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Programming

Submission + - Knocked-Out AOL: How The AOL Servers Were Hacked (xakep.ru)

Submitted by Atlant0s
Atlant0s writes: AOL Corporation has always been a kind of honey pie for all possible kinds of hackers.Looking at all this magnificence you won’t be surprised that one day hackers forwarded XSpider tool to one of the AOL networks in the range of 64.12.0.0 — 64.12.255.255. So here's how the things turned out...
Security

Nuclear Bunker Houses World's Toughest Server Farm 152

Posted by samzenpus from the no-down-time dept.
Lanxon writes "Deep inside the Swiss Alps, a former nuclear bunker is now the ultimate hiding place for the world's most sensitive secrets — the Swiss Fort Knox. In a lengthy feature, Wired gains access to the server farm designed to survive a full-scale military attack. From the article: 'As we punch our codes at the checkpoint, the yellow door opens into what looks like a city of server towers, their green LEDs flickering as a technician in a white jumpsuit runs diagnostic checks. [Later], we are in a dimly lit tunnel next to what looks like a metal oven door carved into the side of the rock. "These are expansion rooms in case you have an atomic explosion outside," Christoph Oschwald, a retired Swiss paratrooper turned contractor, says. The thinking behind the rooms, he explains, is that if there were a nuclear explosion, the rush of high-pressure air would fill them through vents in the opposite side. Then, the vents would snap shut, trapping the air before it had a chance of damaging the fortress. "There is a lot of protection you can't see," he says. We stroll past an intricate network of insulated pipelines that carry water up from the underground glacial lake to the cooling system.'"

Submission + - Over 75 law profs write letter to Obama about ACTA (american.edu)

Submitted by whoever57
whoever57 writes: Over 75 law professors have written an open letter to President Obama, calling for meaningful public consultation on ACTA, and noting that the proposed adoption of ACTA as a sole executive agreement is probably unlawful. The letter notes how the ACTA negotiation process has been in conflict with Obama's promises of openness and transparency and that the treaty has been misrepresented, since its terms apply equally to both counterfeit and genuine items.
Google

Submission + - Users Sue Google, Facebook, Zynga Over Privacy (threatpost.com)

Submitted by Trailrunner7
Trailrunner7 writes: A raft of class action lawsuits filed in Federal court charge the globe's biggest social networking firms with violating federal communications privacy laws, allowing advertisers to profit from personal information harvested from users.

Weeks after the Wall Street Journal blew the whistle on lax data privacy standards on Facebook, a string of class action suits attempt to hold the social networking giant, as well as game company Zynga and Google liable for what the suits contend are lax practices that allow advertisers to harvest personal information on Web users.

The suits are seeking monetary damages on behalf of potentially millions of users of Facebook, Google and game company Zynga. The suits allege that the users' personal information has been leaked to advertisers and other unauthorized individuals, in violation of the companies' privacy policies and a number of state and federal statues protecting the confidentiality of electronic communications.

Submission + - 1TB PCIe SSD Boasts 3X SATA Performance (computerworld.com)

Submitted by Lucas123
Lucas123 writes: OCZ has just released a solid state drive with up to 960GB capacity that it claims has three times the performance of even the highest-end competing SATA SSDs. OCZ said the new drive can generate up to 120,000 IOPS and has read/write speeds of around 720MB/sec. Along with four PCIe lanes, the drive takes advantage of four SandForce-1200 controllers for its performance. You'll also pay through the nose to own the drive. A 250GB model retails for $669 and the 480GB model goes for $1,397.
Government

Submission + - John Carmack Criticizes Big Government (armadilloaerospace.com)

Submitted by bonch
bonch writes: As a game developer, John Carmack has been silent on political matters, but today he has decided to post a 16-paragraph essay decrying the inefficiency of big government. After admitting to not voting for almost 20 years, he says 'taxes are extracted by the threat of force' and announces his intention this year to vote for candidates most likely to reduce the size and ambition of government. Quote: 'My core thesis is that the federal government delivers very poor value for the resources it consumes, and that society as a whole would be better off with a government that was less ambitious. This is not to say that it doesn’t provide many valuable and even critical services, but that the cost of having the government provide them is much higher than you would tolerate from a company or individual you chose to do business with. For almost every task, it is a poor tool.'
Wireless Networking

Submission + - Mozilla: No 'Kill Switch' for Firesheep Add-On (computerworld.com)

Submitted by CWmike
CWmike writes: Mozilla today said it wouldn't — or couldn't — pull a 'kill switch' to disable Firesheep, the add-on that lets anyone steal log-on and account access information to Facebook, Twitter and other major Web services via Wi-Fi. Mozilla has a 'blocklist' mechanism that it can, and has in the past, applied as a last-resort defense against potentially-dangerous browser add-ons. It automatically cripples or uninstalls unwanted extensions that have been added to Firefox. But Mozilla either can't or won't add Firesheep to the blocklist. '[Firesheep] demonstrates a security weakness in a number of popular websites, but does not exploit any vulnerability in Firefox or other Web browsers,' said Mike Beltzner, director of Firefox, in reply to questions about Mozilla's possible moves. On Tuesday, experts suggested defensive measures to ward off Firesheep-born attacks.
Security

Submission + - China Penetrated NSA's Classified Operating System 2

Submitted by
Pickens
Pickens writes: "Seymour M. Hersh writes in the New Yorker that after an American EP-3E Aries II reconnaissance plane on an eavesdropping mission collided with a Chinese interceptor jet over the South China Sea in 2001 and landed at a Chinese F-8 fighter base on Hainan Island, the 24 member crew were unable to completely disable the plane’s equipment and software. The result? The Chinese kept the plane for three months and eventually reverse-engineered the plane’s NSA.-supplied operating system, estimated at between thirty and fifty million lines of computer code, giving China a road map for decrypting the Navy’s classified intelligence and operational data. “If the operating system was controlling what you’d expect on an intelligence aircraft, it would have a bunch of drivers to capture radar and telemetry,” says Whitfield Diffie, a pioneer in the field of encryption. “The plane was configured for what it wants to snoop, and the Chinese would want to know what we wanted to know about them—what we could intercept and they could not.” Despite initial skepticism, over the next few years the US intelligence community began to “read the tells” that China had gotten access to sensitive traffic and in early 2009, Admiral Timothy J. Keating, then the head of the Pacific Command, brought the issue to the new Obama Administration. "If China had reverse-engineered the EP-3E’s operating system, all such systems in the Navy would have to be replaced, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars," writes Hersch. "After much discussion, several current and former officials said, this was done" prompting some black humor from US naval officers. “This is one hell of a way to go about getting a new operating system.”""
Movies

Submission + - The Movie Industry Is Dying, The 1950s Version (techdirt.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: With all the claims from the entertainment industry about how the movie industry is dying due to the internet, it's worth pointing out that they seem to claim this with every new advancement. Many people know about Jack Valenti's famous "Boston Strangler" comment in reference to the VCR, but even before that, there was always some new technology that was the enemy. In a 1959 interview, Mary Pickford, one of the original Hollywood starlets (dubbed "America's Sweetheart") who also founded United Artists and the Motion Picture Academy, announced that the movie industry was dead because of television. No one would want to leave their house for an expensive movie, she insisted, and promised it would become much worse once the dreaded "pay TV" became common. This was 1959. It seems worth mentioning that, fifty years later, in 2009, Hollywood had its best year ever at the box office.

Submission + - US, China Working on Intellectual Property Rights (itworld.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder is visiting Beijing this week to discuss how China and the US can better coordinate efforts to stop intellectual property rights violations. 'One of the things that has happened in recent years is that counterfeiting has become a globalized industry,' said Christian Murck, the president of the American Chamber of Commerce in China. To effectively shut down these operations, cross-country efforts at strengthening global enforcement like Holder's visit to China are crucial, he added. Coinciding with Holder's visit, China announced it will launch a new national campaign to crack down on intellectual property rights violations. The campaign will take aim at the production and distribution of pirated goods such as DVDs and software products. Violations relating to registered trademarks and patents will also be targeted. The campaign will last for half a year. The commercial value of pirated software in China, at $7.5 billion, is second only to that in the U.S., where it is $8.3 billion, according to the Business Software Alliance and IDC.

Submission + - UK to track all browsing, email, phone calls (telegraph.co.uk)

Submitted by Sara Chan
Sara Chan writes: The UK government plans to introduce legislation that will allow the police to track every phone call, email, text message and website visit made by the public. The information will include who is contacting whom, when and where and which websites are visited, but not the content of the conversations or messages. Every communications provider will be required to store the information for at least a year. Full story in The Telegraph.
Open Source

US Elections Dominated By Closed Source. Again. 403

Posted by CmdrTaco from the pay-no-attention-to-the-bot-behind-the-curtain dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Another American election is almost here, and while electronic voting is commonplace, it is still overwhelmingly run by closed source, proprietary systems. It has been shown that many of these systems can be compromised (and because they are closed, there may be holes we simply cannot know about). Plus they are vulnerable to software bugs and are often based on unstable, closed-source operating systems. By the inherent nature of closed software, when systems are (optionally!) certified by registrars, there is no proof that they will behave the same on election day as in tests. The opportunities for fraud, tampering and malfunction are rampant. But nonetheless, there is very little political will for open source voting, let alone simple measures like end-to-end auditable voting systems or more radical approaches like open source governance. Why do we remain in the virtual dark ages, when clearly we have better alternatives readily available?"

Submission + - US Officials Considering Dropping Out Of ACTA (techdirt.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Here's a shock. The US might not sign on to ACTA after all. In the last few negotiations, US negotiators caved on a number of key points that they had been pushing for, meaning that the resulting agreement has a number of things the US (and various lobbyists) disagree with. Many of the responses from US lobbying groups was tepid, and a key point is that the current document includes patents, which the US did not want included. So, now there's actually serious pressure on US officials not to sign ACTA from the same groups who originally supported it. After three years of hyping ACTA, would the US really walk away?

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