rsk - Slashdot User

Submission + - AWS ELB Sends 2 Million Netflix API reqs to wrong (thebuzzmedia.com)

Submitted by rsk on Saturday October 29, 2011 @11:53AM

rsk writes: Amazon Web Services's Elastic Load Balancer is a dynamic load-balancer managed by Amazon. Load balancers regularly swapped around with each other which can lead to surprising results; like getting millions of requests meant for a different AWS customer. Using ELBs can result in AWS unintentionally introducing a man-in-the-middle (attack) into your application environment. Most AWS users do not realize this can happen and have not secured against it.

Submission + - Worlds Safest Airline Grounded (news.com.au)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 29, 2011 @03:55AM

An anonymous reader writes: Australia's national airline QANTAS, famous for never having had a fatal crash, has been grounded immeditaley by management. The grounding is in response to ingoing industrial action by employees and has stranded passengers all over the world, with 108 planes grounded indefinitely.
The Australian Government is seeking an urgent industrial relations hearing in a likely bid to suspend the industrial action and halt further damage to the Australian economy.
This is occurring as Australia hosts the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Perth with 15 world leaders in attendance and the Queen.

Submission + - Anonymous takes on a Mexican drug cartel (chron.com) 1

Submitted by NarcoTraficante on Saturday October 29, 2011 @01:47AM

NarcoTraficante writes: After one of their members was kidnapped in Veracruz, Mexico by the Zetas drug cartel, Mexican Anonymous members have issued an ultimatum to the Zetas in a recently posted YouTube video (Spanish). The video demands release of the kidnapped member and threatens to publish information of cartel members and affiliates in Veracruz if the victim is not released by November 5. The Houston Chronicle article warns that there will be bloodshed if Anonymous publishes information on the Zeta's operations, either perpetrated by rival cartels or reprisal attacks by the Zetas themselves.

Submission + - Weaponizable Police UAV Now Operational in Texas (click2houston.com) 2

Submitted by crackspackle on Saturday October 29, 2011 @01:07AM

crackspackle writes: The Montgomery County Sheriff's Office in suburban Houston, Texas is preparing to launch operations with a newly received Vanguard Defense Industries Shadowhawk MK-III unmanned aerial vehicle, paid for by grant money received by the Department of Homeland Security. The MK-III is a product marketed for both military and law enforcement applications. Michael Buscher, chief executive officer of manufacturer Vanguard Defense Industries, said this is the first local law enforcement agency to buy one of his units. "The aircraft has the capability to have a number of different systems on board. Mostly, for law enforcement, we focus on what we call less lethal systems," he said, including Tazers that can send a jolt to a criminal on the ground or a gun that fires bean bags known as a "stun baton.You have a stun baton where you can actually engage somebody at altitude with the aircraft. A stun baton would essentially disable a suspect," he said. "To be in on the ground floor of this is pretty exciting for us here in Montgomery County," Sheriff Tommy Gage said. The MK-III also has more lethal options available, capable of carrying either a 40mm or 37mm grenade launcher or 12 gauge shotgun with laser designator. Sheriff Gage has stated he has no immediate plans to outfit his drone with weapons.

Submission + - Battlefield 3 Performance: 30+ Graphics Cards, Ben (tomshardware.com)

Submitted by wesbascas on Saturday October 29, 2011 @12:23AM

wesbascas writes: Have you ever wanted to play a new PC game, but weren't sure where your PC falls between the minimum and recommended system requirements? I don't have a whole lot of time to game these days and with new hardware perpetually coming out and component vendors often tweaking their model numbering schemes, knowing exactly what kind of experience I'm buying for $60 can be difficult. Luckily, somebody benchmarked Battlefield 3's campaign on a wide range of hardware configurations and detail settings. If you've purchased a system in the past few years you should be in luck. The video cards tested start with the AMD Radeon HD 4670 and Nvidia GeForce 8500 GT, and go up to the brand new Radeon HD 6990 and GeForce GTX 590. I hate it that my aging Radeon HD 4870 isn't going to cut it at 1080p, but am glad that I found out BEFORE buying the game. I suppose it's time for an upgrade anyway, there's no way I'm missing this title.

Submission + - NASA explains sea level drop (nasa.gov)

Submitted by

riverat1

on Sunday October 02, 2011 @02:18PM

riverat1 writes: "In 2010 sea level dropped 6 mm (nearly 1/4 inch). An August 23, 2011 update from NASA's Sea Level Sentinels explains the shift from El Nino to La Nina in early 2010 led to changes in rainfall worldwide that produced massive flooding in places such as Australia and the northern Amazon basin. Data from the GRACE satellites shows that the missing water has piled up on the continents. But the drop won't last, water flows downhill and will eventually find its way back to the sea."

Submission + - Security Vulnerabilities on HTC Android Devices (androidpolice.com)

Submitted by

revjtanton

on Sunday October 02, 2011 @01:14PM

revjtanton writes: "In recent updates to some of its devices, HTC introduces a suite of logging tools that collected information. Lots of information. LOTS. Whatever the reason was, whether for better understanding problems on users' devices, easier remote analysis, corporate evilness — it doesn't matter."

Submission + - 40% of Android phones are returned? 'Absolutely ri (bgr.com) 1

Submitted by zacharye on Thursday July 28, 2011 @01:37PM

zacharye writes: TechCrunch on Wednesday published a report claiming to reveal “Android’s dirty secret,” and quite a secret it was. According to the report, which cited a person familiar with handset sales for multiple manufacturers, between 30% and 40% of Android handsets are returned by consumers. “Plainly put, these figures are absolutely ridiculous,” a source told BGR. We spoke to multiple well-placed sources following the publication of that story, but in reality we didn’t have to know the claim was ridiculous. If return rates were in fact “approaching 40%” as the report suggests, vendors wouldn’t just be bailing on Android, they would be going out of business. Handset returns are a huge deal in the wireless industry because every single device returned by a customer costs the manufacturer money. It also costs the carrier money in the event the device was sold through a carrier, and it costs the third-party retailer money if the device was sold through a third-party retailer. Read on to find out how many Android devices are really being returned.

Submission + - Google Killing Accounts, Leaving Androids Orphaned (itworld.com) 2

Submitted by

jfruhlinger

on Thursday July 28, 2011 @01:23PM

jfruhlinger writes: "As we've heard in cases of pseudonym-users in Google+, or in the case of Dylan Marcheschi that went viral last week, Google can kill your account at any time — and since Google is keen on tying your account to its entire range of services, that means you could lose data stored everywhere from Gmail to Picasa. Blogger Dan Tynan examined one particular aspect of this problem — namely, the plight of someone who's been Google-executed and who uses an Android phone."

Submission + - New NASA Data Destroys Global Warming Alarmism (yahoo.com) 2

Submitted by Buffaloaf on Thursday July 28, 2011 @01:19PM

Buffaloaf writes: NASA satellite data from the years 2000 through 2011 show the Earth's atmosphere is allowing far more heat to be released into space than alarmist computer models have predicted, reports a new study in the peer-reviewed science journal Remote Sensing. The study indicates far less future global warming will occur than United Nations computer models have predicted, and supports prior studies indicating increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide trap far less heat than alarmists have claimed.

Submission + - Performance effects of an SSD in your PS3 (youtube.com)

Submitted by rsk on Tuesday June 28, 2011 @07:56PM

rsk writes: Ever wondered what kind of performance improvement putting an SSD in your PS3 would give you? Well, it's roughly a 2x speedup in disk intensive operations. Because of the bandwidth cap of the SATA 1.5 Gb/sec (~192 MB/sec) controller in the PS3, there is no need to spend a boat-load on next-gen SSDs (Vertex 3, Intel 510). Picking up a cheaper last-gen SSD like the Vertex 2 or Intel X25 is all you need.

Submission + - Australian network aims for 8 terabit capacity (computerworld.com.au)

Submitted by

angry tapir

on Tuesday June 28, 2011 @07:24PM

angry tapir writes: "Australia’s Academic and Research Network (AARNET) will convert its network to 100 Gigabits per second (Gbps) following a successful 40Gbps trial on its East Coast optical network. The organisation is aiming for a total of an eight terabits per second capacity within 12 months."

Submission + - Dark side of making L.A. Noir (ign.com)

Submitted by JameskPratt on Tuesday June 28, 2011 @06:28PM

JameskPratt writes: Many readers have no delusions of how awful the video game industry treats its workers. Eleven ex-employee of Team Bondi's, who made LA Noir, have cited working 60 to 110 hours a weeks. And claim their boss, Brendan McNamara, crushed office morale with verbal abuse and unreasonable goals. As the saying goes, the two things you don't want to see being made is law and video games."

Submission + - Opera 11.50 Benchmarked: Faster JavaScript Engine (digitizor.com)

Submitted by dkd903 on Tuesday June 28, 2011 @05:43PM

dkd903 writes: Opera 11.50 claims to have a faster JavaScript engine, a faster software graphics engine and improved support for the latest web technologies such as HTML5. According to the benchmarks we found that Opera 11.50 has much better Javascript performance than the previous stable version Opera 11.11 but, Firefox 5 still does better.

Submission + - Realtime Facial Animation with Microsoft Kinect (businessweek.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 28, 2011 @04:21PM

An anonymous reader writes: Using the Kinect's low-cost 3D sensor, researchers are able to record real-time facial expressions from a person looking at the computer and then transfer them to a 3D digital animation. The face-tracking software takes lower-resolution input from the Kinect and maps it to a higher-resolution digital animation. Because it doesn't require intrusive lighting or complex scanning hardware, this kind of animation could become available to consumers. This research paper has been submitted to the Siggraph 2011 conference to be held in August.

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