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Submission + - Slashdot poll: Best cube 3

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: 1. Rubik Cube
2. The Cube (movie)
3. Tardis Siege Mode
4. Lament Configuration
5. Weighted Companion Cube
6. Borg Cube
7. The Inhibitors (Revelation Space)
8. Icecube

Submission + - Holder Severely limits Civil Forfeiture (washingtonpost.com)

Submitted by gurps_npc
gurps_npc writes: As most people know, the US has for quite some time let police steal pretty much anything they wanted to, forcing you to (expensively) go to court to get back your stuff. Most of the problems came about because the Federal government let the local cops keep most of what they took.
Eric Holder, the US Attorney General, has changed the rules of that program, making it more difficult for the police to do it under the federal program. They can still use local state programs, but that accounts for only about 57% of the cash taken. Note he did not end the program entirely, he left in some excepts that amounted to about 1% of the current federal program. Still with this action he will have struck a serious blow to a despicable practice that serious newspapers and comedy TV shows decried as nothing more than legalized theft.

Comment Re:Smartcarding your SSH connection (Score 1) 148

by Pathwalker (#48757895) Attached to: Tips For Securing Your Secure Shell

I've considered moving my SSH private key into a YubiKey Neo; but the Neo only appears to support 2048 bit RSA keys.

I could use a larger key on a normal USB drive, but it would be vulnerable to interception when the drive was inserted. The YubiKey would eliminate that threat, but the limited key size causes me some concern.

Do people feel that the reduction in the attack surface by keeping the key secured on a dedicated hardware device outweighs the reduction in key size?

Submission + - Comcast Forgets To Delete Revealing Note From Blog Post

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Earlier today, Comcast published a blog post to criticize the newly announced coalition opposing its merger with Time Warner Cable and to cheer about the FCC’s decision to restart the “shot clock” on that deal. But someone at Kabletown is probably getting a stern talking-to right now, after an accidental nugget of honesty made its way into that post. Comcast posted to their corporate blog today about the merger review process, reminding everyone why they think it will be so awesome and pointing to the pro-merger comments that have come in to the FCC. But they also left something else in. Near the end, the blog post reads, “Comcast and Time Warner Cable do not currently compete for customers anywhere in America. That means that if the proposed transaction goes through, consumers will not lose a choice of cable companies. Consumers will not lose a choice of broadband providers. And not a single market will see a reduction in competition. Those are simply the facts.” The first version of the blog post, which was also sent out in an e-mail blast, then continues: “We are still working with a vendor to analyze the FCC spreadsheet but in case it shows that there are any consumers in census blocks that may lose a broadband choice, want to make sure these sentences are more nuanced.” After that strange little note, the blog post carries on in praise of competition, saying, “There is a reason we want to provide our customers with better service, faster speeds, and a diverse choice of programming: we don’t want to lose them.”

Submission + - What Does The NSA Think Of Cryptographers? (i-programmer.info)

Submitted by mikejuk
mikejuk writes: A recently declassified NSA house magazine, CryptoLog, reveals some interesting attitudes between the redactions. What is the NSA take on cryptography?
The article of interest is a report of a trip to the 1992 EuroCrypt conference by an NSA cryptographer whose name is redacted.We all get a little bored having to sit though presentations that are off topic, boring or even down right silly but we generally don't write our opinions down. In this case the criticisms are cutting and they reveal a lot about the attitude of the NSA cryptographers. You need to keep in mind as you read that this is intended for the NSA crypto community and as such the writer would have felt at home with what was being written.
Take for example:
Three of the last four sessions were of no value whatever, and indeed there was almost nothing at Eurocrypt to interest us (this is good news!). The scholarship was actually extremely good; it’s just that the directions which external cryptologic researchers have taken are remarkably far from our own lines of interest.
It seems that back in 1992 academic cryptographers were working on things that the NSA didn't consider of any importance. Could things be the same now?
The gulf between the two camps couldn't be better expressed than:
The conference again offered an interesting view into the thought processes of the world’s leading “cryptologists.” It is indeed remarkable how far the Agency has strayed from the True Path.
The ironic comment is clearly suggesting that the NSA is on the "true path" whatever that might be.
Clearly the gap between the NSA and the academic crypto community is probably as wide today with the different approaches to the problem being driven by what each wants to achieve. It is worth reading the rest of the article.

Submission + - Details of iOS and Android Device Encryption

Submitted by swillden
swillden writes: There's been a lot of discussion of what, exactly, is meant by the Apple announcement about iOS8 device encryption, and the subsequent announcement by Google that Android L will enable encryption by default. Two security researchers tackled these questions in blog posts:

Matthew Green tackled iOS encryption, concluding that at bottom the change really boils down to applying the existing iOS encryption methods to more data. He also reviews the iOS approach, which uses Apple's "Secure Enclave" chip as the basis for the encryption and guesses at how it is that Apple can say it's unable to decrypt the devices. He concludes, with some clarification from a commenter, that Apple really can't (unless you use a weak password which can be brute-forced, and even then it's hard).

Nikolay Elenkov looks into the preview release of Android "L". He finds that not only has Google turned encryption on by default, but appears to have incorporated hardware-based security as well, to make it impossible (or at least much more difficult) to perform brute force password searches off-device.

Comment Re:Say what you will but this is cool (Score 1) 52

by AtariDatacenter (#47784419) Attached to: Google Testing Drone Delivery System: 'Project Wing'

Amazon recently announced it was getting into the advertisement business, and it beat out Google to acquire Twitch.

Pure speculation on my part, but I have to wonder if this is just Google's CEO trying to steal some of the spotlight away from Amazon?

Suddenly, Google is saying, "Oh yeah... delivery drones. We've been doing this for some time now." It smells like petty CEO bickering. (As cool as delivery drones are.)

Comment Are you sure of what you are watching? (Score 2) 355

by Pathwalker (#47769711) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: What To Do About Repeated Internet Overbilling?

It sounds like you are watching traffic inside of your network, and not the interface between your edge router, and the ISP device.

You could be missing many things; incoming traffic that your edge router drops, retransmissions between your edge router and the ISP device, and firmware/config updates for the ISP device.

We really need more detail.

Submission + - Some raindrops exceed their terminal velocity (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: New research reveals that some raindrops are “super-terminal” (they travel more than 30% faster than their terminal velocity, at which air resistance prevents further acceleration due to gravity). The drops are the result of natural processes—and they make up a substantial fraction of rainfall. Whereas all drops the team studied that were 0.8 millimeters and larger fell at expected speeds, between 30% and 60% of those measuring 0.3 mm dropped at super-terminal speeds. It’s not yet clear why these drops are falling faster than expected, the researchers say. But according to one notion, the speedy drops are fragments of larger drops that have broken apart in midair but have yet to slow down. If that is indeed the case, the researchers note, then raindrop disintegration happens normally in the atmosphere and more often than previously presumed—possibly when drops collide midair or become unstable as they fall through the atmosphere. Further study could improve estimates of the total amount of rainfall a storm will produce or the amount of erosion that it can generate.

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