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Security

Submission + - British Airways Chief Slams US Security Requests

Ponca City writes: "Reflecting a growing frustration among airport and airline owners with the steady build-up of rules covering everything from footwear to liquids, Martin Broughton, chairman of British Airways, has launched a scathing attack on the "completely redundant" airport checks requested by the TSA and urged the UK to stop "kowtowing" to American demands for ever more security. Speaking at the annual conference of the UK Airport Operators Association, Broughton lambasted the TSA for demanding that foreign airports increase checks on U.S.-bound planes, while not applying those regulations to their own domestic services. "America does not do internally a lot of the things they demand that we do," says Broughton. "We shouldn't stand for that. We should say, 'We'll only do things which we consider to be essential and that you Americans also consider essential.'" For example, Broughton noted that cutting-edge technology recently installed at airports can scan laptops inside hand luggage for explosives but despite this breakthrough the British government still demands computers be examined separately. "It's just completely ridiculous," says Broughton. "Every time there is a new security scare, an extra layer is added on to procedures," adds Mike Carrivick, chief executive of the Board of Airline Representatives in the UK. "We need to step back and have a look at the whole situation. Standards change fairly regularly, and this puts pressure on airports and airlines. We need to decide what we are trying to do and how best to do it.""
Java

Submission + - Oracle Need A Clue As Brain Drain Accelerates (computerworlduk.com) 1

The Contrarian writes: "Looks like Oracle is not suiting former Sun staff well, nor community members in the Java and OpenOffice.org communities. This weekend saw an unusually large number of rather public departures, with (among many others listed in the article) the VP running Solaris development quitting, the token academic on the JCP slamming the door behind him and top community leaders at OpenOffice.org nailing their resignations to the door after having the ex-Sun people slam the door in their face.

The best analysis comes from an unexpected place, with the marketing director of Eclipse — usually loyal defenders of their top-dollar-paying members — turning on Oracle and telling them to get a clue."

Math

Submission + - Quantum Test Could Reinforce String Theory (imperial.ac.uk) 1

eldavojohn writes: There's no much else like a discussion about the 'untestability' of String Theory to get a group of theoretical physicists jawing. Tomorrow in Physical Review Letters, a paper will be published by a professor of the Imperial College of London on how a quantum entanglement test could either disprove or reinforce String Theory (but apparently not prove that it is entirely correct). Curiously, news reports offer little attempt to explain the proposed test aside from how Dr. Duff stumbled upon this relationship between his analysis of String Theory and — bizarrely — a Tasmanian conference on quantum entanglement. While it's not the first test imagined, quantum entanglement has at least been observed before in labs. Big news for theoretical physicists who are fed up with the inability to test String Theory.

Submission + - Newspapers Cut Wikileaks Out Of Shield Law (techdirt.com) 3

An anonymous reader writes: The US press has been pushing for a (much needed) federal shield law, that would allow reporters to protect their sources. It's been something of a political struggle for a few years now, and things were getting close when Wikileaks suddenly got a bunch of attention for leaking all those Afghan war documents. Suddenly, the politicians involved started working on an amendment that would specifically carve out an exception for Wikileaks so that it would not be covered by such a shield law. And, now, The First Amendment Center is condemning the newspaper industry for throwing Wikileaks under the bus, as many in the industry are supporting this new amendment, and saying that Wikileaks doesn't deserve source protection because "it's not journalism."
Security

Submission + - Owning Virtual Worlds For Fun and Profit (threatpost.com)

Trailrunner7 writes: Threatpost has a guest column by security researcher Charlie Miller on the ways in which attackers can easily take advantage of vulnerabilities in virtual worlds and perhaps online games to get control of other players' characters and avatars and even cash out their real-world bank accounts. "I’m a security researcher. I find bugs in software, they get fixed. I write exploits, they give me a shell. It's more or less always the same and it gets kind of boring. But there was one exploit I helped write back in 2007 that was a little different. This is the story of that exploit. It turns out that Second Life uses QuickTime Player to process its multimedia. When I started looking into virtual world exploits, with the help of Dino Dai Zovi, there was a stack buffer overflow in QuickTime Player that had been discovered by Krystian Kloskowski but had not yet been patched. In Second Life it is possible to embed images and video onto objects.

  We embedded a vulnerable file onto a small pink cube and placed it onto a track of land we owned. No matter where the cube was, if a victim walked onto the land and had multimedia enabled (recommended but not required), they would be exploited. The cube could be inside a building, hovering in the air, or even under the ground, and the result was the same."

Linux

Submission + - What is the best cross-platform build system?

rippeltippel writes: I write embedded software for multiple linux-based platforms and use different build systems (makefiles, buildroot, ...) to cross-compile software, kernel, and to generate the final rootfs. I would now like to uniform the build system with a tool which is actively maintained and updated, allows to easily add/remove packages and, most of all, to cross-compile the same codebase to different platforms with little effort.
I've seen that there are several solutions available, e.g. PTXdist, CMake, LTIB, T2 SDE, OpenEmbedded, Poky, Bitbake and, of course, Buildroot. From my understanding, some of them are integrated into each other (e.g. OpenEmbedded uses Bitbake) but unfortunately I couldn't find any serious comparison or review of those tools.
What cross-platform build system do Slashdotters reckon to be the most suitable?
Biotech

Submission + - Resurrected Mammoth Blood is Very Cool

Hugh Pickens writes: "Astrobiology Magazine reports that a team of international researchers has brought the primary component of mammoth blood back to life using ancient DNA preserved in bones from Siberian specimens 25,000 to 43,000 years old and found that the recreated mammoth haemoglobin hads special evolutionary adaptations that allowed the mammoth to cool its extremities down in harsh Arctic conditions to minimise heat loss. We've managed to uncover physiological attributes of an animal that hasn't existed for thousands of years," says team leader Professor Kevin Campbell of the University of Manitoba, Canada. "Our approach opens the way to studying the biomolecular and physiological characteristics of extinct species, even for features that leave no trace in the fossil record." The team converted the mammoth haemoglobin DNA sequences into RNA, and inserted them into modern-day E. coli bacteria, which then manufactured the authentic mammoth protein. Then the team used modern scientific physiological tests and chemical modelling to characterize the biochemical properties that conferred mammoths with physiological cold tolerance. "It has been remarkable to bring a complex protein from an extinct species, such as the mammoth, back to life," adds Professor Alan Cooper, Director of the Australian Centre for Ancient DNA (ACAD), where the mammoth haemoglobin sequences were determined."

Comment Re:Agree. Concepts are a dime a doxen (Score 1) 250

FWIW... I'm a game industry veteran, working on something you sound like target audience for - AAA engine, MMO over P2P back end, 2 authoring levels - simple (point and click) and pro (API), all free for non commercial use, cross platform. Hopefully done this year - watch vscape.com for updates, site is dead looking placeholder, busy team behind.

Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft Threats to Legislature Seal Huge Tax Cut (microsofttaxdodge.com) 1

newscloud writes: As the Washington State Legislature wound down its special session to close a $2.8 billion fiscal deficit, Microsoft's General Counsel Brad Smith successfully used a carefully timed press conference making veiled threats about tax rates as a concern regarding future job expansion in Washington State. Led by Finance Chair Rep. Ross Hunter, a 17 year former Microsoft manager, the Legislature gave Microsoft two huge gifts: a $100 million annual tax cut and an estimated $1.25 billion in amnesty on its 13 year Nevada tax dodge. To make ends meet, the Legislature cut $120 million from K-12 education and $73 million from university budgets. It also raised the general tax rate on businesses from 1.5% to 1.8% and created new '7-11' taxes on the Average Joe on beer, soda and candy. The benefits of 4,700 at-risk unemployed people with disabilities will expire in the coming year. No word on how cash-strapped Washington plans to address Smith's concerns about its educational system and transportation infrastructure. On Wednesday, Gates' father, Bill Sr. announced a citizen initiative to replace the business tax with an income tax on high earners (>$200,000/yr). Asked if his son was on board with the tax initiative, Gates Sr. said, improbably, they hadn't discussed it. 'I don't know what my son is going to do.' Governor Gregoire said this isn't over: once the budget is signed into law, 'there will be real cuts, there will be real people losing jobs.' Yesterday, Microsoft reported record quarterly revenue. It now has $39.6 billion in cash and short term investments.

Comment First people have to care about real security... (Score 4, Interesting) 118

As nearly anyone working on the "front lines" of security will tell you, most companies don't really care about security past some low level of lip service. Corporate networks [nearly] always have firewalls, but most of the time the IT staff is paid to care more about restricting employees from 'wasting company time' than in managing advanced multi-level defenses (why most networks are 'crunch on the outside, soft and chewy on the inside.') Equipment and software vendors provide password level security, often with authentication integration into LDAP/AD, but rarely support real tokens or PKI's backed by an HSM, as most companies don't want to pay for a real HSM (and with post dot bomb price escalation, that's often understandable - $40k for a 1U server with layered tamper switches and a custom app?) CSO's are treated as a cost center along with the rest of IT, and its often the policy to force people to keep quiet when major breaches occur. Its simpler and cheaper to make sure the board and stockholders don't know how often the databases and repositories are exported to FTP sites in China than to actually make it really difficult to succeed, as real security often costs real money. There's a whole underground industry of targeted penetration, as ethics and patriotism fall to greed - the underlying problems are far deeper than basic "cybersecurity".

Google

Submission + - Google Opens Apps Marketplace (infoworld.com)

snydeq writes: "Google has launched the Google Apps Marketplace, providing a venue for third-party, cloud-based applications to supplement Google's own online applications. The program enables integrations with such applications as Google Gmail, Documents, Sites and Calendar. All told, the effort begins with 50 vendors participating, including Atlassian, NetSuite, Skytap and Zoho. Participation in Google Apps Marketplace is open to customers of the Premier, Standard and Education editions of Google Apps. Applications are linked to the marketplace via REST Web services and APIs including OpenID and OAuth."
Patents

Submission + - Seven patent lawsuits you should know about (itworld.com)

jfruhlinger writes: They may not be as high profile as Apple vs. Android, but all of these lawsuits reveal something about our weird and broken tech patent system. From a case squabbling over damages for a patent that expired years ago to a move to use patents the way the Feds used tax evasion against Capone, here are seven patent lawsuits of interest.
Cellphones

Where Android Beats the iPhone 365

snydeq writes "Peter Wayner provides a developer's comparison of Android and the iPhone and finds Android not only competitive but in fact a better choice than the iPhone for many developers, largely due to its Java foundation. 'While iPhone developers have found that one path to success is playing to our baser instincts (until Apple shuts them down), a number of Android applications are offering practical solutions that unlock the power of a phone that's really a Unix machine you can slip into your pocket,' Wayner writes, pointing out GScript and Remote DB as two powerful tools for developers to make rough but workable custom tools for Android. But the real gem is Java: 'The pure Java foundation of Android will be one of the biggest attractions for many businesses with Java programmers on the staff. Any Java developer familiar with Eclipse should be able to use Google's Android documentation to turn out a very basic application in just a few hours. Not only that, but all of the code from other Java programs will run on your Android phone — although it won't look pretty or run as fast as it does on multicore servers.'"
Firefox

3D Graphics For Firefox, Webkit 198

angry tapir writes "A group of researchers plans to release a version of the Firefox browser that includes the built-in ability to view 3D graphics. They've integrated real-time ray tracing technology, called RT Fact, into Firefox and Webkit. Images are described using XML3D, and the browser can natively render the 3D scene." The browser will be released within a few weeks, the researchers say, and they are checking with the Mozilla Foundation about whether they can call it Firefox.

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