Please create an account to participate in the Slashdot moderation system

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Submission + - RNC Calls For Halt To Unconstitutional Surveillance

Submitted by Bob9113
Bob9113 writes: According to an article on Ars Technica, the Republican National Committee (RNC) has passed a resolution that "encourages Republican lawmakers to immediately take action to halt current unconstitutional surveillance programs and provide a full public accounting of the NSA's data collection programs." The resolution, according to Time, was approved by an overwhelming majority voice vote at the Republican National Committee's Winter Meeting General Session, going on this week in Washington, DC.

Submission + - New England Burns Jet Fuel to Keep Lights On (forbes.com) 1

Submitted by inqrorken
inqrorken writes: During the recent cold snap, New England utilities turned to an unconventional fuel: jet fuel. Due to high demand for heating, natural gas supplies dropped and prices skyrocketed to $140/mmBtu and prompting the midatlantic RTO to call on demand response in the region. With 50% of installed generation capacity natural-gas fired, one utility took the step of running its jet fuel-based turbines for a record 15 hours.

Submission + - Michaels Stores Investigating Possible Data Breach (krebsonsecurity.com)

Submitted by tsu doh nimh
tsu doh nimh writes: Michaels Stores In., which runs more than 1,250 crafts stores across the United States, said Saturday that it is investigating a possible data breach involving customer cardholder information. According to Brian Krebs, the journalist who broke the story and news of the Target and Neiman Marcus breaches, the U.S. Secret Service has confirmed it is investigating. Krebs cited multiple sources in the banking industry saying they were tracking a pattern of fraud on cards that were all recently used at Michaels Stores Inc. In response to that story, Michaels issued a statement saying it "recently learned of possible fraudulent activity on some U.S. payment cards that had been used at Michaels, suggesting that the Company may have experienced a data security attack.” In 2011, Michaels disclosed that attackers had physically tampered with point-of-sale terminals in multiple stores, but so far there are no indications what might be the cause of the latest breach. Both Target and Neiman Marcus have said the culprit was malicious software designed to steal payment card data, and at least in Target's case that's been shown to be malware made to infect retail cash registers.

Submission + - VC Likens Google Bus Backlash to Nazi Rampage

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Valleywag reports on legendary Silicon Valley venture capitalist Tom Perkins' WSJ op-ed on class tensions, in which the KPCB founder and former HP and News Corp. board member likens criticism of the techno-affluent and their transformation of San Francisco to one of the most horrific events in Western history. "I would call attention to the parallels of Nazi Germany to its war on its 'one percent,' namely its Jews, to the progressive war on the American one percent, namely the 'rich.'" Perkins writes. "There is outraged public reaction to the Google buses carrying technology workers from the city to the peninsula high-tech companies which employ them. We have outrage over the rising real-estate prices which these 'techno geeks' can pay...This is a very dangerous drift in our American thinking. Kristallnacht was unthinkable in 1930; is its descendent "progressive" radicalism unthinkable now?"

Submission + - How Do We Know How Many Galaxies There Are In The Universe?

Submitted by StartsWithABang
StartsWithABang writes: It's hard to believe that just 100 years ago, we were pretty well convinced that the entire Universe was no bigger than the extent of our Milky Way galaxy. Fast-forward to today, and we know that just the observable part of our Universe is vast — some 46 billion light-years in radius — and full of at least many billions of galaxies. But how many billions? Thanks to the amazing deep fields taken with Hubble, including the eXtreme Deep Field with a 23-day integration time most recently, we can safely extrapolate that there are at least 200 billion galaxies in the Universe. The method is very simple: 5,500 galaxies in that tiny angular region of the sky covered by XDF, and it would take 32 million such regions to fill the entire sky. And that's a safe low estimate; likely many more will be found when the James Webb Space Telescope finally flies.

Submission + - So you thought your GP records were confidential in the UK?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: From March 2014, the Health and Social Care Act 2012 mandates that GP surgeries must on a monthly basis upload all patient data, unanonymised, to a central HSCIC database. While the NHS argues that this will help with planning and service provision, there is already a list of other organisations who have already been approved to have access to the data including the UK Government, BUPA and Dr. Foster. While it is possible to "opt-out" (which incidentally means that your data is still sent but is anonymised), it is not the default option and you must individually contact your GP surgery to arrange this. With the "opt-out" deadline of the end of January 2014 approaching, what will you do? And what could possibly go wrong if you don't?

Submission + - How Many Planets In The Universe?

Submitted by StartsWithABang
StartsWithABang writes: Our observable Universe is a big place, with hundreds of billions of galaxies strewn across a region of space some 92 billion light-years in diameter. And every planet is a chance for something amazing. But how many of them are there? "My point is this: if you want to accurately estimate how many planets there are in our galaxy, you can’t just take the number of planets we find around our star and multiply it by the number of stars in our galaxy. That’s a naïve estimate that we’d make in the absence of evidence." No conservative lower limits here, just the best science we have to date, including what that means for rogue/orphan planets, and how our Solar System stacks up to everything else we've discovered out there. For the TL;DR crowd: there are about 10^25 planets orbiting stars in our observable Universe, and that number goes up by a factor of 100-to-1,000,000 if you include round worlds floating free in space.

Submission + - Google Pushes Back Against Data Localization (nytimes.com)

Submitted by Boweravid
Boweravid writes: The big tech companies have put forth a united front when it comes to pushing back against the government after revelations of mass surveillance. But their cooperation goes only so far.

Microsoft this week suggested that it would deepen its existing efforts to allow customers to store their data near them and outside the United States. Google, for its part, has been fighting this notion of so-called data localization.

“If data localization and other efforts are successful, then what we will face is the effective Balkanization of the Internet and the creation of a ‘splinternet’ broken up into smaller national and regional pieces, with barriers around each of the splintered Internets to replace the global Internet we know today,” Richard Salgado, Google’s director of law enforcement and information security, told a congressional panel in November.

Submission + - Hackers Steal Law Enforcement Documents from Microsoft (securityweek.com)

Submitted by wiredmikey
wiredmikey writes: Microsoft on Friday said that attackers breached the email accounts of a “select number” of employees, and obtained access to documents associated with law enforcement inquiries. According to the company, a number of Microsoft employees were targeted with attacks aiming to compromise both email and social media accounts

“..We have learned that there was unauthorized access to certain employee email accounts, and information contained in those accounts could be disclosed,” said Adrienne Hall, General Manager at Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing Group. “It appears that documents associated with law enforcement inquiries were stolen,” Hall said.

Targeted attacks like this are not uncommon, especially for an organization like Microsoft. What’s interesting about this is that the incident was significant enough to disclose, indicating that a fair number of documents could have been exposed, or that the company fears some documents will make their way to the public if released by the attackers—which may be the case if this was a “hacktivist” attack.

Submission + - Counterfeit Card Shop Bust Confirms Tormail Seizure (krebsonsecurity.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Federal authorities in New Jersey announced a series of arrests and indictments of 14 individuals thought to be connected to an online one-stop shop selling embossed, counterfeit credit cards and holographic overlays. KrebsOnSecurity covers the series of operational security failures by the alleged proprietor that led to his arrest and indictment, but buried in the story is confirmation of what many users of Tormail sort of assumed happened last summer, after the FBI confirmed it had used a Firefox vulnerability to discover the real Internet addresses of some people using the Tor network. From that story, which quotes directly from charging documents that the DOJ released this week: "Between July 22, 2013 and August 2, 2013, in connection with an unrelated criminal investigation, the FBI obtained a copy of a computer server located in France via a Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty request to France, which contained data and information from the Tormail email server, including the content of Tormail e-mail accounts. On or about September 24, 2013, law enforcement obtained a search warrant to search the contents of the Platplus Tormail Account, which resided on the seized Tormail server."

Submission + - Computer Room Flooded -- With Cement (theguardian.com)

Submitted by jollyrgr3
jollyrgr3 writes: The Guardian reports that London's Victorian Tube (subway) Line was shut down after the control room was flooed with cement. Contractors were trying to fill a void in an escalator machine room next to the equipment control room. It appears the concrete burst through to the control room filling it 30cm deep.

Submission + - Facebook mocks 'infection' study, predicts Princeton's demise (facebook.com) 1

Submitted by Okian Warrior
Okian Warrior writes: In a followup to our earlier story about Princeton researchers predicting the end of Facebook by 2017, Facebook has struck back with a post using similar statistical techniques to predict that Princeton itself may be facing irreversible decline.

By using similar methods ("likes," mentions in scholarly papers, Google searches) Facebook creates convincing-looking graphs that indicate Princeton is losing ground compared with its rivals and may have no students at all by 2021.

Submission + - Edward Snowden Wants to Come Home (vice.com)

Submitted by Daniel_Stuckey
Daniel_Stuckey writes: In a live chat this afternoon, Edward Snowden gave the world a glimpse of the changes he hopes to see now that his bombshell leaks have the world fired up about government surveillance and digital privacy. But the text-based Q&A wasn't all about NSA spying. Snowden took the moment of publicity to call for whistleblower protection reform in the US and the chance for a fair trial. He made it clear he wants to come home.

"Returning to the US, I think, is the best resolution for the government, the public, and myself," Snowden said. "But it’s unfortunately not possible in the face of current whistleblower protection laws, which through a failure in law did not cover national security contractors like myself."

Slashdot Top Deals

Don't compare floating point numbers solely for equality.

Close