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Submission + - US gas pump hacked with 'Anonymous' tagline (thestack.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Researchers at Trend Micro have uncovered a gas pump in the United States whose ID has been changed from 'DIESEL' to 'WE_ARE_LEGION' — the call-sign of the Anonymous hacking group. Following up recent revelations regarding the vulnerability of gas pump systems to online attackers, the researchers found 1,515 completely unprotected gas pump monitoring devices via the Shodan device-based search engine. The report notes that the exposed devices are capable of being protected via six-digit pins, but this security measure is not being used. The report concludes: "Our investigation shows that the tampering of an Internet-facing device resulted in a name change. But sooner or later, real world implications will occur, causing possible outages or even worse."

Submission + - Microsoft Fixes Critical Remotely Exploitable Windows Root-Level Design Bug

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In this month's Patch Tuesday, Microsoft has released nine security bulletins to address 56 unique vulnerabilities in Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Office, Internet Explorer, and Microsoft Server software. Of the nine security bulletins, three are rated Critical in severity, and among these three is one that addresses a years-old design flaw that can be exploited remotely to grant attackers administrator-level privileges to the targeted machine or device. An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could take complete control of an affected system. An attacker could then install programs; view, change, or delete data; or create new accounts with full user rights.

Submission + - Has modern Linux lost its way? (complete.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Debian developer says that Linux is no longer "clean, logical, well put-together, and organized" after systemd.

Submission + - A decentralised global mesh internet where nothing can be censored - or removed (thestack.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Later this year the MaidSafe (Massive Array of Internet Disks — Secure Access For Everyone) project leaves nine years of quiet development to go into public beta. The initiative aims to create an ISP-free, decentralised global mesh network with an internal cryptocurrency which automatically rewards users who contribute more bandwidth or storage space. With a single protocol, end-to-end encryption and multiple redundancy built in at the core, uptake of the SAFE network would make TCP/IP, FTP and an avalanche of protocols and other network technologies redundant, as well as compromising the viability of the data center industry. Additionally the network would theoretically be resistant to all government censorship, but by the same token would make 'questionable' web content unerasable. In this interview MaidSafe co-founder Nick Lambert admits "With privacy and security, you either provide it or you don’t. You can’t pick and choose who gets it."
Businesses

How, and Why, Apple Overtook Microsoft 458

Posted by timothy from the paper-beats-rock dept.
HughPickens.com writes James B. Stewart writes in the NYT that in 1998 Bill Gates said in an interview that he "couldn't imagine a situation in which Apple would ever be bigger and more profitable than Microsoft" but less than two decades later, Apple, with a market capitalization more than double Microsoft's, has won. The most successful companies need a vision, and both Apple and Microsoft have one. But according to Stewart, Apple's vision was more radical and, as it turns out, more farsighted. Where Microsoft foresaw a computer on every person's desk, Apple went a big step further: Its vision was a computer in every pocket. "Apple has been very visionary in creating and expanding significant new consumer electronics categories," says Toni Sacconaghi. "Unique, disruptive innovation is really hard to do. Doing it multiple times, as Apple has, is extremely difficult." According to Jobs' biographer Walter Isaacson, Microsoft seemed to have the better business for a long time. "But in the end, it didn't create products of ethereal beauty. Steve believed you had to control every brush stroke from beginning to end. Not because he was a control freak, but because he had a passion for perfection." Can Apple continue to live by Jobs's disruptive creed now that the company is as successful as Microsoft once was? According to Robert Cihra it was one thing for Apple to cannibalize its iPod or Mac businesses, but quite another to risk its iPhone juggernaut. "The question investors have is, what's the next iPhone? There's no obvious answer. It's almost impossible to think of anything that will create a $140 billion business out of nothing."

Submission + - Comcast Customer Service renames customer "Asshole" (arstechnica.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Ars reports that a Comcast customer in Spokane, Washington, who called to cancel the television portion of his service was initially hassled by "retention" specialist before receiving his next bill, with his first name changed to "Asshole".

Submission + - How volunteering at events can advance your open source career (opensource.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Watching other speakers and then meeting them after their sessions helped inspire me to get past my stage fright (with a dash of imposter syndrome) and start speaking at events. I've also forged friendships at conferences that are now almost as old as my career. And I've met more than one person who ended up being a future employer.

Submission + - Valve's Economist Yanis Varoufakis Appointed Greece's Finance Minister (ibtimes.co.in)

Submitted by eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes: A turnover in the Greek government resulted from recent snap elections placing SYRIZA (Coalition of the Radical Left) in power — just shy of an outright majority by two seats. Atheist and youngest Prime Minister in Greek history since 1865 Alexis Tsipras has been appointed the new prime minister and begun taking immediate drastic steps against the recent austerity laws put in place by prior administrations. One such step has been to appoint Valve's economist Yanis Varoufakis to position of Finance Minister of Greece. For the past three years Varoufakis has been working at Steam to analyze and improve the Steam Market but now has the opportunity to improve one of the most troubled economies in the world.

Submission + - Finding a way to share cover songs (blogologue.com)

Submitted by blogologue
blogologue writes: OK, so a little while ago I had problems with SoundCloud ( http://blogologue.com/blog_ent... ), they took down a simple remix I made and gave me a dire warning that they would "terminate" my account.

Now I've got got a notice from MixCloud that they've taken down a song, even though it's my understanding that they pay licensing fees to the original creators so even though I make my own cover variant song of their song and all the income for that song goes to MixCloud and the content creators, they still take it down.

I think it's natural that people interpret popular culture and make works with popular culture. Popular music is also where a lot of people start, so there must be many, many people out there who want to share whatever they're working on, if just for fun (but also for feedback, a chance at getting noticed, making it big and so on). For me this music thing is a hobby so I'm not giving much thought to making money off it and all that entails, and to me it seems just wrong that it isn't possible to participate in a cultural exchange without getting hammered down like this.

Does anyone have suggestions on what I can do to share works that include other works without getting bothered?

Submission + - What kind of stars actually gave rise to us?

Submitted by StartsWithABang
StartsWithABang writes: You've heard the famous quote before, that "we are star stuff." This is true, of course, since only hydrogen and helium existed shortly after the Big Bang, so the elements must have been made in stars. But many of the ones we think of as necessary for life — including phosphorous, sodium, chlorine, magnesium, calcium, potassium, copper, and zinc — didn't come from a single generation of previous, massive stars. It took a slow-burning star like our own Sun to make dozens of elements that are abundant on Earth today.

Comment Misconceptions (Score 2) 1

by jbernardo (#48828171) Attached to: Systemd's Lennart Poettering: "We Do Listen To Users"

I find it telling how to LP "the Unix way" is to have everything in the same repository and developed by the same people: "What's typical for Unix, for example, is that all the tools, the C library, the kernel, are all maintained in the same repository, right? And they're released in sync, have the same coding style, the same build infrastructure, the same release cycles - everything's the same. "

He only needed to google a bit to find this, but it is telling that he won't even give himself to the trouble. It is even funnier when later in the interview he claims to listen to people!

All in all, an interesting propaganda piece, a re-hash of previous ones done by LP on his blog.

Submission + - Lost Beagle2 probe found 'intact' on Mars (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by Stolga
Stolga writes: The missing Mars robot Beagle2 has been found on the surface of the Red Planet, apparently intact.

High-resolution images taken from orbit have identified its landing location, and it looks to be in one piece.

The UK-led probe tried to make a soft touchdown on the dusty world on Christmas Day, 2003, using parachutes and airbags — but no radio contact was ever made with the probe.

Many scientists assumed it had been destroyed in a high-velocity impact.

Comment Re:Will SystemD feature creep ever stop ? (Score 1) 553

by jbernardo (#48822725) Attached to: SystemD Gains New Networking Features

I've been bit by a similar systemd issue. The only way to get it to work is to boot from a USB key or from cd, and force a fsck on all your filesystem. Apparently some systemd versions have race conditions with fsck and won't mount / unless the fsck ended successfuly. Add that to another bug where it won't show a console...
I think these have by now been fixed, but I had your problem also with arch linux, some months ago, on at least two pcs.

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