Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Submission + - Police helicopter was chasing our drone, arrested men say (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by mpicpp
mpicpp writes: Two men were arrested early Monday morning for flying a small drone too close to a New York Police Department (NYPD) helicopter.

Detective Mark Nell, an NYPD spokesman, told Ars that a police helicopter was on routine patrol near the George Washington Bridge in the northwestern part of Manhattan when the pilot spotted the drone orbiting above the bridge.

“During that time, the drone ascended approximately 2,000 feet into the air and came close to the aviation unit, causing it to veer off of its flight pattern,” Nell said, noting that the officers radioed down to ground units. “There were two individuals that were arrested after the drone landed.”

Comment When it comes to fighting cybercrime .. (Score 3, Insightful) 113

"When it comes to fighting cybercrime, few companies can claim to have done as much as Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft"

Despite how much effort Microsoft retrospectively put into trying to change the historical facts. When it comes to causing cybercrime, few companies can claim to have done as much damage as Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft.

"Windows NT and its successors .. were not initially designed with Internet security" ref

Submission + - DistroWatch.com domain name suspended due to issue with domain registrar (zdnet.com)

Submitted by rriegs
rriegs writes: The popular DistroWatch Linux and BSD distribution tracking site has had its .com domain name suspended as a result of unspecified issues with its domain registrar, Doteasy. Founder Ladislav Bodnar reports:

As many of you noticed, the distrowatch.com domain name was suspended by the domain's registrar, Doteasy, last Sunday. I don't want to go into details about what exactly happened as it's a long and boring story. Suffice to say that I feel grossly aggrieved by the series of greedy and even malicious actions taken by Doteasy and as soon as I get this sorted out, I will be looking into transferring the distrowatch.com domain name to another registrar.

DistroWatch continues operations at its alternate domain name, distrowatch.org. Can anyone recommend a suitable, Linux- and BSD-friendly domain registrar to help get DistroWatch back online under its chosen URL?

Comment Re:What the hell? (Score 1) 201

@engun: "The tone of this post is insane. It makes it sound like Americans are the only people on this planet with a right to privacy. What about the rest of the world? So the NSA's only crime is that it spied on US citizens? Is it perfectly ok to undermine those same rights for other human beings?"

Well yea, if your not American you have no right to privacy ..

Submission + - Brazil Contacted an Isolated Tribe for the First Time in Two Decades

Submitted by Jason Koebler
Jason Koebler writes: For the first time in nearly 20 years, the Brazilian government has made contact with a previously isolated indigenous tribe after the group was forced to take refuge from illegal logging in the Amazon rainforest.
According to FUNAI, Brazil's indigenous affairs department, the contact was made last weekend near the Peru-Brazil border. It's the first time the Brazilian government has interacted with a previously uncontacted tribe since 1996. The group is believed to have been pushed there by illegal logging in Peru and comes just days after FUNAI warned of "imminent death and tragedy" if the logging didn't stop.

Comment Don't Feed the Super-Troll .. (Score 1) 228

by lippydude (#47368117) Attached to: Nathan Myhrvold's Recipe For a Better Oven
Don't Feed the Super-Troll

1990: "The purpose of announcing early like this is to freeze the market at the OEM and ISV level .. One might worry that this will help Sun because we will just have vaporware":
Nathan Myhrvold to Bill Gates ..

1995: "Given that we are looking at the Internet destroying our position as the setter of standards and APIs do you see things we should be doing to use ACT assets to avoid this?":
Biill Gates to Nathan Myhrvold ..

Comment What OS does this targeted banking fraud run on? (Score 1) 35

by lippydude (#47314219) Attached to: Banking Fraud Campaign Steals 500k Euros In a Week
“On the C&C server we detected there was no information as to which specific malware program was used in this campaign. However, many existing Zeus variations (Citadel, SpyEye, IceIX, etc.) – have that necessary capability. We believe the malware used in this campaign could be a Zeus flavor using sophisticated web injects on the victims” ref

Submission + - Banking Fraud Campaign Steals 500k Euros In A Week

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The experts at Kaspersky Lab have discovered evidence of a targeted attack against the clients of a large European bank. According to the logs found in the server used by the attackers, apparently in the space of just one week cybercriminals stole more than half a million euros from accounts in the bank. The experts also detected transaction logs on the server, containing information about which sums of money were taken from which accounts. All in all, more than 190 victims could be identified, most of them located in Italy and Turkey. The sums stolen from each bank account, according to the logs, ranged between 1,700 to 39,000 euros.

Submission + - Mozilla puts a development environment into the browser with WebIDE (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by mpicpp
mpicpp writes: Browsers have long contained development tools to help debug and diagnose problems when authoring Web content, but Mozilla is taking Firefox to the next level. Nightly builds of the browser now contain a development environment, WebIDE, for creating, testing, and deploying Firefox OS apps.

With WebIDE, developers will be able to create new applications from scratch, package them for distribution, deploy them to both the Firefox OS simulator and real Firefox OS hardware, and remotely debug them—all from within the browser and without the use of additional tools.

Mozilla cites two major advantages of using WebIDE as compared with developing apps for competing platforms. In-browser development tools are already familiar to the enormous number of Web developers that exist, so using them for application development minimizes the number of new tools and new skills that must be learned.

Second, they're extremely lightweight as development tools go. The substantial size of downloading tools such as Xcode or Visual Studio, in addition to the cost of developer licenses on other platforms, can limit their appeal and usability, especially in emerging markets. Putting the tools into the browser means that Mozilla's reach is near universal.

Submission + - Poorly anonymized logs reveal NYC cab drivers' detailed whereabouts (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by mpicpp
mpicpp writes: In the latest gaffe to demonstrate the privacy perils of anonymized data, New York City officials have inadvertently revealed the detailed comings and goings of individual taxi drivers over more than 173 million trips.

City officials released the data in response to a public records request and specifically obscured the drivers' hack license numbers and medallion numbers. Rather than including those numbers in plaintext, the 20 gigabyte file contained one-way cryptographic hashes using the MD5 algorithm. Instead of a record showing medallion number 9Y99 or hack number 5296319, for example, those numbers were converted to 71b9c3f3ee5efb81ca05e9b90c91c88f and 98c2b1aeb8d40ff826c6f1580a600853, respectively. Because they're one-way hashes, they can't be mathematically converted back into their original values. Presumably, officials used the hashes to preserve the privacy of individual drivers since the records provide a detailed view of their locations and work performance over an extended period of time.

It turns out there's a significant flaw in the approach. Because both the medallion and hack numbers are structured in predictable patterns, it was trivial to run all possible iterations through the same MD5 algorithm and then compare the output to the data contained in the 20GB file. Software developer Vijay Pandurangan did just that, and in less than two hours he had completely de-anonymized all 173 million entries.

Slashdot Top Deals

A boss with no humor is like a job that's no fun.

Close