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Submission + - Some Hackers Unknowingly Gathering Intel for the NSA (itworld.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: As reported Wednesday by the news website The Intercept, the U.S. National Security Agency and its intelligence partners are sifting through data stolen by state-sponsored and freelance hackers on a regular basis in search of valuable information. A page from an internal wiki used by the intelligence agencies of the U.S., Canada and the U.K, which was last modified in 2012 and was among the files leaked by Edward Snowden reads: 'Hackers are stealing the emails of some of our targets... by collecting the hackers’ ‘take’ we 1) get access to the emails ourselves and 2) get insights into who’s being hacked.'

Submission + - Twitter CEO says Twitter sucks at dealing with trolls, vows to kick them out

Submitted by AmiMoJo
AmiMoJo writes: "We suck at dealing with abuse and trolls on the platform, and we've sucked at it for years" wrote Twitter CEO Dick Costolo in a leaked internal post. "We lose core user after core user by not addressing simple trolling issues that they face every day."

Gamergate is only the latest and loudest example of harassment. Robin Williams' daughter, Zelda Williams, left the service last August because of the disturbing images and attacks she received after her father's suicide. Advocates have offered numerous suggestions for fixing the problem, including improving responsiveness to reports and better blocking tools.

Submission + - What tools to cleanup a large C/C++ project?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: I find myself in the uncomfortable position of having to 'cleanup' a relatively large C/C++ project. We are talking ~200 files, 11MB of source code, 220K lines of code...

A superficial glance shows that they are a lot of functions that seems to be doing the same things, a lot of 'unused' stuff and a lot of inconsistency between what is declared in .h files and what is implemented in the corresponding .cpp files.

Is there any tools that will help me catalog this mess and make it easier for me to locate/erase unused things, cleanup .h files, find functions with similar names?

Submission + - Another 0 day exploit hitting Adobe Flash (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Billly Gates
Billly Gates writes: Just a week or 2 ago another flash exploit hit the net installing CryptoWall through infected servers from ad networks. Now the scammers are using another 0 day exploit to hit any browser at any version to install malware or Cryptowall on a victims computer. A decade on Slashdot there were discussions on whether it was time to uninstall Java JRE from local browsers. Is it time in 2015 to just uninstall Flash now since we have HTML 5 with major websites like www.youtube.com already switching to it?

Submission + - Greg KH Favors Rolling Release Distros (google.com)

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: In an interesting Google+ post, the lieutenant Linux developer Greg Kroah-Hartman mentions him fully moving to rolling-release Linux distributions: "Finally retired my last 'traditional' Linux distro box yesterday, it's all 'rolling-release' Linux systems for me. Feels good. And to preempt the ask, it's Arch Linux almost everywhere (laptop, workstation, cloud servers), CoreOS (cloud server), and Gentoo for the remaining few (laptop, server under my desk)." What's your experience? Would in the current situation a rolling-release operating system indeed be the optimal choice?

Submission + - YouTube Launches Multi-Angle Video Experiment

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: YouTube is experimenting with a fun feature already known from DVDs: videos that let you switch between different camera angles while the video is playing. These multi-angle videos are only an experiment right now and there's only one demo video that actually showcases this feature so far. Provided that the user can supply multiple camera streams, YouTube tells that the multiplexing will be automatic, but that the technology is not ready to scale to everyone yet. If you want to give this a try, head over to Madilyn Bailey's channel. The YouTube team took her performance at the most recent YouTube Music Night and set it up as a multi-angle video.

Submission + - Mississippi - The Nation's Leader in Vaccination Rates

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: The NYT reports that Mississippi — which ranks as one of the worst states for smoking, obesity and physical inactivity — seldom is viewed as a leader on health issues. But it is one of two states that permit neither religious nor philosophical exemptions to its vaccination program. Only children with medical conditions that would be exacerbated by vaccines may enroll in Mississippi schools without completing the immunization schedule, which calls for five vaccines. With a vaccination rate of greater than 99.7%, Mississippi leads the national median by five percentage points and has the country’s highest immunization rate among kindergarten students.

However, in recent weeks, the nearly unbending nature of Mississippi’s law requiring students to be vaccinated has been in jeopardy, with two dozen lawmakers publicly supporting an exemption for “conscientious beliefs” turning Mississippi into one more battleground between medical experts who champion vaccinations and parents who fear the government’s role in medical decision-making. “We have been a victim of our success, and people don’t realize how bad these diseases are,” said Mississippi state epidemiologist, Dr. Thomas E. Dobbs III, before lawmakers met to consider a bill that would have expanded exceptions to the vaccine requirement. Members of the education committee for the House of Representatives, in effect, endorsed the state’s current approach. By a voice vote, they advanced a heavily amended version of the bill that now calls for only technical changes to Mississippi’s law, which has been largely untouched since the late 1970s. The amended version of House Bill 130 puts into law the state's existing practice of granting medical waivers to children whose physicians request them, and in doing so, removes the Mississippi Department of Health's ability to deny such requests. "If a medical professional thinks it's wise not to vaccinate, then that will be the gospel," said House Education Committee Chairman John Moore, R-Brandon.

Submission + - Ross Ulbricht Found Guilty On All 7 Counts In Silk Road Trial

Submitted by blottsie
blottsie writes: Ross Ulbricht was convicted on Wednesday of running Silk Road, a Dark Net black market that became over a $100 million Internet phenomenon before Ulbricht’s 2013 arrest.

Ulbricht was found guilty on all seven felony charges he faced, including drug trafficking, continuing a criminal enterprise, hacking, money laundering, and fraud with identification documents. He faces up to life in prison for these convictions.

Submission + - New Chinese Regulations Require Real Name on Internet (pcmag.com) 1

Submitted by mpicpp
mpicpp writes: As part of an effort to increase control over the Internet, China's government this week revealed new regulations that require Web users to register their real names.

According to The Wall Street Journal, the rules apply to users of blogs, microblogs, instant messaging services, online discussion forums, news comment sections, and other related services.

Beginning March 1, China will also ban Web accounts that impersonate people or organizations, Reuters said. That includes groups posing as government entities—the People's Daily state newspaper—and impersonations of foreign leaders, like President Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin.

Submission + - Dig, Simulations Suggest Extinction Refuge, Trigger for Modern Human Behavior

Submitted by Ken Chiacchia
Ken Chiacchia writes: Curtis Marean of Arizona State University, leader of an international team studying early human settlements in the Cape Floral region of South Africa, is triangulating what may have been humanity's closest brush with extinction using three avenues of research. The team's archeological digs have demonstrated human habitation and life-sustaining protein and carbohydrate food sources at a point in the last glacial maximum when virtually no evidence of humans can be found elsewhere in Africa. DNA evidence points to a roughly contemporaneous genetic bottleneck in which the population crashed to 15,000 or fewer individuals. And new climate simulations of the area using Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center's Blacklight supercomputer for the first time provide enough detail to show the area was likely to be an island of moderate climate at a time when the rest of Africa was too arid to support human life. Interestingly, humans began to display modern behavior such as heat-treating stones for tools and artistic representations during this period.

Submission + - Dept. of Justice Blesses IEEE Rules on Injunctions and Reasonability (consortiuminfo.org)

Submitted by Andy Updegrove
Andy Updegrove writes: During the mobile platform patent wars of recent years Apple, Microsoft, Samsung, Motorola and the rest of the major vendors sought injunctions against each other to prevent their competitor from selling their products at all. The suits were often based on claims that a vendor had to pay a reasonable royalty on a “standards essential patent.” The resulting litigation clogged up the courts, and the regulators were not amused. Now, after almost two years of vigorous debate, the standards development organization behind WiFi and thousands of other ICT standards (IEEE-SA) has received the blessing of the U.S. Dept. of Justice to forbid members that have pledged to license such patents from seeking an injunction until all other remedies have been exhausted. Whether other standards organizations will follow suit remains to be seen.

Submission + - Photosynthesizing Sea Slugs Steal Genes From Algae (io9.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: For decades, scientists have puzzled over how a certain sea slug acquires the ability to photosynthesize after ingesting algae. An advanced imaging technique now confirms that the slugs are literally stealing genes from the algae. It's considered the first example of "horizontal gene transfer" in a multicellular organism.

Submission + - Android Adware 'Infects Millions' Of Phones And Tablets

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: BBC reports that Android users are being warned that several popular apps that were on the official Google Play store appear to contain hidden code that made malicious ads pop up with one of the apps — a free version of the card game Durak — downloaded up to 10 million times, according to Google Play's own counter. The "adware" causes spurious pop-up messages to appear that had been made to look like system notifications that say the phone is running "slow" and that the user needs to install new software to fix the problem. "You get re-directed to harmful threats on fake pages," writes Avast malware analyst Filip Chytry, "like dubious app stores and apps that attempt to send premium SMS behind your back or to apps that simply collect too much of your data for comfort while offering you no additional value." Several people who had downloaded the Durak card game had posted warnings on Google Play as far back as November 2013, that they suspected it was forcing pop-up ads to appear. Google Play has been plagued by app problems in the past. It has previously offered titles that provide secret remote access as well as ones that are malicious advertising networks. "Phone users ultimately have to trust the operating system vendor ," says Steven Murdoch, "whether that's Google or Apple [or someone else] to protect them."

Submission + - Google Quietly Unveils Android 5.1 Lollipop

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Google today announced that Android One, the company’s standard for bringing smartphones to the developing world, is coming to Indonesia later this month. This makes Indonesia the fifth country to roll out Android One, in addition to India, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka. Yet the bigger news is that these latest devices are shipping with Android 5.1 Lollipop. Before today, the latest known version of Google’s mobile operating system was Android 5.0 Lollipop, which debuted in November 2014.

Submission + - Confirmed: FCC Will Try To Regulate Internet Under Title II (wired.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler has written an opinion piece explaining how and why the FCC will "use its Title II authority to implement and enforce open internet protections." He says, "hese enforceable, bright-line rules will ban paid prioritization, and the blocking and throttling of lawful content and services. I propose to fully apply—for the first time ever—those bright-line rules to mobile broadband. My proposal assures the rights of internet users to go where they want, when they want, and the rights of innovators to introduce new products without asking anyone’s permission. ... To preserve incentives for broadband operators to invest in their networks, my proposal will modernize Title II, tailoring it for the 21st century, in order to provide returns necessary to construct competitive networks. For example, there will be no rate regulation, no tariffs, no last-mile unbundling. Over the last 21 years, the wireless industry has invested almost $300 billion under similar rules, proving that modernized Title II regulation can encourage investment and competition."

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If Machiavelli were a hacker, he'd have worked for the CSSG. -- Phil Lapsley

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