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Comment Re:WKRP (Score 1) 189

by Flavianoep (#48473267) Attached to: I prefer my turkey ...
Turkeys can fly, but only the wild ones, if they still exist. The ones with ultragigabreasts which will end in a table after death cannot even have sex, and can only be bred artificially.

Submission + - IBM Verse Is The First E-mail To Feature 'Faceted Search' (gizmorati.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The new email ‘IBM Verse’, which is a part of company’s strategy to shift from hardware services to cloud computing and data analytics, is the first application to come out from company’s USD 100 million investment in design innovation.

Submission + - Why We Love to Hate Click Bait

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Ben Smith of Buzzfeed recently wrote that his site doesn’t traffic in “click bait” because the term applies to “tempting, vacuous ‘curiosity gap’ headlines” that mislead readers. But in an industry riddled with plagiarism, civil insensitivities and “hot takes,” “click bait” is still the worst insult you can hurl at a publication. Looking at the history of journalism, sensationalist teases have always been with us. In the past, the city newspaper version of click bait was the "extra" issued every hour or two. "Click bait takes it farther, or rather, faster," says Mark Bauerlein. "It’s not that all the content has degenerated. It’s that the delivery has sped up and the content can be blasted widely on the Internet." Gloria Mark, a professor specializing in human-computer interactions at the University of California, Irvine, says that click bait as a design element is a natural evolution, and consequence, of the way the Internet affects our flow of attention. "Many argue that click bait is not new, as newspapers have used enticing headlines to lure readers since the 19th century. What is new, however, is the combination of click bait with the design of hypermedia that leads us down cognitive paths that make it hard to find our way back to the original, intended task," says Mark. "It is part of the larger grand challenge we face in managing our focus of attention amid the sheer volume of digital information available."

Baratunde Thurston says that one good thing about click bait is that it has inspired a new arena for humor. "Over a year ago, my company hosted a “Comedy Hack Day" built around humor, and one team created a satirical site called Clickstrbait to lampoon this silly practice. Since then The Onion has gone further, successfully launching ClickHole.com, which parodies (and monetizes) the click bait phenomenon with articles like '6 Sunsets That Would Be More Peaceful If It Weren't For Your Loudly Growling Stomach.'" If Thurston is right then the only thing that will defeat click bait overuse is time. "Until then, at least we have jokes."

Submission + - Kim Dotcom declares he is 'broke' because of legal fight

Submitted by mrspoonsi
mrspoonsi writes: Kim Dotcom, the founder of the seized file-sharing site Megaupload, has declared himself "broke". The entrepreneur said he had spent $10m (£6.4m) on legal costs since being arrested in New Zealand in 2012 and accused of internet piracy. Mr Dotcom had employed a local law firm to fight the US's attempt to extradite him, but his defence team stepped down a fortnight ago without explaining why. Mr Dotcom said he would now represent himself at a bail hearing on Thursday. He denies charges of racketeering, conspiring to commit copyright infringement and money laundering. He told a conference in London, via a video link, that his lawyers had resigned because he had run out of money. "The [US authorities] have certainly managed to drain my resources and dehydrate me, and without lawyers I am defenceless," he said. "They used that opportunity to try and get my bail revoked and that's what I'm facing."

Submission + - Auto industry teams up with military to stop car hacking (thestack.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A team of hackers is collaborating with military and industry groups to develop cyber security defences for commercially available cars, in response to a growing threat from criminals and terrorists. In the UK, hackers are now responsible for a third of car thefts in London and there are fears that while technology is progressing, older models will remain vulnerable to attack.

Although there have been no reported instances of a car being completely commandeered outside of controlled conditions, during tests hackers come out on top every time – unlocking car boots, setting off windscreen wipers, locking brakes, and cutting the engine.

“As security has not been a prime objective for vehicle manufacturers in the past these systems have been tightly integrated, leading to a situation where the security of an in-car media player can affect the car's brakes,” explained senior information security consultant at MWR InfoSecurity, Jacques Louw.

Comment Re:Aerial or underground ? (Score 1) 516

by Flavianoep (#48465653) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Why Is the Power Grid So Crummy In So Many Places?

No - it's not even a question. Bury the lines and you will remove a large number of causes for power outages.

Even more important - realize that each outage costs money for the community. In the long run buried lines will save money - even if you are in an area where the ground is filled with rocks.

And what if the place you live in has a lot of trees?
There are some talks in my city about burying the electric grid in the expanded city center; one of the reasons for that is that we have lots of trees whose branches intertwine with the cables. However, most trees have as extensive roots as branches, so I think burying the grid would make things worse.

Submission + - Bitcoin is not anonymous after all (ibtimes.co.uk)

Submitted by Taco Cowboy
Taco Cowboy writes: Researchers from the University of Luxembourg have demonstrated that it is possible to figure out the IP address and therefore the identity of individuals who pay for transactions anonymously online using bitcoins

In an open-access paper entitled Deanonymisation of clients in Bitcoin P2P network — http://orbilu.uni.lu/handle/10... — the researchers explain bitcoins do not protect the IP addresses of users, and these can be linked to the user's transactions in real time, even if the client uses different pseudonyms for each transaction

The researchers say a hacker could discover the identity of a bitcoin user by using several computers and spending just under €1,500 (£1,190, $1,871) on such a deanonymisation attack

There are several ways for a hacker to generate a malformed message and pretend it has been sent by a user on the peer-to-peer bitcoin network, even if the message has been sent from one of Tor's exit nodes

For example, say there are 1,008 Tor exit nodes. The hacker just needs to establish 1,008 connections and send a few megabytes of data to all connections from the Tor exit nodes to Bitcoin servers

Once the attacker knows what all the servers are and the bitcoin users have been banned from accessing these servers using Tor, they will then have to access the servers the normal way

"It shows that the level of network anonymity provided by Bitcoin is quite low. Several features of the Bitcoin protocol makes the attack possible. In particular, we emphasise that the stable set of only eight entry nodes is too small, as the majority of these nodes' connections can be captured by an attacker"

Every time the user's client makes a connection to an entry node of the bitcoin server, its address (perhaps an IP address associated with a major internet service provider) will be advertised

Once the hacker knows this address, he can trick the bitcoin server into revealing the IP address of the user

"The crucial idea of our attack is to identify each client by an octet of outgoing connections it establishes. This octet of Bitcoin peers [entry nodes] serves as a unique identifier of a client for the whole duration of a user session and will differentiate even those users who share the same NAT IP address," the authors stress

"As soon as the attacker receives the transaction from just two to three entry nodes he can with very high probability link the transaction to a specific client"

Submission + - The Software Big Oil's PR Firm Uses to 'Convert Average Citizens'

Submitted by merbs
merbs writes: The CEO of the world’s largest PR firm has a policy when it comes to campaigns that focus on the environment. “We do not work with astroturf groups and we have never created a website for a client with the intent to deny climate change," Richard Edelman wrote in a blog post in August. That may actually turn out to be true. Technically. Edelman may not work with astroturf groups. Instead, it appears to prefer to build them itself, from the ground up, using sophisticated proprietary software platform designed to “convert” advocates and then "track" their behavior.

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