flynn23 - Slashdot User

Submission + - How to teach programming, to a retired automaker 1

Submitted by flynn23 on Monday December 28, 2009 @10:18PM

flynn23 writes: My father is 56 and newly "retired" after working for a Big 3 for over 35 years. He's still young and able and wanting to stay working and productive. He was a crack programmer while pursuing a CS degree in the mid-80s, and has good experience writing assembly language for IBM 36/360 systems as well as good CS principals (documentation, maintainable code, etc). What should he do to get back in the game? Buy a bunch of Ruby on Rails books and write the next Twitter mashup? Or should he stick with low level waterfall type stuff because it seems familiar? Many thanks for the community's thoughts and suggestions.

Submission + - GSM Decryption Published 3

Submitted by

Hugh Pickens

on Monday December 28, 2009 @03:11PM

Hugh Pickens writes: "The NY Times reports that German encryption expert Karsten Nohl says that he has deciphered and published the 21-year-old GSM algorithm, the secret code used to encrypt most of the world's digital mobile phone calls, in what he called an attempt to expose weaknesses in the security system used by about 3.5 billion of the 4.3 billion wireless connections across the globe. Others have cracked the A5/1 encryption technology used in GSM before, but their results have remained secret. “This shows that existing GSM security is inadequate,” Nohl told about 600 people attending the Chaos Communication Congress. “We are trying to push operators to adopt better security measures for mobile phone calls.” The GSM Association, the industry group based in London that devised the algorithm and represents wireless operators, called Mr. Nohl’s efforts illegal and said they overstated the security threat to wireless calls. “This is theoretically possible but practically unlikely,” says Claire Cranton, a GSM spokeswoman, noting that no one else had broken the code since its adoption. “What he is doing would be illegal in Britain and the United States. To do this while supposedly being concerned about privacy is beyond me.” Simon Bransfield-Garth, the chief executive of Cellcrypt, says Nohl's efforts could put sophisticated mobile interception technology — limited to governments and intelligence agencies — within the reach of any reasonable well-funded criminal organization. “This will reduce the time to break a GSM call from weeks to hours,” Bransfield-Garth says. “We expect as this further develops it will be reduced to minutes.”"

Submission + - Privacy Theater: Why Social Networks Only Pretend (techcrunch.com)

Submitted by

ScuttleMonkey

on Monday December 28, 2009 @03:11PM

" rel="nofollow">ScuttleMonkey writes: "Editor's note: The following guest post was written by Rohit Khare, the co-founder of Angstro. Building his latest project, social address book Knx.to, ..."

Submission + - North Magnetic Pole Moving East Due to Core Flux (asdflkjsdflkjasdflkjasdf.com) 1

Submitted by

ScuttleMonkey

on Monday December 28, 2009 @02:01PM

" rel="nofollow">ScuttleMonkey writes: "Earth's north magnetic pole is racing toward Russia at almost 40 miles (64 kilometers) a year due to magnetic changes in the planet's core, new research says."

Comment Re:We've got along well enough without (Score 1) 330

by flynn23 on Monday March 23, 2009 @04:26PM (#27303213) Attached to: Body 2.0 — Continuous Monitoring of the Human Body

Bullshit. Health care costs have spiraled out of control and there's every reason to believe this will be the next industry in line for a DC bailout. Don't you find it disturbing that you have more gages for performance/operation of your car than your own body? Maybe being able to see how choices impact your "vehicle" might be one of the keys to lowering costs of health care for yourself and society.

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