demon93 - Slashdot User

Submission + - Sony Lesson: Managers Not Talking Hurts Security (itworld.com)

Submitted by

jfruhlinger

on Friday May 27, 2011 @11:05AM

jfruhlinger writes: "The series of Sony security disasters over the past few months quickly went from tragedy to farce as one site after another fell to hackers. The worst part is that most of the breaches used similar techniques, but continued to succeed because the heads of Sony's far-flung business units didn't communicate with each other. Kevin Fogarty thinks that this is less a security failure than a management failure."

Submission + - Senate Bill Would Derail DNSSEC (techweb.com)

Submitted by ancientribe on Friday May 27, 2011 @10:59AM

ancientribe writes: A key provision in the Protect IP intellectual property protection bill just approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee (and expected to ultimately become law) could sabotage Internet security and, specifically, DNSSEC, according to a who's who of Internet infrastructure and security experts. That group--which includes Dan Kaminsky, who discovered and helped get patched a serious flaw in DNS, Steve Crocker, an IETF pioneer; David Dagon of the Georgia Institute of Technology and a co-founder of Damballa; Danny McPherson, chief security officer for VeriSign; and Paul Vixie, principal author of the pervasive BIND DNS server software and creator of several DNS standards-- has published a paper describing how DNS filtering could disrupt DNS security efforts and inadvertently help cybercriminals.

Submission + - 1 in 5 American drivers inept on the road (networkworld.com)

Submitted by

coondoggie

on Friday May 27, 2011 @10:41AM

coondoggie writes: "These stats are scary, though not surprising if you do any amount of driving: 1 in 5 drivers on the road today cannot meet the basic requirements to get a driver's license, meaning that nearly 37 million American drivers — roughly 18%- would not pass the written drivers test if taken today.

Those stats come courtesy of the 2011 GMAC Insurance National Drivers Test that showed drivers in Kansas ranked best in the nation while drivers in Washington, D.C. were worst. In fact, GMAC said 1 of 3 of all drivers in New York and Washington, D.C. failed the test. The state with the lowest percentage of failures is Wyoming, with only 1 of 20 failing the test."

Submission + - App Attaches Virtual Images to Real Objects (gizmag.com)

Submitted by Zothecula on Friday May 27, 2011 @10:34AM

Zothecula writes: Fans of the movie "They Live" will recall the special sunglasses in the film, that allowed the unknowing public to see that certain people were actually aliens, and that seemingly ordinary billboards in fact displayed messages like "OBEY" and "CONSUME." The new Aurasma app for iPhone 4 and iPad 2 is kind of like those glasses. OK, it doesn't actually reveal the true nature of things, but it does allow you to see otherwise unseeable videos and other images that fellow Aurasma users have virtually attached to real-world scenes and objects. If you were to point your phone's camera at a certain building, for instance, you would see real-time video of that building on your screen, but perhaps with another user's computer-generated monster climbing up the side of it to promote an upcoming event.

Submission + - Drug helps overwrite bad memories (scienceblog.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 27, 2011 @10:27AM

An anonymous reader writes: Recalling painful memories while under the influence of the drug metyrapone reduces the brain’s ability to re-record the negative emotions associated with them, according to a new study by a team of University of Montreal researchers. The finding challenges the theory that memories cannot be modified once they are stored in the brain. “Our findings may help people deal with traumatic events by offering them the opportunity to ‘write-over’ the emotional part of their memories during therapy,” said the team lead. One major hurdle, however, is the fact that metyrapone is no longer commercially produced.

Submission + - Gudersen testifies on reactor safety (fairewinds.com)

Submitted by

mdsolar

on Friday May 27, 2011 @09:39AM

mdsolar writes: "Arne Gundersen, known to slashot for discovery of Entergy's lies under oath about underground pipes at the the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant, has been trying to call attention to problems with reactor containment for years. Those problems have surfaced in spades at Fukushima and now the the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards is ready listen. Watch the testimony."

Submission + - Moon Has More Water Than Earlier Thought

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 27, 2011 @09:02AM

An anonymous reader writes: Moon has more water than previously thought, according to a new study by NASA-funded researchers. The latest findings have raised new questions about theories of moon's origin.

Submission + - Hardware Vendor Offers Backdoor with Every Product (threatpost.com)

Submitted by Nameisyoung007 on Friday May 27, 2011 @08:59AM

Nameisyoung007 writes: A support page, titled "Backdoor Password for Allied Telesis Devices" recently turned up on Google. The page, labeled ***INTERNAL ONLY*** was written to answer customer questions like "'How do I obtain a backdoor password for my Allied Telesis device?'" and includes instructions on accessing a "built in Backdoor function" on any Allied Telesis device.

Probably a good time to double check your devices, just to make sure you're not affected.

Submission + - ATM repairman accused of faking cash (gawker.com)

Submitted by

fysdt

on Friday May 27, 2011 @08:12AM

fysdt writes: "An ATM repairman was nabbed in Phoenix on charges of having stolen about $200,000 in ATM funds from San Francisco-area branches of Bank of America. His method was almost brilliant in its sheer stupidity: He pocketed the cash, and replaced it in the machines with "counterfeit or photocopied $20 bills.""

Submission + - Load a C64 Into Your Browser... (kingsquare.nl)

Submitted by beaverdownunder on Friday May 27, 2011 @08:08AM

beaverdownunder writes: Forget having Linux boot in your browser... 'jsc64 is a Commodore 64 emulator written in JavaScript by Tim de Koning. It's a port of the FC64, the Commodore 64 emulator written in Actionscript by Darron Schall and Claus Wahlers.' Even has a few demo games. Trés cool!

Submission + - Robot Batcopter to improve drone flight (suasnews.com)

Submitted by

garymortimer

on Friday May 27, 2011 @06:57AM

garymortimer writes: "The objective of my week in the Texan back-country was to perform some experiments on trajectory planning in bats, alongside some other bat researchers from Boston University.

These Brazilian Free-tailed bats (also called Tadarida) come together in the millions in caves all over Texas, leaving every night in swarms so big they can be detected by doppler radar. Somehow, they manage to fly through this dense self-clutter without major collisions, and so our goal is to better understand this behavior. The goal is to fly a UAV through the dense clutter, and record the bats’ response with three ground-based high-speed FLIR cameras, and an airborne 3D HD GoPro camera. The hope is to extract fundamental control laws of flying behavior in order to achieve better autonomous UAV flight."

Submission + - DoE: Salt in Fukushima reactors a grave danger (washingtonpost.com)

Submitted by

mdsolar

on Friday May 27, 2011 @06:51AM

mdsolar writes: "At a second meeting Thursday related to the Fukushima Daiichi crisis, a U.S. Energy Department official warned that the nuclear facility still faces grave danger.

John E. Kelly, deputy assistant secretary for nuclear reactor technologies, said that protective components at the facility could crack because of high salt levels. There “is still a concern about more massive failure” of steel in the “lower head,” an important part of the containment system, Kelly told an NRC advisory committee. About 100 to 200 tons of salt left by the emergency pumping of salt water to cool the reactors are probably corroding the containment components."

Submission + - The man who tastes sounds (wordpress.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 27, 2011 @06:23AM

An anonymous reader writes: Synaesthesia — a condition where the brain has extra connections, causing numbers or days to have colours associated with them, or sounds to have particular tastes etc. — has always fascinated me. This interview with a man with lexical-gustatory synaesthesia shows how all-encompassing the condition is. I asked him when he first became aware of it and he replied that it's like asking someone what was the first thing they saw or smelled. Also, my name tastes salty and metallic. Yum.

FSF On How To Choose a License 210

Posted by timothy on Friday May 27, 2011 @06:02AM from the have-it-suit-your-endeavor dept.

ciaran_o_riordan writes "FSF have put together their license recommendations, beyond just their own licenses, for software, documentation, and other works: 'People often ask us what license we recommend they use for their project. We've written about this publicly before, but the information has been scattered around between different essays, FAQ entries, and license commentaries. This article collects all that information into a single source, to make it easier for people to follow and refer back to. The recommendations below are focused on licensing a work that you create — whether that's a modification of an existing work, or a new original work.'"

Submission + - HTC Unlocks Android Phones (muktware.com)

Submitted by mukt77 on Friday May 27, 2011 @05:39AM

mukt77 writes: "There has been overwhelmingly customer feedback that people want access to open bootloaders on HTC phones. I want you to know that we've listened. Today, I'm confirming we will no longer be locking the bootloaders on our devices. Thanks for your passion, support and patience," Peter Chou, CEO of HTC"

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