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Submission + - RSA Conference Bans 'Booth Babes" (networkworld.com)

Submitted by netbuzz
netbuzz writes: In what may be a first for the technology industry, RSA Conference 2015 next month apparently will be bereft of a long-controversial trade-show attraction: “booth babes.” New language in its exhibitor contract, while not using the term 'booth babe," leaves no doubt as to what type of salesmanship RSA wants left out of its event. Says a conference spokeswoman: “We thought this was an important step towards making all security professionals feel comfortable and equally respected during the show.”

Submission + - GAO denied access to Webb telescope workers by Northrop Grumman

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: In a report as well as at House hearings today the GAO reported that Northrop Grumman has denied them one-on-one access to workers building the James Webb Space Telescope.

The interviews, part of a running series of GAO audits of the NASA flagship observatory, which is billions of dollars overbudget and years behind schedule, were intended to identify potential future trouble spots, according to a GAO official. But Northrop Grumman Aerospace, which along with NASA says the $9 billion project is back on track, cited concerns that the employees, 30 in all, would be intimidated by the process.

To give Northrop Grumman the benefit of the doubt, these interviews were a somewhat unusual request. Then again, if all was well why would they resist? Note too that the quote above says the cost of the telescope project is now $9 billion. If the project was “back on track: as the agency and Northrop Grumman claim, than why has the budget suddenly increased by another billion?

Submission + - Passphrases You Can Memorize That Even The NSA Can't Guess 2

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Micah Lee writes at The Intercept that coming up with a good passphrase by just thinking of one is incredibly hard, and if your adversary really is capable of one trillion guesses per second, you’ll probably do a bad job of it. It turns out humans are a species of patterns, and they are incapable of doing anything in a truly random fashion. But there is a method for generating passphrases that are both impossible for even the most powerful attackers to guess, yet very possible for humans to memorize. First, grab a copy of the Diceware word list, which contains 7,776 English words — 37 pages for those of you printing at home. You’ll notice that next to each word is a five-digit number, with each digit being between 1 and 6. Now grab some six-sided dice (yes, actual real physical dice), and roll them several times, writing down the numbers that you get. You’ll need a total of five dice rolls to come up with each word in your passphrase. Using Diceware, you end up with passphrases that look like “cap liz donna demon self”, “bang vivo thread duct knob train”, and “brig alert rope welsh foss rang orb”. If you want a stronger passphrase you can use more words; if a weaker passphrase is ok for your purpose you can use less words. If you choose two words for your passphrase, there are 60,466,176 different potential passphrases. A five-word passphrase would be cracked in just under six months and a six-word passphrase would take 3,505 years, on average, at a trillion guesses a second.

After you’ve generated your passphrase, the next step is to commit it to memory.You should write your new passphrase down on a piece of paper and carry it with you for as long as you need. Each time you need to type it, try typing it from memory first, but look at the paper if you need to. Assuming you type it a couple times a day, it shouldn’t take more than two or three days before you no longer need the paper, at which point you should destroy it. "Simple, random passphrases, in other words, are just as good at protecting the next whistleblowing spy as they are at securing your laptop," concludes Lee. "It’s a shame that we live in a world where ordinary citizens need that level of protection, but as long as we do, the Diceware system makes it possible to get CIA-level protection without going through black ops training"

Submission + - German auto firms face roadblock in testing driverless car software (thestack.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: As nations compete to build the first operational autonomous car, German auto-manufacturers fear that current domestic laws limit their efforts to test the appropriate software for self-driving vehicles on public roads. German carmakers are concerned that these roadblocks are allowing U.S. competitors, such as Google, to race ahead in their development of software designed to react effectively when placed in real-life traffic scenarios. Car software developers are particularly struggling to deal with the ethical challenges often raised on the road. For example when faced with the decision to crash into a pedestrian or another vehicle carrying a family, it would be a challenge for a self-driving car to follow the same moral reasoning a human would in the situation. “Technologically we can do fully automated self-driving, but the ethical framework is missing,” said Volkswagen CEO Martin Winterkorn.

Submission + - Samsung's Gear VR headset available to try and buy in more than 100 Best Buys (roadtovr.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: By tomorrow, Friday March 27th, Samsung says that more than 100 Best Buy stores will have available Gear VR for customers to try and buy, a mobile VR headset that's powered by the Galaxy Note 4 and was created in conjunction with Oculus (https://www.oculus.com/). Although the headset launched in December, the rollout has been cautious, apparently due to Oculus' lack of confidence in the headset which lacks some ideal functions compared to its desktop-based counterparts. But apparently the company is changing its tune after getting positive feedback from consumers. "What got me off of [the idea that it isn’t ready] is that Gear VR launched—limited release, all these restrictions—but a funny thing happened people kind of like it,” said John Carmack, Oculus' CTO, at GDC earlier this month. “We’ve had extremely good data on return rates. Media outlet response was way better than expected.”

Submission + - New Political Party Runs Entirely on Your Feedback (post-gazette.com)

Submitted by Andrew Warshaver
Andrew Warshaver writes: Fed up with the failures of the U.S. political system, two CMU grads are turning to technology to create a new party that runs entirely online, and entirely on your feedback. Their electorates will make decisions solely based on the principles of Liquid Democracy, a form of Representative Democracy for the Technology Age. If they succeed, no more calling & mailing your representatives, simply log on and vote (or delegate).

Submission + - Millennial Tech Workers Losing Ground in U.S. (dice.com)

Submitted by Nerval's Lobster
Nerval's Lobster writes: Millennial tech workers are entering the U.S. workforce at a comparable disadvantage to other tech workers throughout the industrialized world, according to study earlier this year from Educational Testing Services (PDF). How do U.S. millennials compare to their international peers, at least according to ETS? Those in the 90th percentile (i.e., the top-scoring) actually scored lower than top-scoring millennials in 15 of the 22 studied countries; low-scoring U.S. millennials ranked last (along with Italy and England/Northern Ireland). While some experts have blamed the nation's education system for the ultimate lack of STEM jobs, other studies have suggested that the problem isn't in the classroom; a 2014 report from the U.S. Census Bureau suggested that many of the people who earned STEM degrees didn't actually go into careers requiring them. In any case, the U.S. is clearly wrestling with an issue; how can it introduce more (qualified) STEM people into the market (yes, Dice link)?

Submission + - What evil can you actually do with a hacked wearable? (thestack.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Despite security companies' keenness to exploit paranoia about sports/health wearables, this article contends that hackers have relatively little to gain by concentrating on the enticingly lax security of such devices, due to their extremely limited connection range, passive functionality models and habit of dumping any usable victim data into the cloud every hour in order to clear their low-spec buffers. In effect most hackers would need to be so close to their intended targets, that they might as well take 'direct action' instead of pursuing a cyber-attack.

Submission + - Many password strength meters are downright weak, researchers say (networkworld.com)

Submitted by alphadogg
alphadogg writes: Website password strength meters often tell you only what you want to hear rather than what you need to hear. That’s the finding from researchers at Concordia University in Montreal, who examined the usefulness of those ubiquitous red-yellow-green password strength testers on websites run by big names such as Google, Yahoo, Twitter and Microsoft/Skype. The researchers used algorithms to send millions of “not-so-good” passwords through these meters, as well as through the meters of password management services such as LastPass and 1Password, and were largely underwhelmed by what they termed wildly inconsistent results.

Submission + - 'Bar Mitzvah Attack' Plagues SSL/TLS Encryption (darkreading.com)

Submitted by ancientribe
ancientribe writes: Once again, SSL/TLS encryption is getting dogged by outdated and weak options that make it less secure. This time, it's the weak keys in the older RC4 crypto algorithm, which can be abused such that an attacker can sniff credentials or other data in an SSL session, according to a researcher who revealed the hack today at Black Hat Asia in Singapore.

Submission + - What makes the perfect gaming mouse? (redbull.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A new article looks at the advanced technology that goes into many gaming mice favoured by professional gamers, from dedicated processors to custom weights for the sake of ergonomics, discussing the developments with designers at three top peripheral companies: Logitech, Razer and SteelSeries. Surprisingly, some factors that were once thought to have reached the limit of their usefulness, such as DPI sensitivity, are becoming more important again as screens get bigger and we make the move to 4K resolution.

"With the rise of higher resolution screens, especially looking into 4K multi monitor systems and beyond, DPI might become an important factor in the future again, so we are not ruling out changes in the maximum tracking rate," says Razer CEO Min-Liang Tan.

Feed Google News Sci Tech: Amazon Goes After Dropbox, Google, Microsoft With Unlimited Cloud Drive ... - Te (google.com)

From feed by feedfeeder

TechCrunch
Amazon Goes After Dropbox, Google, Microsoft With Unlimited Cloud Drive ...
TechCrunch
Last year, Amazon gave a boost to its Prime members when it launched a free, unlimited photo storage for them on Cloud Drive. Today, the company is expanding that service as a paid offering to cover other kinds of content, and to users outside of its loyalty...
Amazon Cloud Drive goes unlimited: $11.99/year for photos and $59.99/year for ... VentureBeat
Amazon Cloud Drive Launches Unlimited Cloud StorageMarketWatch
Amazon announces unlimited cloud storage plans — yes, reallySlashGear
Resource Magazine-Business Insider
all 8 news articles

Submission + - Google Quietly Launches Data Saver Extension For Chrome

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Google has quietly released a Data Saver extension for Chrome, bringing the company’s data compression feature to the desktop for the first time. You can download the extension, currently in beta, from the Chrome Web Store. We say “quietly” because there doesn’t seem to be an announcement from Google. The extension was published on March 23 and appears to work exactly as advertised on the tin, based on what we’ve seen in our early tests.

Submission + - Jeremy Clarkson Dismissed From Top Gear

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: According to BBC News, Jeremy Clarkson, longstanding main host for the automobile television show Top Gear, will not have his contract renewed. This decision came about two weeks after he was suspended due to an altercation with a Top Gear producer involving catering during filming for the show. Admittedly not the nerdiest news of the day, but it can be said that his thirteen-year run on the new format of Top Gear has interested many Slashdot users who love their cars and the entertainment that the show has brought to them.

Submission + - GNOME 3.16 Released (gnome.org)

Submitted by kthreadd
kthreadd writes: Version 3.16 of GNOME, the primary desktop environment for GNU/Linux operating systems has been released. Some major new features in this release include a overhauled notification system, an updated design of the calendar drop down and support for overlay scrollbars. Also, the grid view in Files has been improved with bigger thumbnail icons, making the appearance more attractive and the rows easier to read. A video is available which demonstrates the new version.

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