Please create an account to participate in the Slashdot moderation system

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Submission + - Verizon Subscribers Can Now Opt Out Of 'Supercookies' (itworld.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: Verizon said in January that it would allow subscribers to opt out of having a unique identifier placed on their phones that critics have labelled a ‘supercookie’ because it’s almost impossible to remove, but it didn’t say when. On Tuesday, Verizon said the identifier won’t be inserted for customers who opt out of its mobile advertising program: 'Verizon Wireless has updated its systems so that we will stop inserting the UIDH after a customer opts out of the relevant mobile advertising program or activates a line that is ineligible for the advertising program,” such as as a government or business line,' Verizon said in a change to its policies Tuesday.

Submission + - German Man Creates the World's First Working 3D Printed Solar Powered Engine

Submitted by ErnieKey
ErnieKey writes: An engineer in Germany has 3D printed what is believed to be the first working solar powered engine. It runs entirely off of the sun's heat, and can be fabricated on virtually any desktop 3D printer. It is designed after the concept of the Stirling engine, and he says that it could be scaled up to actually function as a working engine for a vehicle.

Submission + - MP3 Backend of Firefox and Thunderbird Found Vulnerable (mozilla.org)

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: A critical vulnerability has been found in the MPEG-1 Layer III playback backend of Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird. Security researcher Aki Helin reported a use-after-free scenario when playing certain audio files on the web using the Fluendo MP3 plugin for GStreamer on Linux. This is due to a flaw in handling certain MP3 files by the plugin and its interaction with Mozilla code. A maliciously crafted MP3 file can lead to a potentially exploitable crash. Linux is the only affected platform, so Windows and OS X users are safe from this particular vulnerability.

Submission + - How Device Drivers Are Reverse Engineered (linuxvoice.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Linux Voice magazine has published a long article about how people go about reverse engineering drivers for hardware peripherals. They use Python and a USB radio-controlled car to demonstrate, walking us through the entire process. It's a cool, easy-to-follow insight into what often seems like a very opaque process.

Submission + - VP application turned down for "lack of activities in social networks" - Sane?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Well, two weeks ago I applied for a VP Technology position in a German ~800 employees games company. They asked for some extra time to evaluate my CV (16yrs in dot-com-o-rama, been there done that, yada yada..).
Today I got the short response from the head-hunter: "While my skills are unquestionable meeting all requirements and the experience is impressive, the customer wishes more 'actions' on Facebook and more activity in social networks in general". Doh?!
This somewhat leaves me standing there open-mouthed. It's not like I'm not having a FB account (and one for my blog), LinkedIn and Twitter and then some. Yes, I'm quite skeptical about giving away too much private or corporate-internal information and do state so e.g. on my blog.... but this should be a plus, at least at VP level.
Am I totally off the track, thinking that skills & experience should be more important than fooling around on FB (no matter if applying for VP or internship)?

Submission + - Meet the Carolina Butcher, a 9-Foot Crocodile That Walked on Two Legs

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Science News reports on the Carolina Butcher, a giant, bipedal reptile that looked a lot like living crocodiles — except it walked on two legs, not four. Carnufex carolinensis is one of the oldest and largest crocodile ancestors identified to date. Its size and stature also suggest that for a time, the Carolina Butcher (named for its menacing features), was one of the top predators in the part of the supercontinent Pangaea that became North America. Past fossil finds show that cousins of ancient crocodiles were vying with the earliest bipedal dinosaurs, called theropods, for the title of top predator in the southern regions of Pangaea but the Carolina Butcher's reign probably ended 201 million years ago when a mass extinction event wiped out most large, land-based predators, clearing the way for dinosaurs to fully dominate during the Jurassic period. Carnufex is one of the most primitive members of the broad category of reptiles called crocodylomorphs, encompassing the various forms of crocs that have appeared on Earth. "As one of the earliest and oldest crocodylomorphs, Carnufex was a far cry from living crocodiles. It was an agile, terrestrial predator that hunted on land," says Lindsay Zanno. "Carnufex predates the group that living crocodiles belong to." Transported back to the Triassic Period, what would a person experience upon encountering this agile, roughly three metre-long, about 1.5 metre-tall beast with a long skull and blade-like teeth? "Abject terror," says Zanno.

Submission + - John Podesta, Obama and Clinton adviser, believes the truth is out there on UFOs (examiner.com)

Submitted by MarkWhittington
MarkWhittington writes: A lot of people are enthusiastic about the idea that aliens are clandestinely visiting Earth in UFOs and that the government is covering up this fact. Only one such person has been chief of staff to President Bill Clinton, a senior adviser to President Barack Obama, and now an adviser to the nascent Hillary Clinton for president campaign. According to a story in Yahoo News, John Podesta has expressed regret that he has not been able to reveal the truth, which is out there, about UFOs.

Comment Re:Driving ban (Score 1) 154

by omems (#48914021) Attached to: Uber Capping Prices During Snowmageddon 2015
At least in Manhattan, where the snow is rather unimpressive, it was really nice last night. Cold, sure, but essentially empty streets, other than a bunch of pedestrians. Since most businesses had already called off operations for Tuesday, it was like an adult snow-day.
I can't wait for the transfer booths to get installed, and we can permanently ban cars.

Comment Re:U-cubed (Score 1) 266

by omems (#48884233) Attached to: Best Cube?
I'll never forget the look on her face when I replied "I'm going to wash u."
I tried to get people to use "tripple-U" but, unsurprisingly, it didn't catch. It was also back in the day when people (well, we midwestern people) said the "www" of a URL, so www.wustl.edu could have been nona-U if one ignored the dot.

Comment Re:Good/BAd news for science. (Score 1) 90

by omems (#48555857) Attached to: Berkeley Lab Builds World Record Tabletop-Size Particle Accelerator
To be fair, the LHC is working with much higher energies. Wiki:
"... two opposing particle beams of either protons at up to 4 teraelectronvolts (4 TeV or 0.64 microjoules), or lead nuclei at an energy of 574 TeV (92.0 J) per nucleus (2.76 TeV per nucleon),[4][5] with energies to be roughly doubled to around 7 TeV (14 TeV collision energy) —more than seven times any predecessor collider—by around 2015."
Space

How Astronomers Will Take the "Image of the Century": a Black Hole 129

Posted by samzenpus from the use-your-flash dept.
An anonymous reader writes with news that scientists may be close to getting the first image of a black hole. "Researchers studying the universe are ramping up to take the image of the century — the first ever image of a supermassive black hole. While the evidence for the existence of black holes is compelling, Scientists will continue to argue the contrary until physical, observational evidence is provided. Now, a dedicated team of astrophysicists armed with a global fleet of powerful telescopes is out to change that. If they succeed, they will snap the first ever picture of the monstrously massive black hole thought to live at the center of our home galaxy, the Milky Way. This ambitious project, called the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), is incredibly tricky, but recent advances in their research are encouraging the team to push forward, now. The reason EHT needs to be so complex is because black holes, by nature, do not emit light and are, therefore, invisible. In fact, black holes survive by gobbling up light and any other matter — nearby dust, gas, and stars — that fall into their powerful clutches. The EHT team is going to zoom in on a miniscule spot on the sky toward the center of the Milky Way where they believe to be the event horizon of a supermassive black hole weighing in at 4 million times more massive than our sun. We can still see the material, however, right before it falls into eternal darkness. The EHT team is going to try and glimpse this ring of radiation that outlines the event horizon. Experts call this outline the "shadow" of a black hole, and it's this shadow that the EHT team is ultimately after to prove the existence of black holes."

Slashdot Top Deals

UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things. -- Doug Gwyn

Close