dafozzee - Slashdot User

Comment RTFM (Score 4, Interesting) 79

by interiot on Saturday December 22, 2012 @03:14PM (#42370775) Attached to: DARPA Wants Wireless Devices That Can Blast Through the Noise

The goal is to "engineer software-based radios that transmit data faster than a competitor using identical hardware".

The goal isn't to develop fancy new hardware, or to use an overwhelming amount of power. The goal is to develop fancy new software.

With frequency-hopping and time-hopping techniques, if you can intelligently adapt to the local interference, and transmit in the time and frequency gaps where the interference doesn't occur, then you can transmit more data for the same amount of power. That's the goal.

Comment extracting keys from RAM (Score 4, Informative) 268

by interiot on Thursday December 20, 2012 @03:09PM (#42351137) Attached to: ElcomSoft Tool Cracks BitLocker, PGP, TrueCrypt In Real-Time

This tool extracts the keys from RAM dumps. There are free tools that do this too, of course.

But isn't it difficult to get a RAM dump, you say? Not really:

Hibernating a computer writes this data to disk. Starting in Windows 8, "shutdown" actually writes some hibernate data by default.
VMs also have their own suspend functionality that does a RAM dump, as well as non-SAN VM migration.
Firewire ports actually allow devices to scan RAM of the machine they're connected to.
Obviously, if you have access to a live machine, you can get the keys directly from RAM.

Comment Dangerous (Score 4, Interesting) 103

by interiot on Saturday November 24, 2012 @04:35PM (#42083151) Attached to: 100km/h Sailboat Sets Speed Record

Interesting fact — There's an 85% fatality rate for the speed record for any boat. This sport is extremely dangerous.

The sailing speed record is 80% slower than the overall boat record, so the sailing record is a little safer. Nonetheless, one of the SailRocket crashes led to the pilot having a broken helmet.

Comment Re:Netflix already works on Linux (Score 4, Informative) 185

by interiot on Friday November 16, 2012 @01:08PM (#42002773) Attached to: Running Netflix On Linux

Netflix runs fine on ChromeOS on x86, which is Linux-based too.

Skype Hands Teenager's Information To Private Firm 214

Posted by Unknown Lamer on Tuesday November 06, 2012 @04:21AM from the but-we-were-friends dept.

New submitter andrew3 writes "Skype has allegedly handed the information of a 16-year-old boy to a security firm. The information was later handed over to Dutch law enforcement. No court order was served for the disclosure. The teenager was suspected of being part of a DDoS packet flood as a part of the Anonymous 'Operation Payback'." According to the article, Skype voluntarily disclosed the information to the third party firm without any kind of police order, possibly violating a few privacy laws and their own policies.

Building the Ultimate Safe House 289

Posted by timothy on Saturday November 03, 2012 @08:27AM from the don't-forget-the-toilet-paper dept.

Hugh Pickens writes "Candace Jackson writes that an increasing number of home builders and buyers are looking for a new kind of security: homes equipped to handle everything from hurricanes, tornadoes and hybrid superstorms like this week's Sandy, to man-made threats ranging from home invasion to nuclear war. Fueling the rise of these often-fortresslike homes are new technologies and building materials—which builders say will ultimately be used on a more widespread basis in storm- and earthquake-threatened areas. For example, Alys Beach, a 158-acre luxury seaside community on Florida's Gulf Coast, has earned the designation of Fortified...for safer living® homes and is designed to withstand strong winds. The roofs have two coats of limestone and exterior walls have 8 inches of concrete, reinforced every 32 inches for 'bunkerlike' safety, according to marketing materials. Other builders are producing highly hurricane-proof residences that are circular in shape with 'radial engineering' wherein roof and floor trusses link back to the home's center like spokes on a wheel, helping to dissipate gale forces around the structure. Deltec, a North Carolina–based builder, says it has never lost a circular home to hurricanes in over 40 years of construction. But Doug Buck says some 'extreme' building techniques don't make financial sense. 'You get to a point of diminishing returns,' says Buck. 'You're going to spend so much that honestly, it would make more sense to let it blow down and rebuild it.''

How Noah Kagan Got Fired From Facebook and Lost $100 Million 236

Posted by timothy on Sunday September 30, 2012 @10:48PM from the but-who's-counting dept.

First time accepted submitter abhi2012 writes "Noah Kagan, a former Facebook product manager, has written a brutally honest article about how and why he got fired from Facebook in 2006 and what he learned from it. The experience must be particularly painful, given that it eventually cost Kagan a $100 million fortune."

Dremel-Based Project Accepted As Apache Incubator 45

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday August 16, 2012 @10:12PM from the read-all-about-it dept.

itwbennett writes "The technology behind Google's BigQuery analytics as a service is based on the company's in-house ad hoc query system called Dremel that can store and search trillion-row datasets without the complexity and batch limitations of Hadoop. Today, Hadoop vendor MapR announced a new open source iteration of Dremel called Drill, which is now an incubation project with the Apache Softare Foundation. First up for the Apache Drill project: getting a consensus on Drill's APIs so that other vendors can work with it, says project leader Tomer Shiran."

Alternative To QR Code Uses NFC and Cheap Rectennas 164

Posted by timothy on Tuesday August 14, 2012 @10:42AM from the which-infrastructure-do-you-prefer? dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The BBC reports researchers in Korea have developed a technology that can be used as a viable alternative to QR codes. Made of plastic and electronic ink, the rectennas cost less than one penny each to produce and use the NFC standards for wireless radio communication to devices. They are seen as a cheap, easy-to-print and environmentally friendly way to overcome the limitations and inconvenience of QR codes, the usage of which has greatly increased in the last few years."

Comment Re:awesome publicity for public awareness (Score 2) 597

by Kev Vance on Monday August 06, 2012 @03:17PM (#40898023) Attached to: NASA's Own Video of Curiosity Landing Crashes Into a DMCA Takedown

It's not perjury, and they're not criminals. Perjury is making a false or misleading statement while under oath, and there is no oath here.

17 U.S.C. (512(c)(3)(A)(vi)):

A statement that the information in the notification is accurate, and under penalty of perjury, that the complaining party is authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.

But IANAL. So why isn't this perjury?

Did an Unnamed MIT Student Save Apollo 13? 258

Posted by samzenpus on Monday August 06, 2012 @10:20AM from the cut-your-hair-and-get-a-job dept.

lukehopewell1 writes "When the Apollo 13 reported an explosion on board, NASA started a marathon effort to get the three astronauts home. Several options were considered, but history tells how flight director Gene Kranz ordered a slingshot around the moon. The story stayed that way for over 40 years, until this weekend when an ex-NASA press secretary came forward and said that an unnamed MIT grad student came up with the idea to slingshot the spacecraft around the moon. NASA reportedly buried his involvement at the last minute when it was discovered that he was a long-haired, bearded hippie-type.' Now the internet has gone on the hunt to find out who this unnamed hero really is."

An Android Tablet Victory May Be Problematic For Free Software 208

Posted by Soulskill on Wednesday July 11, 2012 @05:14AM from the all-the-same-and-yet-all-different dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Glyn Moody writes at The H that Google's Nexus 7 tablet seems to be in a good position to shake up the market and pave the way for serious Android competition to the iPad. That said, he's worried about the potential downsides to a market full of mostly 'open' devices: 'Such customised systems are likely to be as locked down as they can be – the last thing either manufacturers or companies want is for users to start fiddling with the settings or installing their own software. As a result, the apps that run on such systems are likely to be closed source, since that's the way vertical markets tend to work. Such systems will also expose a persistent problem with the open source development methodology. While big and general projects find it relatively easy to attract interested developers, smaller, more targeted solutions tend not to thrive as free software.'"

SPDY Not As Speedy As Hyped? 135

Posted by timothy on Sunday June 17, 2012 @09:50AM from the but-it-stays-late-on-weekends dept.

Freshly Exhumed writes "Akamai's Guy Podjarny reveals after testing: SPDY is different than HTTP in many ways, but its primary value comes from being able to multiplex many requests/responses from client to server over a single (or few) TCP connections. Previous benchmarks tout great benefits, ranging from making pages load 2x faster to making mobile sites 23% faster using SPDY and HTTPS than over clear HTTP. However, when testing real world sites I did not see any such gains. In fact, my tests showed SPDY is only marginally faster than HTTPS and is slower than HTTP."

Ask Slashdot: At What Point Has a Kickstarter Project Failed? 247

Posted by Soulskill on Wednesday April 11, 2012 @05:19AM from the when-people-get-angry-on-the-internet dept.

skywiseguy writes "I have only used Kickstarter to back a single project so far, but one of the backers of that project pointed us to a project promising video capable glasses which was once one of the top 10 highest funded projects in Kickstarter history. After reading through the comments, it is obvious that the project has not met its expected deadline of 'Winter 2011,' but the project team rarely gives any updates with concrete information. All emails sent to them by backers get a form letter in reply, they routinely delete negative comments from their Facebook page, and apparently very soon after the project was funded, they posted pictures of themselves on a tropical beach with the tagline, 'We are not on a beach in Thailand.' Their early promotions were featured on Engadget and other tech sites but since the project was funded they've rarely, if ever, communicated in more than a form letter. So at what point can a project like this be considered to have failed? And if you had backed a project with this kind of lack of communication from the project team, what would you consider to be the best course of action? Disclaimer: I have not backed this project, but I am very interested in funding Kickstarter projects and I do not want to get caught sending money to a less than reputable project. According to the above project's backers, Kickstarter claims to have no mechanism for refunding money to backers of failed projects and no way to hold the project team accountable to their backers. This does not seem like a healthy environment for someone who is averse to giving their money to scam artists."

RIM Firing (Nearly) Everybody 440

Posted by samzenpus on Friday March 30, 2012 @08:06AM from the end-of-the-line dept.

itwbennett writes "Research in Motion (RIM) reported grim Q4 results Thursday and announced sweeping personnel changes. Leading the parade of departing execs is Jim Balsillie, former co-CEO of the company, who has given up his board seat. David Yach, who has been CTO of software for the company for 13 years, is retiring. And Jim Rowan, chief operating officer of global operations, who has been with the company for four years, is leaving to pursue other interests."

Slashdot Top Deals