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Hardware

Submission + - Heat your home with a server or two (i-programmer.info) 1

Submitted by mikejuk
mikejuk writes: A new paper from Microsoft Research suggests a radical but slightly mad scheme for dealing with some of the more basic problems of the data centre.
Rather than build server farms that produce a lot of waster heat, why not have distributed Data Furnaces, that heat home and offices at the same time as providing cloud computing? This is a serious suggestion and they provide facts and figures to make it all seem viable. So when it gets cold all you have to do is turn up the number crunching...
Android

Submission + - Android passwords are stored on disk in plain text (google.com) 1

Submitted by derGoldstein
derGoldstein writes: A new issue page was added to the Android project site: "Issue 10809: Password is stored on disk in plain text". The issue details: "The password for email accounts is stored into the SQLite DB which in turn stores it on the phone's file system in plain text". Andy Stadler replied in a comment: "rest assured, I am not closing this bug. We recognize that this is causing concern for some users, and we're going to look at identifying steps that can make your data more secure."
Oracle

Submission + - Oracle Removes Former Sun CEO's Blog Posts (digitizor.com) 1

Submitted by
kai_hiwatari
kai_hiwatari writes: "When Google announced Android back in 2007, Jonathan Schwartz, the CEO of Sun Microsystems at the time, wrote a blog post congratulating Google.
Until recently, Schwartz’s blog post published on November 5th, 2007 titled “Congratulations Google. Red Hat and the Java Community” could be found at http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/congratulations_google. After the acquisition of Sun Microsystems, the URL was redirected to http://blogs.oracle.com/jonathan/entry/congratulations_google. However, if you check either of the links now, you will get a 404 page.
It is worth noting that Google included this blog post in its defense against Oracle's Android lawsuit."
Privacy

Submission + - Text messages indexed by a search engine (en.rian.ru)

Submitted by sega_sai
sega_sai writes: Today it was discovered that thousands of text messages which were sent using the website of Russian mobile operator Megafon have been indexed together with the phone numbers by Russian search engine Yandex and were available for search. After the discovery the text messages were quickly removed from search results. One of the many reasons for the screw-up was absence of robots.txt on the website of the mobile operator.
Games

Submission + - Women Remain The Ignored Audience In Gaming (industrygamers.com)

Submitted by donniebaseball23
donniebaseball23 writes: Research firm Interpret has released its new report, “Games and Girls: Video Gaming’s Ignored Audience”, which finds that while the female audience in gaming has grown, games tailored to their needs and preferences continue to go missing. Women represent 50% of the market and their usage of HD consoles like Xbox 360 and PS3 is rising. "It remains to be seen whether developers and marketers will effectively invest in understanding and exploiting the undertapped female gaming market," said Courtney Johnson, analyst for Intrepret.

Submission + - Recovering from bank fraud? 4

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Last week, I logged into my online banking account to find that thousands of dollars had been fraudulently withdrawn from my account. My bank claims to have a policy of restoring fraudulent transactions, but they are refusing to do so, arguing that the transaction was not really fraudulent. Of course, I'm lock out of my other savings so now I'm having issues paying my day-to-day bills. Has anyone on Slashdot had experience with resolving this sort of issue?

Submission + - Is SHA-512 the way to go?

Submitted by crutchy
crutchy writes: When I was setting up my secure website I got really paranoid about SSL encryption, so I created a certificate using OpenSLL for SHA-512 encryption. I don't know much about SHA (except bits that I can remember from Wikipedia), but I figure that if you're going to go to the trouble (or expense) of setting up SSL, you may as well go for the best you can get, right? Also, what would be the minimum level of encryption required for say online banking? I've read about how SHA-1 was "broken", but from what I can tell it still takes many hours. What is the practical risk to the real internet from this capability? Would a sort of rolling key be a possible next step, where each SSL-encrypted stream has its own private/public key pair generated on the fly, and things like passwords and bank account numbers were broken up and sent in multiple streams with different private/public key pairs? This would of course require more server grunt to generate these keys (or we could take a leaf from Google's book and just have separate server clusters designed solely for that job), but then if computing performance was a limiting factor, the threat to security of these hashes wouldn't be a problem in the first place. I guess with all security infrastructure, trust becomes a more important factor than technical abilities. Can I trust that my SSL provider hasn't been hacked (or at least snooped)? How do I know some disgruntled IT admin hasn't sold the private key of his company's root CA to the same organisation that developed the conficker virus? It would certainly make for a more profitable payload. I've read some of Bruce Schneier's work (I'm subscribed to Cryptogram) and he tends to highlight the FUD that surrounds internet security, and I agree that there is a lot of FUD, but complete ignorance and blase attitude toward security can also be taken advantage of. Where is the middle ground?
IT

Submission + - SlashDot Slashdotted (slashdot.org) 1

Submitted by wulfmans
wulfmans writes: Since yesterday on and off SlashDot stories have been unavailable to users and their website VERY slow and unresponsive.
http://news.slashdot.org/story/11/06/04/158209/Skype-Is-Working-To-Defeat-the-Reverse-Engineering
Error 503 Service Unavailable
Service Unavailable
Guru Meditation:
XID: 258617160
Varnish cache server
I doubt this will be published but i had to submit it as a story

Submission + - Strip searches of the mind: Laptop border searches (lextechnologiae.com)

Submitted by
pacergh
pacergh writes: "The government can search your laptop with no warrant, probable cause, or reasonable suspicion at the border. Law journal articles have argued that reasonable suspicion should be required. This article examines the origins of this fourth amendment exception and why folks should think about it before traveling abroad."

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