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Comment Re:This is a smart move for them (Score 2) 172

I don't know about you, but I kinda prefer having targeted advertising for stuff I'm actually interested in, as opposed to being bombarded with random ads for beer and diapers and feminine hygiene products that I get when I'm in a "fresh" browser or incognito mode. I'm also OK with using the random Google accounts I created to do online shopping... they're anonymous enough for me relative to the realname account that I only use for talking to the handful of actual people in a "social" context.

Comment Debian on an Ultra 5 (Score 1) 152

by spaceyhackerlady (#50192611) Attached to: Debian Drops SPARC Platform Support

The standard desktop at the company I work for used to be a Sun Ultra 5, and when the company imploded I picked an Ultra 5 with a fast processor (400 MHz), put some more memory in it, took it home and put Debian on it. It worked fine. Entirely decent interactive performance, like a fast Pentium 2. Not a box for video editing or other high-CPU/bandwidth activities, but fine otherwise.

I was amused to note that it wasn't a Windows box, so it was immune to Windows attacks. It wasn't an x86 box, so it was immune to x86 attacks. I guess I amuse easily. :-)

We had a pile of 32 bit SparcStations. We (literally) couldn't give them away.

...laura

Comment I've had issues with the Win10 NVIDIA drivers... (Score 3, Insightful) 317

by snowgirl (#50186035) Attached to: Windows 10's Automatic Updates For NVidia Drivers Causing Trouble

Usually the problem is something like, "it isn't giving me the newest driver" or simply the poor quality of the drivers in the first place. (For awhile there, if I clicked on the start button, it would cause my screen to reset!) And a lot of "your driver stopped responding so we turned it off, then back on again."

In some ways, I like that the drivers are being pushed to me automatically, but at the same time, if I'm doing multiple reinstalls in a single day, I've already downloaded the drivers... I don't need them to be downloaded YET AGAIN, every install...

Comment Depends who you ask... (Score 4, Interesting) 219

At Facebook, it's memcached, with an HDD backup, eventually put onto tape...

At Google, it's a ramdisk, backed up to SSD/HDD, eventually put onto tape...

For anyone who can't afford half a petabyte of RAM with the commensurate number of computers? I have no good ideas... except maybe RAM cache of SSD, cache of HDD, backed up on tape...

Using something like HDFS to store your data in a Hadoop cluster of file requests, is likely the best F/OSS solution you're going to get for that...

Submission + - Senate Passes 'No Microsoft National Talent Strategy Goal Left Behind Act'

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Microsoft is applauding the Senate's passage of the Every Child Achieves Act, a rewrite of the No Child Left Behind Act, saying the move will improve access to K-12 STEM learning nationwide. The legislation elevates Computer Science to a "core academic subject", opening the door to a number of funding opportunities. The major overhaul of the U.S. K-12 education system, adds Microsoft on the Issues, also "advances some of the goals outlined in Microsoft’s National Talent Strategy," its "two-pronged" plan to increase K-12 CS education and tech immigration. Perhaps Microsoft is tackling the latter goal in under-the-radar White House visits with the leaders of Mark Zuckerberg's FWD.us PAC, like this one, attended by Microsoft's William "It's Our Way Or the Canadian Highway" Kamela and FWD.us President Joe "Save Us From Just-Sort-of-OK US Workers" Green.

Comment We all need The Book (Score 1) 24

by rwa2 (#50181061) Attached to: We all need Jesus!!

The one criticism of atheists and agnostics that resonates with me is that they don't really have an established book of beliefs and guidelines. Living life without a code of behavior is somewhat like a computer running without a program... how are you going to predict what it's going to do?

It would be nice for everyone to have their own compiled set of standards, rules, and objective functions that characterizes their philosophy and that they actually use to guide their behavior. Unfortunately, the OKCupid tests are the only thing I've seen that comes anywhere close :P
ch

Swiss Researchers Describe a Faster, More Secure Tor 61

Posted by timothy from the still-has-that-delicious-oniony-taste dept.
An anonymous reader writes: Researchers from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and University College London published a paper this week describing a faster and more secure version of Tor called HORNET. On one hand, the new onion routing network can purportedly achieve speeds of up to 93 gigabits per second and "be scaled to support large numbers of users with minimal overhead". On the other hand, researchers cannot claim to be immune to "confirmation attacks" known to be implemented on Tor, but they point out that, given how HORNET works, perpetrators of such attacks would have to control significantly more ISPs across multiple geopolitical boundaries and probably sacrifice the secrecy of their operations in order to successfully deploy such attacks on HORNET.

Submission + - What Happens When Science Enables Aborting Babies With The 'Gay Gene'? (ijreview.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Bruce Carroll writes at the Independent Journal Review, "One gets the sense these days that the once far away, anti-Utopian worlds of George Orwell, ... and Aldous Huxley are actually here. ... The crux of my concern ... is the inevitable intersection of “safe abortions” and genetic selection to weed out “undesirables.” Genetic selection has reared its head already over the past few decades in China — girls are aborted and boys are the favored gender. In the United States ... a steep reduction in the number of Down’s Syndrome babies over the last decade ... So what do the LGBTQ activists — who are mostly left-wing — do when faced with the inevitable collision of “gay rights” and “reproductive rights”? We seem to be on the verge of the science community agreeing that there are genetic underpinnings to being born gay. ... None other than ultra-conservative Republican Presidential candidate Rick Santorum conceded the point this week in an interview with openly-gay MSNBC anchor Rachel Maddow. ... This is quite a dilemma for pro-abortion gay activists ... Donors to gay rights groups and pro-abortion groups are frequently the same individuals, and millions are exchanged between these two causes. ... gay activists frequently cite “abortion rights” as a keystone to achieving overall LGBT equality. I wonder if gay activists realize that their ... devotion to pro-abortion political organizations, and the multi-million dollar abortion industry itself, may ultimately lead to the destruction of LGBT babies before they are born within my lifetime."

Submission + - AMD clocks 500x spreadsheet speed boost via hardware acceleration in LibreOffice (amd.com)

Submitted by samtuke
samtuke writes: AMD processors get rated and reviewed based on performance. It is in our self-interest to make things work really, really fast on AMD hardware. AMD engineers contribute to LibreOffice, for good reason. Think about what happens behind a spreadsheet calculation. There can be a huge amount of math. Writing software to take advantage of a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) for general purpose computing is non-trivial. We know how to do it. AMD engineers wrote OpenCL kernels, and contributed them to the open source code base. Turning on the OpenCL option to enable GPU Compute resulted in a 500X+ speedup, about ¼ second vs. 2minutes, 21 seconds.

Comment Re:Finally! (Score 2) 151

Yeah, I'm happy enough just closing any tab that starts sprouting unsolicited audio, either from ads or actual content that autoplays. Unfortunately, I doubt most web analytics do a good job showing people leaving their site in droves once some autoplay content starts.

Slashdot might be a good example of this, though... I used to leave /. running in a tab all day long, but now I usually end up closing it after something autoplays nowadays and not going back. Maybe someone noticed, because I do see autoplay junk hit the page slightly less often now.

Facebook oddly enough actually has a pretty nice system where videos autoplay muted as you scroll by them, pause once they're offscreen, unless you unmute or hit play. It would be nice to be able to give better reasons for blocking content, though, like "This link was a useless slideshow" or "The page had some stupid autoplay thing"

Submission + - Secret Service Agents Stake Out the Ugliest Corners of the Internet

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Josephine Wolff writes at The Atlantic that sifting through messages to determine which, threats to President Obama need to be taken seriously is the responsibility of the Secret Service Internet Threat Desk, a group of agents tasked with identifying and assessing online threats to the president and his family. The first part of this mission—finding threats—is in many ways made easier by the Internet: all you have to do is search! Pulling up every tweet which uses the words “Obama” and “assassinate” takes mere seconds, and the Secret Service has tried to make it easier for people to draw threats to its attention by setting up its own Twitter handle, @secretservice, for users to report threatening messages to. The difficulty is trying to figure out which ones should be taken seriously.

The Secret Service categorizes all threats, online and offline alike, into one of three categories. Class 3 threats are considered the most serious, and require agents to interview the individual who issued the threat and any acquaintances to determine whether that person really has the capability to carry out the threat. Class 2 threats are considered to be serious but issued by people incapable of actually follow up on their intentions, either because they are in jail or located at a great distance from the president. And Class 1 threats are those that may seem serious at first, but are determined not to be. The overall number of threats directed at the first family that require investigation has stayed relatively steady at about 10 per day—except for the period when Obama was first elected, when the Secret Service had to follow up on roughly 50 threats per day. “That includes threats on Twitter,” says Ronald Kessler, author of In the President’s Secret Service. “It makes no difference to [the Secret Service] how a threat is communicated. They can’t take that chance of assuming that because it’s on Twitter it’s less serious.”

Submission + - Men who harass women online are quite literally losers, new study finds

Submitted by AmiMoJo
AmiMoJo writes: The men most likely to harass women online are the men most likely to have their own problems. That bit of validation comes courtesy Michael Kasumovic and Jeffrey Kuznekoff, researchers at the University of New South Wales and Miami University, respectively. For their latest study, published in the journal PLOS One last week, the duo watched how men treated women during 163 plays of the video game Halo 3. As they watched the games play out and tracked the comments that players made to each other, the researchers observed that — no matter their skill level, or how the game went — men tended to be pretty cordial to each other. Male players who were good at the game also tended to pay compliments to other male and female players. Some male players, however — the ones who were less-skilled at the game, and performing worse relative their peers — made frequent, nasty comments to the female gamers. In other words, sexist dudes are literally losers.

Submission + - Tomb, a successor to TrueCrypt for Linux geeks (well, dm-crypt, basically...) (dyne.org)

Submitted by jaromil
jaromil writes: Last day we released Tomb version 2.1 with improvements to stability, documentation and translations. Tomb is just a ZSh script wrapping around cryptsetup, gpg and other tools to facilitate the creation and management of LUKS encrypted volumes with features like key separation, steganography, off-line search, QRcode paper backups etc. In designing Tomb we struggle for minimalism and readability, convinced that the increasing complexity of personal technology is the root of many vulnerabilities the world is witnessing today — and this approach turns out to be very successful, judging from the wide adoption, appreciation and contributions our project has received especially after the demise of TrueCrypt.
As maintainer of the software I wonder what Slashdot readers think about what we are doing, how we are doing it and more in general about the need for simplicity in secure systems, a debate I perceive as transversal to many other GNU/Linux/BSD projects and their evolution. Given the increasing responsibility in maintaining such a software, considering the human-interface side of things is an easy to reach surface of attack, I can certainly use some advice and criticism.

Comment Re:Does indeed happen. (Score 1) 634

Yeah, I don't normally get feed back either. But it is kind of suspicious when I do get feedback...

I think it's a lot related to the xkcd comic: https://xkcd.com/385/

If I spend a bunch of time rewriting code (which everyone does), as a man they might think "oh, well, he's just refactoring, or having a bad day." But when I do it, they think "wow, women can't code..." and then reject me out of hand without attempting to rationalize an explanation for why it should be overlooked...

Not that I'm particularly complaining here... this is just life as a woman in the tech industry... that and "oh wow, what does your boyfriend do at Google?" Actually, he's a literature teacher, I'm the genius programmer troubleshooter who knows almost everything about computers...

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