Please create an account to participate in the Slashdot moderation system

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Submission + - "The internet poses one of the greatest threats to our existence" (zdnet.com)

An anonymous reader writes: "The internet poses one of the greatest threats to our existence," said [Australian] Senator Glen Lazarus on Thursday night. Hah! A former rugby player says something dumb, that's always funny, right? No. This mix of ignorance, fear, and sometimes plain laziness infests so many of Australia's lawmakers — and right now that's dangerous.
The Australan Senate was debating new national security laws for Australia. Those laws passed. They give the Australian Security and Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) expansive powers to spy on all Australian internet users, and dramatically restrict freedom of the press.

Australian spies will soon have the power to monitor the entire Australian internet with just one warrant, and journalists and whistleblowers will face up to 10 years' jail for disclosing classified information.

The government's first tranche of tougher anti-terrorism bills, which will beef up the powers of the domestic spy agency ASIO, passed the Senate by 44 votes to 12 on Thursday night with bipartisan support from Labor.
The bill, the National Security Legislation Amendment Bill (No. 1) 2014, will now be sent to the House of Representatives, where passage is all but guaranteed on Tuesday at the earliest.

Submission + - Shellshock: How does it actually work? (fedoramagazine.org)

Karrde712 writes: Matthew Miller, the Fedora Project Leader published an article in the online Fedora Magazine yesterday detailing how the recent bash security vulnerability (also nicknamed "shellshock") actually functions in a way that just about anyone can understand.

Comment Re:Not answered in review (Score 1) 216

That's wayyyyyy too much effort for how I launch things: Tap, tap, done if it's on the first screen. Otherwise if it's on the second screen then it's swipe, tap, tap, done. I'd rather just Tap, tap, tap, done, with never any swipe.

Comment Re:There is no "almost impossible" (Score 1) 236

Encryption is ALWAYS breakable by brute force. Question is how long does it take? Seconds? Hours? Months? Years? Decades? This is usually determined by key sizes. The longer the key, the longer it takes to brute force. (generally)

Chuck Norris can brute force a 256-bit key in the time it takes to blink his eyes.

Comment Re:There is no "almost impossible" (Score 1) 236

I have no clue what all the above really means.... If you are saying that 256 bit keys are hard to break, I would concur. If you are saying that it would take a long time, I would again agree. However, if you look at "possible" it is totally possible to brute force a 256 bit key, it just takes TIME to do, LOTS of time OR lots of computers. Either way, it is perfectly possible... Now it may take a LOT of computers (more than are physically possible) or it may take a LONG time (more than we likely have before the sun destroys the earth) but that is all about being practical and not about being possible.

It's mathematically possible. It's humanly impossible. No human will ever build a machine using normal matter that is capable of it.

Comment Re:Does HFCS count? (Score 1) 294

sugar: 50% fructose, 50% glucose HFCS: 55% fructose, 45% glucose
zomg, clearly hfcs is the reason people are getting so much fatter.

It's not that simple.
Do a little reading about it. Your body has to expend energy/effort to break sugar into fructose + glucose, whereas with HFCS, the fructose and glucose are already separated and your body has immediate use of them. This is the kicker, and why HFCS is worse than sugar. Of course, even worse than HFCS is fruit juice that's high in fructose.

Comment Re:Not answered in review (Score 1) 216

It'd only be nice if you have a filing fetish. It's not useful. Any minor pleasure it might bring filing fetishists would be vastly outweighed by those ordinary phone users who lose applications.

That's a rather naive thing of you to say. Some of us have a hundred apps installed, and it's very useful to have them organized and be able to select them quickly with just a couple or three taps, rather than scrolling through dozens of pages of grids.

Comment Re:Well, if you're going to push... (Score 1) 159

More to the point, when people use, "Google," as a verb, they mean to actually use Google, as opposed to using any brand of facial tissue available when saying, "Kleenex."

Exactly! You can't google something using Bing, for example. Not that you'd want to anyway. You can only google something using Google.

(Now I feel like I need to go wash my hands after mentioning Bing. Eww.)

Comment Re:A solution in search of a problem... (Score 1) 326

Don't feel bad. It's tricky wording. I wasn't sure how to word it to be clear (and to be fair, I don't think it was really clear). "Opposites" to me would imply 180 opposing... so I wrote "mirror-opposites" to imply a vertical mirror, but of course that's pretty subtle and not very unambiguous.

Slashdot Top Deals

Living on Earth may be expensive, but it includes an annual free trip around the Sun.

Working...