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Submission + - EFF fights abuse of court orders to close sites in the wake of Grooveshark (betanews.com)

Submitted by Mark Wilson
Mark Wilson writes: The EFF (Electronic Freedom Foundation) has involved itself in lots of online battles — including the fightback against NSA surveillance, and the drive for net neutrality. The latest fight sees the organization joining forces with web performance and security firm CloudFlare in tackling the site blocking activities of the record industry.

The digital rights group is battling record labels which it says are forcing web firms into becoming the "copyright police". The move was prompted by the closure of Grooveshark, a music website run by one of CloudFlare's clients. It re-opens the question of who is ultimately responsible for the content that appears on sites — those posting it, those hosting it, or any other company involved in the delivery?

Submission + - 200 Open Source Projects Later: Source Code Static Analysis Experience

Submitted by Andrey Karpov
Andrey Karpov writes: Positive Hack Days is a unique international event. It is the only event which brings together the elite of the hackers' world, leaders of the information security industry and representatives of the Internet community to cooperate in addressing burning information security issues. PHDays considers many different preferences of the entire information community and covers the most topical issues related to information security.

The PVS-Studio analyzer is a methodology of detecting errors in program code. However, error is not an incorrect work of the program but also a potential vulnerability. Everything depends on perspectives you look at this errors.

That is why we took part in this forum and tried to demonstrate how often programmers make mistakes or make it vulnerable without any suspicions. The report is based on checking more than 200 projects experience. We were finding various defects with the help of PVS-Studio.

Here we suggest you to acquaint with our report:

Submission + - UK Goes Full Orwell: Snooper's Charter, Encryption Backdoors, Speech Suppression (techdirt.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The old joke goes "George Orwell's 1984 was a warning, not a 'how to' manual." But that joke is increasingly less funny as the UK really seems to be doing everything it can to put in place Orwell's fictitious vision — just a few decades later. Right after the election a few weeks ago, we noted the government's plan to push forward with its "extremist disruption orders" (as had been promised). The basic idea is that if the government doesn't like what you're saying, it can define your statements as "extremist" and make them criminal. Prime Minister David Cameron did his best Orwell in flat out stating that the idea was to use these to go after people who were obeying the law and then arguing that the UK needed to suppress free speech... in the name of protecting free speech. Really.

Submission + - Higgs Boson Mass Explained in New Theory (quantamagazine.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Three physicists who have been collaborating in the San Francisco Bay Area over the past year have devised a new solution to a mystery that has beleaguered their field for more than 30 years. This profound puzzle, which has driven experiments at increasingly powerful particle colliders and given rise to the controversial multiverse hypothesis, amounts to something a bright fourth-grader might ask: How can a magnet lift a paperclip against the gravitational pull of the entire planet?

Submission + - Black Hole Plays Pool With Plasma

Submitted by the monolith
the monolith writes: The Hubble Space Telescope is revealing that there is a pool game in progress, with a long shot being played out on a cosmic scale. It appears that the first recorded shot was observed in 1992, while subsequent canon shots were recorded between 1994 an 2014. In actuality, the shots are plasma, the current player is a black hole, and the playing surface is galactic space itself.

The BBC has a story on the observations and interpretations While the journal Nature has the paywalled in-depth article.

The current score is unknown, and one can only hope that there were no life forms involved in the collision.

Submission + - Apple Facility In Mesa Caught Fire (abc15.com)

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: Officials are on scene of a second-alarm-level fire at the Apple Inc. data center in Mesa. The Mesa Fire Department said that the fire is located near Elliot and Signal Butte Roads in east Mesa. The fire appeared to be on solar panels on the roof of the building over a loading dock. Thick black smoke could be seen raising from the roof. Crews dispatched from multiple locations worked together and knocked the fire down in half an hour. The fire did not appear to be burning inside the building itself, officials said. For now it is unclear what started the fire. A dozen of people had to be evacuated, but there are no reports of any injuries.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Switching careers from software engineering to networking? 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: I am a software engineer with over 10 years of experience making approx 210k a year after bonus. I've seen countless of software engineering jobs off-shored or taken by H1Bs over the past 5 years. While I am pretty safe at my current job, software engineering as a profession is beginning to look bleak, and i am not even sure if I can ask for the same money if I decide to jump ship to another company (I live in an expensive area).

A friend of mine who works as a network architect with dual CCIEs have no problem finding/landing jobs with high salary. His profession doesn't seem to be affected by outsourcing or H1bs, so I am tempted to switch from my field to networking for better stability and greener pastures.

So the question is, should I do it? The reason why I am looking for the long-term stability is because I've a family of 3 to feed. I cannot afford to be jobless for more than 3 months if I do get laid-off, and software engineering doesn't seem to be the profession after years of observation to provide long-term stability.

Thank you!

Submission + - Insurer denies healthcare breach claim citing lack of minimum required practices (securityledger.com)

Submitted by chicksdaddy
chicksdaddy writes: In what may become a trend, an insurance company is denying a claim from a California healthcare provider following the leak of data on more than 32,000 patients. The insurer, Columbia Casualty, charges that Cottage Health System did an inadequate job of protecting patient data.

In a complaint filed in U.S. District Court in California, Columbia alleges that the breach occurred because Cottage and a third party vendor, INSYNC Computer Solution, Inc. failed to follow “minimum required practices,” as spelled out in the policy. Among other things, Cottage “stored medical records on a system that was fully accessible to the internet but failed to install encryption or take other security measures to protect patient information from becoming available to anyone who ‘surfed’ the Internet,” the complaint alleges.

Disputes like this may become more common, as insurers anxious to get into a cyber insurance market that's growing by about 40% annually use liberally written exclusions to hedge against 'known unknowns' like lax IT practices, pre-existing conditions (like compromises) and so on. (http://www.itworld.com/article/2839393/cyber-insurance-only-fools-rush-in.html)

Submission + - Ways to travel faster than light without violating relativity

Submitted by StartsWithABang
StartsWithABang writes: It’s one of the cardinal laws of physics and the underlying principle of Einstein’s relativity itself: the fact that there’s a universal speed limit to the motion of anything through space and time, the speed of light, or c. Light itself will always move at this speed (as well as certain other phenomena, like the force of gravity), while anything with mass — like all known particles of matter and antimatter — will always move slower than that. But if you want something to travel faster-than-light, you aren’t, as you might think, relegated to the realm of science fiction. There are real, physical phenomena that do exactly this, and yet are perfectly consistent with relativity.

Submission + - Bogus FBI 'porn warning' scares Android users into ransomware trap (thestack.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Cybercriminals have been targeting Android users in a new ransomware campaign which poses as an email from the FBI warning against viewing porn online. Romanian security software firm Bitdefender suggests that as many as 15,000 spam emails including zipped attachment files were sent to Android customers over the past few days. The attack is thought to have originated in Ukraine. If the files were opened, users were faced with a ransom note demanding $500 to restore full access to their system. It continued to threaten that users who try to unlock their devices would be charged up to $1,500. Payments were requested to be transferred via PayPal My Cash or Money Pak. The ransomware was disguised as an Adobe Flash Player update – a frequent façade used in hacking attacks.

Submission + - Firefox's Optional Tracking Protection Reduces Load Time For News Sites By 44%

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Former Mozilla software engineer Monica Chew and Computer Science researcher Georgios Kontaxis recently released a paper that examines Firefox’s optional Tracking Protection feature. The duo found that with Tracking Protection enabled, the Alexa top 200 news sites saw a 67.5 percent reduction in the number of HTTP cookies set. Furthermore, performance benefits included a 44 percent median reduction in page load time and 39 percent reduction in data usage.

Submission + - Apple and Google attend spy summit in the UK

Submitted by Presto Vivace
Presto Vivace writes: APPLE AND GOOGLE JUST ATTENDED A CONFIDENTIAL SPY SUMMIT IN A REMOTE ENGLISH MANSION

The three-day conference, which took place behind closed doors and under strict rules about confidentiality, was aimed at debating the line between privacy and security.

Among an extraordinary list of attendees were a host of current or former heads from spy agencies such as the CIA and British electronic surveillance agency Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ. Other current or former top spooks from Australia, Canada, France, Germany and Sweden were also in attendance. Google, Apple, and telecommunications company Vodafone sent some of their senior policy and legal staff to the discussions. And a handful of academics and journalists were also present.

According to an event program obtained by The Intercept, questions on the agenda included: “Are we being misled by the term ‘mass surveillance’?” “Is spying on allies/friends/potential adversaries inevitable if there is a perceived national security interest?” “Who should authorize intrusive intelligence operations such as interception?” “What should be the nature of the security relationship between intelligence agencies and private sector providers, especially when they may in any case be cooperating against cyber threats in general?” And, “How much should the press disclose about intelligence activity?”

The most disturbing part of this is the number of journalists present.

Submission + - GamerGate critic posts death threat voicemail after inaction by prosecutor

Submitted by AmiMoJo
AmiMoJo writes: Game developer and tech diversity advocate Brianna Wu has been complaining about the lack of action by a prosecuting attorney in response to a death threat voicemail she said she received. On Tuesday, she posted a copy of the voicemail (trigger warning, NSFW).

Wu called upon Columbus, Ohio prosecuting attorney Ron O'Brien to issue a subpoena for the name attached to phone records. "If [O'Brien] wished, he could bring criminal charges against this man by the end of the day". She continued "there’s a longer story here about my frustration with working with law enforcement. I’m trying to get anyone to bring a case to trial. I have had dozens upon dozens of meetings, phone calls, and visits from multiple law enforcement agencies—including the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, federal prosecutors, state prosecutors, Congress, and local police."

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