Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Submission + - Chef Engineer Resigns Over Death Threats (gigaom.com)

Submitted by kodiaktau
kodiaktau writes: Seth Vargo, a release engineer for Chef, has resigned due to, "numerous abusive emails and two death threats”.

From the article:

According to Noah Kantrowitz, a former Chef colleague and a recent critic of how the company has been managing its open source community, Vargo’s work on the Chef-centric workflow management tool Berkshelf caused some commotion among certain Chef tool users who advocated using a different workflow method; these people supposedly felt that Berkshelf had somehow affected their daily work habits and routines and their frustrations drove them to react harshly. Vargo apparently “ended up at the center of this storm of disagreements.”

Is this another example of how anonymous behavior on the interwebs has gone too far?

Submission + - 'Unparticles' May Hold The Key To Superconductivity, Say Physicists

Submitted by KentuckyFC
KentuckyFC writes: One curious property of massless particles like photons is that their energy or momentum can take any value across many orders of magnitude, a property that physicists call scale invariance. By contrast, massive particles like electrons always have the same mass regardless of their energy or momentum. So massive particles are not scale invariant. The concept of unparticles is the idea that some “stuff” may have mass, energy and momentum and yet also be scale invariant. This stuff must be profoundly different from ordinary particles, hence the name: unparticles. Nobody has ever seen an unparticle but now physicists are suggesting that unparticles may hold the key to understanding unconventional superconductivity. Their thinking is that at very low temperatures, ordinary particles can sometimes behave like unparticles. In other words, their properties become independent of the scale at which they're observed. So if an unparticle moves without resistance on a tiny scale, then it must also move without resistance at every scale, hence the phenomenon of superconductivity. That could provide some important insights into unconventional superconductivity which has puzzled physicists since it was discovered in the 1980s.

Submission + - Red Hat CEO: Open Source Goes Mainstream In 2014

Submitted by ashshy
ashshy writes: Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst likes to post "state of the union" addresses at the end of every year. Last December, he said that open source innovation is going mainstream in 2014. In an interview with The Motley Fool, Whitehurst matches up his expectations against mid-year progress. Spoiler alert: It's mostly good news.

Feed Google News Sci Tech: China Cracks Down on Messaging Apps - Wall Street Journal (google.com)

From feed by feedfeeder

Wall Street Journal
China Cracks Down on Messaging Apps
Wall Street Journal
China issued new restrictions on public accounts on messaging apps such as WeChat and Laiwang. Reuters. China issued new restrictions on messaging apps Thursday in a move it said was to "help build a clean cyberspace" and safeguard national...
China intensifies crackdown on social media with curbs on instant messagingThe Guardian
China tightens control over instant messaging servicesBusiness Standard
China aims to rein in mobile messaging apps with new regulationsPCWorld
seattlepi.com-Fox Business
all 132 news articles

Submission + - Epic Precursor to Turla APT Campaign Uncovered (threatpost.com)

Submitted by msm1267
msm1267 writes: The Turla APT campaign has baffled researchers for months as to how its victims are compromised. Peaking during the first two months of the year, Turla has targeted municipal governments, embassies, militaries and other high-value targets worldwide, with particular concentrations in the Middle East and Europe.

Researchers at Kaspersky Lab, however, today announced they have discovered a precursor to Turla called Epic that uses a cocktail of zero-days and off-the-shelf exploits against previously unknown and patched vulnerabilities to compromise victims. Epic is the first of a multistage attack that hits victims via spear-phishing campaigns, social engineering scams, or watering hole attacks against websites of interest to the victims.

Epic shares code snippets with Turla and similar encryption used to confound researchers, suggesting a link between the two campaigns; either the attackers are cooperating or are the same group, Kaspersky researchers said.

Feed Google News Sci Tech: Google Says Website Encryption – Or Lack Thereof – Will Now Influenc (google.com)

From feed by feedfeeder

TechCrunch
Google Says Website Encryption – Or Lack Thereof – Will Now Influence Search ...
TechCrunch
Google will begin using website encryption, or HTTPS, as a ranking signal – a move which should prompt website developers who have dragged their heels on increased security measures, or who debated whether their website was “important” enough to...
Google to reward websites that protect users' data with better search rankingBangor Daily News
Google lowers search ranking of websites that don't use encryptionComputerworld
Google Starts Giving A Ranking Boost To Secure HTTPS/SSL SitesSearch Engine Land

all 61 news articles

Submission + - SnapPi Camera (digitaltrends.com)

Submitted by kodiaktau
kodiaktau writes: Digital Trends reports on a new Raspberry Pi camera kit that is based on open-source prototype created by Gregory Holloway, a DIY tutorial can be found here.. He is planning to release the kit as a Kickstarter campaign. Four kits will be offered, each with a Pi Model A, camera, body, battery and charger and one of four combinations of lenses and possible LCD viewers. No mention of where lenses are being made, or how to source them.

Kickstarter campaign can be found here.

Submission + - Global Nuclear Power Supply At Lowest Level Since 1980s (huffingtonpost.com)

Submitted by mdsolar
mdsolar writes: Atomic power's share of global electricity supply is at the lowest level since the 1980s following the shutdown of Japan's reactors after the Fukushima disaster, and may fall further without major new plant construction.

The forecast is one of the main conclusions of the World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2014, a draft copy of which was passed to Reuters before general release later on Tuesday.

The report paints a bleak picture of the industry more than three years after three reactors melted down at Tokyo Electric Power Co's Fukushima Daiichi station north of the Japanese capital after an earthquake and tsunami.

Rising costs, construction delays, public opposition and aging fleets of reactors will make it difficult for nuclear to reverse the decline in its share of global energy supply, even after two reactors in Japan won provisional approval to restart earlier this month.

Submission + - Hardkernel Releases Raspberry Pi Compatible ODROID-W (makezine.com)

Submitted by kodiaktau
kodiaktau writes: Hardkernel released a new Raspberry Pi compatible board based on the Samsung Exynos SoC. The board is smaller than a typical Pi, keeping basic HDMI, USB and CSI interfaces. It also has 26 pin expansion board with more GPIO available, however it lacks an Ethernet jack. Initial prices as estimated around $30.

Interesting to note that the author calls out that the Pi Foundation is likely to run into similar name retention problems as Arduino has had as competitors call their boards "Pi Compatible".

Video overview on YouTube can be found here. http://youtu.be/rIZvsgXNWSc

Submission + - Netflix Pays AT&T with new Peerage Deal to Improve Streaming Performance (geeky-gadgets.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Few things are more annoying than when you sign onto Netflix to watch some movies or TV shows and the video keeps buffering randomly while you watch. Netflix is working with ISPs to improve the streaming speeds that are offered to customers. Much of the time improving the speed means paying the ISP or cable firm in a peerage deal to reduce buffering in the video

Submission + - Black Hat Researchers Actively Trying to Deanonymize Tor Users (torproject.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Last week, we discussed news that a presentation had been canceled for the upcoming Black Hat security conference that involved the Tor Project. The researchers involved hadn't made much of an effort to disclose the vulnerability, and the Tor Project was scrambling to implement a fix. Now, the project says it's likely these researchers were actively attacking Tor users and trying to deanonymize them. "On July 4 2014 we found a group of relays that we assume were trying to deanonymize users. They appear to have been targeting people who operate or access Tor hidden services. The attack involved modifying Tor protocol headers to do traffic confirmation attacks. ...We know the attack looked for users who fetched hidden service descriptors, but the attackers likely were not able to see any application-level traffic (e.g. what pages were loaded or even whether users visited the hidden service they looked up). The attack probably also tried to learn who published hidden service descriptors, which would allow the attackers to learn the location of that hidden service." They also provide a technical description of the attack, and the steps they're taking to block such attacks in the future.

Submission + - UK to allow driverless cars by 2015

Submitted by rtoz
rtoz writes: The UK government has announced that driverless cars will be allowed on public roads from January next year.

It also invited cities to compete to host one of three trials of the tech, which would start at the same time.

In addition, ministers ordered a review of the UK's road regulations to provide appropriate guidelines.

The debate now is whether to allow cars, like the prototype unveiled by Google in May, to abandon controls including a steering wheel and pedals and rely on the vehicle's computer.

Or whether, instead, to allow the machine to drive, but insist a passenger be ready to wrest back control at a moment's notice.

Submission + - Observation of a quantum Cheshire Cat in a matter-wave interferometer experiment (nature.com)

Submitted by Dupple
Dupple writes: From its very beginning, quantum theory has been revealing extraordinary and counter-intuitive phenomena, such as wave-particle duality, Schrödinger cats and quantum non-locality. Another paradoxical phenomenon found within the framework of quantum mechanics is the ‘quantum Cheshire Cat’: if a quantum system is subject to a certain pre- and postselection, it can behave as if a particle and its property are spatially separated. It has been suggested to employ weak measurements in order to explore the Cheshire Cat’s nature. Here we report an experiment in which we send neutrons through a perfect silicon crystal interferometer and perform weak measurements to probe the location of the particle and its magnetic moment.

Submission + - "I accidentally started a Wikipedia hoax" 5

Submitted by Andreas Kolbe
Andreas Kolbe writes: The Daily Dot's EJ Dickson reports how she accidentally discovered that a hoax factoid she added over five years ago as a stoned sophomore to the Wikipedia article on “Amelia Bedelia, the protagonist of the eponymous children’s book series about a ‘literal-minded housekeeper’ who misunderstands her employer’s orders”, had not just remained on Wikipedia all this time, but come to be cited by a Taiwanese English professor, in “innumerable blog posts and book reports”, as well as a book on Jews and Jesus. It's a cautionary tale about the fundamental unreliability of Wikipedia. And as Wikipedia ages, more and more such stories are coming to light.

Slashdot Top Deals

"Protozoa are small, and bacteria are small, but viruses are smaller than the both put together."

Close