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Comment TPB is down for me (Score 2, Insightful) 325

by CoffeeDog (#33497344) Attached to: Pirate Bay Down; Police Raids Across Europe
I've been trying to get on Pirate Bay this morning and most times my connection either times out or I get an error page about connecting to a caching server and only after mashing the reload button many times do I actually get a page.

Then again this could just be the effect of everyone reading news stories about it being down and trying to "test" if the site is up, thus overloading and taking down the server for real. Hooray for self-fulfilling prophecy!

Submission + - Slashdot is Dying, New York Times Confims It (nytimes.com) 12

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The New York Times is running a story about how Slashdot has dropped in popularity compared to other news sites in social web space. Quote: "Why is Slashdot almost irrelevant to the social media community? It used to be the biggest driver of traffic to tech web sites, but now it hardly delivers any traffic at all to them. We explore some of the reasons, including input from our own community."
Science

Submission + - Data leak: galaxy rich in Earth-like planets (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: A leak from an Oxford conference about the Kepler satellite mission reveals that out of approximately 265 planets represented on a particular graph, about 140 were labeled "like Earth"--having a radius smaller than twice Earth's radius. So the unauthorized presentation of preliminary results would seem to confirm that Kepler has succeeded in showing that Earth is no fluke.
Security

Submission + - WiFi WPA2 vulnerability found (networkworld.com)

Submitted by BobB-nw
BobB-nw writes: Perhaps it was only a matter of time. But wireless security researchers say they have uncovered a vulnerability in the WPA2 security protocol, which is the strongest form of Wi-Fi encryption and authentication currently standardized and available.

Malicious insiders can exploit the vulnerability, named "Hole 196" by the researcher who discovered it at wireless security company AirTight Networks. The moniker refers to the page of the IEEE 802.11 Standard (Revision, 2007) on which the vulnerability is buried. Hole 196 lends itself to man-in-the-middle-style exploits, whereby an internal, authorized Wi-Fi user can decrypt, over the air, the private data of others, inject malicious traffic into the network and compromise other authorized devices using open source software, according to AirTight.

"There's nothing in the standard to upgrade to in order to patch or fix the hole," says Kaustubh Phanse, AirTight's wireless architect who describes Hole 196 as a "zero-day vulnerability that creates a window of opportunity" for exploitation.

Comment Re:How much did they save? (Score 3, Insightful) 383

by CoffeeDog (#33005644) Attached to: BSOD Issues On Deepwater Horizon
I hate to be a cynic but if you take the cost savings on cutting safety corners across all their operations (rigs, refineries, etc) for the time the company has been operating them, I bet they still came out on top and BP wouldn't change a damn thing about how they operate short of some regulatory body (lol MMS) forcing them to.
News

Submission + - Deepwater Horizon had BSOD issues (nytimes.com)

Submitted by Ecks
Ecks writes: The testimony has started in the Deepwater Horizon case and in addition to other problems it looks like they had major BSOD issues with their computer system. The whole thing article is an interesting read. It's on the NY Times site so registration is required.

"Problems existed from the beginning of drilling the well, Mr. Williams said. For months, the computer system had been locking up, producing what the crew deemed the “blue screen of death.”

“It would just turn blue,” he said. “You’d have no data coming through.”

Submission + - Embedding A/V Commentary into Geotagged Bike Tour (treehugger.com)

Submitted by charliesfreehweels
charliesfreehweels writes: This weekend marks what should have been my friend Charlie's 26th birthday. Sadly, he was killed three years ago when a car veered off the road and abruptly ended his cross-continent Bike Tour. During his journey, he geo-tagged and blogged each stop along the way. In his memory, teens from a charity (which runs free after-school earn-a-bike mentorship programs — see video) started in his honour are going to be conducting their own bike tour of a historic part of town where both they and Charlie grew up. Just like Charlie geo-tagged his adventure, we'd like to be able to enable people who miss our original tour the opportunity to recreate the experience using nothing but a bike and a smartphone (and a helmet!).

I've tried to reach out to the FourSquare team but have not received any response. We're desperately looking for eloquent ways to create a geotagged path that cyclists can easily follow while also experiencing the original audio and/or video commentary containing the teen residents' unique perspective on living in Regent Park.

I'm comfortable with basic coding, mobile site design and implementing OSS and am looking for alternative software that can cost-effectively capture the tour stops (with commentary) and allow user-friendly access in the future.

Submission + - Trolling Comes to Newspapers (wired.com)

Submitted by dptalia
dptalia writes: First there were patent trolls. Then Copyright Group started copyright trolling. Now a new start up company is trolling for unlicensed news stories posted to blogs and websites. The company has already filed 80 lawsuits and are threatening sites with $150,000/offense penalties if they don't settle.
Linux

Submission + - The Scalability of Linus 1

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "Katherine Noyes writes at LinuxInsider that it may be time for Linus Torvalds to share more of the responsibility for Linux that he's been shouldering. "If Linux wants to keep up with the competition there is much work to do, more than even a man of Linus's skill to accomplish," argues one user and the "scalability of Linus," is the subject of a post by Jonathan Corbet wondering if there might there be a Linus scalability crunch point coming. "The Linux kernel development process stands out in a number of ways; one of those is the fact that there is exactly one person who can commit code to the 'official' repository," Corbet writes. A problem with that scenario is the potential for repeats of what Corbet calls "the famous 'Linus burnout' episode of 1998" when everything stopped for a while until Linus rested a bit, came back, and started merging patches again. "If Linus is to retain his central position in Linux kernel development, the community as a whole needs to ensure that the process scales and does not overwhelm him," Corbet adds. But many don't agree. "Don't be fooled that Linus has to scale — he has to work hard, but he is the team captain and doorman. He has thousands doing most of the work for him. He just has to open the door at the appropriate moment," writes Robert Pogson adding that Linus "has had lots of practice and still has fire in his belly.""
Security

Submission + - Critical Safari AutoFill Flaw Steals Data (threatpost.com)

Submitted by Trailrunner7
Trailrunner7 writes: A prominent security researcher is urging users of Apple’s Safari browser to immediately turn off the AutoFill feature to block hackers from stealing sensitive information. According to Jeremiah Grossman, founder and Chief Technology Officer of WhiteHat Security, the AutoFill Web Forms feature can be hacked to steal data from the computer’s address book.

“Right at the moment a Safari user visits a website, even if they’ve never been there before or entered any personal information, a malicious website can uncover their first name, last name, work place, city, state, and email address,” Grossman said.

Comment Re:Interesting Spin in the Summary (Score 2, Informative) 416

by CoffeeDog (#32991136) Attached to: Forced iAds Coming To OS X?
If you RTFA:

"According to the patent application, users could also choose to access the advertisements when they choose, delaying an ad by 10 minutes, or choosing to watch one immediately. This would help to ensure that the ad is not overly intrusive, appearing while the user was in the middle of an important task."

You're right they aren't "randomly bombarding users with ads" they are "regularly bombarding users with ads".

Comment Re:Not statistically significant! (Score 1) 242

by CoffeeDog (#32990180) Attached to: Google's Free Satnav Outperforms TomTom
While I agree that a single test wouldn't account for any variance and thus isn't very accurate as one system may have just "gotten lucky" that day, Google Navigation along with many other high-end sat navs pull traffic data to avoid congestion due to local traffic, car accidents, or adorable families of ducks. This is why each system probably recommended different routes instead of the geographically shortest route which you'd except to be fairly consistent.

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