Comment cooperative game (Score 1) 155
I spend a lot of time with my wife playing Pandemic. We love the fact that it is hard to win, but a cooperative rather than competitive play.
Submission + - India's Government Asks ISPs To Block GitHub, Vimeo And 30 Other Websites (techcrunch.com)
WhiteDragon writes: Apparently worried about ISIS, India has decided it would be wise to block several popular websites, including GitHub and Vimeo.
Submission + - Mark Shuttleworth Says Open-Source is More Secure Because of Diversity (datamation.com)
darthcamaro writes: 2014 was seen by some as a tough year for open-source, given the Heartbleed and Shellshock vulnerabilities that impacted millions of users and systems. Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu Linux (and former space tourist) has a different view. 2014 was a great year for him, as he marked the 10th anniversary of Ubuntu — and in terms of security he knows exactly why the open-source model is superior.
"The great thing about open source is that it's so dynamic and has so much innovation, that we have much more diversity in our ecosystem than there has ever been in the proprietary ecosystem," Shuttleworth said. "You'll never stop security issues from occurring in either open source or proprietary software but you deal with issues faster in open source."
Submission + - More Than 100,000 WordPress Sites Has Infected By SoakSoak Virus (brightverge.com)
An anonymous reader writes: brightverge.com: On Sunday, mysterious Russia named SoakSoak Virus has infected more than 100,000 WordPress sites, transforming them into attack platforms. Google has already developed the index 11000 sites to avoid further damage. SoakSoak is almost deliberated a prevalent considering the damage that it has done so far.
Submission + - US army could waive combat training for hackers
An anonymous reader writes: New U.S. Army cyber warriors could be spared the rigors of combat training to help the Pentagon attract badly needed recruits from the ponytail wearing Google generation, a top American general has suggested. Lt Gen Brown, commander of the US Army Combined Arms Centre at Fort Leavenworth, said: 'We need to give serious consideration to how the US Army could combine the technical expertise of the "Google" generation with its more traditional military skills. In order to gain an intellectual advantage over adversaries in cyberspace, we will need to tap into a talent pool that may not fit the stereotypical soldier profile. Our goal is to recruit the best talent possible.'"
Submission + - Happy Public Domain Day: Works that copyright extension stole from us in 2015 (boingboing.net)
Submission + - Windows 8.1 Vulnerability Revealed in Google Database After Timeout
An anonymous reader writes: Google's security research database has after a 90 day timeout automatically undisclosed a Windows 8.1 vulnerability which Microsoft hasn't yet patched. By design the system call NtApphelpCacheControl() in ahcache.sys allows application compatibility data to be cached for quick reuse when new processes are created. A normal user can query the cache but cannot add new cached entries as the operation is restricted to administrators. This is checked in the function AhcVerifyAdminContext(). Long story short, the aforementioned function has a vulnerability where it doesn't correctly check the impersonation token of the caller to determine if the user is an administrator. It hasn't been fully verified if Windows 7 is vulnerable. For a passer-by it is also hard to tell whether Microsoft has even reviewed the issue reported by the Google researcher. The database has already one worried comment saying that automatically revealing a vulnerability just like that might be a bad idea.
Submission + - 13 Things We Learned About Programmers In 2014 (itworld.com)
itwbennett writes: It seems these days like anyone and everyone can call themselves a programmer. But true software engineers remain a somewhat mysterious and exotic breed of tech worker. Here's a sampling of things we learned about them in 2014: Programmers from state schools get the best ROI on college, Alan Turing is the most important programmer of all time, and while Clojure programmers are the happiest, Java programmers earn the most.
Submission + - Bitcoin gets its first TV ads
MRothenberg writes: Bitcoin's not just for libertarians and drug dealers any more! Electronic payment service BitPay this week launched a campaign aimed at making Bitcoin transactions more appealing to mainstream business owners — the first time Bitcoin has been featured in a TV spot. Conceived by Felton Interactive Group, the two new ads promote Bitcoin and BitPay as a secure alternative to traditional credit-card transactions.
Comment Re:I'm so sad... :( (Score 1) 97
None of the batteries in any of my laptops work anymore.... I have zero choices to vote for!
I'm in the same boat. I have two old Dell Inspirons and the battery has failed in both. I just run them off of power, and hibernate/suspend-to-disk when done working (which I have configured to happen automatically when I shut the lid). It's not as nice as having a working battery, but it's useable. I could buy new batteries, but last I checked, the official Dell ones are several hundred dollars, and third-party knockoff ones are almost a hundred. That's not worth it for my 10 year old laptops that I got for free.
Comment I wonder how it compares to google's study (Score 1) 1
Google has published a similar study: http://research.google.com/pub... a few years ago. I wonder if technology changes have had much of an impact.
Comment Re:News coverage (Score 1) 188
Having checked a number of on-line news sites, the best real-time coverage seems to be on XKCD
yes, that's how I found out about it.
Comment link to archive (Score 1) 1
http://xkcd1446.org/ has the complete archive; currently at about 120 images.
Submission + - XKCD covers comet landing "live" (xkcd.com) 1
garry_g writes: In yet another epic animated series, XKCD ist currently covering the Philae landing on comet 67P/Tschurjumow-Gerassimenko in real time.
OS X 10.10 Yosemite Review 305
An anonymous reader writes: With the release of OS X 10.10 Yosemite, Ars Technica has posted one of their extremely thorough reviews of the OS's new features and design changes. John Siracusa writes that Yosemite is particularly notable because it's the biggest step yet in Apple's efforts to bring OS X and iOS together — new technologies are now being added to Apple's two operating systems simultaneously. "The political and technical battles inherent in the former two-track development strategy for OS X and iOS left both products with uncomfortable feature disparities. Apple now correctly views this as damage and has set forth to repair it." Yosemite's look and feel has undergone significant changes as well, generally moving toward the flat and compact design present in iOS 7 & 8. Spotlight and the Notifications Center have gotten some needed improvements, as did many tab and toolbar interfaces.
Siracusa also takes a look a Swift, Apple's new programming language: "Swift is an attempt to create a low-level language with high-level syntax and semantics. It tackles the myth of the Sufficiently Smart Compiler by signing up to create that compiler as part of the language design process." He concludes: "Viewed in isolation, Yosemite provides a graphical refresh accompanied by a few interesting features and several new technologies whose benefits are mostly speculative, depending heavily on how eagerly they're adopted by third-party developers. But Apple no longer views the Mac in isolation, and neither should you. OS X is finally a full-fledged peer to iOS; all aspects of sibling rivalry have been banished."
Siracusa also takes a look a Swift, Apple's new programming language: "Swift is an attempt to create a low-level language with high-level syntax and semantics. It tackles the myth of the Sufficiently Smart Compiler by signing up to create that compiler as part of the language design process." He concludes: "Viewed in isolation, Yosemite provides a graphical refresh accompanied by a few interesting features and several new technologies whose benefits are mostly speculative, depending heavily on how eagerly they're adopted by third-party developers. But Apple no longer views the Mac in isolation, and neither should you. OS X is finally a full-fledged peer to iOS; all aspects of sibling rivalry have been banished."
