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Submission + - Involuntary Eye Movement May Provide Definitive Diagnosis of ADHD (gizmag.com)

Submitted by Zothecula
Zothecula writes: If a child who's simply very active is mistakenly diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), they can end up on pharmaceuticals such as Ritalin unnecessarily. The problem is, it can be quite difficult to determine if someone actually has ADHD, and misdiagnoses are common. Now, however, researchers from Tel Aviv University have announced that analyzing a patient's eye movements may be the key.

Submission + - Cisco Slashing Up To 6,000 Jobs (itworld.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: Cisco Systems will cut as many as 6,000 jobs over the next 12 months, saying it needs to shift resources to growing businesses such as cloud, software and security. Cisco has about 74,000 employees, so the cuts will affect about 8 percent of its staff. The move will be a reorganization rather than a net reduction, the company said. It needs to cut jobs because the product categories where it sees the strongest growth, such as security, require special skills, so it needs to make room for workers in those areas, it said.

Submission + - Edward Snowden: NSA was responsible for 2012 Syrian internet blackout. (theverge.com)

Submitted by Dega704
Dega704 writes: When Syria's access to the internet was cut for two days back in 2012, it apparently wasn't the fault of dissenting "terrorists," as the Syrian government claimed: according to Wired, it was the fault of the US government. In a long profile of Edward Snowden published today, Wired writes what Snowden says is the truth about the internet outage. An elite hacking unit in the National Security Agency had reportedly been attempting to install malware on a central router within Syria — a feat that would have allowed the agency to access a good amount of the country's internet traffic. Instead, it ended up accidentally rendering the router unusable, causing Syria's internet connection to go dark.

Submission + - Inside the CryptoLocker Takedown

Submitted by Trailrunner7
Trailrunner7 writes: The takedown of the GameOver Zeus malware operation in June got more than its share of attention, but it was the concurrent demolition of the CryptoLocker ransomware infrastructure that may prove to have been the most important part of the operation. That outcome was the culmination of months of behind the scenes work by dozens of security researchers who cooperated with law enforcement to trace, monitor and ultimately wreck the careful work and planning of the CryptoLocker crew.

“This was something new. This was ransomware done right,” said John Bambenek, president of Bambenek Consulting, who was involved in the working group that tracked CryptoLocker and talked about the operation at the Black Hat USA conference here Thursday. “It made for a good case study on how to do threat intelligence.”

The working group that came together to defeat CryptoLocker was global and had people with all kinds of different skill sets: malware reverse engineering, math, botnet tracking and intelligence. Some members worked on taking part the domain-generation algorithm while others looked at the command-and-control infrastructure and still others broke down the malware itself. What the researchers began to notice as they dug deeper into the CryptoLocker operation was that the crew behind the ransomware had done a lot of things right, but had also exhibited some oddly inconsistent behaviors.

Submission + - Khronos Releases OpenGL 4.5, Announces Development Of New Graphics API (phoronix.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Khronos Group announced from SIGGRAPH the OpenGL 4.5 specification that brings direct state access and other improvements to the GL standard. Khronos also announced they are developing a brand new graphics API from the ground-up to succeed OpenGL in its current form. "Key directions for the new ground-up design include explicit application control over GPU and CPU workloads for performance and predictability, a multithreading-friendly API with greatly reduced overhead, a common shader program intermediate language, and a strengthened ecosystem focus that includes rigorous conformance testing. Fast-paced work on detailed proposals and designs are already underway, and any company interested to participate is strongly encouraged to join Khronos for a voice and a vote in the development process."

Submission + - TEPCO: Nearly all nuclear fuel melted at Fukushima No. 3 reactor (asahi.com)

Submitted by mdsolar
mdsolar writes: Almost all of the nuclear fuel in the No. 3 reactor of the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant melted within days of the March 11, 2011, disaster, according to a new estimate by Tokyo Electric Power Co.

TEPCO originally estimated that about 60 percent of the nuclear fuel melted at the reactor. But the latest estimate released on Aug. 6 revealed that the fuel started to melt about six hours earlier than previously thought.

TEPCO said most of the melted fuel likely dropped to the bottom of the containment unit from the pressure vessel after the disaster set off by the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami.

Submission + - Snowden granted three more years in Russia

Submitted by SiggyRadiation
SiggyRadiation writes: Edward Snowden is allowed to stay in Russia for three more years. According to the NYPost:
"His lawyer, Analtoly Kucherena, was quoted by Russian news agencies on Thursday as saying Snowden now has been granted residency for three more years, but that he had not been granted political asylum. That status, which would allow him to stay in Russia permanently, must be decided by a separate procedure, Kucherena said, but didn’t say whether Snowden is seeking it."

The question that remains of course is, did the Russians use this as leverage over him to get to more information or influence him or is the positive PR in itself enough for the Russians in the current climate of tensions and economic sanctions relating to the Ukraine crisis?

Comment Learn fundamentals, and a hot button (Score 1) 637

by mrflash818 (#47615847) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: "Real" Computer Scientists vs. Modern Curriculum?

One of my favorite Computer Science instructors said to us: Learn the fundamentals, and a hot button.

A hot button is the 'new cool thing' that everyone is asking for.

The fundamentals are, well, the fundamentals.

So, when I went to school to work on my Bachelor's, we used ADA, c, c++, x86 assembly. ADA was for the "intro to computer science", clang was for many, I chose to use c++ for compiler class. x86 assembly was for assembly language programming.

Back then Java was the new thing, so I made sure to take Java as an elective.

So for YOU, figure out what is hot, learn it, but also learn your fundamentals. Knowing how to allocate, use, and return system resources is a fundamental. That fundamental is used for working with Files, Memory, Databases. I would dare day that also learning to work with exception handling (c++/java) is a good fundamental. If you think 'old school' programming is an interest, then being comfortable with clang pointers would be good as well.

Submission + - The FBI Is Infecting Tor Users with Malware with Drive-by Downloads (wired.com)

Submitted by Advocatus Diaboli
Advocatus Diaboli writes: For the last two years, the FBI has been quietly experimenting with drive-by hacks as a solution to one of law enforcement’s knottiest Internet problems: how to identify and prosecute users of criminal websites hiding behind the powerful Tor anonymity system. The approach has borne fruit—over a dozen alleged users of Tor-based child porn sites are now headed for trial as a result. But it’s also engendering controversy, with charges that the Justice Department has glossed over the bulk-hacking technique when describing it to judges, while concealing its use from defendants.

Submission + - Barack Obama's Secret Terrorist-Tracking System, by the Numbers (firstlook.org)

Submitted by Advocatus Diaboli
Advocatus Diaboli writes: Nearly half of the people on the U.S. government’s widely shared database of terrorist suspects are not connected to any known terrorist group, according to classified government documents obtained by The Intercept. Of the 680,000 people caught up in the government’s Terrorist Screening Database—a watchlist of “known or suspected terrorists” that is shared with local law enforcement agencies, private contractors, and foreign governments—more than 40 percent are described by the government as having “no recognized terrorist group affiliation.” That category—280,000 people—dwarfs the number of watchlisted people suspected of ties to al Qaeda, Hamas, and Hezbollah combined.

Submission + - Carnegie Mellon creates open source tool to 'extract' 3D obecjts from 2D images (themukt.com)

Submitted by sfcrazy
sfcrazy writes: It's not exactly 'extracting' in literal terms, but you can now pick an object in any image and manipulate it as if you are 'holding' it in your hands. Carnegie Mellon university has created tool which can add the ’3rd dimension’ to an object in a photo allowing the editors to turn or flip objects any way they want, even exposing surfaces not visible in the original photograph.

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