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Submission + - Dice Ruins Slashdot (slashdot.org) 12

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In an attempt to modernize Slashdot, Dice has removed everything that made Slashdot unique and worthwhile and has turned it into a generic blog site. User feedback has been unanimously negative, but this is to no avail, and users will have to head elsewhere for insightful and entertaining commentary on tech news.

Submission + - Change.org petition, ARM SoC changes for Linux 3.12 invite Torvalds' fury (paritynews.com) 1

Submitted by hypnosec
hypnosec writes: Linus Torvalds, in response to a petition on Change.org to remove RdRand from /dev/random, has lambasted the petitioner by called him ignorant for not understanding the code in Linux Kernel. Kyle Condon from UK raised a petition on Change.org to get Linus to remove RdRand from /dev/random in a bid “to improve the overall security of the linux kernel.” In his response, Torvalds asked the Condon and the supports of the petition to gain an understanding of Linux drivers, cryptography and then "come back here and admit to the world that you were wrong." Torvalds stressed that kernel maintainers knew what they were doing and the petitioner didn’t. Torvalds, in a similar outburst just yesterday, hoped that "ARM SoC hardware designers all die in some incredibly painful accident." This came in response to a message from Kevin Hilman when he noted that there were quite a few conflicts in the ARM SoC pull request for Linux 3.12, which were a result of the platform changes conflicting with driver changes going in to the V4L tree.

Submission + - How to foil NSA sabotage: use a dead man's switch (theguardian.com) 4

Submitted by mspohr
mspohr writes: Cory Doctorow has an interesting idea published in todays Guardian on how to approach the problem of NSA "gag orders" which prevent web sites, etc. from telling anyone that they have been compromised. His idea is to set up a "dead man" switch where a site would publish a statement that "We have not been contacted by the government" ... until, of course, they were contacted and compromised. The statement would then disappear since it would no longer be true.
He points out a few problems... Not making the statement could be considered a violation of disclosure... but, can the government force you to lie and state that you haven't been contacted when you actually have?
Input Devices

Former Lockheed Skunkworks Engineer Auctioning a Prototype "Spy Rock" 119

Posted by timothy from the for-that-price-I'd-expect-at-least-two-rocks dept.
ilikenwf writes "For a cool $10,000,000.00, the prototype of a surveillance rock full of spy gadgets could be yours! More importantly, server backups from the gentleman's time at Lockheed are included, being the real valuable in this auction, as it contains schematics and such. The seller seems to think that the current xBee radio products are actually based on his work with Lockheed. The proceeds will go towards legal action the seller is apparently taking against his former employer." This may be the most unusual eBay product description I've ever encountered, and one of the most interesting, too.

Comment Re:Really? Why not just query the NSA directly? (Score 1) 97

Why would you limit yourself to ssh, when there's so many useful unpatched exploits for so many other server applications? Among other things, you're missing out on all the easily exploitable Windows ME boxen out there.

ssh defaults to port 22. Port 23 is usually telnet.
Software

Ask Slashdot: Tags and Tagging, What Is the Best Way Forward? 142

Posted by timothy from the spray-and-pray dept.
siliconbits writes "The debate about tagging has been going for nearly a decade. Slashdot has covered it a number of times. But it seems that nobody has yet to come up with a foolproof solution to tagging. Even luminaries like Engadget, The Verge, Gizmodo and Slashdot all have different tagging schemes. Commontag, a venture launched in 2009 to tackle tagging, has proved to be all but a failure despite the backing of heavyweights like Freebase, Yahoo and Zemanta. Even Google gave up and purchased Freebase in July 2010. Somehow I remain convinced that a unified, semantically-based solution, using a mix of folksonomy and taxonomy, is the Graal of tagging. I'd like to hear from fellow Slashdotters as to how they tackle the issue of creating and maintaining a tagging solution, regardless of the platform and the technologies being used in the backend." A good time to note: there may be no pretty way to get at them, but finding stories with a particular tag on Slashdot is simple, at least one at a time: Just fill in a tag you'd like to explore after "slashdot.org/tag/", as in "slashdot.org/tag/bizarro."
China

After a User Dies, Apple Warns Against Counterfeit Chargers 457

Posted by timothy from the risk-vs-reward dept.
After a Chinese woman was earlier this month evidently electrocuted while talking on her iPhone while it was plugged in to charge, Apple is warning users to avoid counterfeit chargers. From CNet: "Last week, reports surfaced in China that suggested the woman, Ma Ailun, might have been using a third-party charger designed to look like the real thing. Although third-party chargers are not uncommon, they vary widely in terms of safety and quality. Earlier this year, safety consulting and certification company UL issued a warning that counterfeit Apple USB chargers were making the rounds and that consumers should be on the lookout for them due to their lower quality and possibly dangerous defects. The company posted the guidance on its site after a woman was allegedly electrocuted while answering a call on her iPhone."
AI

Spanish Chatbot Hunts For Pedophiles 186

Posted by timothy from the how-do-you-feel-about-justin-bieber dept.
cylonlover writes "For a number of years now, police forces around the world have enlisted officers to pose as kids in online chat rooms, in an attempt to draw out pedophiles and track them down. Researchers at Spain's University of Deusto are now hoping to free those cops up for other duties, and to catch more offenders, via a chatbot that they've created. Its name is Negobot, and it plays the part of a 14 year-old girl." (Read the original source, in Spanish).
Programming

Things That Scare the Bejeezus Out of Programmers 641

Posted by Soulskill from the it's-just-a-matter-of-code dept.
itwbennett writes "Software developers are, by and large, a cool and analytical bunch, but there are a handful of things that strike terror in their hearts. Phil Johnson scoured developer forums looking for an answer to the question: What's your biggest fear as a programmer? The answers clustered into 5 broad groups ranging from being forced to learn or use a specific technology to working for and with incompetents. What's your biggest fear?"

Comment Re:User's time, not BBC time (Score 1) 487

by stderr_dk (#43932827) Attached to: BBC Clock Inaccurate - 100 Days To Fix?

1) Clock drift in excess of a minute per day is not unheard-of.

I don't think I have ever seen numbers that high myself, but if needed, the time_diff could be recalculated more often. If the page notice a large clock drift between two calculations of the diff, it could schedule the next recalculation to occur sooner.

2) If the AJAX request fails, what do you do?

For the first calculation of the diff, you don't really need to use AJAX since the page already includes the server time in the "clock"-element. If a later AJAX-request fails, you could simply reuse the old diff and schedule a new calculation at a much sooner time that otherwise.

3) If the AJAX request hits a high asymmetric delay (not unheard-of), you'll be off by a good fraction of a minute.

You're right, I don't have a good solution for that problem. Maybe take a look at how NTP deals with it.

4) If the user can't set their computer's clock, what makes you think they can set the computer's timezone?

I don't think I said anything about the user setting the timezone anywhere, so I fail to see your point.

I did mention the "Europe/London"-timezone, but that timezone would be set by the BBC site, not the user.

5) Related to 4, what happens during a daylight savings time shift? You can't count on the local clock changing by an hour, but you also can't count on it *not* changing.

What daylight savings time? There's a reason why I'm using milliseconds since Epoch.

If you know the time in milliseconds since Epoch and you know when the transition between standard time and daylight savings occur (or any other change of offset from UTC), you can calculate the local time. You can find the transition times and offsets in the tzdatabase and do the calculation yourself or you can use the tzdata-javascript library I mentioned.

Comment Re:User's time, not BBC time (Score 2) 487

by stderr_dk (#43923163) Attached to: BBC Clock Inaccurate - 100 Days To Fix?

What the BBC said was that they would find it difficult and expensive to accurately show the time at the user's location, when the user's time settings were wrong.

This is roughly how I would do it:

  • Make sure the server is running NTP or something similar, so the server time is correct.
  • When the page is requested, include the current server time: <span id="clock">Thu Jun 6 11:29:04 BST 2013</span>.
  • If JavaScript is off, we can't update the time and all we can do is display that static time.
  • If JavaScript is on, we:
    • Find the HTML-element: var clock=document.getElementById("clock");
    • Get the current local time as milliseconds since Epoch: var local_time_1=new Date().valueOf();
    • Use AJAX to get the current server time as milliseconds since Epoch, server_time.
    • Get the current local time as milliseconds since Epoch, local_time_2.
    • Assuming that the delay from the client to the server is the same as the delay from the server to the client, calculate the difference between server time (correct time) and local time: var time_diff=server_time - (local_time_1+local_time_2)/2;
    • Every second, minute, whatever...
      • Get the current local time as milliseconds since Epoch, local_time.
      • Calculate the assumed server time: var assumed_time=local_time + time_diff;
      • Update the HTML-element to display the assumed_time in some "pretty" format.
      • If you don't want to display the time in either UTC or "whatever timezone the user has configured", use something like (shameless plug) tzdata-javascript to convert it "Europe/London".
    • Maybe recalculate time_diff every hour to avoid time drifting. I highly doubt this is needed.

Wouldn't that work?

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