wrekkuh - Slashdot User

Submission + - Despite Mars Curiosity Landing, Poll Shows Tepid Support for Human Mars Mission (yahoo.com)

Submitted by

MarkWhittington

on Sunday August 12, 2012 @01:07AM

MarkWhittington writes: "The recent landing of the Curiosity science rover on Mars had not created an overwhelming level of support for sending a human expedition to Mars, according to the findings of a survey conducted by Rasmussen Reports. The Rasmussen survey showed that 36 percent of American adults question agreed that a humans to Mars mission should be included in America's space goals. 38 percent disagreed with that goal. 27 percent were not sure. The survey was conducted of 1,000 American adults on Aug. 7-8."

Submission + - uTorrent Adds "Featured Torrents" Advertising - With No Opt Out (Yet) (utorrent.com)

Submitted by wrekkuh on Sunday August 12, 2012 @12:52AM

wrekkuh writes: BitTorrent, Inc, the company who owns the freeware (but closed-source) BitTorrent client uTorrent, has announced that it will be updating it's popular client with "Featured Torrents." In a post on uTorrent's forum, the company explained -

"This featured torrent space will be used to offer a variety of different types of content. We are working towards bringing you offers that are relevant to you. This means films, games, music, software...basically anything that you will find interesting."

In the Q&A portion of their announcement, the company adds — "There is no way to turn in-client offers off*. We will pay attention to feedback, and may change this in the future." (*The Plus version of the BitTorrent client does not include these ads).

Submission + - Forget Wires, WiSA Aims to Make Home Theater Systems Wireless (audioholics.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 11, 2012 @11:34PM

An anonymous reader writes: Everyone loves surround sound, but running wires throughout a home can be expensive, if even possible. The Wireless Speaker and Audio Association (WiSA) is working with major manufacturers, such as Samsung, Pioneer, Polk Audio, and Klipsch, to establish a wireless audio standard. This standard will allow for wireless audio to be sent from devices such as smart phones, blu-ray players, and TVs, directly to wireless speakers. What is really great about this standard is that WiSA products will be the first FCC certified products to operate in the U-NII wireless band, allowing WiSA products to avoid wireless interference from existing wireless products.

Submission + - Rootbeer GPU Compiler allows almost any Java code to run on the GPU (github.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 11, 2012 @07:20PM

An anonymous reader writes: Today the source code to the Rootbeer GPU Compiler was released open source on github. This work allows for a developer to use almost and Java code on the GPU. It is free, open source and highly tested. Rootbeer is the most full featured translator to convert Java Bytecode to CUDA. It allows arbitrary graphs of objects to be serialized to the GPU and the GPU kernel to be written in Java.

Submission + - Let The Campaign Edit Wars Begin

Submitted by

Hugh Pickens writes

on Saturday August 11, 2012 @01:18PM

Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Megan Garber writes that in high school, Paul Ryan's classmates voted him as his class's "biggest brown noser," a juicy tidbit that is a source of delight for his political opponents but considered an irrelevant piece of youthful trivia to his supporters. "But it's also a tension that will play out, repeatedly, in the most comprehensive narrative we have about Paul Ryan as a person and a politician and a policy-maker: his Wikipedia page," writes Garber. Late last night, just as news of the Ryan choice leaked in the political press — the first substantial edit to that page removed the "brown noser" mention which had been on the page since June 16. The Wikipedia deletion has given rise to a whole discussion of whether the mention is a partisan attack, whether "brown noser" is a pejorative, and whether an old high school opinion survey is notable or relevant. As of this writing, "brown noser" stands as does a maybe-mitigating piece of Ryan-as-high-schooler trivia: that he was also voted prom king. But that equilibrium could change, again, in an instant. "Today is the glory day for the Paul Ryan Wikipedia page," writes Garber. "Yesterday, it saw just 10 [edits]. Today, however — early on a Saturday morning, East Coast time — it's already received hundreds of revisions. And the official news of the Ryan selection, of course, is just over an hour old." Now Ryan's page is ready to host debates about biographical details and their epistemological relevance. "Like so many before it, will be a place of debate and dissent and derision. But it will also be a place where people can come together to discuss information and policy and the intersection between the two — a town square for the digital age.""

Comment Domestic Spying (Score 1) 2

by wrekkuh on Monday August 06, 2012 @12:42AM (#40891495) Attached to: Who's Afraid of Huawei?

When video from DEFCON 20 is released (in the coming days/weeks), it will be interesting to see General Keith Alexander's speech (Director at NSA, Commander at USCYBERCOM). He says that records aren't kept on every American, and that there is a lot of oversight involved (from multiple branches of the US Government).(Quick summary here.)

Will be interesting to see that talk, but the NSA installation found years ago by that AT&T Technician, which made wholesale copies of international and domestic internet traffic says quite different to the US Government's current claims.

Comment A Few Possible Points (Score 1) 153

by wrekkuh on Sunday August 05, 2012 @06:59PM (#40889601) Attached to: The Chinese Telecom That Spooks the World

and have them install a critical software update to avoid exploits.

I love how Cisco did something along these lines recently, including the siphoning off of web history, along with a slew of other privacy violations completely in the clear, with no permission whatsoever.

Another possible point of hypocrisy is the CIA's partial funding of Facebook, which seems to suggest that if a foreign company wants to build a network in the US, that is government funded, it's a National Security issue... but if a domestic company, which is funded by the US government, wants to build a network all over the world, and a foreign government says, "Um, no." then it's censorship.

There is also the fact that Huawei has hired a former defense contractor for the US government as it's Chief Security Officer.

Submission + - Refugee from Facebook questions the social media life (washingtonpost.com)

Submitted by stevegee58 on Sunday August 05, 2012 @03:19PM

stevegee58 writes: The Washington Post published an interesting article about Facebook's employee #51, Katherine Losse. As an English major from Johns Hopkins, Losse wasn't the typical Facebook employee. But after starting in customer service, she later became Mark Zuckerberg's personal ghostwriter, penning blog posts in his name. The article traces Losse's growing disillusionment with social networking in general and Facebook in particular. After cashing out some FB stock, Losse resigned and moved to a rural West Texas town to get away from technology and focus on writing. Her book, "The Boy Kings: A Journey Into the Heart of the Social Network" was recently published in June of this year.

The article provides an interesting vignette of life inside Facebook and is well worth the quick read.

Submission + - Who's Afraid of Huawei? (economist.com) 2

Submitted by wrekkuh on Sunday August 05, 2012 @03:17PM

wrekkuh writes: The Economist has printed an interesting look at the concerns and speculations of the fast-growing Chinese telecom giant Huawei, and it's spread into western markets. Of particular concern is Huawei's state funding, and the company's founder, Ren Zhengfei, who once served as an engineer in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). However, another article from The Economist goes into greater detail about the steps Huawei has taken to mitigate some of these concerns in England — including co-operating with the GCHQ in Britain, the UK's signals-intelligence agency, to ensure equipment built by Huawei is not back-doored.

Submission + - DARPA Creates first 0.85 THz Solid State Receiver (paritynews.com) 3

Submitted by hypnosec on Saturday August 04, 2012 @10:57PM

hypnosec writes: DARPA, under its THz Electronics program, has designed a solid state receiver capable of THz (terahertz) frequencies thus inching towards the possibilities of transistor-based electronics that will operate at THz frequencies. The newly designed solid state receiver demonstrates a gain of 0.85 THz. This particular milestone is a stepping stone for the next target of 1.03 THz. Because of this achievement a host of DoD electronics capabilities can now be realized. One such application where this can be of use is for a sensor that will operate through clouds under a DARPA program, dubbed, VISAR.

Submission + - Hackers topple Huawei routers at Defcon (google.com)

Submitted by TarPitt on Monday July 30, 2012 @10:38AM

TarPitt writes: Huawei routers turn out to be have multiple serious security vulnerabilities lending to easy exploit:
LAS VEGAS, Nevada — Hackers at an infamous Def Con gathering were shown how to easily slip into computer networks through some routers made by Chinese electronics colossus Huawei Technologies. "For the 20th anniversary of Def Con the gift is China," Recurity Labs chief Felix "FX" Lindner said as he opened his presentation. "Nobody needs a back door; this is plausible deniability," he quipped as he detailed weaknesses in three small Huawei routers that could be exploited using basic hacking techniques. "You get what you pay for. Sorry."

Oddly this story has not picked up much notice in the technical press.

Submission + - Ticket Holders at London 2012 Can't Share Media on Social Networks (techcrunch.com)

Submitted by wrekkuh on Monday July 30, 2012 @09:46AM

wrekkuh writes: Ticket holders at the Olympics in London are banned from 'exploiting' media from the Games -

"Images, video and sound recordings of the Games taken by a Ticket Holder cannot be used for any purpose other than for private and domestic purposes and a Ticket Holder may not license, broadcast or publish video and/or sound recordings, including on social networking websites and the internet more generally, and may not exploit images, video and/or sound recordings for commercial purposes under any circumstances, whether on the internet or otherwise, or make them available to third parties for commercial purposes."

Submission + - NY: Freedom of Information Req's Do Not Include BBerry's PIN-to-PIN Msg System (nydailynews.com)

Submitted by wrekkuh on Monday July 16, 2012 @09:28PM

wrekkuh writes: The Daily News is reporting that if aides of New York's Governor Andrew Cuomo cannot speak in person or by telephone with the Governor, they are told to use BlackBerry's PIN-to-PIN messaging system — a function that leaves no lasting trail because it bypasses data-saving email servers. Consequently, a Freedom of Information request for all e-mails to and from Governor Cuomo's office resulted in an empty reply from the Records Access Officer -

"Please be advised that the New York State Executive Chamber has conducted a diligent search, but does not possess records responsive to your request."

Submission + - The Hivemind Singularity (theatlantic.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 16, 2012 @08:38PM

An anonymous reader writes: Alan Jacobs at The Atlantic writes about a book called New Model Army, which takes the idea of Anonymous — a loose, self-organizing collective with a purpose — and adds twenty-five years of technological advancement. The book's author, Adam Roberts, 'asks us to imagine a near future when electronic communications technologies enable groups of people to communicate with one another instantaneously, and on secure private networks invulnerable, or nearly so, to outside snooping.' With the arrival of high-tech communications technology, such groups wouldn't be limited to enacting their will from behind a computer screen: they could form actual armies. 'Again, each NMA organizes itself and makes decisions collectively: no commander establishes strategy and gives orders, but instead all members of the NMA communicate with what amounts to an advanced audio form of the IRC protocol, debate their next step, and vote. Results of a vote are shared to all immediately and automatically, at which point the soldiers start doing what they voted to do. ... They are proud of their shared identity, and tend to smirk when officers of more traditional armies want to know who their "ringleaders" are. They have no ringleaders; they don't even have specialists: everyone tends the wounded, not just some designated medical corps, and when they need to negotiate, the negotiating team is chosen by army vote. Each soldier does what needs to be done, with need determined by the NMA which each has freely joined.' Let's hope resistance isn't futile.

Comment Re:If anyone wondered what to use the Q for (Score 1) 121

by wrekkuh on Saturday July 14, 2012 @12:03PM (#40648965) Attached to: XBMC Ported To Android

Exactly what i was thinking. Also, this quote from the submission... "Running your favorite media-center software on small, cheap, embedded hardware is about to become a hassle-free reality." is a little confusing to me because, well, i have a hassle-free installation of my favorite media-center software (XBMC) on small, cheap, embedded hardware already, as many others do as well.

Further to the point, can anyone tell the court what the hardware requirements for compiling Jelly Bean or Ice Cream Sandwich is?

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