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Security

Is China Creating the World's Largest Botnet Army? 195

Posted by timothy from the economies-of-scale dept.
david_a_eaves writes "The Chinese government is mandating that all computers sold in China come with Internet blocking software. Rob Cottingham writes an excellent piece noting how the censorship application of this software should be the least of our concerns. This new software may create an opportunity for the Chinese Government to appropriate these computers and use them to create the worlds largest botnet army." Update: 06/11 21:26 GMT by T : J. Alex Halderman writes "My students and I have been examining the Green Dam censorware software. We've found serious vulnerabilities that can be exploited by any web site a user visits with the software installed. We also found that some of the blacklists seems to have been taken from the American-made filtering program CyberSitter. We've posted a report and demo."

Comment Please, no more US political stories on /. (Score 1) 550

by Esteban (#28005839) Attached to: Biden Reveals Location of Secret VP Bunker

This has been the most useless set of comments I've seen on Slashdot (and yes, I'm not excepting my own).

For some reason, censorship stories, Patriot Act stories, MS stories, OLPC stories, evil-video-game stories, Star Trek stories, dog vs. cat stories, Mountain Dew vs. Jolt stories, coffee/tea stories, religion stories, lawyer stories, public wifi stories, stories that refer to crackers as 'hackers', and a bunch of other story types, none of them prompts a set of comments as worthless as this sort of story.

We have lots of places to see people post their political views without reading anyone else's comments. Please don't make Slashdot another venue for that.
Medicine

Draft Stem Cell Guidelines Threaten Research 206

Posted by kdawson from the retroactively-applied-ethics dept.
Death Metal suggests we peruse a piece up at Wired on how the Obama administration's draft guidelines for stem cell research could invalidate hundreds of cell lines. "Under the Obama administration's proposed rules for funding embryonic stem cell research, hundreds of existing cell lines could be ineligible, even those that qualified under President Bush. The guidelines were written by the National Institutes of Health and are currently in draft form and expected to be finalized in July. But in their current state, they restrict funding to stem cell lines produced according to new rules that are only now being established. Few existing cell lines will meet those requirements. 'The so-called Presidential lines aren't suitable for actual medical application,' said Patrick Taylor, deputy counsel at Children's Hospital Boston, who criticized the NIH guidelines in a paper published Thursday in Cell Stem Cell. 'But we're talking about many, many more lines. The new lines were created with extensive ethical oversight. They're at stake here.'"
Security

Man Arrested For Taking Photo of Open ATM 1232

Posted by kdawson from the i-will-tackle-you dept.
net_shaman writes in with word of a Seattle man who was arrested for taking a photo of an ATM being serviced. "Today I was shopping at the downtown Seattle REI. I was about to buy a Thule hitch mount bike rack. They were out of the piece that locks the bike rack into the hitch. So I was in the customer service line to special order one. It was a long line and while I was waiting, I saw two of guys (employees of Loomis, as I later learned) refilling the ATM. I walked over and took a picture with my iPhone of them and more interestingly of the open ATM. I took the picture because I'm fascinated by the insides of things that we don't normally get to see. ... That was when Officer GE Abed (#6270) spun me around and put handcuffs on me."

Comment Not in a relatively safe spot. (Score 2, Insightful) 604

by Esteban (#27768085) Attached to: When it comes to the Swine Flu, I am ...

I'm generally not so concerned about these things, but:
1) I teach at a university in Florida. Students here don't go to Florida for spring break. They go to Mexico.
2) I just received exams from the students in my large intro class. College kids aren't the most hygienic bunch. I also received about 1000 pages of homework, on paper originating in their filthy filthy dorm rooms.

All that being the case, I feel a bit more conc-

Oops, have to cut this short. I've started experiencing fever, lethargy, lack of appetite and coughing (to say nothing of the runny nose, sore throat, nausea, vomiting and diarrhea).
Social Networks

Social Networking Sites Getting Risky For Recruiting 227

Posted by kdawson from the no-clue-what-you-did-last-summer dept.
onehitwonder writes "While many recruiters and HR managers are taking advantage of the Web and online social networks to screen candidates for positions inside their organizations, a bank in Texas has decided that using social networking websites in its recruiting process is too risky legally. Amegy Bank of Texas now prohibits internal HR staff and external recruiters from using social networking sites in its hiring process. Amegy's decision to ban the use of social networking sites in its hiring process demonstrates its respect for prospective employees' privacy. It also sends a message to the employers and recruiters using social networks to snoop into job seekers' personal lives that their actions border on discrimination and could get them in a lot of legal trouble."
Earth

New Data Center Will Heat Homes In London 204

Posted by samzenpus from the one-click-heating dept.
1sockchuck writes "The heat generated by thousands of servers at the new Telehouse West data center in London will soon be used to heat nearby houses and businesses. The Greater London Authority has approved a plan in which waste heat from the colocation facility will be used in a district heat network for the local Docklands community. The project is expected to produce up to nine megawatts of power for the local community."
Networking

Grad Student Project Uses Wikis To Stash Data, Miffs Admins 268

Posted by timothy from the going-on-the-beg-forgiveness-principle dept.
Anonymous writes "Two graduate students at the Ivy League's Brown University built a P2P system to use abandoned wiki sites to store data. The students were stealing bandwidth from open MediaWiki sites to send data between users as an alternative to BitTorrent. There was immediate backlash as site operators quickly complained to the University. The project appears to be shutdown, but many of the pages still remain on the web. The project homepage was also taken down and the students posted an apology this afternoon." The same submitter links to two different forum discussions on the project.
Image

Chimpanzees Exchange Meat For Sex 313

Posted by samzenpus from the what-do-I-get-for-a-cheeseburger dept.
the_therapist writes "A team from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, studied chimps in the Tai Forest reserve in Ivory Coast and discovered that chimpanzees enter into 'deals' whereby they exchange meat for sex. Among the findings are that 'male chimps that are willing to share the proceeds of their hunting expeditions mate twice as often as their more selfish counterparts.' They also found this to be 'a long-term exchange, so males continue to share their catch with females when they are not fertile, copulating with them when they are.'"
Medicine

Beware the Perils of Caffeine Withdrawal 700

Posted by timothy from the to-make-a-grown-man-cry dept.
palegray.net writes "CNN is running an article on the notorious effects of caffeine withdrawal, a problem that seems to be affecting an increasing number of people. Citing numerous reasons why people might need to cut back on their caffeine intake (pregnancy, pre-surgery requirements, etc), the story notes a significant number of people who are simply unable to quit. I drink around eight cups of coffee a day, along with a soda or two, and I definitely suffer from nasty withdrawal symptoms without my fix."
Networking

New Fundamental Law of Network Economics 106

Posted by kdawson from the move-over-metcalfe dept.
intersys writes "A new fundamental law of economics has been formulated by Rod Beckstrom, former Director of the National Cyber Security Center. In Words: The value of a network equals the net value added to each user's transactions (PDF) conducted through that network, valued from the perspective of each user, and summed for all. It answers the decades-old question of 'how valuable is a network.' It is granular and transactions-based, and can be used to value any network: social, electronic, support groups, and even the Internet as a whole. This new model or law values the network by looking from the edge of the network at all of the transactions conducted and the value added to each. One way to contemplate the value the network adds to each transaction is to imagine the network being shut off and what the additional transactions' costs or loss would be. Beckstrom's Law replaces Metcalfe's law, Reed's law, and other concepts which proposed that the value of a network was based purely on the size of the network (and in the case of Metcalfe's law, one other variable)."

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