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Submission + - Linux Kernel Git Repositories Add 2-Factor Authentication (linux.com)

Submitted by LibbyMC
LibbyMC writes: For a few years now Linux kernel developers have followed a fairly strict authentication policy for those who commit directly to the git repositories housing the Linux kernel. Each is issued their own ssh private key, which then becomes the sole way for them to push code changes to the git repositories hosted at kernel.org. While using ssh keys is much more secure than just passwords, there are still a number of ways for ssh private keys to fall into malicious hands. So they've further tightened access requirements with two-factor authentication using yubikeys.

Submission + - The Data Dome: A Server Farm in a Geodesic Dome (datacenterknowledge.com)

Submitted by 1sockchuck
1sockchuck writes: In a unique approach to data center design, the new high-performance computing center in Oregon is housed in a geodesic dome. The new facility at the Oregon Health and Science University requires no mechanical air conditioning, using outside air to racks of servers reaching densities of 25kW per cabinet. The design uses an aisle containment system to separate hot and cold air, and can recirculate server exhaust heat to adjust cold aisle temperatures in the winter. It's a very cool integration of many recent advances in data center design, combining elements of the Yahoo Chicken Coop and server silo in Quebec. The school has posted a virtual tour that provides a deep technical dive.

Submission + - Microsoft's Windows 8 App Store is Full of Scamware and It Doesn't Seem to Care

Submitted by Deathspawner
Deathspawner writes: Windows 8 brought a lot to the table, with one of its most major features being its app store. However, it's not a feature that Microsoft seems too intent on keeping clean. As it is today, the store is completely littered with misleading apps and outright scamware. The unfortunate thing is that to find any of it, all you have to do is simply open the store and peruse the main sections. Not so surprisingly, no Microsoft software seems to be affected by this, but many open-source apps can be found at the store from unofficial sources that have a cost, or will lead the user to download a third-party installer. It's only a matter of time before malware sneaks its way in, if it's not there already.

Submission + - Windows 8.1 Update Crippling PCs With BSOD, Microsoft Suggests You Roll Back (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: Right on schedule, Microsoft rolled-out an onslaught of patches for its "Patch Tuesday" last week, and despite the fact that it wasn't the true "Update 2" for Windows 8.1 many of us were hoping for, updates are generally worth snatching up. Since the patch rollout, it's been discovered that four individual updates are causing random BSoD issues for its users, with KB2982791, a kernel-mode related driver, being the biggest culprit. Because of the bug's severity, Microsoft is recommending that anyone who updated go and uninstall a couple of the specific updates, or rollback using Windows Restore. You can uninstall these updates in much the same way you uninstall any app; the difference is that once you're in the "Programs and Features" section, you'll need to click on "View installed updates" on the left. While it's mostly recommended that you uninstall 2982791, you may wish to uninstall the others as well, just in case.

Submission + - ICANN offers fix for domain name collisions 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: This kind of problem — when an internal server's DNS name conflicts with one of the new Top Level Domain (TLD) names — is going to start happening more and more often. With over 300 new TLDs available to be used by August 2014 and 1,100 more to come, you can expect to see it a lot. Fortunately, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has a fix so you don't have to go through all the hoops I did to find the problem: the Name Collision Occurrence Management Framework. According to ICANN, which is also the organization that has blessed us with so many new TLDs to add to such old favorites of .com, .edu, and .org, "The framework is designed to mitigate the impact of name collisions in the DNS, which typically occur when fully qualified domain names conflicts with similar domain names used in private networks. When this occurs, users can be taken to an unintended web page or encounter an error message."

Submission + - NSA and it's "MonsterMind" cyberattack AI

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Edward Snowden revealed that one of the NSA's projects that's status remains unknown is "MonsterMind", an autonomous AI designed to detect cyberattacks and retaliate with a cyberattack of its own, at least, that's what it says on the tin.

From tgdaily.com:
        In a recent Wired interview Edward Snowden revealed among other things that the NSA was (and may
        still be) working on a project codenamed MonsterMind. The autonomous AI would monitor all data traffic
        entering the U.S. from anywhere in the world looking for potential cyber-attacks.
        It would then shut down the attack and could launch automated counter-attacks.

More here: http://www.tgdaily.com/web/124...

Submission + - The Windows Store is a Cesspool of Scam Apps, Why Doesn't Microsoft Care? (howtogeek.com)

Submitted by capedgirardeau
capedgirardeau writes: Microsoft’s Windows Store is a mess. It’s full of apps that exist only to scam people and take their money. Why doesn’t Microsoft care that their flagship app store is such a cesspool? ... It’s now been more than two years since Windows 8 was released, and this has been a problem the entire time, and it is getting worse. If Microsoft was trying to offer a safe app store to Windows users, they’ve failed. Searching for most popular apps will return a list of many scam clones that charge a fee for what is a free app from the official publisher and you have to hope there is no malware installed as well. Worse yet, the Windows Store is now integrated with the system search feature. Search for an application using the Start screen search or search charm and these garbage apps from the Windows Store will appear. The article points out the reason is probably "Microsoft hasn’t been encouraging quality apps. Instead, they just want quantity. In March, 2013, Microsoft ran a promotion where they paid developers $100 for each app they submitted to the Windows Store or Windows Phone Store."

Submission + - Is Storage Necessary for Renewable Energy? (engineering.com) 2

Submitted by mdsolar
mdsolar writes: Physicist and energy expert Amory Lovins, chief scientist at The Rocky Mountain Institute, recently released a video in which he claims that renewable energy can meet all of our energy needs without the need for a fossil fuel or nuclear baseload generation. There’s nothing unusual about that — many people have made that claim — but he also suggests that this can be done without a lot of grid-level storage. Instead, Lovins describes a “choreography” between supply and demand, using predictive computer models models to anticipate production and consumption, and intelligent routing to deliver power where it’s needed. This “energy dance,” combined with advances in energy efficiency, will allow us to meet all of our energy needs without sacrificing reliability.

It’s a short video — I’ll let you watch it and then I’ll make some comments about it:

Submission + - Companies That Don't Understand Engineers Don't Respect Engineers (techcrunch.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Following up on a recent experiment into the status of software engineers versus managers, Jon Evans writes that the easiest way to find out which companies don't respect their engineers is to figure out which companies simply don't understand them. "Engineers are treated as less-than-equal because we are often viewed as idiot savants. We may speak the magic language of machines, the thinking goes, but we aren't business people, so we aren't qualified to make the most important decisions. ... Whereas in fact any engineer worth her salt will tell you that she makes business decisions daily–albeit on the micro not macro level–because she has to in order to get the job done. Exactly how long should this database field be? And of what datatype? How and where should it be validated? How do we handle all of the edge cases? These are in fact business decisions, and we make them, because we’re at the proverbial coal face, and it would take forever to run every single one of them by the product peopleand sometimes they wouldn’t even understand the technical factors involved. ... It might have made some sense to treat them as separate-but-slightly-inferior when technology was not at the heart of almost every business, but not any more."

Submission + - New Cridex Malware Copies Tactics From GameOver Zeus

Submitted by Trailrunner7
Trailrunner7 writes: The GameOver Zeus malware had a nice run for itself, making untold millions of dollars for its creators. But it was a run that ended with a multi-continent operation from law enforcement and security researchers to disassemble the infrastructure. Now researchers have identified a new variant of the Cridex malware that has adopted some of the techniques that made GOZ so successful in its day.

Researchers at IBM’s X-Force research team have seen a new version of Cridex, which is also known as Bugat and Feodo, using some of the same techniques that GOZ used to such good effect. Specifically, the new strain of malware has adopted GOZ’s penchant for using HTML injections, and the researchers say the technique is nearly identical to the way that GOZ handled it.

“There are two possible explanations for this. First, someone from the GOZ group could have moved to the Bugat team. This would not be the first time something like this has happened, which we’ve witnessed in other cases involving Zeus and Citadel; however, it is not very likely in this case since Bugat and GOZ are essentially competitors, while Zeus and Citadel are closely related. The second and more likely explanation is that the Bugat team could have analyzed and perhaps reversed the GOZ malware before copying the HTML injections that made GOZ so highly profitable for its operators,” Etay Maor, a senior fraud prevention strategist at IBM, wrote in an analysis of the new malware.

Submission + - Cisco to slash up to 6,000 jobs (8% of workforce) (networkworld.com)

Submitted by alphadogg
alphadogg writes: Cisco Systems will cut as many as 6,000 jobs over the next 12 months, saying it needs to shift resources to growing businesses such as cloud, software and security. The move will be a reorganization rather than a net reduction, the company said. It needs to cut jobs because the product categories where it sees the strongest growth, such as security, require special skills, so it needs to make room for workers in those areas, it said. “If we don’t have the courage to change, if we don’t lead the change, we will be left behind,” Chairman and CEO John Chambers said on a conference call.

Submission + - Cisco Slashing Up To 6,000 Jobs (itworld.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: Cisco Systems will cut as many as 6,000 jobs over the next 12 months, saying it needs to shift resources to growing businesses such as cloud, software and security. Cisco has about 74,000 employees, so the cuts will affect about 8 percent of its staff. The move will be a reorganization rather than a net reduction, the company said. It needs to cut jobs because the product categories where it sees the strongest growth, such as security, require special skills, so it needs to make room for workers in those areas, it said.

Submission + - Teen's Device Produces Renewable Energy and Fresh Water (inhabitat.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Concerned about the millions of people living without energy and water, 17-year-old student scientist Cynthia Sin Nga Lam developed the H2Pro – a portable photocatalytic electricity generation and water purification unit that produces clean energy and fresh water at the same time. Cynthia explains that while investigating photocatalysis, she stumbled upon the idea of the H2Pro: “In photocatalysis, not only water is purified and sterilized, but hydrogen is also produced through water-splitting, which can be used to generate electricity.”

Submission + - Telegram Not Dead STOP Alive, Evolving In Japan STOP (itworld.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: Japan is one of the last countries in the world where telegrams are still widely used. A combination of traditional manners, market liberalization and innovation has kept alive this age-old form of messaging. Companies affiliated with the country's three mobile carriers, NTT DoCoMo, KDDI and SoftBank, offer telegrams, which are sent via modern server networks instead of the dedicated electrical wires of the past (Morse telegraphy hasn't been used since 1962), and then printed out with modern printers instead of tape glued on paper. But customers are still charged according to the length of the message, which is delivered within three hours. A basic NTT telegram up to 25 characters long can be sent for ¥440 ($4.30) when ordered online.

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Doubt isn't the opposite of faith; it is an element of faith. - Paul Tillich, German theologian and historian

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