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Security

Diebold Marries VMs with ATMs to Secure Banking Data 151

Posted by timothy from the do-you-machine-take-this-data dept.
gManZboy writes "Automatic teller machine maker Diebold has taken a novel approach to protecting bank customer data: virtualization. Virtualized ATMs store all customer data on central servers, rather than the ATM itself, making it difficult for criminals to steal data from the machines. In places including Brazil, customer data has been at risk when thieves pulled or dynamited ATMs out of their settings and drove off with them. With threats increasing worldwide at many retail points of sale, such as supermarket checkout counters and service station gas pumps, Diebold needed to guarantee the security of customer data entered at the 50,000 ATMs that it manages. Diebold last year partnered with VMware to produce a zero-client ATM. No customer data is captured and stored on the ATM itself." Perhaps Diebold should take the same approach to vote-tabulating machines.
Canada

Toronto School Bans Hard Balls 319

Posted by samzenpus from the watch-how-you-play dept.
In an attempt to finally "think of the children," Earl Beatty Public school has prohibited students from playing with balls after a "few serious incidents" in which students and staff were hit or almost hit by balls. From the article: "The happy days of kicking a ball around at recess ended Monday after students took home a letter advising that henceforth, no child could bring a soccer ball, football, volleyball or even tennis ball to the junior and senior school in the area of Coxwell and Danforth Aves." I assume all lunches will soon be taken via feeding tube to minimize choking hazards.

Comment Re:Good (Score 1) 569

by castle (#37846506) Attached to: HPV Vaccine Recommended For Boys

It's good that you reveal that your vested interest is in saving your place saving the world for your pharmaceutical corporate employer, keep up the rent seeking. It's good that you're honest about it.

You probably are doing some good, but you are a part of a machine that isn't all good. Just look at your lobbyists, and your public relations expenditures.
Japan

Fukushima's Fallout Worse Than Thought 308

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the usda-recommended-daily-dose-of-cs-137 dept.
gbrumfiel writes "A new study posted for open peer-review suggests that the nuclear reactors at Fukushima Daiichi released far more radiation than the Japanese government initially estimated. The study [PDF] uses global radioisotope and meteorological data to calculate the size of the release from the plant. Nature News reports that, contrary to official claims, the model shows that fuel being stored in a pool at unit 4 released a significant amount of cesium-137, a long-lived contaminant that has spread across the countryside. It also says that some Xenon-133 may have been released early on in the accident, suggesting that the plant was already damaged before it was hit by a tsunami. Overall, it estimates that Fukushima released about twice as much cesium-137 as the government claims and half as much as Chernobyl."
Math

The Data Crunching Prowess of Barack Obama 334

Posted by samzenpus from the mobilizer-in-chief dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "Micah Sifry, co-founder of the Personal Democracy Forum, writes that Barack Obama may be struggling in the polls and even losing support among his core boosters, but when it comes to the modern mechanics of identifying, connecting with and mobilizing voters, as well as the challenge of integrating voter information with the complex internal workings of a national campaign, Obama's data analysis team is way ahead of the Republican pack. Alone among the major candidates running for president, the Obama campaign not only has a Facebook page with 23 million 'likes' (roughly 10 times the total of all the Republicans running), it has a Facebook app that is scooping up all kinds of juicy facts about his supporters and inside the Obama operation, his staff members are using a powerful social networking tool called NationalField, which enables everyone to share what they are working on. 'The holy grail of data analysis is data harmonization, or master data management,' says Alex Lundry, a Republican data-mining expert at TargetPoint Consulting. 'To have political talking to finance and finance talking to field, and data is flowing back and forth and informing the actions of each other — it sounds easy, but it's incredibly hard to implement.' Sifry writes that if the 2012 election comes down to a battle of inches, where a few percentage points change in turnout in a few key states making all the difference, we may come to see Obama's investment in predictive modelers and data scientists as the key to victory."
Security

US House 'Creator' of TSA Wants To Kill It 681

Posted by OverTheGeicoE from the seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time dept.
U.S. Representative John Mica (R-Florida), the sponsor of the original House bill that helped create the TSA, has become an outspoken opponent of the agency. In a recent interview, "Mica said screeners should be privatized and the agency dismantled." Mica seems to agree with other TSA critics that the agency 'failed to actually detect any threat in 10 years.' Mica is the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman and receives classified briefings on TSA. Perhaps we should trust him more than most people on this topic.
Medicine

Measles Resurgent Due To Fear of Vaccination 668

Posted by Soulskill from the don't-take-medical-advice-from-nude-models dept.
florescent_beige writes "In the September Mayo Clinic Proceedings, Gregory Poland, M.D. writes that 'More than 150 cases of measles have been reported in the United States already this year and there have been similar outbreaks in Europe, a sign the disease is making an alarming comeback (abstract). The reappearance of the potentially deadly virus is the result of unfounded fears about a link between the measles shot and autism that have turned some parents against childhood vaccination.'" This follows the recent release of a massive review of studies into the side effects of vaccination, summarized here by Nature, which did not find convincing support for the idea that MMR shots caused autism.
Security

Get Cyber-Mercenaries Suggests Ex NSA, CIA Director 135

Posted by samzenpus from the watch-out-for-the-black-ice dept.
siliconbits writes "One of the architects of US foreign policy under George W. Bush, General Michael Hayden, suggested that the US Government should consider creating a "Digital Blackwater" during a conversation at an event called the Aspen Security Forum. Blackwater was the US private military group founded in 1997 and which has been renamed as Xe Services LLC, a move possibly linked with a number of controversies that arose after the company expanded its security-related operations into Iraq and Afghanistan. Recruiting mercenaries, Hayden suggested 'might be one of those big new ideas in terms of how we have to conduct ourselves in this new cyber domain.'"
China

Governments, IOC and UN Hit By Massive Cyber Attack 122

Posted by CmdrTaco from the because-mcafee-says-so dept.
fysdt writes "IT security firm McAfee claims to have uncovered one of the largest ever series of cyber attacks. It lists 72 different organisations that were targeted over five years, including the International Olympic Committee, the UN and security firms. McAfee will not say who it thinks is responsible, but there is speculation that China may be behind the attacks. Beijing has always denied any state involvement in cyber-attacks, calling such accusations 'groundless.'"
Government

Outgoing Federal CIO Warns of 'IT Cartel' In DC 198

Posted by Soulskill from the interweb-industrial-complex dept.
CWmike writes "In a wide-ranging discussion Friday with President Barack Obama's top science advisors, Federal CIO Vivek Kundra warned of the dangers of open data access and was sharply critical of government IT contracting, telling the committee: '...We almost have an IT cartel within federal IT' made up of very few companies that benefit from government spending 'because they understand the procurement process better than anyone else.' He added: 'It's not because they provide better technology.'"
Security

Los Alamos Fire Idles NSA Supercomputer 65

Posted by CmdrTaco from the disko-inferno dept.
ygslash writes "Among the many facilities shut down since Monday at Los Alamos National Laboratory due to the approaching wildfire is Cielo, one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world. The National Nuclear Security Administration's three national laboratories - Los Alamos, Sandia, and Lawrence Livermore - all share computing time on Cielo, according to Associated Press." Update: 06/30 14:48 GMT by S : As readers have pointed out, this article refers to the National Nuclear Security Administration, not the National Security Agency. Summary updated to reflect that.

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