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Comment Re:What good is it? (Score 1) 68

by TheSHAD0W (#45760517) Attached to: Throwable 36-Camera Ball Nearly Ready To Toss

I have a friend who will want one; she uses them for 3D rendering. Conventional panorama capture can have problems, like object and cloud movement, while the photos are being taken; this eliminates the issue.

I'd love to order one, but I have serious trust issues with Paypal and am not going to sign up just to join the campaign. I'll have to wait until it goes retail. Here's hopes the campaign succeeds!

Comment not a scam (Score 1) 179

by TheSHAD0W (#45321399) Attached to: Amazon Botches Sales Tax, Overcharges NJ

It's unlikely Amazon would be scamming using this method; the fines involved would be horrendous. It would only take one person noticing to trigger an investigation and audit by the state.

From most of the responders to this thread, this is unlikely to also be a mistake. But even if it were, Amazon wouldn't be keeping the money, but would be handing it over to the NJ tax authorities. (That would also probably result in a fine, but not a catastrophic one.)
Security

The Linux Backdoor Attempt of 2003 360

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the alright-which-one-of-you-did-it dept.
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Ed Felton writes about an incident, in 2003, in which someone tried to backdoor the Linux kernel. Back in 2003 Linux used BitKeeper to store the master copy of the Linux source code. If a developer wanted to propose a modification to the Linux code, they would submit their proposed change, and it would go through an organized approval process to decide whether the change would be accepted into the master code. But some people didn't like BitKeeper, so a second copy of the source code was kept in CVS. On November 5, 2003, Larry McAvoy noticed that there was a code change in the CVS copy that did not have a pointer to a record of approval. Investigation showed that the change had never been approved and, stranger yet, that this change did not appear in the primary BitKeeper repository at all. Further investigation determined that someone had apparently broken in electronically to the CVS server and inserted a small change to wait4: 'if ((options == (__WCLONE|__WALL)) && (current->uid = 0)) ...' A casual reading makes it look like innocuous error-checking code, but a careful reader would notice that, near the end of the first line, it said '= 0' rather than '== 0' so the effect of this code is to give root privileges to any piece of software that called wait4 in a particular way that is supposed to be invalid. In other words it's a classic backdoor. We don't know who it was that made the attempt—and we probably never will. But the attempt didn't work, because the Linux team was careful enough to notice that that this code was in the CVS repository without having gone through the normal approval process. 'Could this have been an NSA attack? Maybe. But there were many others who had the skill and motivation to carry out this attack,' writes Felton. 'Unless somebody confesses, or a smoking-gun document turns up, we'll never know.'"
Windows

The Black Underbelly of Windows 8.1 'Blue' 608

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the can't-let-google-win-most-evil-crown dept.
snydeq writes "Changes in Microsoft's forthcoming upgrade to Windows 8 reveal the dark underbelly of Microsoft's evolving agenda, one that finds pieces of Windows 8 inexplicably disappearing and a new feature that allows Microsoft to track your local searches cropping up, InfoWorld's Woody Leonhard reports. 'As Windows 8.1 Milestone Preview testers push and prod their way into the dark corners of Windows 8.1 "Blue," they're finding a bunch of things that go bump in the night. From new and likely unwelcome features, to nudges into the Microsoft data tracking sphere, to entire lopped-off pieces of Windows 8, it looks like Microsoft is changing Windows to further its own agenda.'" A lot of the stuff the article gripes about are what Google has been doing for ages with Android: requiring a Microsoft account, funneling users to their services first, tracking your system usage, etc.

Comment Not just robot armies (Score 3, Interesting) 161

by TheSHAD0W (#44080665) Attached to: The Men Trying To Save Us From the Machines

Even if it's bound by the laws of physics as we understand them (Stross-universe-like "P=NP"-powered reality modification aside) there are plenty of dangers out there we're well aware of which computing technology could ape. Nanoassemblers might not be able to eat the planet, but what if they infested humans like a disease? We're already having horrible problems with malware clogging up people's machines, and they're coded by humans; what if an artificial intelligence was put in control of a botnet, updating and improving the exploiters faster than anyone could take them apart?

Submission + - Megatokyo Gets a Visual Novel Game

Submitted by TheSHAD0W
TheSHAD0W writes: It's been over a decade since Megatokyo was mentioned in a Slashdot story. Fred Gallagher, author of the long-running webcomic, has launched a Kickstarter for a Megatokyo Visual Novel Game. The KS has fared very well, funding its basic goal in less than four hours and covering most of the posted stretch goals in the first twenty-four. Fred also posted a half-joking stretch goal at a half-million dollars to include "excessively romantic content", wink wink nudge nudge. He may have been kidding, but there are some indications it might be reached.

Comment FOSS (Score 2) 318

by TheSHAD0W (#43761833) Attached to: FBI Considers CALEA II: Mandatory Wiretapping On Every Device

I wonder how this could ever be implemented in FOSS.

The same way anything is implemented in FOSS. It'll be written into the source. Lots of people will modify the code to disable the backdoors. People will post versions of the software with the backdoors missing, many of which actually still have them or have different backdoors installed. Governments may lead an automated search for software without the backdoors, or may simply ignore it uniless they have a reason to target the individual using it.

In other words, what a fucking mess.

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