Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Submission + - Programmers' Most Hated Languages - And How To Avoid Them (itworld.com) 1

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: If you work in programming for any length of time, you will sooner or later be forced to work with a language that, whether due to odd syntax, too much (or too little) flexibility, poor debugging capabilities or any number of other reasons, makes you pull your hair out. Of course, some languages are easier to avoid than others. If Visual Basic is your I-can't-stand-it language you can simply not work at any company with Windows applications created before 2008. But if Perl's myriad ways of doing things (and hence near=unreadability) turn you off, maybe you should just give up on programming altogether.

Submission + - Hackers Offered Reward to Crack iPhone 5s Fingerprint Security (ibtimes.co.uk) 1

Submitted by DavidGilbert99
DavidGilbert99 writes: A couple of security researchers have set up a crowd-funded website to offer a reward to the first person who can "reliably and repeatedly break into an iPhone 5s by lifting prints.” The IsTouchIDHackedYet website shows 40 people offering everything from cash to Bitcoins, whiskey, wine and even a "dirty sex book" to the successful hacker. With the iPhone 5s launching tomorrow, there will be a lot of interest in whether or not the hackers can successfully crack Apple's Touch ID system.

Submission + - Wi-Fi sniffing lets researchers take social snapshots of crowds (techworld.com.au)

Submitted by angry tapir
angry tapir writes: The probe requests emitted by a smartphone as it seeks a Wi-Fi network to connect reveal the device's manufacturer thanks to its MAC address. This can offer some information about a crowd of people by looking at the breakdown by device brand. However, because some OSes include a preferred network list (PNL) in their probes, it may be possible to use Wi-Fi sniffing to infer even more information about a group of people by looking for common SSIDs, and potentially mapping them to known network locations. A group of Italian researchers has been looking at ways to use the information in probe requests to analyse the social connections of crowds.

Submission + - OpenZFS Project Launches Uniting ZFS Developers

Submitted by Damek
Damek writes: The OpenZFS project launched today, the truly open source successor to the ZFS project. ZFS is an advanced filesystem in active development for over a decade. Recent development has continued in the open, and OpenZFS is the new formal name for this community of developers, users, and companies improving, using, and building on ZFS. Founded by members of the Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X, and illumos communities, including Matt Ahrens, one of the two original authors of ZFS, the OpenZFS community brings together over a hundred software developers from these platforms. Read their announcement here.

Submission + - Most IT Staff Don't Communicate Security Risks (darkreading.com)

Submitted by CowboyRobot
CowboyRobot writes: A Tripwire survey of 1,320 IT personnel from the U.S. and U.K. showed that most staff "don't communicate security risk with senior executives or only communicate when a serious security risk is revealed." The reason is that staff have resigned themselves to staying mum due to an environment in which "collaboration between security risk management and business is poor, nonexistent or adversarial", or at best, just isn't effective at getting risk concerns up to senior management.

Submission + - Man Killed By Own Radio-Controlled Helicoptor in Brooklyn (wsj.com) 4

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: From the Wall Street Journal:

A 19-year-old model helicopter enthusiast was killed Thursday when a toy helicopter he was flying struck him in the head, a law-enforcement official said.
Victim Roman Pirozek “was known to be aggressive in his flying and often executed tricks. He was executing a trick when he was struck,” the official said.
Mr. Pirozek – depicted in (this) YouTube video he posted in July — was flying a remote-controlled helicopter worth about $2,000 when it struck him, cutting off the top of his head, the official said. The Woodhaven, Queens, resident was pronounced dead at the scene. His father was with him at the time of the accident, the official said

Submission + - New Musopen Campaign Wants To "Set Chopin Free"

Submitted by Eloquence
Eloquence writes: Three years ago, Musopen raised nearly $70,000 to create public domain recordings of works by Beethoven, Brahms, Mozart, Schubert, and others. Now they're running a new campaign with a simple but ambitious objective: 'To preserve indefinitely and without question everything Chopin created. To release his music for free, both in 1080p video and 24 bit 192kHz audio. This is roughly 245 pieces.' Will this funding approach work to incrementally free up humanity's cultural heritage?

Submission + - 'Ghetto Tracker' Walked on Shoulders of Tech Giants

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: GhettoTracker.com, which invited users to rate neighborhoods based on 'which parts of town are safe and which ones are ghetto, or unsafe', predictably drew the ire of the press and was quickly shut down amid cries of racism. "This site is gone. It's not worth the trouble," explained the site's creator, who insisted race-had-nothing-to-do-with-it. Not to excuse the at best ill-conceived 'Ghetto Tracker,' but why was there much less outrage from the press when the USPTO gave IBM a patent on adding surcharges to your auto insurance premium when a GPS device reports that you drove into an area in Big Blue's bad neighborhood database? Or when Microsoft was granted a patent on walking directions that avoid crime-ridden neighborhoods? Or when Google was charged with issuing a bad neighborhood caution to walking directions? When it comes down to it, how different is 'Ghetto Tracker' from Google's patented system and method for storing and providing routes, which proposes to 'remove streets from recommended directions if uploaded route information indicates that travelers seem to avoid the street' (routes that 'traverse one or more high crime areas,' explains Google, 'may be less appealing to most travelers')? In spirit, aren't both really kind of all about using tech to avoid Martin Luther King Boulevard? Does omitting the word 'ghetto' make the tech giants' patents non-racist?

Submission + - Gut bacteria in slim people extract more nutrients (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by Beeftopia
Beeftopia writes: Researchers discovered that inserting gut bacteria from obese people into mice without gut bacteria led to the mice becoming obese. Gut bacteria from slim people inserted into the same mice did not lead to mouse obesity. The researchers concluded that gut bacteria from the slim people were more efficient at extracting nutrients from food than those of the obese.

Submission + - Move over email spoofing there's a new trick in town (itworld.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: Spam filters will catch spoofed emails, but fraudsters are employing a new trick to slip past the filters, says security researcher Markus Jakobsson. The limited screen size of smartphones puts constraints on what is presented to the user. Friendly 'from' names – yes. Email addresses – no. Just slap a friendly from in front of a not-so-friendly email address and smartphone users will be none the wiser — until they open that email message.

Submission + - N.S.A. Foils Much Internet Encryption (nytimes.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The New York Times is reporting that the NSA has "has circumvented or cracked much of the encryption, or digital scrambling, that guards global commerce and banking systems, protects sensitive data like trade secrets and medical records, and automatically secures the e-mails, Web searches, Internet chats and phone calls of Americans and others around the world, the documents show."

"The agency, according to the documents and interviews with industry officials, deployed custom-built, superfast computers to break codes, and began collaborating with technology companies in the United States and abroad to build entry points into their products. The documents do not identify which companies have participated."

Submission + - Researchers crack Windows 8 picture passwords (networkworld.com)

Submitted by colinneagle
colinneagle writes: We all know text-based passwords are not overly secure, so when Microsoft offered a Picture Gesture Authentication (PGA) system on Windows 8, many people chose that option. However, researchers at Arizona State University, Delaware State University and GFS Technology Inc. analyzed picture gesture authentication on more than 10,000 picture passwords collected from more than 800 subjects through online user studies, and found that regardless of what image you selected, your unique picture password gestures may not be so unique after all.

The research found that the strength of picture gesture password has a "strong connection" to how long a person spent setting up that password gesture. The most common gesture combination is three taps, meaning it took about 4.33 — 5.74 seconds to setup. Passwords with two circles and one line took the longest average input time of about 10.19 seconds. After studying why people choose certain categories of images, the most common gesture types and direction patterns in PGA passwords, the researchers developed an attack framework that is "capable of cracking passwords on previously unseen pictures in a picture gesture authentication system."

Submission + - Jury finds Google guilty of FRAND patents abuse against Microsoft

Submitted by recoiledsnake
recoiledsnake writes: A federal jury has ordered Google to pay Microsoft $14.5 million in damages for breach of contract for failing to license at reasonable terms standard essential patents covering WiFi and H.264 used in the Xbox game console and Windows. Motorola had demanded Microsoft pay annual royalties of up to $4 billion for use of patents that are part of the H.264 video and 802.11 wireless standards, which are baked into Windows and the Xbox video game console. Microsoft said it was willing to pay royalties but not at the 2.25 percent of the product price that Motorola sought. We previously covered Motorola's demands.

Submission + - They found the God particle--what now? (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by Jim_Austin
Jim_Austin writes: Teams of hundreds of young scientists--including many grad students and postdocs--staffed the Large Hadron Collider and helped make one of the most important scientific discoveries in recent decades. Now they must compete for just a handful of jobs.

Submission + - Code for America is "the Peace Corps for geeks"

Submitted by rjmarvin
rjmarvin writes: Cities are taking coding to the streets http://sdt.bz/64063 through projects like Code for America and CityNext, working with governments on multiple levels to better serve constituents with mobile and cloud technologies. The "Peace Corps for geeks" is leveraging technology to make everyday life in cities run more smoothly, providing a way to "connect technologist and designers with their government to solve important problems and reimagine how government could work." It's the way of the future...

Slashdot Top Deals

Too many people are thinking of security instead of opportunity. They seem more afraid of life than death. -- James F. Byrnes

Close