Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Moon

Russia Wants To Establish a Permanent Moon Base 313

Posted by samzenpus from the one-of-these-days-Alisa dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Having established its presence in the Crimean Peninsula, Russia is now shooting for a bit loftier goal, a permanent Moon base. 'As reported by the Voice of Russia, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin told the government daily Rossiiskaya Gazeta that establishing a permanent Moon base has become one of the country's top space priorities. "The moon is not an intermediate point in the [space] race, it is a separate, even a self-contained goal," Rogozin reportedly said. "It would hardly be rational to make some ten or twenty flights to the moon, and then wind it all up and fly to the Mars or some asteroids."'"
Education

Is Germany Raising a Generation of Illiterates? 431

Posted by samzenpus from the me-write-pretty-one-day dept.
StartsWithABang (3485481) writes "Over at Starts With A Bang, the weekly question comes in from Germany, where we're informed: 'In Germany, many teachers have adopted a new way of teaching children to write properly. The way is called "Writing by Reading" and essentially says: Write as you wish, you're not bound by any rules. Recently, this way of teaching has been heavily criticized [link in German], but not before it has been "tested" on several years of school children.' The reading wars have been going on in the US, too, but will this wind up having a negative outcome? Or, as this piece argues, is it likely to be a wash?"
Security

Private Keys Stolen Within Hours From Heartbleed OpenSSL Site 151

Posted by samzenpus from the that-didn't-take-long dept.
Billly Gates (198444) writes "It was reported when heartbleed was discovered that only passwords would be at risk and private keys were still safe. Not anymore. Cloudfare launched the heartbleed challenge on a new server with the openSSL vulnerability and offered a prize to whoever could gain the private keys. Within hours several researchers and a hacker got in and got the private signing keys. Expect many forged certificates and other login attempts to banks and other popular websites in the coming weeks unless the browser makers and CA's revoke all the old keys and certificates."

Comment Re:Curiosity if you don't mind (Score 2, Informative) 693

by vadim_t (#46740937) Attached to: The GNOME Foundation Is Running Out of Money

The Linus/systemd controvery is long over btw. People had a conflict, yelled a bit at each other, then came up with patches, and everything went back to normal.

Personally I like at least the idea of systemd. It means I can make a single startup script, and have most of the work done by the system, instead of having to muck around with the minor differences of the ubuntu/debian/etc scripts.

Comment Re:From the parent article: (Score 4, Insightful) 693

by vadim_t (#46740891) Attached to: The GNOME Foundation Is Running Out of Money

Let me translate. They were fucking off by diverging from the core project into recreational political activities unrelated to their mission.

But that seems to be what a lot of people on Slashdot want. Look at the Mozilla and DropBox controversies. Lots of people posting and moderating support those.

No, I'd say what people here want in general is for an organization to be apolitical. Being against LGBT is bad, but doing activities related to LGBT is also bad. A software company is supposed to be a bunch of people coding and nothing else, ideally.

Deviations are allowed only for subjects related to the core mission: patents, copyright, open source, etc.
GNOME

The GNOME Foundation Is Running Out of Money 693

Posted by samzenpus from the coffers-are-bare dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The GNOME Foundation is running out of money. The foundation no longer has any cash reserves so they have voted to freeze non-essential funding for running the foundation. They are also hunting down sponsors and unpaid invoices to regain some delayed revenue. Those wishing to support the GNOME Foundation can become a friend of GNOME."
Businesses

The Comcast/TWC Merger Is About Controlling Information 107

Posted by Soulskill from the there's-a-party-at-comcast's-house-and-attendance-is-mandatory dept.
An anonymous reader sends this excerpt from The Consumerist: "Comcast and proposed merger partner Time Warner Cable claim they don't compete because their service areas don't overlap, and that a combined company would happily divest itself of a few million customers to keeps its pay-TV market share below 30%, allowing other companies that don't currently compete with Comcast to keep not competing with Comcast. This narrow, shortsighted view fails to take into account the full breadth of what's involved in this merger — broadcast TV, cable TV, network technology, in-home technology, access to the Internet, and much more. In addition to asking whether or not regulators should permit Comcast to add 10-12 million customers, there is a more important question at the core of this deal: Should Comcast be allowed to control both what content you consume and how you get to consume it?"

Comment Re:One word... (Score 3, Informative) 76

by Samantha Wright (#46735151) Attached to: Can Web-Based Protests Be a Force for Change?
Well, here's the tl;dr of TFA: Social media is the starting point. Hence the Arab Spring—you use Facebook or Twitter or whatever to spread your message and/or propaganda, and then accrue those with personal willingness to march and coordinate action through the net. Five dictators have been overthrown in the Middle East since December 2010 (as well as uprisings and protests in more than a dozen other countries) following social media germination, so clearly it's viable for that. Unfortunately this means it's also a single point of failure, as shown in Egypt when they depeered from the rest of the network in early 2011, easy to infiltrate and possible to manipulate.
Displays

3D Display Uses Misted Water 65

Posted by Soulskill from the bring-an-umbrella dept.
An anonymous reader points out work at the University of Bristol into interactive, 3-D displays created by projecting light on misted water. "These personal screens are both see-through and reach-through. The see-through feature provides direct line of sight of the personal screen and the elements behind it on the tabletop. The reach-through feature allows the user to switch from interacting with the personal screen to reaching through it to interact with the tabletop or the space above it. The personal screen allows a range of customisations and novel interactions such as presenting 2D personal content on the screen, 3D content above the tabletop or supplementing and renewing actual objects differently for each user."
Government

Canada Introduces Privacy Reforms That Encourage Warrantless Disclosure of Info 99

Posted by samzenpus from the what-do-you-want-to-know? dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Earlier this week, the government introduced the Digital Privacy Act (Bill S-4), the latest attempt to update Canada's private sector privacy law. Michael Geist reports that the bill includes a provision that could massively expand warrantless disclosure of personal information. Organizations will be permitted to disclose personal information without consent (and without a court order) to any organization that is investigating a contractual breach or possible violation of any law. This applies both past breaches or violations as well as potential future violations. Moreover, the disclosure occurs in secret without the knowledge of the affected person (who therefore cannot challenge the disclosure since they are not aware it is happening). Consider it a gift to copyright trolls, who won't need the courts to obtain information on thousands of Internet users."
The Almighty Buck

Comcast PAC Gave Money To Every Senator Examining Time Warner Cable Merger 133

Posted by samzenpus from the best-government-money-can-buy dept.
An anonymous reader writes in with news about money and politics that is sure to shock no one."It's no surprise that Comcast donates money to members of Congress. Political connections come in handy for a company seeking government approval of mergers, like Comcast's 2011 purchase of NBCUniversal and its proposed acquisition of Time Warner Cable (TWC). But just how many politicians have accepted money from Comcast's political arm? In the case of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which held the first congressional hearing on the Comcast/TWC merger yesterday, the answer is all of them."

Comment Re:One of the oldest semantic games played on /. (Score 2) 126

by ewhac (#46719391) Attached to: Photo Web Site Offers a Wall of Shame For Image Thieves

I see this old semantic game blooms anew on Slashdot. "It isn't stealing". Fine. It's fraud. Don't worry that your reputation is shot and/or somebody else is trading on your good name. It isn't stealing. Oh... the victim feels much better now.

I don't understand; what are you complaining about? You're correct. It isn't theft, it is fraud. So why call it theft when it's clearly something else?

If you call it by the correct name, you'll get community support, even among the "copying is not theft" crowd. OTOH, if you call it stealing, then you'll get mired in a gigantic semantic dogpile as hundreds of people re-litigate what constitutes "stealing."

We don't even need to raise the "Is it stealing?" question in this case. It's clearly fraud. So call it "fraud." Geez...

Comment Re:Low even for Slashdot (Score 1) 313

I think if James Clapper or Keith Alexander joined the board of DropBox you'd see the same issues. But they haven't.

Being a donor to one of two political choices (or often both) is one thing. That's very, very far removed from power. Actually having started wars whilst being Secretary of State is entirely different.

Slashdot Top Deals

Neutrinos have bad breadth.

Close