Comment Re:Sticking with Clementine (Score 1) 152
Slackware dumped GNOME years ago.
Submission + - Scariest IPv6 attack scenarios (networkworld.com)
alphadogg writes: Experts are reporting a rise in the number of attacks that take advantage of known vulnerabilities of IPv6, a next-generation addressing scheme that is being adopted across the Internet. Salient Federal Solutions, a Fairfax, Va., IT engineering firm, is reporting real-world incidents of IPv6 attacks based on the emerging protocol's tunneling capabilities, routing headers, DNS broadcasting and rogue routing announcements. The No. 1 attack that Salient Federal is seeing is the result of so much IPv6 traffic being tunneled across IPv4 networks, particularly using the Teredo mechanism that is built into both Microsoft Windows Vista and Windows 7. This vulnerability with IPv6-over-IPv4 tunneling has been known for at least five years, but it is still being exploited.
Submission + - $25 PC alpha board successfully runs Linux
An anonymous reader writes: Late last month it was reported that the $25 PC had gone into alpha production. That meant the spec of the board had been finalized by the Raspberry Pi Foundation, and they wanted hardware to start testing. Now they have an alpha board to play with. That board is significantly larger than the final product will be, but as testament to just how small this thing is even scaled up, the alpha version is about the size of 3 credit cards--the final version will be credit-card sized. The board, complete with its 700MHz ARM11 processor, successfully ran Linux (version 2.6.35.7).
Submission + - Russian toilet in the sky (cnn.com)
Mage99 writes: Looks like the Russians are having trouble with their space sh*t.
Submission + - Alternatives to Gmail (web and IMAP, paid) 2
TheGratefulNet writes: I want to cut the cord with google and the first step is to find a good email/ISP provider. With all the snooping going on (by governments and the data center raids that happen in the US), I'd like to find an *offshore* (maybe Europe?) provider who emphasizes 'freedom' aspects, such as end to end security, data encryption on local disks, keeping absolute minimal logs/purging them frequently; as well as having a decent enough set of spam filters that they actively maintain. I *want* to pay for the sevice since I don't want ads or to have to spend time blocking stuff. I'd like to support a right-thinking ISP; are there any left, out there? Help me find a trusted offshore ISP that will likely be around and who does not do DPI and other evil things. Any recommendations for well-behaved ISPs out there?
Submission + - That Developer's Salary is Bigger than Mine! (earthweb.com) 2
jammag writes: "Longtime developer Eric Spiegel remembers earlier in his career when he accidentally glimpsed all his fellow developers' salaries. To his shock, he realized he was almost the lowest paid coder at the company — though he wasn't the newest or youngest. As he confronted his manager (who had just praised him in a salary review) he realized some nitty gritty facts about programmer pay — including how he had failed to get the best pay package for himself."
Submission + - Future of KDE Plasma - Plasma Quick (blogspot.com)
jrepin writes: "Aaron Seigo writes: "In Platform 4.6 and newer, Plasma supports writing components in QtQuick's QML. One tantalizing thing QML holds out is using an OpenGL accelerated scene graph for all rendering. Having seen this in action, the results are impressive. To put it mildly. Think "better performance on a mobile device than on the typical desktop running the QGraphicsView equivalent". To get to the point that Plasma can use this scene graph, however, we need to have everything in a given shell done in QML.""
Submission + - Good Old Games: DRM drives gamers to piracy (bit-tech.net)
arcticstoat writes: Independent retro games retailer Good Old Games has spoken out about digital rights management, saying that it can actually drive gamers to piracy, rather than acting as a deterrent. In an interview, a spokesperson for Good Old Games said that the effectiveness of DRM as a piracy-deterrent was "None, or close to none."
"What I will say isn’t popular in the gaming industry," says Kukawski, 'but in my opinion DRM drives people to pirate games rather than prevent them from doing that. Would you rather spend $50 on a game that requires installing malware on your system, or to stay online all the time and crashes every time the connection goes down, or would you rather download a cracked version without all that hassle?"
"What I will say isn’t popular in the gaming industry," says Kukawski, 'but in my opinion DRM drives people to pirate games rather than prevent them from doing that. Would you rather spend $50 on a game that requires installing malware on your system, or to stay online all the time and crashes every time the connection goes down, or would you rather download a cracked version without all that hassle?"
Submission + - Simple email encryption - not possible? 1
bradley13 writes: Like practically everyone on Slashdot, I often play "free consultant" for friends. The most recent inquiry: local law will soon require small companies that send accounting information electronically, to do so "securely". Many small businesses outsource their accounting; correspondingly, some accounting companies handle the accounts of dozens of small businesses. Lots of sensitive information is sent by email — which ought to be encrypted.
So my friend asked me — from the perspective of one of these accounting companies — how they can exchange encrypted email with their customers. The problem: businesses to small to handle their own accounts are certainly too small to have read IT — some cousin set up a couple of off-the-shelf computers. This means: the solution has to be (a) easy for a non-technical person to set up and (b) has to work with people who use Outlook, or Gmail, or whatever else their company happens to use.
By now, one might think that there would be point-and-click solutions to this sort of problem. But no — you need certificates, implementations are platform specific, set up requires IT expertise. About the best thing available seems to be PGP (but who wants to do business with Symantec? Anyway, when did they buy PGP — that is just sad).
Can easy-to-use, secure, cross-platform email encryption really still be an unsolved problem? What do other Slashdotters use?
So my friend asked me — from the perspective of one of these accounting companies — how they can exchange encrypted email with their customers. The problem: businesses to small to handle their own accounts are certainly too small to have read IT — some cousin set up a couple of off-the-shelf computers. This means: the solution has to be (a) easy for a non-technical person to set up and (b) has to work with people who use Outlook, or Gmail, or whatever else their company happens to use.
By now, one might think that there would be point-and-click solutions to this sort of problem. But no — you need certificates, implementations are platform specific, set up requires IT expertise. About the best thing available seems to be PGP (but who wants to do business with Symantec? Anyway, when did they buy PGP — that is just sad).
Can easy-to-use, secure, cross-platform email encryption really still be an unsolved problem? What do other Slashdotters use?
Submission + - Piracy: are we being conned? (smh.com.au)
AcidAUS writes: Is piracy really sending the entertainment industry broke or are the claimed hundreds of millions of dollars in annual losses and thousands of job cuts just a load of hogwash?
The industry is constantly warning of an impending piracy apocalypse but continues to notch up healthy revenues and record box office takings.
From bogus figures to highly exaggerated press releases, analysts and academics claim there is no limit to the hyperbole record labels and movie studios will use in their relentless lobbying campaign.
The industry is constantly warning of an impending piracy apocalypse but continues to notch up healthy revenues and record box office takings.
From bogus figures to highly exaggerated press releases, analysts and academics claim there is no limit to the hyperbole record labels and movie studios will use in their relentless lobbying campaign.
Submission + - Wikileaks causes political storm in India (ndtv.com)
tanveer1979 writes: White in the west wikileaks cable releases have been met with skepticism and negativity towards the messenger, the scene in the developing world is quite different. Unlike their western counterparts, the Indian press is taking the govt to a task, and opposition parties are stalling the parliament.
More than the content of the leaks, what is really interesting is the way the reactions to the cables have been in the general public. While most western voters stood by their leaders, and even called Assange a traitor, in India its quite the opposite, with everybody baying for govt's blood. It could be because democracy is more democratic in India, or maybe because the general notion of the public that all politicians are crooks, and if there is a bribery allegation, it must be true!
More than the content of the leaks, what is really interesting is the way the reactions to the cables have been in the general public. While most western voters stood by their leaders, and even called Assange a traitor, in India its quite the opposite, with everybody baying for govt's blood. It could be because democracy is more democratic in India, or maybe because the general notion of the public that all politicians are crooks, and if there is a bribery allegation, it must be true!
Submission + - My $200 Laptop Can Beat Your $500 Table (pcworld.com) 2
Roblimo writes: Yes, we know tablets like the iPad are the wave of the future and that PCs and laptops are dead. But some of us see tablets as laptops with their keyboards missing and a few hundred bucks tacked onto the price.
Submission + - Experienced Need Not Apply
theodp writes: A federal lawsuit claims that requirements in job ads posted by Infosys automatically discriminated against older workers. Ralph DeVito, a NJ resident who filed the lawsuit, had applied for two tech job openings advertised by Infosys on Monster.com. One posting set a 'maximum experience' requirement of 15 years, and another set a limit of 25 years. DeVito, who was 58 when he applied for the jobs, has more than 25 years of experience in the jobs sought. 'Simply doing the math, 25 years' experience boxes out anyone who is over 40,' said John Roberts, who represents DeVito. Infosys, whose CEO and Chairman each have 30 years experience with the company, said it doesn't comment on pending litigation. Monster Worldwide was also named in the lawsuit, which contends that Monster should have known that 'maximum experience' requirements 'constituted a de facto age limit.' In November, the EEOC, in a letter to DeVito, wrote, 'We found that you were discriminated against in violation of the ADEA (Age Discrimination in Employment Act),' but the agency declined to bring a lawsuit.
Submission + - Volume 4A of Knuth's TAOCP Finally In Print (informit.com) 1
jantangring writes: "It's been 28 years since Volume 3 of Donald Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming was published. The book series is a classic work of computer science in spite of the fact that still more than half of the seven volume series is still to be finalized. In 1992 Donald Knuth retired to medieval monkness in order to finish his work. After many long years in draft volume 4A now in print and you can get it in a boxed set if you don't mind admitting that you don't already own the first thee volumes. They won't be checking if you read it."
Submission + - Researcher Warns of Smartphone Baseband Apocalypse (thinq.co.uk)
Blacklaw writes: A security researcher is warning that recent advances in open-source mobile base stations could leave smartphones vulnerable to attack over-the-air, exploiting vulnerabilities in the previously unreachable baseband processor.
Ralf-Philipp Weinmann, a cryptologist and security researcher currently studying at the LACS Laboratory in the University of Luxembourg, is to take to the stage at this year's Black Hat DC conference with a presentation that will bring a chill to the heart of anyone in the telecommunications industry: an over-the-air attack against smartphones using a malicious base station.
Ralf-Philipp Weinmann, a cryptologist and security researcher currently studying at the LACS Laboratory in the University of Luxembourg, is to take to the stage at this year's Black Hat DC conference with a presentation that will bring a chill to the heart of anyone in the telecommunications industry: an over-the-air attack against smartphones using a malicious base station.
