Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Submission + - 32 Cities Want to Challenge Big Telecom, Build Their Own Gigabit Networks

Submitted by Jason Koebler
Jason Koebler writes: More than two dozen cities in 19 states announced today that they're sick of big telecom skipping them over for internet infrastructure upgrades and would like to build gigabit fiber networks themselves and help other cities follow their lead.
The Next Centuries Cities coalition, which includes a couple cities that already have gigabit fiber internet for their residents, was devised to help communities who want to build their own broadband networks navigate logistical and legal challenges to doing so.

Submission + - Facebook to DEA: Stop Using Phony Profiles to Nab Criminals

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: CNNMoney reports that Facebook has sent a letter to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration demanding that agents stop impersonating users on the social network. "The DEA's deceptive actions... threaten the integrity of our community," Facebook chief security officer Joe Sullivan wrote to DEA head Michele Leonhart. "Using Facebook to impersonate others abuses that trust and makes people feel less safe and secure when using our service." Facebook's letter comes on the heels of reports that the DEA impersonated a young woman on Facebook to communicate with suspected criminals, and the Department of Justice argued that they had the right to do so. Facebook contends that their terms and Community Standards — which the DEA agent had to acknowledge and agree to when registering for a Faceook account — expressly prohibit the creation and use of fake accounts. "Isn't this the definition of identity theft?" says Privacy researcher Runa Sandvik. The DEA has declined to comment and referred all questions to the Justice Department, which has not returned CNNMoney's calls.

Submission + - TorFi, an alternative to Anonabox, already up at Kickstarter (kickstarter.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Riding on the coattails of the desire for anonymity on the Internet displayed by Anonabox, new Kickstarter project TorFi "aims to satisfy the demand demonstrated for a simple, plug-and-play, secure access point to the Internet. With no more technical knowledge than what it takes to plug into a home ISP connection..." It appears to use OpenWRT and pre-existing hardware to accomplish this and claims it will only cost $30.

Submission + - Torvalds: I Made A "Metric Sh--load" Of Mistakes With The Linux Community (readwrite.com)

Submitted by electronic convict
electronic convict writes: In a Q&A at LinuxCon Europe, Linux creator Linus Torvalds — no stranger to strong language and blunt opinions — acknowledged a "metric shitload" of interpersonal mistakes that unnecessarily antagonized others within the Linux community. In response to Intel's Dirk Hohndel, who asked him which decision he regretted most over the past 23 years, Torvalds replied:

From a technical standpoint, no single decision has ever been that important... The problems tend to be around alienating users or developers and I'm pretty good at that. I use strong language. But again there's not a single instance I'd like to fix. There's a metric shitload of those.

It's probably not a coincidence that Torvalds said this just a few weeks after critics like Lennart Poettering started drawing attention to the abusive nature of some commentary within the open-source community. Poettering explicitly called out Torvalds for some of his most intemperate remarks and described open source as "quite a sick place to be in." Still, Torvalds doesn't sound like he's about to start making an apology tour. "One of the reasons we have this culture of strong language, that admittedly many people find off-putting, is that when it comes to technical people with strong opinions and with a strong drive to do something technically superior, you end up having these opinions show up as sometimes pretty strong language," he said. "On the Internet, nobody can hear you being subtle."

Submission + - White House wants ideas for 'bootstrapping a solar system civilization' (examiner.com)

Submitted by MarkWhittington
MarkWhittington writes: Tom Kalil, the Deputy Director for Policy for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and Senior Advisor for Science, Technology and Innovation for the National Economic Council, has an intriguing Tuesday post on the OSTP blog. Kalil is soliciting ideas for “bootstrapping a solar system civilization.” Anyone interested in offering ideas along those lines to the Obama administration can contact a special email address that has been set up for that purpose.

The ideas that Kalil muses about in his post are not new for people who have studied the question of how to settle space at length. The ideas consist of sending autonomous robots to various locations in space to create infrastructure using local resources with advanced manufacturing technology, such as 3D printing. The new aspect is that someone in the White House is publicly discussing these concepts.

Submission + - Trans-Pacific Partnership May Endanger World Health, Newly Leaked Chapter Shows

Submitted by blottsie
blottsie writes: WikiLeaks has released an updated version of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) chapter on intellectual property. The new version of the texts, dated May 2014, show that little improvement has been made to sections critics say would hurt free speech online. Further, some of the TPP's stipulations could have dire consequences for healthcare in developing nations. The Daily Dot reports:

Nearly all of the changes proposed by the U.S. advantage corporate entities by expanding monopolies on knowledge goods, such as drug patents, and impose restrictive copyright policies worldwide. If it came into force, TPP would even allow pharmaceutical companies to sue the U.S. whenever changes to regulatory standards or judicial decisions affected their profits.

Professor Brook K. Baker of Northeastern U. School of Law [said] that the latest version of the TPP will do nothing less than lengthen, broaden, and strengthen patent monopolies on vital medications.

Submission + - Bill Gates Thinks Thomas Piketty's Attack On Inequality Is Right (huffingtonpost.com)

Submitted by rvw
rvw writes: Billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates essentially concurs with French economist Thomas Piketty's landmark book on income inequality, according to a review Gates published on his own blog Monday. Those "most important" conclusions? High levels of income inequality are bad, capitalism cannot fix inequality on its own, and government action can help break the vicious cycle in which inequality begets more severe inequality.

It's appropriate that Gates reviewed the book, because he and his philanthropic foundation are actually mentioned to buttress Piketty's argument. After he became a very, very rich man, Gates stopped laboring and focused instead on giving away his money. Yet, more than a decade later, his wealth has actually skyrocketed. In 1998, Gates' net worth was valued at $50 billion. By October 2014, that number had increased nearly 60 percent to $79.3 billion, despite his having given away tens of billions of dollars.

Submission + - Technology Heats Up the Adultery Arms Race

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Michelle Cottle reports in The Atlantic that in an earlier era, a suspicious husband might have rifled through his wife's pockets or hired a private investigator but today spouses have easy access to an array of sophisticated spy software that that record every keystroke; compile detailed logs of calls, texts, and video chats; that track a phone’s location in real time; recover deleted messages from all manner of devices (without having to touch said devices); and that turn phones into wiretapping equipment. One might assume that the proliferation of such spyware would have a chilling effect on extramarital activities. But according to Cottle, aspiring cheaters, need not despair: software developers are also rolling out ever stealthier technology to help people conceal their affairs. Right or wrong, cheating apps tap into a potentially lucrative market and researchers regard the Internet as fertile ground for female infidelity in particular. “Men tend to cheat for physical reasons and women for emotional reasons,” says Katherine Hertlein. “The Internet facilitates a lot of emotional disclosure and connections with someone else.”

But virtual surveillance has its risks. Stumbling across an incriminating email your partner left open is one thing; premeditated spying can land you in court. A Minnesota man named Danny Lee Hormann, suspecting his wife of infidelity, installed a GPS tracker on her car and allegedly downloaded spyware onto her phone and the family computer. In March 2010, Hormann's wife had a mechanic search her car and found the tracker. She called the police, and Hormann spent a month in jail on stalking charges. “I always tell people two things: (1) do it legally, and (2) do it right,” says John Paul Lucich, a computer-forensics expert and the author of Cyber Lies, a do-it-yourself guide for spouses looking to become virtual sleuths. Lucich has worked his share of ugly divorces, and he stresses that even the most damning digital evidence of infidelity will prove worthless in court—and potentially land you in trouble—if improperly gathered. His blanket advice: Get a really good lawyer.

Submission + - If your cloud vendor goes out of business, are you ready?

Submitted by storagedude
storagedude writes: With Amazon Web Services losing $2 billion a year, it’s not inconceivable that the cloud industry could go the way of storage service providers (remember them?). So any plan for cloud services must include a way to retrieve your data quickly in case your cloud service provider goes belly up without much notice (think Nirvanix). In an article at Enterprise Storage Forum, Henry Newman notes that recovering your data from the cloud quickly is a lot harder than you might think. Even if you have a dedicated OC-192 channel, it would take 11 days to move a petabyte of data – and that’s with no contention or other latency. One possible solution: a failover agreement with a second cloud provider – and make sure it’s legally binding.

Submission + - National Security Letter Issuance Likely Headed to Supreme Court (threatpost.com)

Submitted by Gunkerty Jeb
Gunkerty Jeb writes: The Ninth Circuit appeals court in San Francisco took oral arguments from the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Department of Justice yesterday over the constitutionality of National Security Letters and the gag orders associated with them. The EFF defended a lower court's ruling that NSLs are unconstitutional, while the DoJ defended a separate ruling that NSLs can be enforced. Whatever the court rules, the issue of NSLs is all but certainly headed for the Supreme Court in the not too distant future.

Submission + - The malware of the future may come bearing real gifts (thestack.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Research by Prof. Giovanni Vigna of the University of California leads him to believe that the malware of the future will come in a friendly form, be genuinely useful and may not reveal its intentions for a protracted period of time.

Prof. Vigna, speaking at IP Expo in London, outlined a fearful future of 'mimicry' in evolved strains of malware. In the current stage of the war between malware and security researchers, the emphasis is almost entirely on the attempt to convince increasingly intelligent — and increasingly suspicious — malware that it is operating in a bare-metal environment when it is in fact in a sandbox or VM environment.

For the malware, the stakes are tremendously high — if it has reached the point of OS-level execution without its hash being indexed and red-flagged by online security databases, it cannot afford to reveal its intentions in a test environment. This article outlines the extraordinary game of cat-and-mouse being played between researchers and hackers, and how future malware exploits are likely to abandon a rush for the buffer overflow in favour of 'the long game' — and to make themselves useful in the process.

Submission + - Tesla's Starting A Certified Preowned Program

Submitted by cartechboy
cartechboy writes: Name a luxury automaker that doesn't have a Certified Previously Owned (CPO) program. Go ahead, I'll wait. That's right, you can't really name one can you. Tesla isn't like a normal luxury automakers, in fact, it's not really like any automaker out there. It doesn't have franchises and it sells its own vehicles through its network of galleries. It seems the Silicon Valley start-up sees the light, or rather, the profit potential, as it plans to create its own CPO program. It seems there's a great deal of Model S sedans out there currently under lease contracts. When those cars are ready to come back, Tesla has guaranteed that it will purchase them for a figure that falls somewhere between 43 and 50 percent of the original purchase price. This is exactly how Tesla's going to create its CPO fleet. Tesla seems to do everything in an unconventional manner, so we'll have to see if its CPO program is like every other automakers, or if it blazes its own path in this area as well.

Submission + - MIT Thinks It Has Discovered the 'Perfect' Solar Cell (vice.com)

Submitted by Daniel_Stuckey
Daniel_Stuckey writes: A new MIT study offers a way out of one of solar power's most vexing problems: the matter of efficiency, and the bare fact that much of the available sunlight in solar power schemes is wasted. The researchers appear to have found the key to perfect solar energy conversion efficiency—or at least something approaching it. It's a new material that can accept light from an very large number of angles and can withstand the very high temperatures needed for a maximally efficient scheme.

Conventional solar cells, the silicon-based sheets used in most consumer-level applications, are far from perfect. Light from the sun arrives here on Earth's surface in a wide variety of forms. These forms—wavelengths, properly—include the visible light that makes up our everyday reality, but also significant chunks of invisible (to us) ultraviolet and infrared light. The current standard for solar cells targets mostly just a set range of visible light.

Submission + - Why Microsoft skipped Windows 9

Submitted by Bizzeh
Bizzeh writes: Microsoft may not be everybody's favorite company, but they are the kings of backwards compatibility. When testing what was Windows 9 (and is now Windows 10). It seems like they came across some compatibility issues from the Windows 9x days. Mentioned by Mikko Hypponen on twitter (https://twitter.com/mikko/status/517358472715710465), quite a lot of products test the version string with "indexOf("windows 9")". Using searchcode, we can see what he means. https://searchcode.com/?q=if(v...

Submission + - UK legalises music, film and e-book back-ups (bbc.com)

Submitted by rastos1
rastos1 writes: A law has come into effect that permits UK citizens to make copies of CDs, MP3s, DVDs, Blu-rays and e-books. Consumers are allowed to keep the duplicates on local storage or in the cloud.
While it is legal to make back-ups for personal use, it remains an offence to share the data with friends or family. Users are not allowed to make recordings of streamed music or video from Spotify and Netflix, even if they subscribe to the services.
Thirteen years after iTunes launched, it is now legal to use it to rip CDs in the UK.

Slashdot Top Deals

The moon is made of green cheese. -- John Heywood

Close