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Submission + - US Department of Homeland Security Providing Online Open Source Code Testing (zdnet.com) 1

Submitted by cold fjord
cold fjord writes: ZDNet reports, "At OSCon, The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) ... quietly announced that they're now offering a service for checking out your open-source code for security holes and bugs: the Software Assurance Marketplace (SWAMP). ... Patrick Beyer, SWAMP's Project Manager at Morgridge Institute for Research, the project's prime contractor, explained, "With open source's popularity, more and more government branches are using open-source code. Some are grabbing code from here, there, and everywhere." Understandably, "there's more and more concern about the safety and quality of this code. We're the one place you can go to check into the code" ... funded by a $23.4 million grant from the Department of Homeland Security Science & Technology Directorate (DHS S&T), SWAMP is designed by researchers from the Morgridge Institute, the University of Illinois-Champaign/Urbana, Indiana University, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Each brings broad experience in software assurance, security, open source software development, national distributed facilities and identity management to the project. ... SWAMP opened its services to the community in February of 2014 offering five open-source static analysis tools that analyze source code for possible security defects without having to execute the program. ... In addition, SWAMP hosts almost 400 open source software packages to enable tool developers to add enhancements in both the precision and scope of their tools. On top of that the SWAMP provides developers with software packages from the National Institute for Standards and Technology's (NIST) Juliet Test Suite."
Privacy

Ask Slashdot: Preparing an Android Tablet For Resale? 113

Posted by timothy from the link-free-cloth-and-a-.45 dept.
UrsaMajor987 (3604759) writes I have a Asus Transformer tablet that I dropped on the floor. There is no obvious sign of damage but It will no longer boot. Good excuse to get a newer model. I intend to sell it for parts (it comes with an undamaged keyboard) or maybe just toss it. I want to remove all my personal data. I removed the flash memory card but what about the other storage? I know how to wipe a hard drive, but how do you wipe a tablet? If you were feeling especially paranoid, but wanted to keep the hardware intact for the next user, what would you do?

Comment The scammer's dream. (Score 3, Insightful) 172

by Animats (#47551715) Attached to: US States Edge Toward Cryptocoin Regulation

Over half the Bitcoin exchanges have gone bust. Entire Bitcoin "stock exchanges" disappeared with the money. Bitcoin "investments" promising substantial returns each month were, of course, Ponzi schemes.

Bitcoin is a scam magnet. Irrevocable, remote, anonymous money transfers are the scammer's dream. (Yes, there are people talking about cryptographic escrow schemes so you can buy something with Bitcoins and have some recourse if it doesn't show up. So far, that hasn't reached usability.)

That's why Bitcoin needs regulation. If you're going to hold other people's money, you have to be regulated. Deal with it.

Submission + - On Learning to Think Like A Programmer

Submitted by danspalding
danspalding writes: I'm an adult educator who's posted here before, about my book "How to Teach Adults". Now I'm learning to code to (hopefully) make quality adult ed available to more people around the world. And it's been hard. But I recently used my adult learning expertise to make a breakthrough in my ability to think like a programmer. So what does Slashdot think? What does thinking like a programmer mean to you — and how did you learn to do so?
Cellphones

Lots Of People Really Want Slideout-Keyboard Phones: Where Are They? 544

Posted by timothy from the could-be-anywhere-really dept.
Bennett Haselton writes: I can't stand switching from a slideout-keyboard phone to a touchscreen phone, and my own informal online survey found a slight majority of people who prefer slideout keyboards even more than I do. Why will no carrier make them available, at any price, except occasionally as the crummiest low-end phones in the store? Bennett's been asking around, of store managers and users, and arrives at even more perplexing questions. Read on, below.
Bitcoin

US States Edge Toward Cryptocoin Regulation 172

Posted by timothy from the hey-these-still-smell-like-dollars dept.
SonicSpike points out an article from the Pew Charitable Trusts' Research & Analysis department on the legislation and regulation schemes emerging in at least a few states in reaction to the increasing use of digital currencies like Bitcoin. A working group called the Conference of State Bank Supervisors’ Emerging Payments Task Force has been surveying the current landscape of state rules and approaches to digital currencies, a topic on which state laws are typically silent. In April, the task force presented a model consumer guidance to help states provide consumers with information about digital currencies. A number of states, including California, Massachusetts and Texas, have issued warnings to consumers that virtual currencies are not subject to “traditional regulation or monetary policy,” including insurance, bonding and other security measures, and that values can fluctuate dramatically. ... The article focuses on the high-population, big-economy states of New York, California and Texas, with a touch of Kansas -- but other states are sure to follow. Whether you live in the U.S. or not, are there government regulations that you think would actually make sense for digital currencies?

Submission + - The Misleading Fliers Comcast Used to Kill Off a Local Internet Competitor

Submitted by Jason Koebler
Jason Koebler writes: In the months and weeks leading up to a referendum vote that would have established a locally owned fiber network in three small Illinois cities, Comcast and SBC (now AT&T) bombarded residents and city council members with disinformation, exaggerations, and outright lies to ensure the measure failed.
The series of two-sided postcards painted municipal broadband as a foolhardy endeavor unfit for adults, responsible people, and perhaps as not something a smart woman would do. Municipal fiber was a gamble, a high-wire act, a game, something as "SCARY" as a ghost. Why build a municipal fiber network, one asked, when "internet service [is] already offered by two respectable private businesses?" In the corner, in tiny print, each postcard said "paid for by SBC" or "paid for by Comcast."

Submission + - Cellphone Unlocking Bill Has One Big Gotcha (itworld.com) 2

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: The cellphone unlocking bill that passed in the House of Representatives on Friday, and which President Obama said he would sign, comes with a catch that will likely prevent you from switching carriers — at least right away: Your existing wireless contract takes precedence over the law. So if your wireless contract says that you can't unlock your phone until your contract expires, you can't do it.
The Internet

Internet Census 2012 Data Examined: Authentic, But Chaotic and Unethical 32

Posted by timothy from the could-have-been-worse dept.
An anonymous reader writes "A team of researchers at the TU Berlin and RWTH Aachen presented an analysis of the Internet Census 2012 data set (here's the PDF) in the July edition of the ACM Sigcomm Computer Communication Review journal. After its release on March 17, 2013 by an anonymous author, the Internet Census data created an immediate media buzz, mainly due to its unethical data collection methodology that exploited default passwords to form the Carna botnet. The now published analysis suggests that the released data set is authentic and not faked, but also reveals a rather chaotic picture. The Census suffers from a number of methodological flaws and also lacks meta-data information, which renders the data unusable for many further analyses. As a result, the researchers have not been able to verify several claims that the anonymous author(s) made in the published Internet Census report. The researchers also point to similar but legal efforts measuring the Internet and remark that the illegally measured Internet Census 2012 is not only unethical but might have been overrated by the press."

Submission + - U.S. Coastal Flooding on the Rise, Government Study Finds (nytimes.com)

Submitted by mdsolar
mdsolar writes: Flooding is increasing in frequency along much of the U.S. coast, and the rate of increase is accelerating along the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic coasts, a team of federal government scientists found in a study released Monday.

The study examined how often 45 tide gauges along the country’s shore exceeded National Weather Service flood thresholds across several decades. The researchers found that the frequency of flooding increased at 41 locations. Moreover, they found that the rate of increase was accelerating at 28 of those locations. The highest rates of increase were concentrated along the mid-Atlantic coast.

Submission + - Better Living Through Data (ifweassume.com)

Submitted by jradavenport
jradavenport writes: Using 2 years of continuous (every 1 minute) monitoring of my MacBook Air battery usage, I have been able to study my own computer use patterns in amazing detail. This dataset includes 293k measurements, or more than 204 days of use over 2 years. I use the laptop more than 50hours per week on average, and my most productive day is Tuesday. Changes in my work/life balance have begun to appear over the 2 year span, and I am curious if such data can help inform how much computer use is healthy/effective.

Submission + - A 24-Year-Old Scammed Apple 42 Times In 16 Different States (businessinsider.com) 1

Submitted by redletterdave
redletterdave writes: Sharron Laverne Parrish Jr., 24, allegedly scammed Apple not once, but 42 times, cheating the company out of more than $300,000 — and his scam was breathtakingly simple. According to a Secret Service criminal complaint, Parrish allegedly visited Apple Stores and tried to buy products with four different debit cards, which were all closed by his respective financial institutions. When his debit card was inevitably declined by the Apple Store, he would protest and offer to call his bank — except, he wasn’t really calling his bank. So he would allegedly offer the Apple Store employees a fake authorization code with a certain number of digits, which is normally provided by credit card issuers to create a record of the credit or debit override. But that’s the problem with this system: as long as the number of digits is correct, the override code itself doesn’t matter.

Submission + - Free Active Phishing Sites Repository Launched (softpedia.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A new source for checking the latest active phishing websites, called OpenPhish, has become available online, from FraudSense, a company that offers anti-phishing intelligence services. OpenPhish is similar to PhishTank in that it provides real-time information about the URLs that have been identified as phishing. But the difference consists in the fact that it provides the targeted brand on the main page and, more importantly, it offers intelligence about the cyber crooks, collected from FraudSense’s systems.
Oracle

Oracle Offers Custom Intel Chips and Unanticipated Costs 97

Posted by timothy from the your-fries-come-with-lobster dept.
jfruh (300774) writes "For some time, Intel has been offering custom-tweaked chips to big customers. While most of the companies that have taken them up on this offer, like Facebook and eBay, put the chips into servers meant for internal use, Oracle will now be selling systems running on custom Xeons directly to end users. Those customers need to be careful about how they configure those systems, though: in the new Oracle 12c, the in-memory database option, which costs $23,000 per processor, is turned on by default."

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