iPhones and 9 iPod touches in 31 seconds flat. Estimated value, based on average selling price: $46,345. No word yet on whether Microsoft's Laptop Hunters have alibis."
Idle

Submission + - Police Swarm Bungie Office over HALO replica rifle (kotaku.com) 1

Submitted by sv_libertarian
sv_libertarian writes: A panicked person in Kirkland, WA called local police claiming they saw someone walking down the street with an AK-47, when it was actually an Bungie employee carrying an overgrown model of a HALO sniper rifle. Which resembles an AK-47 as much as a Volkswagen resembles a Formula 1 racer...
Security

Submission + - Wordpress.org Warns of Active Worm Hacking Blogs (wordpress.org)

Submitted by
Erik
Erik writes: "Wordpress, the popular open-source Content Management System (CMS) for many thousands of bloggers worldwide, is under attack from a "clever" worm that automatically compromises unpatched versions of the Wordpress system. The particularly nasty bug crawls the web for vulnerable Wordpress installations, installing malware, deleting content, and generally wreaking havoc wherever it can. Today, Wordpress founder Matt Mullenweg eloquently implored Wordpress bloggers to update more frequently. Originally, updating the Wordpress system was a rather laborious process, however newer versions offer fast and simple one-click upgrades. The two most recent versions of Wordpress (2.8.3 and 2.8.4) cannot be attacked by the worm discovered this week, and blogs hosted at Wordpress.com are also apparently immune."
Earth

Submission + - Activist Disrupts Detonations to Protect Cranes

Submitted by
The Narrative Fallacy
The Narrative Fallacy writes: "Nature reports that on 14 July, Ingmar Lee broke into a buried explosive charge and cut the detonation cord, later claiming responsibility and giving television interviews threatening more damage at Denny Island, an isolated Canadian island in British Columbia about 500 km north of Vancouver where a team of geophysicists is studying granite formation. The aim of the seismic studies on Denny Island is to define the formation, growth and recycling of Earth's crust in that area — events that happened in the late Cretaceous, some 65 million years ago. After Royal Canadian Mounted Police declined to provide protection to the scientists, local residents rallied to guard them so that they could complete repairs and set off a targeted charge late on the night of 16 July and over the following two days, the team were able to set off the remainder of the charges at 15 other sites in a line moving inland through a river valley. Lee, a long-time forest-protection campaigner who lives 1 km from the blast site, says that "there has been no prior community information, consultation or discussion" of the detonations and that the reason he disrupted the detonations was to protect Sandhill crane nests located within 2 km of the Denny Island blast site whose recently hatched chicks are currently in their most vulnerable pre-flight stage. "This is a very specialized wilderness area," says Lee. "I was concerned for the sandhill cranes and salmon. I consider this non-violent civil disobedience." On 17 July, police charged Lee with one count of willful mischief endangering life for disrupting the seismic studies."
Data Storage

Submission + - GlusterFS, GPL3 Clustered File System, Release 2.0 (gluster.org)

Submitted by
Shehjar Tikoo
Shehjar Tikoo writes: "GlusterFS is a clustered file system that runs on commodity off-the-shelf hardware, delivering multiple times the scalability and performance of conventional storage. The architecture is modular, stackable and kernel-independent, which makes it easy to customize, install, manage and support different operating systems. Multiple storage systems can be clustered together, supporting petabytes of capacity in a single global namespace. Building a configuration of a few hundred terabytes can be accomplished in less than thirty minutes.

GlusterFS 2.0 Release:
GlusterFS v2.0 has gone through a major revamp in design and development since v1.3. Thanks to thousands of initial users who provided us great feedback and bug reports. There are a number of production deployments now. GlusterFS uses existing disk file systems (such as Ext3, XFS, ZFS..) to store your data as regular files and folders. You can restore the data, even after you uninstall GlusterFS. So, give it a try and let us know.

License: GNU GPLv3
What is in 2.0 release
Who is using GlusterFS
Download

Happy Hacking
--
GlusterFS Team"
Security

Botnet Worm Targets DSL Modems and Routers 272

Posted by kdawson from the new-vector dept.
CoreDuo writes "The people who bring you the DroneBL DNS Blacklist services, while investigating an ongoing DDoS incident, have discovered a botnet composed of exploited DSL modems and routers. OpenWRT/DD-WRT devices all appear to be vulnerable. What makes this worm impressive is the sophisticated nature of the bot, and the potential damage it can do not only to an unknowing end user, but to small businesses using non-commercial Internet connections, and to the unknowing public taking advantage of free Wi-Fi services. The botnet is believed to have infected 100,000 hosts." A followup to the article notes that the bot's IRC control channel now claims that it has been shut down, though the ongoing DDoS attack on DroneBL suggests otherwise.
Security

Submission + - Botnet worm that targets DSL modems and routers (dronebl.org)

Submitted by CoreDuo
CoreDuo writes: The people that bring you the DroneBL DNS Blacklist services, after investigation of a recent DDoS incident, have disocvered a botnet that is comprised of exploited DSL modems and routers. What makes this impressive is the sophisticated nature of the bot, and the potential damage it can do not only to an knowing end user, but to small businesses using non-commercial internet connections and the unknowing public that take advantage of the more popular than ever free wifi services. The botnet is believed to have an estimated 100,000 effected hosts.

Comment I am a Fairpoint Maine customer (Score 1) 249

by diablo-d3 (#26247013) Attached to: Fairpoint Pledges To Violate Net Neutrality

I just got the letter today, and my interpretation is if you get any MSN or Yahoo value added services or use a Verizon email address, you now access these services through a Fairpoint URL and Fairpoint email servers. You are no longer a Verizon DSL customer, you are now a Fairpoint DSL customer.

In other words, nothing has changed, you just type in a new URL from now on to access webmail and MSN/Yahoo Verizon^WFairpoint services, and you change the POP/SMTP settings in your email client.

At no point is Fairpoint blocking the real MSN and Yahoo websites nor blocking you from using MSN and Yahoo directly for your non-bundled-service services.

Slashdot jumped the gun.

Slashdot Top Deals

Without life, Biology itself would be impossible.

Close