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Open Source

Submission + - Red Hat Fights Patent Troll With GPL (itworld.com)

Submitted by
jfruh
jfruh writes: "Red Hat is in the middle of a patent lawsuit with Twin Peaks Software, which claims that a Red Hat subsidiary is abusing a Twin Peaks filesystem lawsuit. Now, Red Hat is launching an intriguing countermeasure: the company claims that Twin Peaks' own closed source software violates the GPL because it makes use of an open source disk utility that Red Hat holds the copyright no. Is this a smart move on Red Hat's part?"
News

Submission + - Post mortem on malware served from major Dutch news site, infecting thousands (fox-it.com)

Submitted by
joost.bijl
joost.bijl writes: "nu.nl, one of the biggest news sites of the Netherlands has been serving malware during lunch time, infecting thousands. Fox IT has published a post mortem analysis of the sinowal malware with some interesting results. The malware seems to be defunct. The attack seems to be carefully planned however. The source of the incident points to Russia."

Comment Correction: Link to Translated Story (Score 1) 1

by lbalbalba (#39375431) Attached to: Location stolen iPad insufficient evidence for Dutch authorities
Iphone

Submission + - Location stolen iPad insufficient evidence for Dutch authorities 1

Submitted by lbalbalba
lbalbalba writes: A location message send from a stolen iPad by an anti-theft application, turns out to be insufficient evidence to issue a search warrant for the Dutch authorities. A Dutch man reported his iPad as stolen to the Dutch authorities last month. Despite the fact that the rightful owner was able to locate his iPad within hours of the theft, thanks to the anti-theft application he had installed, the Dutch authorities did not issue a warrant to perform a search. The app reported two possible addresses, indicating were the device could located. 'One of them is the residency of an elderly couple. For all we know, they could have bought the device on e-Bay. Furthermore, the police is requested to take action based solely on data retrieved by citizens. Should we really rely on such information ? According to the prosecutors, a search warrant is 'a very heavy measure, that invades the privacy of people. Something we do not take lightly. It should only be used when there is sufficient suspicion'. The theft report by the owner was viewed as 'subjective evidence' in the case.

Link to Orignal Story (Google translation)

Link to Ipad App:
Science

Submission + - Sexually-Rejected Flies Booze Way Harder Than Their Hunky Peers (vice.com)

Submitted by
derekmead
derekmead writes: "How’s this for hilariously depressing: male fruit flies who have their sexual advances rejected drink alcohol far more heavily than males who are regularly having sex.

Yes, you read that right. New research from a team at UC San Francisco has discovered that a tiny molecule in flies’ brains, called neuropeptide F, acts as a link between sexual rejection and excessive drinking. A similar molecule, neuropeptide Y, exists in humans, and as such the research helps shed light on what triggers human addiction."
Hardware

Submission + - Guy gets his old CCIE job back after stealing $2M from Cisco (businessinsider.com)

Submitted by
Julie188
Julie188 writes: "Imagine you are a Cisco CCIE working for a Cisco Gold reseller. You get convicted for stealing nearly $2 million worth of gear from Cisco through SMARTnet fraud. You are sentenced to 33 months in jail. You leave jail and your old company — a reseller that manages SMARTnet contracts — hires you right back. Tell me ... are honest CCIEs THAT hard to find?"

Submission + - Mammal Successful Before Dinosaur Extinction (canada.com)

Submitted by eternaldoctorwho
eternaldoctorwho writes: New evidence has been uncovered that suggests mammals were widely successful at least 20 million years before dinosaurs went extinct in the K-T asteroid impact. A recently published study in Nature by paleontologist Greg Wilson of the University of Washington reveals that multituberculates (a class of mice-like mammals named for the shape of their teeth) became abundant at the same time as the rise of flowering plants. So what did finally wipe out this now-extinct class of "multis"? University of Chicago paleontologist Zhe-Xi Luo has the answer, "You could say multituberculates were a good match against the dinosaurs, but they were no match for the rodents."

Submission + - Location stolen iPad insufficient for warrant for Dutch Authorities (google.com)

Submitted by lbalbalba
lbalbalba writes: A location message send from a stolen iPad by an anti-theft application, turns out to be insufficient 'evidence' to issue a search warrant for the Dutch authorities. A Dutch man reported his iPad as stolen to the Dutch authorities last month. Despite the fact that the rightful owner was able to locate his iPad within hours of the theft, thanks to the anti-theft application he had installed, the Dutch authorities did not issue a warrant to perform a search. According to the prosecutors, a search warrant is 'a very heavy measure', that should only be used when there is 'sufficient suspicion'. The theft report by the owner was viewed as 'no objective evidence' in the case.
Medicine

Submission + - Thousands of side-effects from mixing meds revealed (nature.com)

Submitted by ananyo
ananyo writes: An algorithm designed by US scientists to trawl through a plethora of drug interactions has yielded thousands of previously unknown side effects caused by taking drugs in combination (http://www.nature.com/news/drug-data-reveal-sneaky-side-effects-1.10220). The work provides a way to sort through the hundreds of thousands of 'adverse events' reported to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) each year.
The researchers developed an algorithm that would match data from each drug-exposed patient to a nonexposed control patient with the same condition. The approach automatically corrected for several known sources of bias, including those linked to gender, age and disease.
The team then used this method to compile a database of 1,332 drugs and possible side effects that were not listed on the labels for those drugs. The algorithm came up with an average of 329 previously unknown adverse events for each drug — far surpassing the average of 69 side effects listed on most drug labels.

Submission + - Dutch Telecom KPN Phone Systems Hacked

Submitted by lbalbalba
lbalbalba writes: Dutch Telecom company KPN-Telecom phone system had been hacked about a month ago. They didnt notify the authorities up about a week after discovering the break-in. The hack was made possible because the telecom didnt apply security updates, supposedly for years.The hackers had access to, and copied, about 16GB of private costumers data. According to the telecom, in theory the worst-case scenario would have been that thge hackers had been able to disable all telephone calls for all of it's customers: including the inability to call emergency service '211' (the equivalent of 911). What makes this interesting is the fact that all dutch telecoms are required by law to enable people to call emergency service '112' at all times.

Original story (In dutch)
http://nos.nl/artikel/339192-hoogste-alarmfase-na-hack-kpn.html

Google translation of dutch story:
http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=nl&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fnos.nl%2Fartikel%2F339192-hoogste-alarmfase-na-hack-kpn.html

Comment Re:Sounds like the PHP dev team... (Score 1) 334

by lbalbalba (#37248610) Attached to: Updated: Mozilla Community Contributor Departs Over Bug Handling
The problem was integrating the PHP plugin (nsapi ?) on Netscape/iPlanet webserver on AIX. Not the most common set up, I agree, but it was claimed to be 'supported'. Yea, I looked at the backtraces myself, but since im not a dev I couldnt get much useful info out of it, apart from the fact that the backtrace looked exactly the same over different versions of PHP. If there were specific requirements of using libfoo.so.14 instead of libfoo.so.15, then the devs could have made an effort to point me in that direction, instead of just saying over and over: 'oh, you are using an outdated version of PHP now, 3 months after you submitted your last backtrace. Now go do it again with the newest release'. Which then got the exact same results. And even if it would have 'obviously' been a problem with my compiler/linker/debugger (GCC on AIX), then it would have been helpful if the devs would have given me suggestions on what else to try besides: 'use the latest php version', even though the code that core dumped hasnt changed in eons. PHP devs suck.

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