Grench - Slashdot User

Submission + - Judge Koh Rules: Samsung Did Not Willfully Infringe (muktware.com)

Submitted by sfcrazy on Thursday January 31, 2013 @05:02AM

sfcrazy writes: In a nutshell there won't be a new trial, as Samsung wanted, because the judge thinks that the trial was fair despite allegations that the jury foreman could have been biased. She also ruled that there won't be any more money for Apple as the iPhone maker failed to prove they were 'undercompensated' by the jury. The most important ruling was that she also found that 'Samsung did not willfully' infringe'.

Submission + - Chinese Hackers Attack New York Times (halls-of-valhalla.org) 1

Submitted by

halls-of-valhalla

on Thursday January 31, 2013 @04:48AM

halls-of-valhalla writes: "Following an investigation by the New York Times on the claims that Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao had amassed a multi-billion dollar fortune, the newspaper's network was attacked by Chinese hackers. These attacks started nearly four months ago with hackers stealing passwords from every employee at the paper, and in addition, personal computers of 53 employees were broken into.

These attacks were first noticed when the Times saw some unusual activity in their systems. After an investigation by a security firm called Mandiant, the security team was able to get into the system and track the activity of these hackers to see what their aim was and eventually to block them out of the system.

These hackers used typical Chinese military techniques in their attacks. These techniques include: routing attacks through US university computers, constantly rotating IP addresses, using email viruses to break into the system, and installing custom software to target specific individuals and documents.

The Chinese Ministry of National Defense has of course denied that the government had any connection to these attacks."

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Name conflicts in automatically generated email addresses

Submitted by matteocorti on Thursday January 31, 2013 @04:33AM

matteocorti writes: I work at medium-sized university and we are considering reducing the number of domains used for email addresses (now around 350): the goal is to have all the 30K personal addresses in a single domain.

This will increase the clashes for the local part of the address for people with the same first and last name (1.6%).

We are considering several options: one of them is to use "username@domain.tld" and the other is to use "first.last@domain.tld". The first case will avoid the any conflict in the addresses (usernames are unique) but the second is fancier. Which approach do your organization use? How are name conflicts (homonyms) solved? Manually or automatically (e.g., by adding a number)?

Submission + - N.Y. Times: China hacked us for past four months (blogspot.com)

Submitted by

quantr

on Thursday January 31, 2013 @03:38AM

quantr writes: ""The New York Times says Chinese hackers repeatedly penetrated its computer networks over the past four months, stealing reporters' passwords and hunting for files on an investigation into the wealth amassed by the family of one of China's leaders.

In a report released late Wednesday, the Times said security experts hired to plug the breach tracked the attacks to China, in some cases computers identified with the Chinese military.

The newspaper reports that, "After surreptitiously tracking the intruders to study their movements and help erect better defenses to block them, The Times and computer security experts have expelled the attackers and kept them from breaking back in."

The attacks coincided with a Times investigation into how the family and relatives of Premier Wen Jiabao built a fortune worth more than $2 billion. The report says no Times customer data was compromised but that the passwords for all employees were stolen.""

Submission + - Hardcore Minecrafters build immaculate clone of Game of Thrones' King's Landing (gizmag.com)

Submitted by cylonlover on Thursday January 31, 2013 @03:20AM

cylonlover writes: A dedicated band of Minecraft and Game of Thrones enthusiasts has lovingly recreated the fictional King's Landing locale in incredible detail. The setting will be familiar to fans of George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire fantasy novels and its TV adaptation, Game of Thrones, as the capital of the Seven Kingdoms. It took 100 builders over four months to build the King's Landing map, which includes some 3,000 buildings which have all been decorated on the inside.

Submission + - NASA: Feb. 15 asteroid fly-by will buzz Earth closer than many satellites (networkworld.com)

Submitted by

coondoggie

on Wednesday January 30, 2013 @12:45PM

coondoggie writes: "NASA says an asteroid about half the size of a football field will blow past Earth on Feb 15 closer than many man-made satellites. NASA added that while the asteroid, designated 2012 DA14 has no change of striking Earth, since regular sky surveys began in the 1990s, astronomers have never seen an object so big come so close to our planet."

Submission + - The DOS Bug That Almost Killed The Spirit Mars Rover (itworld.com) 3

Submitted by

jfruh

on Tuesday January 29, 2013 @12:21PM

jfruh writes: "On January 21, 2004, the Spirit Mars rover, which had been cheerfully collecting data and sending it back to Earth for the two weeks since it had landed, suddenly ground to a halt. Mission controllers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory were getting pings indicating that the rover was alive, but that was it. Over the next eleven days, the JPL team coaxed the rover back to life, eventually discovering that the heart of the problem lay in a DOS memory management bug interacting with insufficiently tested third-party code."

Submission + - Successful brain transplant between sexes in chicken (nature.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 29, 2013 @12:13PM

An anonymous reader writes: Here is the paper demonstrating a successful brain transplant between sexes in chicken.

They find that the female chimeras with male brains display delayed sexual maturation and irregular oviposition cycles. The male chimeras with female brains show phenotypes similar to typical cocks. Their study demonstrates that male brain cells retain male sex identity and do not differentiate into female cells to drive the normal oestrous cycle, even when situated in the female hormonal milieu.

Submission + - Google Gives 15,000 Raspberry Pi to UK Schools (bbc.co.uk) 1

Submitted by Grench on Tuesday January 29, 2013 @10:46AM

Grench writes: Search giant Google is providing funding to the Raspberry Pi Foundation to give 15,000 new Raspberry Pi Model B computers to schools all around the United Kingdom.

Google Giving's partnership with the Raspberry Pi Foundation is a significant investment in UK IT education; it is hoped this will help turn around the decline in UK school-leavers going on to study IT in colleges or universities.

15,000x Model B units at $35 each = $525,000

The Foundation's website also has an article on this news here: http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/3158

Submission + - Review: Office 2013 is the best Office yet (infoworld.com)

Submitted by

tsamsoniw

on Tuesday January 29, 2013 @10:44AM

tsamsoniw writes: "In a hands-on review of Microsoft's newly released Office 365 Home Premium, InfoWorld Test Center reviewer Serdar Yegulalp found that the software giant has succeeded in bringing excellent cloud features and pay-as-you-go pricing to its popular productivity suite. Some of the new features are better than others (e.g. the new Apps for Office are hit and miss) — but overall, the reviewed deemed the package "the sweetest Microsoft Office suite yet.""

Submission + - iPad grows to 128GB, directly targeting Surface Pro, ultrabooks (appleinsider.com)

Submitted by noh8rz10 on Tuesday January 29, 2013 @10:35AM

noh8rz10 writes: holy moly! iPad gets a heavyweight sibling, clicking in at 128GB. This places it in range of storage for Surface Pro and ultrabooks. It's clearly targeted at the professional market, as the press release cites xrays and cad files as reasons. Should M$ be afraid? Methinks so. Best part, pricing is growing by log 2. Just as the 32GB version is $100 more than the 16, and the 64 is $100 more than the 32, this new version is $100 more than the 64!

Submission + - Trojan Stole Over 16,000 Facebook Credentials (net-security.org)

Submitted by

Orome1

on Tuesday January 29, 2013 @09:47AM

Orome1 writes: "ESET discovered a social engineering Trojan horse that managed to steal the login credentials of more than 16,000 Facebook users. The 'PokerAgent' Trojan targeted Zynga Poker, the most popular online poker site in the world. Zynga Poker hosts the Texas Hold'Em Poker App for Facebook. According to APPData, the game has more than 35 million active monthly users. Specifically, the malware was designed to steal users' Facebook login details and link them with user information for the online poker game. ESET estimates that in addition to Texas Hold'Em Poker on Zynga Poker, other Facebook applications could have been similarly infected."

Comment Re:How about the Black Diamond? (Score 1) 35

by Grench on Tuesday January 22, 2013 @09:32AM (#42656029) Attached to: Tour of the Deep Underground Science and Engineering Lab

we have an old rail line that goes thru the old Navel weapons station..

So you can use a train to escape from the bad guys with the belly button guns?

Comment Enforcement and Boundaries (Score 2) 196

by Grench on Monday January 21, 2013 @10:38AM (#42646695) Attached to: France Proposes a Tax On Personal Information Collection

Their biggest problem, of course, will be how to enforce the collection of this tax. If a user signs up for Facebook (etc), does that mean Facebook has to tell the French government about it so they can be billed correctly for the tax? Doesn't that mean someone can really screw Facebook up by signing up a bunch of bogus accounts registered in France, meaning Facebook has to foot the bigger tax bill? What about French citizens signing up from other countries but marking down their country of origin as France (these people wouldn't be French taxpayers any more, yet Facebook would presumably have to pay the tax on the collection of that users' data). It's not an easy one to resolve...

Comment Re:What do I do with one? (Score 1) 212

by Grench on Wednesday January 09, 2013 @01:03PM (#42533665) Attached to: A Least Half a Million Raspberry Pis Sold

Try using an HDMI-to-DVI cable; if you have a TV or monitor with a DVI input, this should allow your Pi to connect and get you going.

Headless all-in-one works sweet - mine spent about 3 hours connected to my TV, even had a keyboard and mouse - now it's headless. I installed VNC server (so X sessions are possible) and I use SSH to connect to it for command line configuration changes (99% of all interaction between me and the Pi come through a TeraTerm Pro SSH connection). Install Webmin on it too if you like, then you can work on it via a web browser.

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