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Comment My own thoughts. (Score 1) 1

by mustard5 (#36114910) Attached to: When Mobiles Phones attack. Luddite Revolt Ensues.
My first reaction was that my flatmate had a pretty valid point, in that we were completely ignoring her. I have been noticing it a lot lately, this phenomenon of people all glued to their electronic devices. I used to experience it when my ex-wife used to spend all her time on the phone and actually interacting with her had become an impossibility as she was forever talking to someone else. Now I find myself more interested in my digital interactions than my physical interactions. I often catch a taxi to work, and I've noticed that I prefer sitting playing with my mobile phone than interacting with the driver. Even though I drive taxis myself. The physical world seems so slow and cumbersome, whereas the digital world seems dynamic and exciting.
Digital

Submission + - When Mobiles Phones attack. Luddite Revolt Ensues. (wordpress.com) 1

Submitted by mustard5
mustard5 writes: The story begins.

Flatmate One had a bit of a fit the other day, when talking to myself and Flatmate Two. It began when Flatmate One noticed we were both staring at out our mobile phones and not listening to them. I was checking my twitter, facebook and ident.ca accounts, posting photos online. Flatmate Two was reading SMS messages or, something of that nature.

Flatmate One then railed against the latest intrusion of gadgetry into our lives and suggested it was not too late for us all to turn back and save ourselves from technological damnation. That we had begun to communicate more with our digital world than our physical world. We had improved contact, and or, divided our social attentions with the distant at the cost of those closest to us. It was a ludicrous situation, and shouldn’t be tolerated.

I suggested she was a Luddite, and that this was the inevitable progression of human interaction and networking had become an important component of our lives. We create elaborate networks of self-minded individuals all devoted to our very individual pursuits. We now have a presence well beyond those of our predecessors, in which we could make ourselves heard. Personal branding and promotion have become the future. To be visible and active in the digital world was now a critical part of having a voice in the biggest forum of the world. If we didn’t seek to have a digital personality, presence and most importantly a network with ‘our people’, the voice of ‘our people’ would not be heard. The earliest people to create digital identities are in fact the ‘babies of the internet’ growing into ‘adults of the internet’ in a future sense of their growing understanding of the utility of the digital networking tool they have created for themselves and how they can control that tool.

A lot of this was all said in jest, because we were both, Flatmate Two and I, very much caught with our pants down in,rudely ignoring Flatmate 1s story of their working day. Unforgiveable, so we laughed instead.

Questions this raises:

Is Flatmate One a Luddite of the digital age?

Are Flatmate Two and I, ignorant and uncaring bastards?

Is the digital information age a brave new frontier?

I,ll let you be the judge.
Encryption

FBI Alleged To Have Backdoored OpenBSD's IPSEC Stack 536

Posted by kdawson from the all-your-vpn dept.
Aggrajag and Mortimer.CA, among others, wrote to inform us that Theo de Raadt has made public an email sent to him by Gregory Perry, who worked on the OpenBSD crypto framework a decade ago. The claim is that the FBI paid contractors to insert backdoors into OpenBSD's IPSEC stack. Mr. Perry is coming forward now that his NDA with the FBI has expired. The code was originally added ten years ago, and over that time has changed quite a bit, "so it is unclear what the true impact of these allegations are" says Mr. de Raadt. He added: "Since we had the first IPSEC stack available for free, large parts of the code are now found in many other projects/products." (Freeswan and Openswan are not based on this code.)
Networking

Why Anonymous Can't Take Down Amazon.com 392

Posted by CmdrTaco from the can't-imagine dept.
suraj.sun writes "The website-attacking group 'Anonymous' tried and failed to take down Amazon.com on Thursday. The group's vengeance horde quickly found out something techies have known for years: Amazon, which has built one of the world's most invincible websites, is almost impossible to crash.... Anonymous quickly figured that out. Less than an hour after setting its sights on Amazon, the group's organizers called off the attempt. 'We don't have enough forces,' they tweeted."
User Journal

Journal Journal: What is Slashdot to me?

Journal by mustard5

It's the place I find the news and conversations that really interests me. I can kick back in my comfy chair and get lost in the nerdiest stuff known to man. Stuff that matters. :)

As I gaze upon the myriad threads, my mind is catapulted into a universe of technological possibilities, wherein I am both vexed by its complexity and rejuvenated by its social enhancements.
Operating Systems

Linux Distribution Popularity Trends Plotted 209

Posted by Soulskill from the year-of-linux-on-the-toaster dept.
DeviceGuru writes "In order to get a sense of the popularity of various Linux distributions over the past several years, LinuxTrends entered their names into Google's search insights tool and grabbed images of the resulting graphs. The graphs display some fascinating trends and bode well for the future of Linux, particularly its ability to adapt to changing requirements and opportunities. What's especially noteworthy is that Android is the first Linux spin to take on a life of its own within consumer devices. It's certainly not the first use of Linux as an OS for devices; what's unique, however, is that it's the first branded Linux-based OS to be widely marketed to consumers."
AMD

Open-Source 2D, 3D Drivers For ATI Radeon HD 5000 Series 245

Posted by Soulskill from the following-through dept.
An anonymous reader writes "AMD has now rolled out open-source 2D and 3D drivers for their ATI Radeon HD 5000 series graphics processors. As described at length over at Phoronix, it's taken nearly a year to complete but there is now public code released that enables 2D, 3D, and video hardware-acceleration for this latest generation of ATI GPUs. For now this code is intended for developers and enthusiasts but with time it will make its way into stable Linux distribution updates. AMD's open-source developers are also beginning to work on ATI Radeon HD 6000 series support, which is hardware not to be released until late in the year."
Debian

Debian 6.0 "Squeeze" Frozen 202

Posted by timothy from the declaring-it-squozen dept.
edesio writes with a snippet from debian-news.net, trumpeting an announcement from the ongoing DebConf10 in NYC: "Debian's release managers have announced a major step in the development cycle of the upcoming stable release Debian 6.0 'Squeeze': Debian 'Squeeze' has now been frozen. In consequence this means that no more new features will be added and all work will now be concentrated on polishing Debian 'Squeeze' to achieve the quality Debian stable releases are known for. The upcoming release will use Linux 2.6.32 as its default kernel in the installer and on all Linux architectures.""
Encryption

Submission + - Bitcoin releases Version 0.3 4

Submitted by Teppy
Teppy writes: How's this for a disruptive technology? Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer network based digital currency with no central bank, and no transaction fees. Using a proof-of-work concept, nodes burn CPU cycles searching for bundles of coins, broadcasting their findings to the network. Analysis of energy usage indicates that the market value of Bitcoins is already above the value of the energy needed to generate them, indicating healthy demand. The community is hopeful the currency will remain outside the reach of any government.
Microsoft

Microsoft Out of Favor With Young, Hip Developers 775

Posted by kdawson from the so-last-week dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft's failures with the KIN phone (only two months on the market, less than 10,000 phones sold) are well-known to this community. Now the NY Times goes farther, quoting Tim O'Reilly: 'Microsoft is totally off the radar of the cool, hip, cutting-edge software developers.' Microsoft has acknowledged that they have lost young developers to the lures of free software. 'We did not get access to kids as they were going through college,' acknowledged Bob Muglia, the president of Microsoft's business software group, in an interview last year. 'And then, when people, particularly younger people, wanted to build a start-up, and they were generally under-capitalized, the idea of buying Microsoft software was a really problematic idea for them.' Microsoft's program to seed start-ups with its software for free requires the fledgling companies to meet certain guidelines and jump through hoops to receive software — while its free competitors simply allow anyone to download products off a website with the click of a button." Update: 07/07 13:21 GMT by T : Tim O'Reilly says that while he "[doesn't] disagree with all of his conclusions," he's not happy with it Ashlee Vance's piece, writing "I was not the source for the various comments that were attributed to me," including the bit about "totally off the radar." (Thanks to reader gbll.)
Crime

FBI Failed To Break Encryption of Hard Drives 486

Posted by kdawson from the deploy-the-quantum-computer dept.
benoliver writes to let us know that the FBI has failed to decrypt files of a Brazilian banker accused of financial crimes by Brazilian law enforcement, after a year of attempts. Five hard drives were seized by federal police at the apartment of banker Daniel Dantas, in Rio de Janeiro, during Operation Satyagraha in July 2008. (The link is to a Google translation of the original article in Portuguese.) The article in English mentions two encryption programs, one Truecrypt and the other unnamed. 256-bit AES was used, and apparently both the Brazilian police and the FBI tried dictionary attacks against it. No Brazilian law exists to force Dantas to produce the password(s).

Submission + - Obama Administration Announces Piracy Crackdown (dailytech.com)

Submitted by dawilcox
dawilcox writes: The White House's vision is perhaps a prelude to the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, which will go before Congress later this year. The bill would make P2P or BitTorrent client development a criminal offense if the distributed software was used for infringement. It also implements an interesting provision called "imminent infringement", which allows the government to charge people who they think might be about to infringe with a civil offense (for example if you searched "torrent daft punk"). This is among the first official "thought crime" provisions to be proposed by the U.S. government. The bill also makes it a criminal offense to bypass DRM.
Security

Submission + - Distributed SSH Brute Force Attack Underway (threatpost.com)

Submitted by Trailrunner7
Trailrunner7 writes: Security experts are warning about a fresh round of attacks against SSH implementations. The attacks are brute-force attempts to authenticate to remote SSH servers, a tactic that has been used quite often in the past in distributed attacks. However, this series of attacks isn't using the password authentication method. Instead, the attackers are attempting to connect to the SSH servers by using the alternative keyboard-interactive authentication method. In the past, many of the large, distributed SSH attacks have used the simpler password authentication method and just run through a given set of potential passwords on a target server hoping to get lucky.

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