Comment Re: Oddly nobody factors in risk and after costs (Score 1) 409
You are so now on the NSA hit list with those keywords LOL
Submission + - Washington Post reports servers attacked, suspects Chinese hackers (pcworld.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The Washington Post’s servers were recently broken into by a group of unknown origin that gained access to the user names and passwords of its employees, the paper said on Wednesday.
The extent of the loss of company data was not immediately clear, though officials are planning to ask all employees to change their user names and passwords, the newspaper said in a report. The Post said the passwords were encrypted. However, hackers in some cases have been able to decode encrypted passwords.
The Post did not see any evidence that the hackers accessed information about its subscribers, such as credit cards or home addresses. Nor were there immediate signs that they accessed the Post’s publishing system or email, nor sensitive personal information of its employees, such as Social Security numbers.
Post officials learned of the intrusion on Wednesday from Mandiant, a cybersecurity contractor that monitors the paper’s networks. The breach was of relatively short duration, maybe a few days at most, and an investigation is ongoing, the story said, citing a Post spokeswoman. It marks at least the third intrusion for the paper over the past three years, according to the paper.
The extent of the loss of company data was not immediately clear, though officials are planning to ask all employees to change their user names and passwords, the newspaper said in a report. The Post said the passwords were encrypted. However, hackers in some cases have been able to decode encrypted passwords.
The Post did not see any evidence that the hackers accessed information about its subscribers, such as credit cards or home addresses. Nor were there immediate signs that they accessed the Post’s publishing system or email, nor sensitive personal information of its employees, such as Social Security numbers.
Post officials learned of the intrusion on Wednesday from Mandiant, a cybersecurity contractor that monitors the paper’s networks. The breach was of relatively short duration, maybe a few days at most, and an investigation is ongoing, the story said, citing a Post spokeswoman. It marks at least the third intrusion for the paper over the past three years, according to the paper.
Submission + - Target has major credit card breach (chicagotribune.com) 2
JoeyRox writes: Target experienced a system-wide breach of credit card numbers over the Black Friday holiday shopping season. What's unique about this massive breach is that it didn't involve compromising a centralized data center or website but instead represented a distributed attack at individual Target stores across the country. Investigators believe customer account numbers were lifted via software installed on card readers at checkout.
Comment Re:There's an app for that (Score 1) 101
But the catch is that you left the Bluetooth option enabled, now your iPhone battery is dead, and now you have no idea where your car is located!
Comment Re:so much trouble (Score 1) 349
The biological section has less organic chemistry than it used to, and the overall exam is more verbal in character than before. When I took the MCAT, I got a 10/13/10. The overall score is not as important as getting 10+ in each section, so you can't just do well in one area and not the others. In medical school, it's hard to cheat on many exams, but certainly possible in some (and people have been caught doing so and reprimanded/kicked out). I just finished medical school and will be going onto a residency in general surgery, after being a chemist and then computer programmer for many years. I know that some people have cheated at time during the process, but they will be weeded out eventually as we take many licensing exams, and it's pretty difficult to cheat on everything and still get your license.
Comment Re:Consitancy (Score 1) 237
If you don't like something, then either turn it off or uninstall it. Whining about it so that others, who may want the technology, can't have it is just wrong.
Opossums Overrun Brooklyn, Fail To Eliminate Rats
343
__roo writes "In a bizarre case of life imitates the Simpsons, New York City officials introduced a population of opossums into Brooklyn parks and under the boardwalk at Coney Island, apparently convinced that the opossums would eat all of the rats in the borough and then conveniently die of starvation. Several years later, the opossums have not only failed to eliminate the rat epidemic from New York City, but they have thrived, turning into a sharp-toothed, foul-odored epidemic of their own."
Comment I'll believe it (Score 1) 240
I'll believe it when I see a successive series of releases supporting Linux, rather than one-off updates, especially with regards to security updates. Plus all the stuff about "well Linux isn't standard so we'll implement stuff only for Windows" makes it even more clear that Flash needs to be replaced unless they show results regarding supporting all platforms equally.
Comment Tough (Score 1, Insightful) 870
1. Tell the students "Tough!". You don't need a calculator!
2. The best way I've seen professors handle this is to design the questions to only require basic math knowledge, or only require answers that don't require extensive calculations. Make it so that if they are correctly arriving at the answer, the math is stupidly easy.
3. Tough about the English requirement. You are in the USA, and our language is English. And in a physics class, there shouldn't be that much to look up anyways. If you must have a dictionary, you can buy really cheap paperback ones. You think I get access to a dictionary when I take a test, or any book for that matter? NO!
No test should ever need a calculator if setup properly. It should only require basic math skills. If it must require knowledge of square roots and such, make a table available or make it so that the final calculations are ridiculously easy (like square root of 9). You are testing physics concepts, not math. And if you can't handle basic math and basic English, how did they ever get into college in the first place?
Comment iPad has no camera (Score 0) 439
But, the iPad doesn't have a camera. How are the school administrators going to be able to see the children undressing in their rooms or doing naughty things?
Woman Wins Libel Suit By Suing Wrong Website
323
An anonymous reader writes "It appears that Cincinnati Bengals cheerleader Sarah Jones and her lawyer were so upset by a comment on the site TheDirty.com that they missed the 'y' at the end of the name. Instead, they sued the owner of TheDirt.com, whose owner didn't respond to the lawsuit. The end result was a judge awarding $11 million, in part because of the failure to respond. Now, both the owners of TheDirty.com and TheDirt.com are complaining that they're being wrongfully written about in the press — one for not having had any content about Sarah Jones but being told it needs to pay $11 million, and the other for having the content and having the press say it lost a lawsuit, even though no lawsuit was ever actually filed against it."
Comment Not quite launched in the USA (Score 0) 130
I spend my time updating the iPhone app, and then the facebook program isn't available yet if Florida. Not quite ready for primetime.
Comment Re:UFFSA (Score 0) 637
Back in the mid 90's I was detained at the Canadian border for 2-3 hours (I was driving into Canada) while on a camping trip. I had just graduated from college, and decided to go camping in North Dakota and Southern Canada just for fun. I was stopped, taken upstairs, repeatedly asked questions where a customs offer would come in the room, ask me if I had ever been to prison, been in front of a judge, how much money did I have, did I have a job, etc. She would leave for a few minutes, would come back and ask me similar to identical questions while typing on her computer, leave and come back...repeated for almost 2 hours. Then they took me down to my truck and searched everything, took apart my camping equipment, took a keen interest in my first aid kit, but found nothing (there was nothing to find) and let me go. I was detained for 2-3 hours just because.
On my way back into the USA, they barely batted an eye.
Comment Re:TI Should really let them be hacked (Score 0) 234
Agreed. I can see the usefulness of a basic calculator for math and simple operations, which can be found in extremely cheap china versions for less than $1 each. One solution my professors had for the complicated calculations problems on exams was to make the math extremely easy, as what they were testing was your ability to do the calculation, not whether you could calculate 1.84523*32.344/422.33... so they'd make it into a problem where the math was more like 2*6/4.
Comment TI Should really let them be hacked (Score 1, Insightful) 234
What if the kids did hack their calculators, install inappropriate notes, and cheat on their exams? It would be inconvenient for the teachers to reflash/reformat/reset each calculator, and be sure that the student wasn't still cheating. The teacher's only solution would be to purchase additional TI calculators for exam purposes only. A win-win for TI!
