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Comment Not the same (Score 1) 252

by Pale Dot (#43355481) Attached to: Blink! Google Is Forking WebKit
Big difference is that other developers besides Microsoft weren't allowed to embrace, extend, etc IE6. But here Google is allowing other opensource developers to do their own embrace and extend, so at worst the third part is likely to be a repeat of step 1: embrace, extend, embrace fork.

Comment Re: life-long updates (Score 1) 687

by Pale Dot (#43231919) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: What Is a Reasonable Way To Deter Piracy?
That's why my credit card has a low credit limit (I insisted the bank roll it back when they gave me a free upgrade), which I only use to pay for groceries and stuff I'm forced to buy online. I don't tie down my whole life to a single point of failure, and have at least three different payment methods for my bills and whatnot.

Comment Re: (in)Security cameras (Score 2) 307

by Pale Dot (#43190829) Attached to: Should We Be Afraid of Google Glass?
True. The cellphone in your pocket (it doesn't even have to be smartphone) already has all the privacy-invading features of Google Glass. How do you know that person who appears to be texting on another table isn't already recording a video of your tryst? Wouldn't you also be alarmed if you see someone using a cellphone inside a public bath? GooGlass should be banned in the very same places where the use of a cellphone is already considered improper or rude.

Comment Re: Public list of VPNs? (Score 1) 91

by Pale Dot (#43168523) Attached to: Users Flock To Firewall-Busting Thesis Project

Well written response. You have a very good point. That circumvention only works well in governments with a rather democratic judicial system where circumvention is not in itself a crime.

Ironically the system is likely to be more useful in Japan, which recently enacted one of the the toughest laws against online copyright infringement in the (relatively) free world, punishing even mere downloaders with jail time.
Government

Submission + - Users Flock To Firewall-Busting Thesis Project (itworld.com)

Submitted by
itwbennett
itwbennett writes: "Daiyuu Nobori, a Ph.D. student at Japan's Tsukuba University designed 'VPN Gate' to help individuals in countries that restrict Internet use circumvent government firewalls. The service, which has drawn 77,000 users since its launch last Friday, encourages members of the public to set up VPN servers and offer free connections to individual users, aiming to make the technology more accessible. Nobori had originally planned to host the service on his university's servers, but they have been down recently so he switched it to the Windows Azure cloud platform. He has spent about US$9,000 keeping it up so far."
China

Submission + - Bruce Schneier: A Cyber Cold War" Could Destabilize the Internet (technologyreview.com)

Submitted by moon_unit2
moon_unit2 writes: In an op-ed piece over at Technology Review, Bruce Schneier says that the cyber espionage between the US, China, and other nations, has been rampant for the past decade. But he also worries that the media frenzy over recent attacks is fostering a new kind of Internet-nationalism and spurring a cyber arms race that has plenty of negative side-effects for the Internet and it's users. From the piece: "We don’t know the capabilities of the other side, and we fear that they are more capable than we are. So we spend more, just in case. The other side, of course, does the same. That spending will result in more cyber weapons for attack and more cyber-surveillance for defense. It will result in move government control over the protocols of the Internet, and less free-market innovation over the same. At its worst, we might be about to enter an information-age Cold War: one with more than two “superpowers.” Aside from this being a bad future for the Internet, this is inherently destabilizing."

Submission + - Cryptographers awarded the Turing Award (acm.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Turing Award (Nobel Prize of Computer Science) has been awarded to Shafi Goldwasser and Salvio Micali for groundbreaking foundational work in cryptography.

Submission + - openSUSE 12.3 Available for download (muktware.com)

Submitted by sfcrazy
sfcrazy writes: openSUSE 12.3 has been released on time and this release shows how it's getting better and better with time. openSUSE is investing quite a lot of resources in ARM and ARM 64bit, which makes sense as ARM is about to make inroads into the server space where SUSE is one of the market leaders behind Red Hat. As we speak there are at over 4,000 build packages for ARM which puts openSUSE ahead of any Linux distribution which supports ARM's AArch64 architecture. openSUSE 12.3 can be downloaded from here.
Security

Submission + - BackTrack Goes Pro with Kali Linux (paritynews.com)

Submitted by hypnosec
hypnosec writes: Offensive Security, the company behind one of the best hacking distributions out there – BackTrack, has announced the availability of Kali Linux — a new penetration testing and security auditing distribution. Dubbed by Offensive Security as an enterprise ready professional version of BackTrack, the distribution has been developed in collaboration with Metasploit makers Rapid7. The collaboration has ensured that Rapid7 will be extending official Metasploit support to Kali. A total of 300 tools such as Aircrack-ng, John the Ripper, Metasploit framework, Nmap and Wireshark have been included in Kali Linux.
Security

Submission + - MIT crypto experts win 2012 Turing Award ("Nobel Prize in Computing") (networkworld.com)

Submitted by alphadogg
alphadogg writes: A pair of MIT professors and security researchers whose work paved the way for modern cryptography have been named winners of the 2012 A.M. Turing Award, also known as the “Nobel Prize in Computing.” Shafi Goldwasser, the RSA Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT and a professor at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, and Silvio Micali, the MIT Ford Professor of Engineering, are recipients of the award, which will be formerly presented by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) http://amturing.acm.org/byyear.cfm on June 15 in San Francisco. According to the ACM: “By formalizing the concept that cryptographic security had to be computational rather than absolute, they created mathematical structures that turned cryptography from an art into a science." Goldwasser and Micali will split a $250K prize.
Robotics

Submission + - Humanoid CHIMP Robot Can Roll on Treads Instead of Walking (gizmag.com)

Submitted by Zothecula
Zothecula writes: Robots either have legs, or they run on something like treads or wheels ... right? Well, not in the case of Carnegie Mellon University (CMU)’s new CHIMP robot. The humanoid ‘bot does have arms and legs, allowing it to stand and carry out tasks on a human scale. When it’s time to move, however, it can hunker down on all fours and roll along on rubberized treads built into its feet and forearms.
Japan

Submission + - Users flock to Japan student's firewall-busting thesis project (networkworld.com)

Submitted by alphadogg
alphadogg writes: Tsukuba University doctoral student Daiyuu Nobori's online thesis project, VPN Gate, is designed to help individuals in countries that restrict Internet use to beat government firewalls. The service encourages members of the public to set up VPN servers and offer free connections to individual users, aiming to make the technology more accessible. "Today's VPN software is very complex. They are not easy to use. Some VPN services around the world are expensive for people in other parts of the world," Nobori said in an interview with IDG News Service. His service maintains a public, real-time list of freely available VPN servers for users to choose from. It also offers downloadable server software to run the VPN, and a client that greatly simplifies the process of finding and connecting to one of the free servers, for the less technically inclined.

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