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Comment I Do Not Have A Facebook Account (Score 1) 163

by Marlin Schwanke (#59006362) Attached to: Did Facebook End The Encryption Debate?

Will I be required by law to have social media apps installed on my phone, tablet or laptop? Perhaps there is a simpler method.

There are countries that are right now requiring root certificates belonging to their government be installed on computing devices. The U.S. Attorney General is demanding an encryption back-door such as this right now. No pesky court order required. Your communications are always accessible on demand, in real-time, that way.

It may be that we are not yet cowed sufficiently to let that happen. In that case the author has a point. Get commercial entities to do their thing and then step in an grab the data from them. Just like the good old days when the NSA had wire-taps installed right in the phone company's switching facilities.

Submission + - Feds nab exec on allegations he hacked to steal info about school lunches (theregister.co.uk)

Submitted by sandbagger
sandbagger writes: After a year-long investigation, a top California exec has been arrested by the FBI for allegedly hacking into a competitor's website and stealing their customer data in an effort to ruin their business. There is an unusual twist, however: this isn't the high-stakes world of big tech or high finance, but American school lunches. According to the criminal complaint against him, filed in San Mateo County, the businessman stole data on hundreds of students, and then sent it anonymously to the local government department that oversees the school lunch program in an apparent effort to undermine his competitor.

Submission + - Can cryptocurrency be valuable without scarcity? (cryptoglobe.com) 3

Submitted by shanen
shanen writes: Mostly submitting the story due to minor surprise that Slashdot hasn't already discussed it... Lots of bandwagoners around here who think Bitcoin is better than sliced bread.

My own take is that cryptocurrency is a worthless idea. Essentially it comes down to the notion that certain numbers are valuable because they are rare relative to all of the other numbers out there (as distinguished by some algorithm). This basis of value is bogus on two counts: One: All numbers are interesting (and there's a famous proof), and Two: There's no scarcity of algorithms to separate numbers into small and large sets.

And yet... Are there any numbers that really are more interesting than others? It's a kind of ontological argument, like Godel's proof of gawd's existence... My favorite candidate would be the Euler-Mascheroni Constant. Gamma is so "messed up" that no one has even been able to prove it isn't rational, though I'm personally convinced it must be transcendental. But I still wouldn't base a cryptocurrency on it.

Then again, you could argue that stock prices themselves have mutated into pure opinions. In that case, Buffett's opinion counts for what?

Submission + - Mozilla rolls out fix for disabled Firefox add-ons problem (betanews.com) 1

Submitted by Mark Wilson
Mark Wilson writes: Since late last night, Firefox users have been plagued with a problem that meant no add-ons were working. Extensions were disabled and users were unable to re-enable them, causing confusion and frustrationaround the world.

It turns out that that the reason Firefox add-ons stopped working is that a signing certificate expired. Having determined the cause of the problem, Mozilla has developed a fix for users of the desktop version of Firefox on the Release, Beta and Nightly channel — and it is rolling out using a slightly usual method.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Is The Information Asymmetry Between Producers And Consumers Good?

Submitted by dryriver
dryriver writes: The producer of a tech product — thanks to internet data mining — may know all sorts of things about me, the buyer of a product. Gender, age, income level, education level, profession, geolocation, what I read online, who my social media friends are, what interests me intellectually, which way I swing politically, and more. For a few dollars spent, I am no "mystery" to the producer of this tech product. But if I were to ask the producer of the product simple questions like "How much did the GPU component in this laptop you are selling me cost you?" or "What portion of the final asking price of this product is profit that goes to you?" I likely wouldn't get an answer. Information asymmetry is at play now — the producing party in the buying transaction knows far, far more about me than I can possibly know about the producing party. And unlike the producing party, I cannot simply open my wallet and purchase "data mined information" about the producing party. Company secrets are company secrets. The "info buying" works in one direction only. Is it a good thing for consumers that this "information asymmetry" exists in the first place? That pretty much any tech producer can learn about me with a few bucks spent, but I cannot get simple information like "How much did the Nvidia 1060 Mobile GPU in this 1,200 Dollar notebook cost the producer"?

Submission + - The World Video Game Hall of Fame 2019 Inductees

Submitted by Dave Knott
Dave Knott writes: The 2019 World Video Game Hall of Fame inductees have been announced. The Hall Of Fame "recognizes individual electronic games of all types — arcade, console, computer, handheld, and mobile — that have enjoyed popularity over a sustained period and have exerted influence on the video game industry or on popular culture and society in general." The 2019 inductees are: Colossal Cave Adventure, Microsoft Solitaire, Mortal Kombat, and Super Mario Kart.

Submission + - A Hacker Is Wiping Git Repositories and Asking for a Ransom (zdnet.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Hundreds of developers have had had Git source code repositories wiped and replaced with a ransom demand. The hacker removes all source code and recent commits from vitcims' Git repositories, and leaves a ransom note behind that asks for a payment of 0.1 Bitcoin (~$570). The hacker claims all source code has been downloaded and stored on one of their servers, and gives the victim ten days to pay the ransom; otherwise, they'll make the code public.

Hundreds of users have had code repositories wiped and replaced with ransom notes. The coordinated attack has hit Git repositories stored across multiple platforms, such as GitHub, GitLab,and Bitbucket. Some users who fell victim to this hacker have admitted to using weak passwords for their GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket accounts, and forgetting to remove access tokens for old apps they haven't used for months --both of which are very common ways in which online accounts usually get compromised. Several users also tried to pin the issue on the hacker using an exploit in SourceTree, a Git GUI app for Mac and Windows made by Atlassian; however, there is no evidence to support this theory, for the time being.

Submission + - Accidentally swallowed AirPod still works after being passed (9to5mac.com)

Submitted by Applehu Akbar
Applehu Akbar writes: A Taiwanese man woke up from a nap to find one of his AirPods missing. When he used Apple’s Find My Device feature to locate it, it showed as still being in his room, and he he could hear it beeping, like a TV remote hiding in the couch cushions. When he realized that the beeping was coming from his own stomach, he reported to an emergency room.

ER staff gave him the option of surgery, but recommended that he pass it naturally. This he did, and after carefully washing and drying it, he found it still worked — and with 41% charge still left.

Submission + - U.K. Defense Chief Is Fired Over Huawei Leak (nytimes.com)

Submitted by hackingbear
hackingbear writes: UK Prime Minister Theresa May of Britain on Wednesday abruptly fired her defense secretary, Gavin Williamson, blaming him for a leak that suggested she would give a role in designing a British telecommunications network to a Chinese company considered a security threat by the United States. Williamson, an ardent pro-American, denied he was the real threat of U.K. government secrets. “I strenuously deny that I was in any way involved in this leak,” he said in a letter released publicly. A senior American intelligence official, who declined to be identified because he was not authorized to discuss the topic, said the firing of Mr. Williamson was a setback for the American effort to engage in quiet dialogue with European nations, whom have been spied upon by the NSA, about the dangers of letting Chinese technology companies build the core of any 5G network.

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