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Submission + - Why we're not going to see sub-orbital airliners (antipope.org)

Submitted by glowend
glowend writes: While this article is ostensibly about sub-orbital flight, I'm more interested in the general proposition. FTA: "One of the failure modes of extrapolative SF is to assume that just because something is technologically feasible, it will happen."
Movies

Box Office 2014: Moviegoing Hits Two-Decade Low 400

Posted by timothy from the thanks-kim-jung-il dept.
mrspoonsi writes The number of people going to the movies in 2014 in North America slipped to its lowest level in two decades. According to preliminary estimates, roughly 1.26 billion consumers purchased cinema tickets between Jan. 1 and Dec. 31. That's the lowest number since 1.21 billion in 1995. Year-over-year, attendance looks to be off 6 percent from 2013, when admissions clocked in at 1.34 billion. Admissions have fluctuated dramatically over the years, and particularly since the advent of modern-day 3D, which can skew the average ticket price. Movie going in North America hit an all-time high in 2002, when 1.57 billion consumers lined up, thanks in part to Spider-Man, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, Star Wars: Episode II — Attack of the Clones, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets and My Big Fat Greek Wedding.
Businesses

Hunting For a Tech Job In 2015 174

Posted by samzenpus from the get-to-work dept.
Nerval's Lobster writes It's a brand new year, and by at least some indications the economy's doing pretty well, which means that a lot of people will begin looking for a new, possibly better job. If you're looking to trade up, here are some tips, some of which are pretty standard-issue ("Update resume," etc.), and others that could actually stand you in good stead, including using the Bureau of Labor Statistics to judge the median salary for a position before negotiating with HR. According to Glassdoor, Dice, and other sources, the average salary for many kinds of tech workers will only rise over the next year, so it really could be a good time to see what's out there. Good luck.
Data Storage

Apple Faces Class Action Lawsuit For Shrinking Storage Space In iOS 8 325

Posted by samzenpus from the too-much-room dept.
An anonymous reader notes that Apple is being sued over claims that iOS 8 uses too much storage space on the company's devices. "Ever wonder why there never is enough space on your iPhone or iPad? A lawsuit filed this week against Apple Inc. alleges that upgrades to the iOS 8 operating system are to blame, and that the company has misled customers about it. In the legal complaint filed in California, Miami residents Paul Orshan and Christopher Endara accuse Apple of "storage capacity misrepresentations and omissions" relating to Apple's 8 GB and 16GB iPhones, iPads and iPods. Orshan has two iPhone 5 and two iPads while Endara had purchased an iPhone 6. They contend the upgrades to the operating system end up taking up as much as 23 percent of the storage space on their devices."
Moon

Private Russian Company Proposes Lunar Base 81

Posted by samzenpus from the welcome-to-the-neighborhood dept.
MarkWhittington writes According to an article in Sputnik, a private Russian company called Lin Industrial has announced that it is capable of building a lunar base. However, according to information contained to a recent post in Parabolic Arc, this announcement may be more the result of idle boasting than an objective assessment of actual ability. Nevertheless, Lin seems to be one of the few entrepreneurial startups in Russia in the style of much more robust enterprises in the West such as SpaceX and Blue Origin.
Image

South Korean Activist To Drop "The Interview" In North Korea Using Balloons 146

Posted by samzenpus from the it's-raining-movies dept.
Siddharth Srinivas writes Park Sang Hak, a North Korean democracy activist, said he will start dropping 100,000 DVDs and USBs with Sony's The Interview by balloon in North Korea as early as late January. He's partnering with the U.S.-based non-profit Human Rights Foundation, which is financing the making of the DVDs and USB memory sticks of the movie with Korean subtitles.
Security

FBI Monitoring Hacking Targets For Retaliation 96

Posted by Soulskill from the never-start-a-fight-but-always-end-one dept.
An anonymous reader writes: As high profile security breaches continue to grab headlines, little is being done visibly by the government to prevent future attacks. This is prompting some victims (and potential victims) to find creative ways to stop the hackers. The FBI is now concerned that U.S. companies and institutions are themselves breaking laws by retaliating with cyberattacks of their own. "In February 2013, U.S officials met with bank executives in New York. There, a JPMorgan official proposed that the banks hit back from offshore locations, disabling the servers from which the attacks were being launched ... Federal investigators later discovered that a third party had taken some of the servers involved in the attack offline, according to the people familiar with the situation. Based on that finding, the FBI began investigating whether any U.S. companies violated anti-hacking laws in connection with the strike on those servers, according to people familiar with the probe."

Submission + - Out With the Red-Light Cameras, In With the Speeding Cameras (go.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Have you enjoyed reading the constant flow of news about how red light cameras are failing? They've been installed under the shadow of corruption, they don't increase safety, and major cities are dropping them. Well, the good news is that red-light cameras are on the decline in the U.S. The bad news is that speeding cameras are on the rise. From the article: "The number of U.S. communities using red-light cameras has fallen 13 percent, to 469, since the end of 2012, according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, a nonprofit scientific and educational organization funded by the insurance industry. That includes the 24 towns in New Jersey that participated in a pilot program that ended this month with no pending legislation to revive it. Meanwhile, the institute estimates that 137 communities use speed cameras, up from 115 at the end of 2011."

Submission + - The Open-Office Is Destroying The Workplace

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Lindsey Kaufman writes in the WaPo that despite its obvious problems, the open-office model has continued to encroach on workers across the country with about 70 percent of US. offices having no or low partitions. Silcon Valley has led the way with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg enlisting famed architect Frank Gehry to design the largest open floor plan in the world, housing nearly 3,000 engineers with a single room, stretching 10 acres, where everyone will sit in the open with moveable furniture. Michael Bloomberg was an early adopter of the open-space trend, saying it promoted transparency and fairness. Bosses love the ability to keep a closer eye on their employees, ensuring clandestine porn-watching, constant social media-browsing and unlimited personal cellphone use isn’t occupying billing hours. But according to Kaufman employers are getting a false sense of improved productivity with a 2013 study showing that many workers in open offices are frustrated by distractions that lead to poorer work performance. Nearly half of the surveyed workers in open offices said the lack of sound privacy was a significant problem for them and more than 30 percent complained about the lack of visual privacy. The New Yorker, in a review of research on this nouveau workplace design, determined that the benefits in building camaraderie simply mask the negative effects on work performance. While employees feel like they’re part of a laid-back, innovative enterprise, the environment ultimately damages workers’ attention spans, productivity, creative thinking, and satisfaction says Kaufman. "Though multitasking millennials seem to be more open to distraction as a workplace norm, the wholehearted embrace of open offices may be ingraining a cycle of underperformance in their generation," writes Maria Konnikova. "They enjoy, build, and proselytize for open offices, but may also suffer the most from them in the long run."
Advertising

Lizard Squad: Xbox Live, PSN Attacks Were a 'Marketing Scheme' For DDoS Service 139

Posted by timothy from the now-how-much-would-you-pay? dept.
blottsie writes The devastating Christmas Day attacks against the gaming networks of Sony and Microsoft were a marketing scheme for a commercial cyberattack service, according to the hackers claiming responsibility for the attacks. Known as Lizard Squad, the hacker collective says it shut down the PlayStation Network (PSN) and Xbox Live network on Dec. 25 using a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, a common technique that overloads servers with data requests. The powerful attacks rendered the networks unusable for days, infuriating gamers around the world and causing yet-untold losses of revenue. Now, members of Lizard Squad say the group is selling the DDoS service they used against Sony and Microsoft to anyone willing to pay.

Submission + - License Plate Reader Technology Looks At Faces (thenewspaper.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Police and private companies link facial recognition software to databases that track motorists.

The leading suppler of automated license plate reader technology in the US is expanding its offerings to law enforcement. Vehicle owners have already had their movements tracked by the company Vigilant Solutions, which boasts 2 billion entries in its nationwide database, with 70 million additional license plate photographs being added each month. Now passengers can also be tracked if they hitch a ride with a friend and are photographed by a camera aimed at the front of the car. The Livermore, California-based firm recently announced expanded integration of facial recognition technology into its offerings.

And the hits just keep on coming.

Submission + - Investigation IDs Crew of 6 Behind Hack of Sony, Including Former Employee (securityledger.com)

Submitted by chicksdaddy
chicksdaddy writes: Alternative theories of who is responsible for the hack of Sony Pictures Entertainment have come fast and furious (http://it.slashdot.org/story/14/12/24/1757224/did-north-korea-really-attack-sony)in recent weeks- especially since the FBI pointed a finger at the government of North Korea last week. (http://news.slashdot.org/story/14/12/18/0249222/us-links-north-korea-to-sony-hacking) But Norse Security is taking the debate up a notch: saying that they have conclusive evidence pointing to group of disgruntled former employees as the source of the attack and data theft.

The Security Ledger quotes Norse Vice President Kurt Stammberger saying that Norse has identified a group of six individuals — in the U.S., Canada, Singapore and Thailand — that it believes carried out the attack, including at least one 10 year employee of SPE who worked in a technical capacity before being laid off in May.(https://securityledger.com/2014/12/new-clues-in-sony-hack-point-to-insiders-away-from-dprk/)

Rather than starting from the premise that the Sony hack was a state sponsored attack, Norse researchers worked their investigation like any other criminal matter: starting by looking for individuals with the "means and motive" to do the attack. HR files leaked in the hack provided the motive part: a massive restructuring in Spring, 2014, in which many longtime SPE employees were laid off.

After researching the online footprint of a list of all the individuals who were fired and had the means to be able to access sensitive data on Sony's network, Norse said it identified a handful who expressed anger in social media posts following their firing. They included one former employee — a 10 year SPE veteran who he described as having a “very technical background.” Researchers from the company followed that individual online, noting participation in IRC (Internet Relay Chat) forums where they observed communications with other individuals affiliated with underground hacking and hacktivist groups in Europe and Asia.

According to Stammberger, the Norse investigation was eventually able to connect an individual directly involved in conversations with the Sony employee with a server on which the earliest known version of the malware used in the attack was compiled, in July, 2014.

While Stammberger admits that some clues in the investigation seemed to point to attackers in one of the Koreas, he says those paths all turned into dead ends, and that Norse investigators found no convincing evidence of North Korean involvement in the incident.

According to Stammberger, the company is briefing the FBI on its investigation on Monday. I'd love to be a fly on the wall in that room!
Government

Snowden Documents Show How Well NSA Codebreakers Can Pry 278

Posted by timothy from the keeping-you-well-under-surveillance dept.
Der Spiegel has published today an excellent summary of what some of Edward Snowden's revelations show about the difficulty (or, generally, ease) with which the NSA and collaborating intelligence services can track, decrypt, and correlate different means of online communication. An interesting slice: The NSA and its allies routinely intercept [HTTPS] connections -- by the millions. According to an NSA document, the agency intended to crack 10 million intercepted https connections a day by late 2012. The intelligence services are particularly interested in the moment when a user types his or her password. By the end of 2012, the system was supposed to be able to "detect the presence of at least 100 password based encryption applications" in each instance some 20,000 times a month. For its part, Britain's GCHQ collects information about encryption using the TLS and SSL protocols -- the protocols https connections are encrypted with -- in a database called "FLYING PIG." The British spies produce weekly "trends reports" to catalog which services use the most SSL connections and save details about those connections. Sites like Facebook, Twitter, Hotmail, Yahoo and Apple's iCloud service top the charts, and the number of catalogued SSL connections for one week is in the many billions -- for the top 40 sites alone. ... The NSA also has a program with which it claims it can sometimes decrypt the Secure Shell protocol (SSH). This is typically used by systems administrators to log into employees' computers remotely, largely for use in the infrastructure of businesses, core Internet routers and other similarly important systems. The NSA combines the data collected in this manner with other information to leverage access to important systems of interest.

Submission + - Chaos Computer Club Claims It Can Reproduce Fingerprints From People's Photos 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Chaos Computer Club, Europe’s largest association of hackers, claims it can reproduce your fingerprints from a couple of photos that show your fingers. At the 31st annual Chaos Computer Club convention in Hamburg, Germany, Jan Krissler, also known by his alias "Starbug," explained how he copied the thumbprint of German Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen. Because these fingerprints can be used for biometric authentication, Starbug believes that after his talk, "politicians will presumably wear gloves when talking in public."
Education

White House Touts Obama's 1-Liner as 2014 Tech Highlight 65

Posted by timothy from the wrestling-bears-for-their-usb-keys-#2 dept.
theodp (442580) writes That President Obama became the first President to write a line of code (as a top Microsoft lobbyist looked on) is #1 on the White House's Top 9 science and technology highlights from 2014. To kick off this year's Hour of Code, the President 'learned to code' by moving a Disney Princess Elsa character 100 pixels on a screen, first by dragging-and-dropping Blockly puzzle pieces and then by coding 1 line of JavaScript. Interestingly, Bill Clinton might have been The First President To Write Code had Microsoft seen fit to use its patented, circa-1995 Graphical Programming System and Method for Enabling a Person to Learn Text-Based Programming — which describes how kids as young as 8-12 years of age can be taught to program by progressing from creating a program using graphical objects to doing so using text-based programming — to teach President Clinton to code some 20 years ago!

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