jfruh - Slashdot User

Submission + - Counterterrorism Expert: It's Time To Give Companies Offensive Cybercapabilities

Submitted by itwbennett on Monday August 03, 2015 @05:10PM

itwbennett writes: Juan Zarate, the former deputy national security advisor for counterterrorism during President George W. Bush’s administration says the U.S. government should should consider allowing businesses to develop 'tailored hack-back capabilities,' deputizing them to strike back against cyberattackers. The government could issue cyberwarrants, giving a private company license 'to protect its system, to go and destroy data that’s been stolen or maybe even something more aggressive,' Zarate said Monday at a forum on economic and cyberespionage hosted by think tank the Hudson Institute.

Submission + - Zuckerberg Sees VR As "Obvious Next Thing" In Social Sharing (itworld.com)

Submitted by jfruh on Thursday July 30, 2015 @01:03AM

jfruh writes: Posts on Facebook may increasingly center of video in the near future, but company founder Mark Zuckerberg is looking ahead to the next thing — and in his opinion the next thing is "immersive 3D content." This may explain the company's puzzling decision to buy Oculus VR for $2 billion.

Submission + - Oracle To Debut Low-Cost SPARC Chip Next Month (itworld.com)

Submitted by jfruh on Thursday July 30, 2015 @12:57AM

jfruh writes: Of the many things Oracle acquired when it absorbed Sun, the SPARC processors have not exactly been making headlines. But that may change next month when the company debuts a new, lower-cost chip that will compete with Intel's Xeon.

Submission + - Maliciously Crafted MKV Video Files Can Be Used To Crash Android Phones

Submitted by itwbennett on Wednesday July 29, 2015 @11:17AM

itwbennett writes: Just days after the so-called 'Stagefright' flaw, which could allow attackers to compromise devices with a simple MMS message, was revealed, researchers have found another Android media processing flaw. The latest vulnerability is located in Android’s mediaserver component, more specifically in how this service handles files that use the Matroska video container (MKV), the Trend Micro researchers said in a blog post Wednesday.

Submission + - Tools Coming To Def Con For Hacking RFID Access Doors

Submitted by jfruh on Wednesday July 29, 2015 @12:27AM

jfruh writes: Next month's Def Con security conference will feature, among other things, new tools that will help you hack into the RFID readers that secure doors in most office buildings. RFID cards have been built with more safeguards against cloning; these new tools will bypass that protection by simply hacking the readers themselves.

Submission + - China's Huawei Building Fibre Optic Internet Cable In West Africa (itworld.com)

Submitted by jfruh on Wednesday July 29, 2015 @12:19AM

jfruh writes: The West African nation of Guinea will be getting its first fibre optic Internet cable by 2017, built by Chinese telecom giant Huawei. Funded by the Guinean government and Chinese banks, the cable will provide high-speed Internet access to many Guinean institutions, and may provide connectivity to neighboring countries as well.

Submission + - Trillion-Dollar World Trade Deal Aims To Make IT Products Cheaper (itworld.com)

Submitted by itwbennett on Monday July 27, 2015 @10:49AM

itwbennett writes: A new (tentative) global trade agreement, struck on Friday at a World Trade Organization meeting in Geneva, eliminates tariffs on more than 200 kinds of IT products, ranging from smartphones, routers, and ink cartridges to video game consoles and telecommunications satellites. A full list of products covered was published by the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, which called the ITA expansion 'great news for the American workers and businesses that design, manufacture, and export state-of-the-art technology and information products, ranging from MRI machines to semiconductors to video game consoles.' The deal covers $1.3 trillion worth of global trade, about 7 percent of total trade today.

Submission + - Study: Push Notifications As Distracting As Taking A Call (itworld.com)

Submitted by itwbennett on Thursday July 23, 2015 @11:43AM

itwbennett writes: Researchers at Florida State University have found that simply being aware of a missed call or text can have the same damaging effect on task performance as actually using a mobile phone. 'Although these notifications are short in duration, they can prompt task-irrelevant thoughts, or mind-wandering,' the researchers wrote in their paper. In further bad news for chronic multitaskers, a new study by researchers at the University of Connecticut finds that 'students who multitasked while doing homework had to study longer, and those who frequently multitasked in class had lower grades on average than their peers who multitasked less often.'

Submission + - New York Judge Rules Against Facebook In Search Warrant Case

Submitted by itwbennett on Wednesday July 22, 2015 @01:22PM

itwbennett writes: Last year, Facebook appealed a court decision requiring it to hand over data, including photos and private messages, relating to 381 user accounts. (Google, Microsoft, and Twitter, among other companies backed Facebook in the dispute). On Tuesday, Judge Dianne Renwick of the New York State Supreme Court ruled against Facebook, saying that Facebook has no legal standing to challenge the constitutionality of search warrants served on its users.

Submission + - Bug Exposes OpenSSH Servers To Brute-Force Password Guessing Attacks (itworld.com)

Submitted by itwbennett on Wednesday July 22, 2015 @10:08AM

itwbennett writes: OpenSSH servers with keyboard-interactive authentication enabled, which is the default setting on many systems, including FreeBSD ones, can be tricked to allow many authentication retries over a single connection, according to a security researcher who uses the online alias Kingcope, who disclosed the issue on his blog last week. According to a discussion on Reddit, setting PasswordAuthentication to 'no' in the OpenSSH configuration and using public-key authentication does not prevent this attack, because keyboard-interactive authentication is a different subsystem that also relies on passwords.

Submission + - Former Hacking Team Supplier Stops Selling Zero-Day Exploits On Ethical Grounds (itworld.com)

Submitted by itwbennett on Tuesday July 21, 2015 @12:47PM

itwbennett writes: Italian surveillance software maker Hacking Team may not have lost any customers after it was hacked two weeks ago, or at least not yet. But it has lost at least one business partner. Over the weekend, U.S.-based penetration testing specialist and zero-day exploit broker Netragard announced that it is terminating its long-time running Exploit Acquisition Program (EAP), citing revelations about Hacking Team’s customers as one of the reasons.

Submission + - What's the Oldest Technology You've Used In a Production Environment? (itworld.com)

Submitted by itwbennett on Tuesday July 21, 2015 @11:02AM

itwbennett writes: Sometimes it's a matter of 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it,' sometimes corporate inertia is to blame, but perhaps even more often what keeps old technology plugging away in businesses large and small is the sense that it does a single, specific job the way that someone wants it done. George R.R. Martin's preference for using a DOS computer running WordStar 4 to write his Song of Ice and Fire series is one such example, but so is the hospital computer whose sole job was to search and print medical images, however badly or slowly it may have done the job. We all have such stories of obsolete tech we've had to use at one point or another. What's yours?

Comment not the first time (Score 2) 232

by jfruh on Sunday July 19, 2015 @01:39PM (#50140493) Attached to: Techies Hire Witch To Protect Computers From Viruses and Offices From Spirits

In 2000, the dot-com I worked for moved into new office space that had house three other companies that had failed in rapid succession, and our bosses brought in a feng shui consultant to cleanse it from the bad energy. It didn't work; we all go laid off less than eighteen months later.

Submission + - Italian Court Throws Out TripAdvisor Fine Over Bad Reviews (itworld.com)

Submitted by jfruh on Wednesday July 15, 2015 @05:18PM

jfruh writes: TripAdvisor had been fined half a million euros in Italy for publishing "misleading" information in its reviews. But now an Italian court has thrown out that punishment, saying that the site clearly states that the reviews are user-submitted and that TripAdvisor can't confirm all details.

Submission + - Check Into A Robot-Staffed Japanese Hotel (itworld.com)

Submitted by jfruh on Wednesday July 15, 2015 @05:09PM

jfruh writes: The front desk is staffed by a female android in a white tunic. The bellhop is a mechanical velociraptor. A giant robot arm put luggage into cubbyholes. It's the Henn-na Hotel in Nagasaki and it's opening this Friday, and it's a place where 'basically guests will see only robots, not humans,' according to general manager Masahiko Hayasaka.

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