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Security

Submission + - Government Red Teams Discuss Vulnerabilities

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Sandia National Laboratories in the US put out a press release this week about their REDTEAM2007 Conference "for the government red-teaming community to exchange ideas and foster cooperation." Judging from the conference's homepage, this looks like an excuse for law enforcement, military, and intelligence officials to get together and discuss vulnerabilities for all sorts of reasons (wink, wink). Since the conference is unclassified I'm guessing all the really interesting sharing will happen in back rooms, but at $900US it might be interesting to see what these government types are thinking about.
Book Reviews

SELinux by Example

Posted by samzenpus from the read-all-about-it dept.
Ravi writes "SELinux is a project started and actively maintained by the U.S Department of Defense to provide a Mandatory Access Controls mechanism in Linux. It had been a long standing grouse of Linux power users and system administrators over its lack of fine grained access control over various running processes as well as files in Linux. While Solaris touts its famous RBAC and Microsoft Windows has its own way of providing finer rights to its resources, Linux had to put up with the simple but crude user rights known in tech speak as discretionary access control to control user access of files. With SELinux project making great strides and now being bundled with many major Linux distributions, it is possible to effectively lock down a Linux system through judicious use of SELinux policies. SELinux implements a more flexible form of MAC called type enforcement and an optional form of multilevel security." Read the rest of Ravi's review.
Portables

Submission + - OLPC in Romania

Submitted by
len_p
len_p writes: "After the government has payed millions to M$ for various licenses I was surprised to see our prime minister holding the green laptop on TV and talking about a proposal for an OLPC laptop in Romania (sorry romanian only). The government wants to propose a project for the large adoption of OLPC. Strangely the price is 150$ now. Hopefully the OLPC project will not be used for a classic romanian scam, or maybe it is just electoral propaganda?"
Security

Submission + - Companies apologetic after data breaches

Submitted by
jbrodkin
jbrodkin writes: "This two-story package examines the many apologies companies have been forced to make after exposing the sensitive personal information of Americans. This story — http://www.networkworld.com/news/2007/031407-wider -net-apologies-letters.html — gives 10 examples of company apologies and rates the effectiveness of each one on a scale of 1 to 10. This story — http://www.networkworld.com/news/2007/031407-wider -net-apologies.html — examines the typical mistakes companies make when they apologize for data breaches. Often, a bad apology can make the situation worse."
Security

Submission + - OpenBSD: Now 2 remote holes in more than 10 years

Submitted by
Saint Aardvark
Saint Aardvark writes: "CoreLabs released an advisory today about a remote hole in OpenBSD. The vulnerability, which affects versions 3.1, 3.6, 3.8, 3.9, 4.0 and the upcoming 4.1 release (for code obtained prior to Feb 26th; the upcoming CD is fine), comes from the way OpenBSD's IPv6 code handles mbufs. Theo's terse announcement is an interesting counterpoint to Core Security's timetable, which details their efforts to convince the OpenBSD team of the flaw's seriousness. The workaround is to block IPv6. Discussion continues on Undeadly.org, and a short discussion of the flaw's details can be found here."
Games

Submission + - Commodore's new gaming PC - specs revealed

Submitted by
steven williamson
steven williamson writes: "Following on from the press release earlier today announcing new details for Commodore's range of gaming PCs, the spec for have been revealed before CeBIT 2007 in Hanover launches tomorrow. HEXUS.gaming have gatecrashed the show early and have a full list of what we can expect.

So we all got excited over the news that Commodore are entering the gaming PC market, but what we've all been gagging to know is what the spec of these new PCs will be...
Check out the full list : here"
Robotics

Submission + - Plummeting Chandelier Thrills with Mechatronics

Submitted by GregPic83
GregPic83 writes: The Venetian Hotel's production of Phantom of the Opera in Las Vegas involves a four-part 2,100-lb chandelier freefalling and safely stopping just over the heads of theater goers. Contractors sought to all but crash the chandelier in what turned out to be a classic mechatronics project, involving everything from 3D simulation software to LED strobe lights. A very cool project — check out the videos.
The Internet

Submission + - What will Google PageRank for Video be?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Read/WriteWeb has an interview with Matt Cutts, about Google and Next-Generation Search. At the end Cutts talks about where Google is heading with Video search. He says they are looking for a PageRank equivalent for video search:

"...we have this notion of reputation — which is PageRank, it's how many people link to your site and it's also the quality of that incoming set of links. So it's fun to think about things like reputation in video search — whether it be for Google Video or YouTube — because you don't have links necessarily. You might have things that are somewhat similar to links, but you look at the quality of the users, the quality of the ratings. I think in lots of ways it gives Google good practice to think about the power of people, and the power of trust — and how to apply that in a lot of different areas."
Supercomputing

Submission + - SETI@Home is now the World's Fastest Supercomputer

Submitted by jemecki
jemecki writes: I was looking through the distributed computing statistics at BOINCstats today and I noticed that SETI@Home distributed computing grid just passed 280 TeraFLOPS in computing power. The reason this is so remarkable is that the fastest supercomputer in the world Blue Gene/L ALSO operates at a sustained 280 TeraFLOPS. So while governments are busy using their supercomputers to model bombs and nuclear weapons, the geeks have put together the world's fastest computer and they're using it to look for aliens. Awesome.

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