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Submission + - NSA CTO Patrick Dowd Moonlighting for Private Security Firm (theguardian.com)

Submitted by un1nsp1red
un1nsp1red writes: Current NSA CTO Patrick Dowd has taken a part-time position with former-NSA director Keith Alexander's security firm IronNet Cybersecurity — while retaining his position as chief technology officer for the NSA. The Guardian states that "Patrick Dowd continues to work as a senior NSA official while also working part time for Alexander’s IronNet Cybersecurity, a firm reported to charge up to $1m a month for advising banks on protecting their data from hackers. It is exceedingly rare for a US official to be allowed to work for a private, for-profit company in a field intimately related to his or her public function." Some may give Alexander a pass on the possible conflict of interests as he's now retired, but what about a current NSA official moonlighting for a private security firm?

Submission + - FBI: backdoors in software may need to be mandatory (nytimes.com)

Submitted by wabrandsma
wabrandsma writes: The New York Times:

The director of the F.B.I., James B. Comey, said on Thursday that the "post-Snowden pendulum" that has driven Apple and Google to offer fully encrypted cellphones had "gone too far." He hinted that as a result, the administration might seek regulations and laws forcing companies to create a way for the government to unlock the photos, emails and contacts stored on the phones.

But Mr. Comey appeared to have few answers for critics who have argued that any portal created for the F.B.I. and the police could be exploited by the National Security Agency, or even Russian and Chinese intelligence agencies or criminals. And his position seemed to put him at odds with a White House advisory committee that recommended against any effort to weaken commercial encryption.

Submission + - Microsoft, Facebook Declare European Kids Clueless About Coding, Too

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Having declared U.S. kids clueless about coding, Facebook and Microsoft are now turning their attention to Europe's young 'uns. "As stewards of Europe's future generations," begins the Open Letter to the European Union Ministers for Education signed by Facebook and Microsoft, "you will be all too aware that as early as the age of 7, children reach a critical juncture, when they are learning the core life skills of reading, writing and basic maths. However, to flourish in tomorrow's digital economy and society, they should also be learning to code. And many, sadly, are not." Released at the launch of the European Coding Initiative — aka All You Need is Code! — in conjunction with the EU's Code Week, the letter closes, "As experts in our field, we owe it to Europe's youth to help equip with them with the skills they will need to succeed — regardless of where life takes them." Hopefully, life won't take them to a massive layoff, like the one that left 12,500 Nokia workers jobless just three months after joining Microsoft. By the way, the "All You Need is Code" initiative, explained an SAP press release, was conceived at the 2014 World Economic Forum, where EU Commission vice president Neelie Kroes — who yukked-it-up at the event with former nemesis Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith — called on the private sector to endorse the Davos Declaration to deepen support for the Grand Coalition for Digital Jobs.

Submission + - WordPress Defaults Preserve Avenue For Denial of Service Attacks (thedrinkingrecord.com)

Submitted by MrBingoBoingo
MrBingoBoingo writes: As bad as the Bash shell behavior was, giving attackers a shell on your server This WordPress XMLRPC Pingback hole is just as bad to your fellow internet residents. Sure Shell Shock was worse for you since it offered a shell on your machine, but to your friendly Internet neighbors the WordPress bullshit is just as bad. And much like WordPress there were Bash scripts that had been functional since 1992 which no longer work on patched versions of Bash, but for WordPress Backwards compatibility is still more important.

Submission + - 700k New Zealand Internet Users Suffer Outage From Fake Celebrity Nudes Malware (techgeek.com.au)

Submitted by cold fjord
cold fjord writes: techgeek reports, "Spark New Zealand – the country’s largest internet service provider – suffered a massive outage lasting nearly thirty hours from last Friday. The outage saw its nearly 700,000 customer base having slow or no internet connectivity on their mobile phones or computers – all because some users on their network wanted to see nude pics of celebrities. According to local media, some users clicked on a link that claimed to contain images from the recent dump of nude photos of several high profile female celebrities like Jennifer Lawrence and Ariana Grande. However, the link lead them to a page telling them they had to download a piece of software to view them – which was malware. ... Spark told the New Zealand Herald that it was a denial of service attack linked to some of its customers downloading malware was the reason why its network went down, and has taken steps to remedy the problem." — NBC News reports both phishing and malware attacks associated with the stolen photographs.

Submission + - Scientists found the origin of the Ebola outbreak (vox.com)

Submitted by Taco Cowboy
Taco Cowboy writes: One of the big mysteries in the Ebola outbreak in West Africa is where the virus came from in the first place — and whether it's changed in any significant ways

In a new paper in Science, researchers reveal that they have sequenced the genomes of Ebola from 78 patients in Sierra Leone who contracted the disease in May and June. Those sequences revealed some 300 mutations specific to this outbreak

Among their findings, the researchers discovered that the current viral strains come from a related strain that left Central Africa within the past ten years. Using genetic sequences from current and previous outbreaks, the researchers mapped out a family tree that puts a common ancestor of the recent West African outbreak some place in Central Africa roughly around 2004. This contradicts an earlier hypothesis that the virus had been hanging around West Africa for much longer than that

Researchers are also planning to study the mutations to see if any of them are affecting Ebola's recent behavior. The number of mutations found is completely normal, and it isn't necessarily the case that they'll have a big effect. But it's possible that something intriguing could turn up. For example, this outbreak has had a higher transmission rate and lower death rate than others, and researchers are curious if any of these mutations are related to that

The scientific paper on Ebola is also a sad reminder of the toll that the virus has taken on those working on the front lines. Five of the authors died of Ebola before it was published

There is a graph of the "family tree" of the Ebola virus @ http://cdn3.vox-cdn.com/thumbo...

Submission + - Firefox 31 Garbage Collection

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Firefox 31 now has the Generational Garbage Collection and now the future of Garbage Collection in Firefox is about adding Compaction to this GGC (Generational Garbage Collection). After implementing Exact Rooting this is the most natural transition. As a Research Student I want to study the Generational Garbage Collection followed by Firefox 31. According to the Benchmark results (http://www.arewefastyet.com/) Firefox have seen some performance improvements but somewhere they seem to degrade as well. So I want to know what is the reason behind this.

I am curious to know what is the exact algorithm that is being followed for GGC in Firefox 31. Even a link where it is described with enough details will be a great help.

Submission + - DOJ Admits It's Still Destroying Evidence In NSA Case

Submitted by Presto Vivace
Presto Vivace writes: DOJ Admits It's Still Destroying Evidence In NSA Case; Judge Orders Them (Again) To Stop; DOJ Flips Out

So, remember how we wrote about the big EFF filing in the Jewel v. NSA case, about how the NSA and DOJ had been knowingly destroying key evidence by pretending that they thought the preservation orders only applied to one kind of spying, and not the kind that was approved by the FISA Court (despite at other times admitting that the surveillance at issue in the case was approved by the FISA Court)? Yeah, so, yesterday, the EFF realized that despite the big kerfuffle this whole thing had caused, the NSA and DOJ were still destroying that evidence, and sprinted over to the court to file for an emergency temporary restraining order on the government.

Submission + - Haiku debates kernel switch to Linux... or not. (osnews.com)

Submitted by taikedz
taikedz writes: A very interesting discussion is taking place in the Haiku mailing list. A developer has created a working prototype implementation of the BeOS API layer on top of the Linux kernel, and he is wondering if the project is worth pursuing.

Both 'sides' make a lot of compelling arguments, and it gives a lot of insight into decisions that went into the Haiku project, both past and present.

Submission + - Study: Social Networks Have Negative Effect On Individual Welfare (technologyreview.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A study of 50,000 people in Italy has found the impact of social networking on individual welfare to be "significantly negative." The researchers found that improvements in self-reported well-being occurred when online networking led to face-to-face interactions, but this effect was overwhelmed by the perceived losses in well-being (PDF) generated by interaction strictly through social networks. The researchers "highlight the role of discrimination and hate speech on social media which they say play a significant role in trust and well-being. Better moderation could significantly improve the well-being of the people who use social networks, they conclude."

Submission + - MIPS Tempts Hackers with Raspbery Pi-like Dev Board (linuxgizmos.com) 1

Submitted by __aajbyc7391
__aajbyc7391 writes: In a bid to harness the energy and enthusiasm swirling around today’s open, hackable single board computers, Imagination Technologies, licensor of the MIPS ISA, has unveiled the Creator C120 development board, the ISA's counter to ARM's popular Raspberry Pi and BeagleBone Black SBCs. The MIPS dev board is based on a 1.2GHz dual-core MIPS32 system-on-chip and has 1GB RAM and 8GB flash, and there's also an SD card slot for expansion. Ports include video, audio, Ethernet, both WiFi and Bluetooth 4.0, and a bunch more. OS images are already available for Debian 7, Gentoo, Yocto, and Arch Linux, and Android v4.4 is expected to be available soon. Perhaps the most interesting feature of the board is that there's no pricing listed yet, because the company is starting out by giving the boards away free to developers who submit the most interesting projects.

Submission + - Bitcoin User tells of Interview by FBI and Treasury Department (thedrinkingrecord.com)

Submitted by MrBingoBoingo
MrBingoBoingo writes: Recently a Bitcoin user reports being interviewed over their past use of a now defuct exchange service by agents from the FBI and Treasury Department. This encounter raises concerns that earlier Bitcoin users who entered the space inocuously and without ties to Dark Markets or The Silk Road might need to prepare for Law Enforcement questioning about their early Bitcoin related activities.

Comment Re: False dichotomy. (Score 3, Insightful) 199

by MrBingoBoingo (#47672817) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Should You Invest In Documentation, Or UX?
And then there's the matter that a number of people who really benefit from good documentation are developers. Documentation helps describe to your team what these chunks of code are supposed to do and in the long run can help to avoid the problem where "new features" end up poorly replacing popular well used features.

Comment Re:There's another treatment that stops most T2 (Score 2) 253

by MrBingoBoingo (#47480523) Attached to: New Treatment Stops Type II Diabetes
"Yeah; your cholesterol levels are controlled by your liver." Very much this. I am chubby pack a day smoker while also being sedentary and drinking ~400 ml plus of hard liquor a day. My cholersterol is great though. Ninetieth percentile on LDL's and low HDL and VHDL cholesterol. It is a situation where people don't get to roll their own dice as much as the shills would have them imagine so.

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