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Comment Making some people smarter will ruin society... (Score 1) 259

by tiago.bonetti (#46325867) Attached to: Is Google Making the Digital Divide Worse?
The most idiotic argument I've heard on an article in a while.... The not smarter, but not less smarter either, will benefit with more smarter people. A better decision on part of one individual on a society will probably benefit the whole society. I prefer much more to be a idiot on a sea of geniuses then a idiot in a sea of my pairs.

Submission + - How I Lost My Google Glass (and Regained Some Faith in Humanity) (slashdot.org)

Submitted by Nerval's Lobster
Nerval's Lobster writes: 'The winter weather made my hands numb. I was distracted, rushed, running late to a meeting. Put those two things together, and it’s a recipe for disaster,' Boonsri Dickinson writes in her account of how she lost her Google Glass unit. 'The cab had already gone two blocks before I realized my Google Glass was no longer in my hand. I asked the driver to swing back around to where he picked me up; I retraced my steps along the snowy street to my apartment, looking for my $1,500 device. No luck. Total panic.' The device featured photos, video, email, and other data that, in the wrong hands, could seriously upend her life. Fortunately, the person who found the Glass unit was a.) more interested in returning the device than wrecking her existence, and b.) engaged in quite a bit of digital detective work to track her down (with some help from Google). 'The device holds more than enough data to make me nervous about the possible voyeuristic invasion of my privacy, and the fear of the thought that the media connected to my Glass would possibly end up online, somewhere, cached forever in a Google search,' she concluded. But the saga also reset some of her faith in humanity.

Submission + - "Honey Encryption" to Bamboozle Attackers with Fake Secrets

Submitted by Hugh Pickens DOT Com
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: Tom Simonite writes at MIT Technology Review that security researcher Ari Juels says that trickery is the missing component from the cryptography protecting sensitive data and proposes a new encryption system with a devious streak. It gives encrypted data an additional layer of protection by serving up fake data in response to every incorrect guess of the password or encryption key. If the attacker does eventually guess correctly, the real data should be lost amongst the crowd of spoof data. The new approach could be valuable given how frequently large encrypted stashes of sensitive data fall into the hands of criminals. Some 150 million usernames and passwords were taken from Adobe servers in October 2013, for example. If an attacker uses software to make 10,000 attempts to decrypt a credit card number, for example, they would get back 10,000 different fake credit card numbers. “Each decryption is going to look plausible,” says Juels. “The attacker has no way to distinguish a priori which is correct.” Juels previously worked with Ron Rivest, the “R” in RSA, to develop a system called Honey Words to protect password databases by also stuffing them with false passwords. Juels says that by now enough password dumps have leaked online to make it possible to create fakes that accurately mimic collections of real passwords and is currently working on creating the fake password vault generator needed for Honey Encryption to be used to protect password managers. This generator will draw on data from a small collection of leaked password manager vaults, several large collections of leaked passwords, and a model of real-world password use built into a powerful password cracker. "Honeywords and honey-encryption represent some of the first steps toward the principled use of decoys, a time-honored and increasingly important defense in a world of frequent, sophisticated, and damaging security breaches."

Submission + - Developer Loses $50,00 Twitter Name Through Extortion

Submitted by Hugh Pickens DOT Com
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: Naoki Hiroshima, creator of Cocoyon and a developer for Echofon, writes at TNW that he had a rare one-letter Twitter username, @N and had been offered as much as $50,000 for its purchase. "People have tried to steal it. Password reset instructions are a regular sight in my email inbox," writes Hiroshima. "As of today, I no longer control @N. I was extorted into giving it up." Hiroshima writes that a hacker used social engineering with paypal to get the last four digits of his credit card number over the phone then used that information to gain control of his GoDaddy account. "Most websites use email as a method of verification. If your email account is compromised, an attacker can easily reset your password on many other websites. By taking control of my domain name at GoDaddy, my attacker was able to control my email." Hiroshima received a message from his extortionist. "Your GoDaddy domains are in my possession, one fake purchase and they can be repossessed by godaddy and never seen again. I see you run quite a few nice websites so I have left those alone for now, all data on the sites has remained intact. Would you be willing to compromise? access to @N for about 5 minutes while I swap the handle in exchange for your godaddy, and help securing your data?" Hiroshima writes that it'’s hard to decide what’s more shocking, the fact that PayPal gave the attacker the last four digits of his credit card number over the phone, or that GoDaddy accepted it as verification. Hiroshima has two takeaways from his experience: Avoid custom domains for your login email address and don’t let companies such as PayPal and GoDaddy store your credit card information.

Submission + - New Cryptographic Timestamping Service Leveraging Bitcoin (cryptostamp.net)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Crypto Stamp places a timestamp on your files such that you can prove the time the file existed to anyone else without relying on Crypto Stamp as a trusted third-party. Obvious uses are proving patent designs or homework completion before a certain date. But, people could find many other uses for their personal or business life. A mobile app allows you to keep secure timestamps of all photos you take, and a developer API allows others to develop services which use Crypto Stamp.

Submission + - Facebook Puts 10,000 Blu-ray Discs In Low-Power Storage System (itworld.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: Facebook said last year that it was exploring Blu-ray for its data-center storage needs, and on Tuesday it showed a prototype system at the Open Compute Project summit meeting in San Jose, California. It designed the system to store data that hardly ever needs to be accessed, or for so-called "cold storage" (think duplicates of users' photos and videos that it keeps for backup). The Blu-ray system reduces costs by 50% and energy use by 80% compared with its current cold-storage system, which uses hard disk drives, said Jay Parikh, Facebook's vice president of infrastructure engineering.
Mars

Submission + - Journal of Cosmology scientist sues to force NASA to investigate "donut" on Mars

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Rhawn Joseph, a self-described astrobiologist involved with the infamous Journal of Cosmology, is suing NASA, demanding 100 high-resolution photos and 24 micrographs be taken of the "donut" rock that recently appeared in front of the Opportunity rover on Mars, on the basis that it is a living organism. The remarkable full text of the complaint, which cites NASA's mineralogical analysis of the rock as evidence against it being a rock, is available to read at Popular Science.

Submission + - Google Removes CSS Regions From Blink - An Optimization Too Far (i-programmer.info)

Submitted by mikejuk
mikejuk writes: Google and Opera split from WebKit to create Blink, their own HTML rendering engine, and everyone was worried about the effect on standards. Now we have the first big example of a split in the form of CSS Regions support. Essentially Regions are used to provide the web equivalent of text flow, a concept very familiar to anyone who has used a DTP (DeskTop Publishing) program. The basic idea is that you define containers for a text stream which is then flowed from one container to another to provide a complex multicolumn layout. The W3C standard for Regions has mostly been created by Adobe — long time DTP company. Now the Blink team propose to remove Regions support saving 10,000 lines of code in 350,000 in the name of efficiency.
If Google does remove the Regions code, which looks highly likely, this would leave Safari and IE 10/11 as the only two major browsers to support Regions. Both Apple and Microsoft have an interest in ensuring that their hardware can be used to create high quality magazine style layouts — Google and Opera aren't so concerned. I thought standards were there to implement not argue with.

Submission + - Acid bath offers easy path to stem cells (nature.com)

Submitted by ananyo
ananyo writes: In 2006, Japanese researchers reported a technique for creating cells that have the embryonic ability to turn into almost any cell type in the mammalian body — the now-famous induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells. In papers published this week in Nature, another Japanese team says that it has come up with a surprisingly simple method — exposure to stress, including a low pH — that can make cells that are even more malleable than iPS cells, and do it faster and more efficiently.
The work so far has focused on mouse white blood cells but the group are now trying to make the method work with cells adult humans. If they're succesful, that would dramatically speed up the process of creating stem cells for potential clinical applications.

Submission + - Full of Unknowns: Inside The Arms Race of Google Glass App Development (ibtimes.co.uk)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Beneath the debates over privacy, piracy and road safety, an arms race is descending on Google Glass as developers brainstorm ideas, seek investment funding and frantically code applications they hope will turn Glass from a clever concept into a game-changing success story.

Submission + - best x86 tablet for a white hack

Submitted by Gregory oakley-stevenson
Gregory oakley-stevenson writes: Im looking for a x86 tablet prefable working with kali and ubuntu.
Keep getting stuck with secure boot and 32 bit uefi, any one with a good tablet?

Submission + - A Grassroots Campaign Using the 4th Amendment to Shut Off the NSA's Water Supply (vice.com) 3

Submitted by Daniel_Stuckey
Daniel_Stuckey writes: The NSA’s metaphorical Eye of Sauron is powered by supercomputers that get super-hot creeping on all that data, and to avoid bursting into flames they require massive amounts of water-cooling. Without the water, these computers literally crash and burn. And as Michael Boldin,the founder and executive director of the Tenth Amendment Centre told me, turning off the tap is theoretically fairly easy to do: “In theory, if they don't have water, electricity, wastewater treatment, and all kinds of other daily needs, they're going to have a pretty hard time operating.”

Off Now are leading the charge with a state-level bill, the Fourth Amendment Protection Act. If adopted, it would effectively nullify all NSA facilities within that state by refusing to provide them with crucial day-to-day services. It's now been introduced in ten states (though predictably stalled at various points along the way), and the campaign has also given birth to other related actions—adopting a similar strategy, a campaign to cut off the NSA’s juice in Washington State has received over 18,000 signatures of their 20,000-strong goal. By targeting individual facilities, Off Now believes the NSA’s accumulative power can be significantly reduced.

Submission + - Samsung's First Tizen Smartphone Gets Leaked

Submitted by SmartAboutThings
SmartAboutThings writes: We are less than a month away from seeing the first ever Tizen smartphone from Samsung. The leaked image points towards Feb 24th launch date at MWC 2014 in Barcelona. The phone design is very similar to Galaxy phones, while the UI reminds us of Windows Phone 8 . Samsung is also the world's top smartphone vendor, so it has all the chances of developing a mobile OS of its own, what do you think?

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