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Submission + - LAX to London flight delayed over WiFi name

Submitted by linuxwrangler
linuxwrangler writes: A flight from LAX to London was delayed after a passenger reported seeing "Al-Quida Free Terror Nettwork" as an available hotspot name and reported it to a flight attendant. The flight was taken to a remote part of the airport and delayed for several hours but "after further investigation, it was determined that no crime was committed and no further action will be taken."

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Unlimited Data Plan for Seniors? 1

Submitted by hejman08
hejman08 writes: I am having an issue with my grandmother who, like many of us, has discovered the wonders one can experience by browsing the internet while pooping. She is on her own plan through Verizon with 1GB of data, and she literally blows through it in 3 days or less every month, then complains about having nothing to do. They have WiFi at her senior center, but only in specific rooms, and she has bad ankles and knees so she wants to stay home. Internet service would cost 80 a month to add where she lives. What I am wondering, is if any of the genius slashdotters out there know of a plan that- regardless of cost of phone, which we could manage as a gift to her, once- would allow her to have at least 300 minutes, 250 texts, and truly unlimited data (as in none of that Unlimited* stuff that is out there where they drop you to caveman speeds within a gig of usage), all for the price of less than say, 65 a month? The big 4 carriers don't seem to have anything that would work for her.

Comment First it is not DOCSYS (Score 1) 291

by ChrisSlicks (#48209863) Attached to: Will Fiber-To-the-Home Create a New Digital Divide?
It is DOCSIS. And there are providers offering Gbit speeds on cable using DOCSIS 3.0 with version 3.1 offering speeds of 10 Gbit. Even lowly DSL has new technologies that can support up to 1Gbit for short distances. Fiber is nice and all (I have it) but it isn't outpacing the encumbent technologies any time soon, at least while the ISP's are holding the reins. I have 50 Mbit service and it is expensive. Max offering is 300 Mbit (same as cable) and is crazy expensive.

Submission + - Boeing Told to Replace Cockpit Screens Affected by Wi-Fi

Submitted by Rambo Tribble
Rambo Tribble writes: The Federal Aviation Administration has ordered Boeing to replace Honeywell-built cockpit screens that could be affected by wi-fi transmissions. Additionally, the FAA has expressed concerns that other frequencies, such as used by air surveillance and weather radar, could disrupt the displays. The systems involved report airspeed, altitude, heading and pitch and roll to the crew, and the agency stated that a failure could cause a crash.

Meanwhile, the order is said to affect over 1,300 aircraft, and some airlines are baulking, since the problem has never been seen in operation, that the order presents "a high, and unnecessary, financial burden on operators".

Submission + - Galileo Launch Failure caused by Frozen Propellant Line (spaceflight101.com)

Submitted by advid.net
advid.net writes: Commission investigating the circumstances of the Galileo launch failure found that a frozen Hydrazine line caused fuel starvation for 18mn on two attitude control thrusters.

As a result of the incorrect initial attitude during barbecue operations, Fregat did not achieve the proper orientation for the second burn, pointing its thrust vector in an erroneous direction leading to the off-target insertion of the two Galileo satellites.

It remains to be answered why the attitude discrepancies that originated in the first 38 minutes of the mission were not detected by the onboard computer or teams on the ground watching over the vehicle in real time.

It is also unknown whether it is a standard design on Fregat to mount the cold Helium line in close proximity to the Hydrazine pipeline or whether the lines got bundled by accident.

Submission + - Back to faxes: Doctors can't exchange digital medical records (nytimes.com) 1

Submitted by nbauman
nbauman writes: Doctors with one medical records system can't exchange information with systems made by other vendors, including those at their own hospitals, according to the New York Times. An ophthalmologist spent half a million dollars on a system and still keeps sending faxes. If doctors can't exchange records, they'll face a 1% Medicare penalty. The largest vendor is Epic Systems, Madison, WI, which holds almost half the medical records in the U.S. A RAND report described Epic as a “closed” platform that made it “challenging and costly” for hospitals to interconnect. UC Davis has a staff of 22 to keep everything communicating. Epic charges a fee to send data to some non-Epic systems. Congress held hearings. Epic hired a lobbyist. Epic's founder, billionaire computer science major Judith Faulkner, said that Epic was one of the first to establish code and standards for secure interchange, which included user authentication provisions and a legally binding contract. She said the federal government, which gave $24 billion incentive payments to doctors for computerization, should have done that. The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology said that it was a "top priority" and they just wrote a 10-year vision statement and agenda for it.

Submission + - Earth Gets Another Quasi-Moon 1

Submitted by The Bad Astronomer
The Bad Astronomer writes: Astronomers have found a new asteroid, 2014 OL339, that is a quasi-moon of the Earth. Discovered accidentally earlier this year, the 150-meter asteroid has an orbit that is more elliptical than Earth's, but has a period of almost exactly one year. It isn't bound to Earth like a real moon, but displays apparent motion as if it did, making it one of several known quasi-moons.

Submission + - Hundreds of Police Agencies distributing spyware and keystroke logger

Submitted by realized
realized writes: For years, local law enforcement agencies around the country have told parents that installing ComputerCOP software is the “first step” in protecting their children online.

As official as it looks,ComputerCOP is actually just spyware, generally bought in bulk from a New York company that appears to do nothing but market this software to local government agencies.

The way ComputerCOP works is neither safe nor secure. It isn’t particularly effective either, except for generating positive PR for the law enforcement agencies distributing it. As security software goes, we observed a product with a keystroke-capturing function, also called a “keylogger,” that could place a family’s personal information at extreme risk by transmitting what a user types over the Internet to third-party servers without encryption.

EFF conducted a security review of ComputerCOP while also following the paper trail of public records to see how widely the software has spread. Based on ComputerCOP’s own marketing information, we identified approximately 245 agencies in more than 35 states, plus the U.S. Marshals, that have used public funds (often the proceeds from property seized during criminal investigations) to purchase and distribute ComputerCOP. One sheriff’s department even bought a copy for every family in its county.

Some of the agencies that have used it include U.S. Marshals — Under Director John Clark, Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office gave out the program for "free" to 6,700 foster parents, Riverside County District Attorney's Office, San Diego County District Attorney's Office, Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office,

Complete list of agencies that use the software compiled by the eff click here

Submission + - DARPA Working on 'Unhackable' Embedded Software

Submitted by Trailrunner7
Trailrunner7 writes: DARPA is the birthplace of the network that eventually became today’s Internet, and the agency has spent the decades since it released that baby out into the world trying to find new ways defend it. That task has grown ever more complex and difficult, and now DARPA is working on a new kind of software that is provably secure for specific properties.

Arati Prabhakar, the director of DARPA, said that the agency, which performs advanced research and development for the United States military and government, has been working on the software in the hopes that it can run on some embedded systems. The software isn’t meant as a general purpose operating system for servers or desktops, but Prabhakar said that the agency believes it has plenty of applications.

“Unfortunately there’s not going to be a silver bullet. There are pieces of this we think can become tractable. One of our programs is working on software that’s unhackabale for specific security properties,” said Prabhakar, who was speaking at the Washington Post Cybersecurity Summit on Wednesday. “We’re working on a mathematical proof that the software can’t be hacked from the outside. It’s for embedded systems with a modest number of lines of code.”

Submission + - Firejail – A Security Sandbox for Mozilla Firefox (wordpress.com)

Submitted by ttyX
ttyX writes: Firejail is a SUID sandbox program that reduces the risk of security breaches by restricting the running environment of untrusted applications. The core technology behind Firejail is Linux Namespaces, a virtualization technology available in Linux kernel. It allows a process and all its descendants to have their own private view of the globally shared kernel resources, such as the network stack, process table, mount table, IPC space.

Submission + - Unexplained out-of-band WIndows DVD patch

Submitted by davidwr
davidwr writes: Microsoft released September 2014 update for DVD playback in Windows 7 SP1

as an out-of-band "Important" update yesterday without explaining why it was rushed instead of waiting two weeks.

Microsoft knows that patching annoys system administrators and others and typically doesn't do out of band updates without a good reason. Unlike the recent out-of-band Russian Time Zone update, there isn't an obvious to be a "you must install this by a certain date or something will break" reason to rush this.

Does anyone know why Microsoft didn't either 1) wait two weeks or 2) provide a clearer explanation of why this is important enough to push out early?

Submission + - Apple Stock falls 3-4% after "Nude Celeb Scandal" (businessinsider.com)

Submitted by retroworks
retroworks writes: Both the Wall Street Journal (paywall http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat...), USA

Today, and Business Insider are all running stories about the big dip in Apple stock, close to the eve of the iPhone 6 rollout. Huffington Post's Headline is "Apple Stock Getting Killed" http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...

There are two different explanations given for the tanking Apple stock. To be sure, potential liabilities over The iCloud photo scandal and leaked celebrity nude photos gets its share of the blame. But and a note from Pacific Crest analyst Andy Hargreaves telling investors to sell Apple shares seems to carry more weight.

"Last week, the company was flying high as anticipation built for the iPhone 6, and the iWatch, which are expected to be announced next week. The stock was hitting new all-time highs...It all came to a screeching halt over the weekend for Apple, when nude photos of celebrities hit the web. Apple's weak security on iCloud, where the photos were backed up, was blamed for the photos hitting the web."

Apple's new mobile payments feature, as well as health tracking data tied to the iPhone, may feel the pinch from the data security breach (although most of that data is likely to be stored right on the phone, not in the iCloud, BusinessInsider points out). Pacific Crest's Hargreaves says, "We recommend taking profits in Apple."

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