HoleShot - Slashdot User

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Why Is the Power Grid So Crummy In So Many Places? (wikipedia.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 25, 2014 @09:10PM

An anonymous reader writes: I live in a relatively large college town that's within easy driving distance of several major metropolitan centers. In many ways, the infrastructure around here is top-notch. The major exception is the electrical grid. Lightning storm? Power outage. Heavy winds? Power outage. Lots of rain? Power outage. Some areas around town are immune to this — like around the hospital, for obvious reasons. But others seem to lose power at the drop of hat. Why is this? If it were a tiny village or in the middle of nowhere, it would make sense to me. What problems do the utility companies face that they can't keep service steady? Do you face similar problems where you live? I'm not sure if it's just an investment issue or a technological one. It hasn't gotten better in the decade I've lived here, and I can imagine it will only get worse as the infrastructure ages.

Submission + - Visual Studio 2015 supports CLANG and Android (with emulator included) (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Billly Gates on Saturday November 15, 2014 @07:50PM

Billly Gates writes: What would be unthinkable a decade ago is Visual Studio supporting W3C HTML and CSS and now apps on other platforms. Visual Studio 2015 preview is available for download which includes support for LLVM/Clang, Android development, and even Linux development with Mono using Xamarin. A little more detail is here. A tester also found support for Java, ANT, SQL LITE, and WebSocket4web. We see IE improving in terms of more standards and Visual Studio Online even supports IOS and MacOSX development. Is this a new Microsoft emerging? In any case it is nice to have an alternative to Google tools for Android development.

AT&T Stops Using 'Super Cookies' To Track Cellphone Data 60

Posted by timothy on Saturday November 15, 2014 @06:35PM from the turns-out-people-hate-that dept.

jriding (1076733) writes AT&T Mobility, the nation's second-largest cellular provider, says it's no longer attaching hidden Internet tracking codes to data transmitted from its users' smartphones. The practice made it nearly impossible to shield its subscribers' identities online. Would be nice to hear something similar from Verizon.

Real Steampunk Computer Brought Back To Life 81

Posted by timothy on Saturday November 15, 2014 @04:36PM from the malware-free dept.

New submitter engineerguy writes We discovered a 100 year old 19th century computer that does Fourier analysis with just gears spring and levers. It was locked in a glass case at the University of Illinois Department of Mathematics. We rebuilt a small part of the machine and then for two years thoroughly photographed and filmed every part part of the machine and its operation. The results of this labor of love are in the video series (short documentary), which is 22 minutes long and contains stunning footage of the machine in action — including detailed descriptions of how it operates. The photos are collected in a free book (PDF). The computer was designed by Albert Michelson, who was famous for the Michelson-Morley experiment; he was also the first American to win a Nobel Prize in physics.

Submission + - Potential 2 million user botnet (reddit.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 15, 2014 @04:04PM

An anonymous reader writes: There is currently a debate going on regarding the videogame Arma2 (plus DayZ Standalone) and their anti cheat service called Battle-Eye (Run by Bastian Suter) Currently only in Arma2, but being prototyped for DayZ-SA is a new kind of anticheat.

A first of its kind from what I can tell, which involves a service running at kernel level access in order to hinder game hacking. What concerns me about this is the fact that over 2million players will be giving 1 person (who has already been shown to have shady practices of stealing source code files (URL will be included below)) the "keys" to their systems.

On top of this Bastian himself has been hacked once (at least) in order to verify just how shady his practices were. Unfortunately to find out he is breaking his Terms of Service, other people had to break his Terms of Service first in order to verify it. Making this somewhat of a legal nightmare.

Can we really trust a very seemingly shady character who has already been hacked, to protect a developer which also (coincidence?) has been hacked this year and had their source code for DayZ-SA stolen.

If this anticheat goes live in its current form, and the BEDaisy.sys driver is implemented onto DayZ-SA we are quite literally looking at the most effective anticheat system to date, but also something just as invasive as the NSA. Plus one man holds all the keys, what if he gets hacked again, or worse decides to sell the keys to the kingdom?

We could be looking at an entire videogame population being turned into one of the largest botnets in history, all under the pretense of "securing the game against cheaters".

(BTW, the majority of the outcry for hacks in the game are related to bad coding practices done by the developers in the first place. I am not trying to be unsympathetic to legitimate players concerns over hacking, but is a rootkit really the right answer to cheating in a videogame? Especially on such a large scale.

Additional details relevant to the scenario:

- Bastian Suter has been alledgedly claimed to have created and sold hacks prior to developing his anticheat. As can be found referenced on the UnknownCheats forum.

- Bastian Suter has reportedly been using his authority as an anticheat to steal source code files, not directly related to the hacks he is protecting users from. Same forum as above for references.

- This appears to be a classic case of someone turning traitor for the sole purpose of financial or power gains.

-S

Submission + - Dealing with VOIP Fraud/Phising Scams 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 15, 2014 @01:20PM

An anonymous reader writes: I run the IT department for a medium-sized online retailer, and we own a set of marketing toll-free numbers that route to our VOIP system for sales. Yesterday we began receiving dozens and now hundreds of calls from non-customers claiming that we're calling out from our system and offering them $1 million in prizes and asking for their checking account details (a classic phishing scheme).

After verifying that our own system wasn't compromised, we realized that someone was spoofing the Caller ID of our company on a local phone number, and then they were forwarding call-backs to their number to one of our 1-800 numbers.

We contacted the registered provider of the scammer's phone number, Level3, but they haven't been able to resolve the issue yet and have left the number active (apparently one of their sub-carriers owns it). At this point, the malicious party is auto-dialing half of the phone book in the DC metro area and it's causing harm to our business reputation.

Disabling our inbound 800 number isn't really possible due to the legitimate marketing traffic. Does Slashdot have any suggestions?

Japanese Maglev Train Hits 500kph 419

Posted by timothy on Saturday November 15, 2014 @01:15PM from the for-amtrak-that-takes-negligence dept.

An anonymous reader writes Japan has now put 100 passengers on a Maglev train doing over 500kph. That's well over twice as fast as the fastest U.S. train can manage, and that only manages 240kph on small sections of its route. The Japanese Shinkansen is now running over 7 times times as fast as the average U.S. express passenger train. 500kph is moving towards the average speed of an airliner. Add the convenience of no boarding issues, and city-centre to city-centre travel, and the case for trains as mass-transport begins to look stronger.

Submission + - What if Congress Votes a Pipeline and Nobody Comes?

Submitted by HughPickens.com on Saturday November 15, 2014 @11:23AM

HughPickens.com writes: Tim Mullaney reports at CNBC that as Congress rushes to approve the long-delayed Keystone XL pipeline, it is questionable whether or not the controversial pipeline will make as much of a difference as proponents expect. The so-called "heavy oil" extracted from sand in Alberta, which the proposed pipeline would carry to Nebraska, en route to refineries on the Gulf Coast, will cost between $85 and $110 to produce, depending on which drilling technology is used, according to a report in July by the Canadian Energy Research Institute, a nonprofit whose work is often cited by Keystone proponents. But crude oil futures now hover near four-year lows as sustained concerns over a glut in world markets continued to weigh heavily on prices and oil ministers from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait resisted calls to lower production to prevent further price declines. CERI' s analysis squares with the views of other experts, who have pointed to low prices as a sign that economic facts, at least for now, don't match political rhetoric coming from Washington, where Keystone has been a goal for both Republicans and for Senate Democrats from oil-producing states. "Anything not under construction [is] at risk of being delayed or canceled altogether," says Dinara Millington

The situation is broadly similar to that faced by an earlier proposal to build a natural-gas pipeline from Alaska to the Midwest says energy economist Chris Lafakis. After being approved by then-Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin in 2007, the pipeline was never built, because newly discovered supplies of gas in the Lower 48 states pushed gas prices down by about two-thirds. "If oil were to stay as cheap as it is right now," says Lafakis, "you might very well get that Palin pipeline scenario."

Submission + - Nintendo President Considers an End of Region Locking (technobuffalo.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 07, 2014 @12:02PM

An anonymous reader writes: Back at the helm of his company after recovering from surgery, Nintendo President Satoru Iwata has responded that the company must address one of the biggest glaring missteps of its current two consoles: region-locking.

Mathematical Proof That the Universe Could Come From Nothing 429

Posted by Soulskill on Friday November 07, 2014 @11:53AM from the you-are-a-long-term-fluctuation dept.

TaleSlinger writes: One of the great theories of modern cosmology is that the universe began in a "Big Bang", but the mathematical mechanism by which this occurred has been lacking. Cosmologists at the Wuhan Institute have published a proof that the Big Bang could indeed have occurred spontaneously because of quantum fluctuations. "The new proof is based on a special set of solutions to a mathematical entity known as the Wheeler-DeWitt equation. In the first half of the 20th century, cosmologists struggled to combine the two pillars of modern physics— quantum mechanics and general relativity—in a way that reasonably described the universe. As far as they could tell, these theories were entirely at odds with each other.

At the heart of their thinking is Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. This allows a small empty space to come into existence probabilistically due to fluctuations in what physicists call the metastable false vacuum. When this happens, there are two possibilities. If this bubble of space does not expand rapidly, it disappears again almost instantly. But if the bubble can expand to a large enough size, then a universe is created in a way that is irreversible. The question is: does the Wheeler-DeWitt equation allow this? "We prove that once a small true vacuum bubble is created, it has the chance to expand exponentially," say the researchers.

Submission + - A Tech Rebellion Brewing? (xconomy.com)

Submitted by gthuang88 on Friday November 07, 2014 @11:52AM

gthuang88 writes: Joi Ito is a rebel, but he’s also head of the MIT Media Lab and depends on funding from big companies like Fox, Intel, and Google. Anil Dash is a Web entrepreneur, but he wants the industry held responsible for its nefarious terms of service, poor civic track record, and lack of diversity. Ayah Bdeir runs a hardware startup, but she rails against blind consumption of apps and devices. A recent PopTech gathering shows tech leaders are wrestling with their role in society. It also uncovers a fundamental tension between rebellious startups and the institutions they seek to disrupt.

Submission + - Motorola Droid Turbo hands-on and first impressions (androidauthority.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 07, 2014 @11:33AM

An anonymous reader writes: Taking the place of the Droid Ultra in the Verizon exclusive Motorola line-up, the Droid Turbo looks to offer everything you’d expect from a flagship device, and more. To find out exactly what this device has to offer, we go hands on, and give you our first impressions about the Motorola Droid Turbo!

Submission + - Website peeps into 73,000 unsecured security cameras via default passwords (networkworld.com) 1

Submitted by colinneagle on Friday November 07, 2014 @11:31AM

colinneagle writes: After coming across a Russian website that streams video from unsecured video cameras that employ default usernames and passwords (the site claims it's doing it to raise awareness of privacy risks), a blogger used the information available to try to contact the people who were unwittingly streamed on the site. It didn't go well. The owner of a pizza restaurant, for example, cursed her out over the phone and accused her of "hacking" the cameras herself. And whoever (finally) answered the phone at a military building whose cameras were streaming on the site told her to "call the Pentagon."

The most common location of the cameras was the U.S., but many others were accessed from South Korea, China, Mexico, the UK, Italy, and France, among others. Some are from businesses, and some are from personal residences. Particularly alarming was the number of camera feeds of sleeping babies, which people often set up to protect them, but, being unaware of the risks, don't change the username or password from the default options that came with the cameras.

It's not the first time this kind of issue has come to light. In September 2013, the FTC cracked down on TRENDnet after its unsecured cameras were found to be accessible online. But the Russian site accesses cameras from several manufacturers, raising some new questions — why are strong passwords not required for these cameras? And, once this becomes mandatory, what can be done about the millions of unsecured cameras that remain live in peoples' homes?

Submission + - Facebook launches Ebola charity donation button (techfeasta.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 07, 2014 @11:19AM

An anonymous reader writes: Facebook Inc said users would now have option to donate directly to various Ebola relief charities through a button at the top of their News Feeds.

After Silk Road 2.0 Bust, Eyes Turn To 'Untouchable' Decentralized Market 108

Posted by Soulskill on Friday November 07, 2014 @11:12AM from the for-relatively-touchable-values-of-untouchable dept.

apexcp sends this article from The Daily Dot: Following a wave of Dark Net arrests that brought down the famous anonymous drug market Silk Road 2.0, all eyes have turned to a marketplace called OpenBazaar that is designed to be impossible to shut down. Described as the "next generation of uncensored trade" and a "safe untouchable marketplace," OpenBazaar is fundamentally different from all the online black markets that have come before it, because it is completely decentralized. If authorities acted against OpenBazaar users, they could arrest individuals, but the network would survive. "If you're thinking about OpenBazaar as Silk Road 3.0, you're thinking about it much too narrowly," said OpenBazaar operations lead Sam Patterson in an interview last night. "I actually think it's much more powerful as eCommerce 2.0."

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