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Comment IT Security vs as cost center... (Score 1) 77

by kbonin (#36451082) Attached to: McAfee CSO Issues Warning On the 'New Cold War'

The only thing changing is that IT in general is generally considered a "cost center" to trim, IT security an even less indirectly profitable component of that cost center, and management of most organizations is becoming more aggressive at reducing that cost. Add outsourcing and subcontracting issues and you end up with a system where there is real interest only in having an appearance of security, and standard practices revolve around plausible deniability and passing the buck.

Almost everyone whose been in enterprise security for a while has a collection of cringe worthy stories they cannot share... (sigh)

Submission + - Infosys, IBM using B1 visa workers ILLEGALLY (youtube.com)

Submitted by visasrus
visasrus writes: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZdhIR1-s8Mg

This is a 'Dan Rather Reports" video piece about a lawsuit filed by an ex-Infosys employee about the rampant fraud committed by Infosys and others such as IBM to illegally use B1 visas to bring their Indian workers to the US and being allowed to displace and ignore US citizen workers
When he refused to help them commit the fraud , he actually got death threats!!!!
Watch the piece and see for yourself. Pass this onto anyone and everyone you know. The truth is finally getting published about the Indian IT worker fraud on this country!!!!
Japan

Submission + - FUKUSHIMA core cooling pools R HOT (iaea.org)

Submitted by
DarkStarZumaBeach
DarkStarZumaBeach writes: "Reactor fuel cooling pools need to be kept at 26 degrees Celsius. The reactor 4 cooling pool caught fire when used reactor fuel overheated earlier this week because water either evaporated or leaked out due to primary structural failure. The reactor 3 cooling pool is also very low — and both 3 and 4 are exposed to open air. And, reactor 5 and 6 cooling pools are registering increasing temperatures ..."
Media

1928 Time Traveler Caught On Film? 685

Posted by samzenpus from the I-hate-time-travel-stories dept.
Many of you have submitted a story about Irish filmmaker George Clarke, who claims to have found a person using a cellphone in the "unused footage" section of the DVD The Circus, a Charlie Chaplin movie filmed in 1928. To me the bigger mystery is how someone who appears to be the offspring of Ram-Man and The Penguin got into a movie in the first place, especially if they were talking to a little metal box on set. Watch the video and decide for yourself.
Security

Submission + - China Penetrated NSA's Classified Operating System 2

Submitted by
Pickens
Pickens writes: "Seymour M. Hersh writes in the New Yorker that after an American EP-3E Aries II reconnaissance plane on an eavesdropping mission collided with a Chinese interceptor jet over the South China Sea in 2001 and landed at a Chinese F-8 fighter base on Hainan Island, the 24 member crew were unable to completely disable the plane’s equipment and software. The result? The Chinese kept the plane for three months and eventually reverse-engineered the plane’s NSA.-supplied operating system, estimated at between thirty and fifty million lines of computer code, giving China a road map for decrypting the Navy’s classified intelligence and operational data. “If the operating system was controlling what you’d expect on an intelligence aircraft, it would have a bunch of drivers to capture radar and telemetry,” says Whitfield Diffie, a pioneer in the field of encryption. “The plane was configured for what it wants to snoop, and the Chinese would want to know what we wanted to know about them—what we could intercept and they could not.” Despite initial skepticism, over the next few years the US intelligence community began to “read the tells” that China had gotten access to sensitive traffic and in early 2009, Admiral Timothy J. Keating, then the head of the Pacific Command, brought the issue to the new Obama Administration. "If China had reverse-engineered the EP-3E’s operating system, all such systems in the Navy would have to be replaced, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars," writes Hersch. "After much discussion, several current and former officials said, this was done" prompting some black humor from US naval officers. “This is one hell of a way to go about getting a new operating system.”""

Submission + - BP dispersants 'causing sickness' along Gulf coast (aljazeera.net)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Al Jazeera English has found toxic illnesses linked to BP oil dispersants along Gulf coast.

Two-year-old Gavin Tillman of Pass Christian, Mississippi, has been diagnosed with severe upper respiratory, sinus, and viral infections. His temperature has reached more than 39 degrees since September 15, yet his sicknesses continues to worsen. His parents, some doctors, and environmental consultants believe the child's ailments are linked to exposure to chemicals spilt by BP during its Gulf of Mexico oil disaster. Gavin's father, mother, and sister, Shayleigh, are also facing serious health problems. Their symptoms are being experienced by many others living along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico.
Security

Submission + - British Airways Chief Slams US Security Requests

Submitted by
Ponca City
Ponca City writes: "Reflecting a growing frustration among airport and airline owners with the steady build-up of rules covering everything from footwear to liquids, Martin Broughton, chairman of British Airways, has launched a scathing attack on the "completely redundant" airport checks requested by the TSA and urged the UK to stop "kowtowing" to American demands for ever more security. Speaking at the annual conference of the UK Airport Operators Association, Broughton lambasted the TSA for demanding that foreign airports increase checks on U.S.-bound planes, while not applying those regulations to their own domestic services. "America does not do internally a lot of the things they demand that we do," says Broughton. "We shouldn't stand for that. We should say, 'We'll only do things which we consider to be essential and that you Americans also consider essential.'" For example, Broughton noted that cutting-edge technology recently installed at airports can scan laptops inside hand luggage for explosives but despite this breakthrough the British government still demands computers be examined separately. "It's just completely ridiculous," says Broughton. "Every time there is a new security scare, an extra layer is added on to procedures," adds Mike Carrivick, chief executive of the Board of Airline Representatives in the UK. "We need to step back and have a look at the whole situation. Standards change fairly regularly, and this puts pressure on airports and airlines. We need to decide what we are trying to do and how best to do it.""
Java

Submission + - Oracle Need A Clue As Brain Drain Accelerates (computerworlduk.com) 1

Submitted by
The Contrarian
The Contrarian writes: "Looks like Oracle is not suiting former Sun staff well, nor community members in the Java and OpenOffice.org communities. This weekend saw an unusually large number of rather public departures, with (among many others listed in the article) the VP running Solaris development quitting, the token academic on the JCP slamming the door behind him and top community leaders at OpenOffice.org nailing their resignations to the door after having the ex-Sun people slam the door in their face.

The best analysis comes from an unexpected place, with the marketing director of Eclipse — usually loyal defenders of their top-dollar-paying members — turning on Oracle and telling them to get a clue."
Math

Submission + - Quantum Test Could Reinforce String Theory (imperial.ac.uk) 1

Submitted by eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes: There's no much else like a discussion about the 'untestability' of String Theory to get a group of theoretical physicists jawing. Tomorrow in Physical Review Letters, a paper will be published by a professor of the Imperial College of London on how a quantum entanglement test could either disprove or reinforce String Theory (but apparently not prove that it is entirely correct). Curiously, news reports offer little attempt to explain the proposed test aside from how Dr. Duff stumbled upon this relationship between his analysis of String Theory and — bizarrely — a Tasmanian conference on quantum entanglement. While it's not the first test imagined, quantum entanglement has at least been observed before in labs. Big news for theoretical physicists who are fed up with the inability to test String Theory.

Submission + - Newspapers Cut Wikileaks Out Of Shield Law (techdirt.com) 3

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The US press has been pushing for a (much needed) federal shield law, that would allow reporters to protect their sources. It's been something of a political struggle for a few years now, and things were getting close when Wikileaks suddenly got a bunch of attention for leaking all those Afghan war documents. Suddenly, the politicians involved started working on an amendment that would specifically carve out an exception for Wikileaks so that it would not be covered by such a shield law. And, now, The First Amendment Center is condemning the newspaper industry for throwing Wikileaks under the bus, as many in the industry are supporting this new amendment, and saying that Wikileaks doesn't deserve source protection because "it's not journalism."
Security

Submission + - Owning Virtual Worlds For Fun and Profit (threatpost.com)

Submitted by Trailrunner7
Trailrunner7 writes: Threatpost has a guest column by security researcher Charlie Miller on the ways in which attackers can easily take advantage of vulnerabilities in virtual worlds and perhaps online games to get control of other players' characters and avatars and even cash out their real-world bank accounts. "I’m a security researcher. I find bugs in software, they get fixed. I write exploits, they give me a shell. It's more or less always the same and it gets kind of boring. But there was one exploit I helped write back in 2007 that was a little different. This is the story of that exploit. It turns out that Second Life uses QuickTime Player to process its multimedia. When I started looking into virtual world exploits, with the help of Dino Dai Zovi, there was a stack buffer overflow in QuickTime Player that had been discovered by Krystian Kloskowski but had not yet been patched. In Second Life it is possible to embed images and video onto objects.

  We embedded a vulnerable file onto a small pink cube and placed it onto a track of land we owned. No matter where the cube was, if a victim walked onto the land and had multimedia enabled (recommended but not required), they would be exploited. The cube could be inside a building, hovering in the air, or even under the ground, and the result was the same."
Linux

Submission + - What is the best cross-platform build system?

Submitted by rippeltippel
rippeltippel writes: I write embedded software for multiple linux-based platforms and use different build systems (makefiles, buildroot, ...) to cross-compile software, kernel, and to generate the final rootfs. I would now like to uniform the build system with a tool which is actively maintained and updated, allows to easily add/remove packages and, most of all, to cross-compile the same codebase to different platforms with little effort.
I've seen that there are several solutions available, e.g. PTXdist, CMake, LTIB, T2 SDE, OpenEmbedded, Poky, Bitbake and, of course, Buildroot. From my understanding, some of them are integrated into each other (e.g. OpenEmbedded uses Bitbake) but unfortunately I couldn't find any serious comparison or review of those tools.
What cross-platform build system do Slashdotters reckon to be the most suitable?
Biotech

Submission + - Resurrected Mammoth Blood is Very Cool

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "Astrobiology Magazine reports that a team of international researchers has brought the primary component of mammoth blood back to life using ancient DNA preserved in bones from Siberian specimens 25,000 to 43,000 years old and found that the recreated mammoth haemoglobin hads special evolutionary adaptations that allowed the mammoth to cool its extremities down in harsh Arctic conditions to minimise heat loss. We've managed to uncover physiological attributes of an animal that hasn't existed for thousands of years," says team leader Professor Kevin Campbell of the University of Manitoba, Canada. "Our approach opens the way to studying the biomolecular and physiological characteristics of extinct species, even for features that leave no trace in the fossil record." The team converted the mammoth haemoglobin DNA sequences into RNA, and inserted them into modern-day E. coli bacteria, which then manufactured the authentic mammoth protein. Then the team used modern scientific physiological tests and chemical modelling to characterize the biochemical properties that conferred mammoths with physiological cold tolerance. "It has been remarkable to bring a complex protein from an extinct species, such as the mammoth, back to life," adds Professor Alan Cooper, Director of the Australian Centre for Ancient DNA (ACAD), where the mammoth haemoglobin sequences were determined."

Comment Re:Agree. Concepts are a dime a doxen (Score 1) 250

by kbonin (#32099564) Attached to: Best Way To Sell a Game Concept?

FWIW... I'm a game industry veteran, working on something you sound like target audience for - AAA engine, MMO over P2P back end, 2 authoring levels - simple (point and click) and pro (API), all free for non commercial use, cross platform. Hopefully done this year - watch vscape.com for updates, site is dead looking placeholder, busy team behind.

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