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Submission + - D-Link Releases Router Firmware Updates for unauthorized vulnerability (thehackernews.com)

Submitted by Mohit Kumar
Mohit Kumar writes: D-Link has Releases Router Firmware Updates for unauthorized vulnerability, that was discovered back in October. The flaw allows an attacker to access the Router as administrator if the browser's user agent string is set to xmlset_roodkcableoj28840ybtide. The company advised users to do not enable the Remote Management feature, since this will allow malicious users to use this exploit from the internet and also warned to ignore unsolicited emails.

Submission + - Government Chemist Tampered With 34000 Cases, Mass legal system in turmoil (npr.org)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: In a maddening scandal that is rocking the state of Massachusetts, a government crime lab chemist has been caught intentionally forging signatures and tampering with evidence from thousands of cases, destroying the lives of countless innocent Americans.

Annie Dookhan worked as a chemist for the State of Massachusetts, and it turns out she had close relations with prosecutors.

These prosecutors were able to successfully convict innocent Americans because Dookhan would chemically taint the “evidence,” resulting in career boosts for the prosecutors while innocent men and women were torn from their families and locked in cells.

Prosecutors praised Dookhan’s work and depended on her to get the convictions they wanted. Hundreds of “convicts” and defendants have already been released, and there are potentially thousands more waiting to be set free.

Submission + - Computer Model Reveals Escape Plan From Poverty's Vicious Circle (medium.com)

Submitted by KentuckyFC
KentuckyFC writes: Infectious disease condemns poor countries to an endless cycle of ill health and poverty. Now a powerful new model of the link between disease and economic growth has revealed why some escape plans work while others just make matters worse. The problem is that when workers suffer from poor health, economic output goes down. And if economic output goes down, there is less to spend on healthcare. And if spending on healthcare drops, workers become less healthy. And so on. So an obvious solution is for a country to spend more on healthcare. But the new model says governments must take care since the cost to a poor country can send the economy spiralling into long term decline. By contrast, an injection of capital from outside the country allows spending on healthcare to increase without any drop in economic output. "“We find that a large influx of capital is successful in escaping the poverty trap, but increasing health spending alone is not,” say the authors. And the amount required is relatively little. The model suggests that long term investment needs only to be more than 15 per cent of the cost of healthcare. But anything less than this cannot prevent the vicious circle of decline.

Submission + - Rivals can legally create copycat software says UK Court (out-law.com)

Submitted by eionmac
eionmac writes: Decision byy UK Appeal Court. Businesses can replicate the way a rivals' computer program operates by interpreting how it functions from reading user manuals or other accompanying documents their rivals produce without infringing copyright, the Court of Appeal has ruled

Submission + - ASICMINER's Immersion Bitcoin Miner - How Far It Has Gone (i-programmer.info)

Submitted by mikejuk
mikejuk writes: If you think that Bitcoin mining is something you can do with a spare GPU, or even a rack of spare GPUs, then it's time to rethink. The day of the dedicated hash computing hardware is with us and people pay thousands of dollars for hardware that does nothing but mine Bitcoin. However, it seems that it is time to upgrade your expectations once again because there are mining operations that use racks of liquid cooled ASIC devices to do the job.
The ASICMINER construction was started in August 2013 and its hash rate started to ramp up in October. The whole unit is installed on the roof of the company that makes the ASIC chips. The ASIC cards are fitted to racks inside a glass tank containing a fire retardant liquid normally used in extinguishers. The liquid is cooled and pumped around using Chinese hardware. Each tank has 92 blades with 200cc of liquid providing 4kw of cooling.
How much of an impact on the difficulty of Bitcoin mining such super miners will have is difficult to say. The Bitcoin algorithm adjusts the difficulty every 2016 blocks to keep the rate at about 10 minutes to solve a block. It the hardware improves then the difficulty goes up to keep the rate constant. So introducing super hash farms, such as this one, will make the problem harder and make it increasingly difficult for less well equipped miners to succeed.
Of course, this is another potential mechanism whereby the Bitcoin algorithm could become compromised. A single mining faculty such as this could end up in control of most of the block validations in the world, with the resulting loss of decentralised processing that Bitcoin depends on.

Submission + - Japan Wants To Turn The Moon Into A Giant Power Plant Read more: http://www.bus

Submitted by mrspoonsi
mrspoonsi writes: Shimizu Corporation, a Japanese architecture and engineering firm, has a plan to effectively turn the moon into a giant solar power plant, reports Inhabitat. It proposes building a massive collection of solar panels (a "Luna Ring") 6,800 miles long by 12 miles wide on the moon's surface. That's certainly a heavy-duty construction job for human beings, so Shimizu plans to get the work done with robots, only involving humans in supervisory roles. Once complete, this hypothetical plant could continuously send energy to "receiving stations" around the globe by way of lasers and microwave transmission. This idea gets around two major hurdles for solar power, as there is no weather or darkness to curb electricity production on the moon. If operating in ship-shape, Shimizu says it could continuously send 13,000 terawatts of power back to Earth. By comparison, the total installed electricity generation summer capacity in the United States was 1,050.9 gigawatts.

Comment Re:To hire specific people (Score 1) 465

by Rande (#45553573) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Why Are Tech Job Requirements So Specific?

Because the person they hired for that job lied on their CV and at interview to get the job, and if they lied on their CV about having a certain specific set of skills, they *shock* may well have lied about lots of other things.
So now they put the job back up, maybe asking the other interviewees is they are still available. Still not realizing that by having such a specific set of requirements, almost noone is qualified and the few people who are, aren't going to settle for the wage offered.
And so everyone who does pass the filter is a liar, only ever interviewing liars. ...And then complain loudly how hard it is to get any good engineers.

Comment Re:price (Score 1) 331

by Rande (#45547787) Attached to: 62% of 16 To 24-Year-Olds Prefer Printed Books Over eBooks

Actually, before Apple, the publishers were making exactly the same amount of profit, because they were selling them at a fixed price to the retailers.
However, Amazon was quite happy with a ~2% profit margin, and so were selling ebooks quite cheaply.
But this could give an impression that books were not as valuable as the publishers would like, and so were quite happy to collude with Apple when they wanted their 30% profit.

This impression of value is why garment labels hate grey imports. The market will bear $100 labelled jeans even though it only costs them $8 to make, _if_ there is an impression of exclusivity/value. But this impression is broken when a grey market seller decides to sell the same product for $50 - the same price as a lower tier label.

Comment Re:Why chess? (Score 1) 131

by Rande (#45491633) Attached to: 22-Year-Old Norwegian Magnus Carlsen Is the New World Chess Champion

Imagine chess replacing actual war.

We'd use drones then too.
The BAU would be scanning eye movements and microgestures of the opponent.
The NSA generate a mental model simulating the opponent.
The CIA would drug the opponent and kidnap his family.
The TSA would anally probe them entering the country.
And NASA would move the board to the moon. ...actually, that last one wouldn't be a bad thing.

Submission + - Google Shows Playable Doodle for "Doctor Who"

Submitted by rtoz
rtoz writes: Google is showing special interactive animated Doodle for “Doctor Who” which is a British science-fiction television programme produced by the BBC. The programme depicts the adventures of a Time Lord—a time-travelling humanoid alien known as the Doctor. If you are not yet seeing this Doodle in your country, you can play from https://www.google.com/logos/2013/drwho/drwho.html

Or, watch this video if you are not having enough patience to play this game yourself.

Submission + - Google's Tour of Middle Earth: LOTR From a Great Eagle's POV (thehobbit.com)

Submitted by Press2ToContinue
Press2ToContinue writes: Middle Earth is an amazing fictional world, but if you want to really get to know it, you've got to read a lot of words. So if you're in the mood for a little Tolkien fantasy without hunkering down for a serious reading session, Google's brand new tour of Middle Earth is a beautiful (and effortless) way to get your fix.

Submission + - How do you avoid corporate Thanksgiving?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Here in the United States it is coming close to Thanksgiving, a holiday to visit family and be thankful for our many blessings. However corporate culture, as a part of our-business-is-a-family mentality likes to do pot lucks. I will encourage and support anyone that wants to have the pot luck on company time as long as the company does not make me participate. I, like many people, do not regard my co-workers as a "family". I don't feel like investing extra money to feed these people in the name of company-is-family and "team building". I'm not a hostile employee but I realize that the company regards everyone as a replaceable cog and a lowest-cost expense. Of course I realize saying anything like this to our company would cause me to be fired. I am sure I am not alone in feeling this. How does everyone else deal with this?

Submission + - Imagining the Post-Antibiotic Future

Submitted by Hugh Pickens DOT Com
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: Health authorities have been struggling to convince the public that the threat of totally drug-resistant bacteria is a crisis. Earlier this year, British chief medical officer Sally Davies described resistance to antibiotics as a "catastrophic global threat" that should be ranked alongside terrorism. In September, Dr. Thomas Frieden, the director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, issued a blunt warning: “If we’re not careful, we will soon be in a post-antibiotic era. For some patients and some microbes, we are already there.” Now Maryn McKenna writes that we are on the verge of entering a new era in history and asks us to imagine what our lives would be like if we really lost antibiotics to advancing drug resistance. We'll not just lose the ability to treat infectious disease; that’s obvious. But also: The ability to treat cancer, and to transplant organs, because doing those successfully relies on suppressing the immune system and willingly making ourselves vulnerable to infection. We'll lose any treatment that relies on a permanent port into the bloodstream — for instance, kidney dialysis. We'd lose any major open-cavity surgery, on the heart, the lungs, the abdomen. We'd lose implantable devices: new hips, new knees, new heart valves. We’d lose the ability to treat people after traumatic accidents, as major as crashing your car and as minor as your kid falling out of a tree. We’d lose the safety of modern childbirth. We’d lose a good portion of our cheap modern food supply because most of the meat we eat in the industrialized world is raised with the routine use of antibiotics, to fatten livestock and protect them from the conditions in which the animals are raised. "And it wouldn’t be just meat. Antibiotics are used in plant agriculture as well, especially on fruit. Right now, a drug-resistant version of the bacterial disease fire blight is attacking American apple crops," writes McKenna. "There’s currently one drug left to fight it."

Submission + - New Design for Airline Seats Allows for Adjustable Width (futuretravelexperience.com)

Submitted by dragonguyt
dragonguyt writes: British design and innovation consultancy Seymourpowell has unveiled an adjustable economy airline seat concept, which allows for seat width to be increased or decreased depending on passenger needs.

The concept – named ‘Morph’ – uses a sheet of fabric that is stretched across three seats and held in place using armrests and dividers. One sheet of fabric is used for the seat base and another for the seat back.

The seats also include formers, which can be moved to adjust the individual seat size. So, in a configuration of three 18-inch wide seats, one seat could be increased to 20 inches, one could remain 18 inches and the third could be reduced to 16 inches.

The company says airlines could choose to charge more for wider seats and less for the narrower seats. For families travelling together, the adults could widen their seats, while the children could sit in the narrower seats.

The launch of the Morph seat concept comes just two weeks after Airbus called on all airlines to offer a minimum 18-inch seat width in long-haul economy.

Submission + - Microsoft Customers Hit With New Wave Of Fake Tech Support Calls

Submitted by rjmarvin
rjmarvin writes: A new surge of callers posing predominately as Microsoft technicians are attempting and sometimes succeeding in scamming customers http://sdt.bz/66400, convincing them their PCs are infected and directing them to install malware-ridden software or give the callers remote access to the computer. The fraudsters also solicit payment for the fake services rendered. This comes only a year after the FTC cracked down on fake tech support calls, charging six scam operators last October http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2012/10/pecon.shtm.

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