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The Internet

Vint Cerf, US Congresswoman Oppose Net Regulation 156

Posted by timothy from the what-does-that-guy-know? dept.
schliz writes "Vint Cerf, Google, ICANN and California Congresswoman Mary Bono Mack have opposed a recently revealed UN initiative to regulate the internet. Congresswoman Mack put forward a US resolution that the United Nations and other international governmental organisations maintain a 'hands-off approach' to the internet, arguing that 'the internet has progressed and thrived precisely because it has not been subjected to the suffocating effect of a governmental organization's heavy hand.' Meanwhile, the so-called 'father of the internet,' Vint Cerf, called on stakeholders to sign a petition to mobilize opposition of the UN's plan. 'Today, I have signed that petition on Google's behalf because we don't believe governments should be allowed to grant themselves a monopoly on Internet governance,' said Cerf, who is also Google's chief internet lobbyist."
Google

Google Donates Windowbuilder, Codepro To Eclipse 150

Posted by timothy from the spreading-it-around dept.
h00manist writes "Google is donating Windowbuilder Pro and Codepro Profiler to the Eclipse project. 'Google acquired the software when it bought Instantiations, relaunching the Java graphical user interface building tool Windowbuilder Pro shortly after. Now the outfit has decided to donate both Windowbuilder Pro and the code analysis tool Codepro to the open source Eclipse project. Although Google has announced its intention to donate the software, it needs go through a rigorous filtering process to ensure that no intellectual property rights will be breached. Once those formalities are dealt with, it is likely that both Windowbuilder Pro and Codepro will tip up in the Indigo release of Eclipse sometime in June 2011.'"
Crime

FBI Defend Raids On Texas Datacenter 115

Posted by timothy from the we're-from-the-govt-and-we're-here-to-help dept.
Aryden writes "Wired Reports: 'The FBI on Tuesday defended its raids on at least two data centers in Texas, in which agents carted out equipment and disrupted service to hundreds of businesses. The raids were part of an investigation prompted by complaints from AT&T and Verizon about unpaid bills allegedly owed by some data center customers, according to court records. One data center owner charges that the telecoms are using the FBI to collect debts that should be resolved in civil court. But on Tuesday, an FBI spokesman disputed that charge.'"
Movies

H.R. Giger Returns To the Alien Franchise 144

Posted by timothy from the how-could-this-not-give-nightmares dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Great news for Alien franchise purists, as conceptual artist H.R. Giger has been confirmed as a contributor to the prequel that Ridley Scott is set to begin shooting in February. The originator of the 'xenomorph' design, Giger was left out of James Cameron's Aliens (1986), since Cameron only needed a new 'Alien queen' design, and had come up with that himself. This article features the Swiss TV broadcast where Giger's wife broke the news, and a full gallery of Giger's conceptual work for Alien."
Education

Drop Out and Innovate, Urges VC Peter Thiel 239

Posted by timothy from the good-work-if-you-can-get-it dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The San Francisco-based founder of PayPal and co-founder of Facebook is offering two-year fellowships of up to $100,000 (£63,800) to 20 entrepreneurs or teams of entrepreneurs aged under 20 in a worldwide competition that closes this week. With the money, the recipients are expected to drop out of university — Thiel calls it 'stopping out' — and work full time on their ideas. 'Some of the world's most transformational technologies were created by people who stopped out of school because they had ideas that couldn't wait until graduation,' Thiel says. 'This fellowship will encourage the most brilliant and promising young people not to wait on their ideas either.' Thiel says the huge cost of higher education, and the resulting burden of debt, makes students less willing to take risks. 'And we think you're going to have to take a lot of risks to build the next generation of companies.'"

Submission + - First measurement of magnetic field in Earths core

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A University of California, Berkeley, geophysicist has made the first-ever measurement of the strength of the magnetic field inside Earth's core, 1,800 miles underground. The magnetic field strength is 25 Gauss, or 50 times stronger than the magnetic field at the surface that makes compass needles align north-south. Though this number is in the middle of the range geophysicists predict, it puts constraints on the identity of the heat sources in the core that keep the internal dynamo running to maintain this magnetic field.
Canada

Submission + - CBC Endangered (friends.ca)

Submitted by Don Philip
Don Philip writes: The current Canadian government is apparently trying to shut down Canada's national broadcaster, the CBC. Over the years, the CBC has done a splendid job of reporting on Canadian issues, and has generally been fair in its treatment of all political parties. There is an online petition so sign if you would like to support the CBC's continued existence.
Security

Openwall Linux 3.0 — No SUIDs, Anti-Log-Spoofing 122

Posted by Soulskill from the wouldn't-an-open-wall-be-a-gate dept.
solardiz writes "Openwall GNU/*/Linux (or Owl for short) version 3.0 is out, marking 10 years of work on the project. Owl is a small, security-enhanced Linux distro for servers, appliances, and virtual appliances. Two curious properties of Owl 3.0: no SUID programs in the default install (yet the system is usable, including password changing); and logging of who sends messages to syslog (thus, a user can't have a log message appear to come, say, from the kernel or sshd). No other distro has these. Other highlights of Owl 3.0: single live+install+source CD, i686 or x86_64, integrated OpenVZ (host and/or guest), 'make iso' & 'make vztemplate' in the included build environment, ext4 by default, xz in tar/rpm/less, 'anti-Debian' key blacklisting in OpenSSH. A full install is under 400 MB, and it can rebuild itself from source."
Google

Submission + - Time to Loosen Google's Grip?

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "Steven Pearlstein writes in the Washington Post that Google has cleverly used its near-monopoly in Web search and search advertising and the profits it generates to achieve dominant positions in adjacent or complementary markets moving into operating system and application software, mobile telephone software, e-mail, Web browsers, maps, and video aggregation. The problem "is in allowing Google to buy its way into new markets and new technologies, particularly when the firms being bought already have a dominant position in their respective market niches," writes Pearlstein. That was certainly the case with the company's acquisitions of YouTube, DoubleClick and AdMob and with Google's proposed $700 million acquisition of ITA Software. "One at a time, these deals might appear to be relatively benign. But taken together, they allow Google to increase the scale and scope of its activities and to further enhance its controlling position across a range of sectors." It's worth remembering that aggressive enforcement of the antitrust laws has been a crucial part of the history of technological innovation in this country with enforcement like the ATT divestiture that led to a surge of competition in the long distance telecommunications market by companies such as Sprint and MCI. "So far, neither the Justice Department nor the Federal Trade Commission has been willing to use [anti-trust regulation] to mount a broad challenge to Google and its strategy of using acquisitions to expand and protect its existing monopoly," adds Pearlstein. "It's easy to see why Google would want to use well-chosen acquisitions to try to delay or prevent that next round of creative destruction. What's harder to understand is why we would let them do it."""

Submission + - What happens when you steal a hackers computer... (defcon.org) 1

Submitted by Agent__Smith
Agent__Smith writes: This is a presentation from DEFCON 18 in Las Vegas. Apparently some looser kicked in the door to Zoz Brooks appartment and stole his computer. Unfortunately for said looser, it was a MAC and as the thief had no MAC OS disks to wipe the system, he used it without modification. Zoz is a professor at MIT and as he travels and lectures all over the world, he had software installed so that he could log into the machine remotely. 4 months or so after the theft, the system showed up on the interweb, and Zoz began several months of detective work to get his system back. In so doing, he realized that the looser was using his system to fill out documents for government programs (now had his name address soc sec number etc...) and that he apparently has an affinity for Brazilian women with large rear ends. And as such was using the system to put pictures of himself (sans clothing) trying to hook up. (now we know what he looks like) It gets even better when this idiot uses the intact keychain to store all of his passwords (banking, facebook, ebay etc...) It is a hilarious story and well worth a listen. From the defcon.org website, you can hear the entire presentation, complete with slides of the things that Zoz found on this guy. I have to say that this was easily the funniest presentation of Defcon 18.
Botnet

Submission + - Raising a botnet in captivity (technologyreview.com)

Submitted by holy_calamity
holy_calamity writes: Technology Review reports that researchers installed 3000 copies of Windows XP on a high performance cluster at a Canadian university and set loose the Waledac botnet on them. It's the first time researchers have built and operated their own botnet as a strategy to better understand those at large on the internet. Doing it inside an experimental computing cluster removes the legal and ethical complications of experimenting with live botnets that control innocent users' machines.
Image

Thief Posts His Photo To Facebook Victim's Account Screenshot-sm 222

Posted by samzenpus from the criminal-status-update dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Washington Post reporter Marc Fisher discovered his house had been burgled; money, a winter coat, an iPod and his son's laptop were stolen. Imagine his surprise when Facebook friends of his 15-year-old son reported that a photo of the apparent thief, wearing Fisher's coat and holding a wad of notes, had been uploaded to his son's Facebook account. How addicted do you have to be to a social network to post a status update and upload your photo *while* you're burgling someone's house?"
Security

NSA Considers Its Networks Compromised 239

Posted by Soulskill from the nowhere-to-go-but-up dept.
Orome1 writes "Debora Plunkett, head of the NSA's Information Assurance Directorate, has confirmed what many security experts suspected to be true: no computer network can be considered completely and utterly impenetrable — not even that of the NSA. 'There's no such thing as "secure" any more,' she said to the attendees of a cyber security forum sponsored by the Atlantic and Government Executive media organizations, and confirmed that the NSA works under the assumption that various parts of their systems have already been compromised, and is adjusting its actions accordingly."

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