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Submission + - Did Hillary Commit a Felony? (nationalreview.com) 1

Submitted by bhlowe
bhlowe writes: Hilliary used a private email server hosted at her house to conduct business as Secretary of State under a pseudonym. This appears to be in violation of US law that may exclude her from holding office. A mock twitter account has been set up using the pseudonym of the "administrator" of her server, Eric Hoteham. In 2000, Hillary Clinton says she gave up using email because of the number of investigations she's been under.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot - Private-cloud file hosting software for linux, like Google Drive?

Submitted by TarpaKungs
TarpaKungs writes: I'm Asking Slashdot because I *know* this is a growing problem, but I have failed to find a suitable soution. Here's hoping the collective intelligence of Slashdot will prevail :)

OK — you have lots of android devices and maybe a several Chromebooks: Google Drive is great — it works well, it has user selectable offline caching ("Keep on device") — and most importantly, it handles updates from multiple clients gracefully. The main problem with this is reliability (will the service stay there), security, privacy and cost.

"Cost" because I have several terabytes of data (mostly photos, but a lot of other important files and documents) on an existing linux infrastructure which is well maintained, raid-ed and backed up. A small fraction of this it would be nice to replicate to all my client devices. The rest would be nice just to have on demand, subject to a network connection.

"Privacy and security" because I have lots of data that I don't want to lose control of.

I have been searching for a long time and have yet to find any self hosted software that has the technical abilities of Google Drive or Dropbox. Adding to that, the ability to maintain a secondary sync'd full copy of specific shares on linux (eg on my laptop) would be cool — but not crucial. However a general access linux client is a must.

I'm not looking for the all singing all dancing features of Google Drive such as live spreadsheets in my browser or any of the ancillary features like email and calendars. Simply good honest robust file serving with client offline mode (aka local cached copy, user selectable file by file or folder by folder) and no issues with multiple clients updating files.

I've tried Tonido and Owncloud and neither play nice with POSIX user permissions — they seem to want to own the files and manage access at a server level. Owncloud free seems also to be limited to a single share and enterprise pricing on both products is very high (3 to 4 figures) with no hobbyist/home licensing tier.

Simpler scenarios like SFTP and SMB of course do play nice with the local user permissions, but are not so bright on the client side — ie no offline mode. I did look down the WebDAV route but again, I have failed to find any client apps that are smart about offline mode. I suspect Google and Dropbox add some additional stuff to their protocols to push notifications of changes to other connected clients and also to manage the concept of "who has the latest copy".

So I guess what I am looking for is either a whole server/client suite that works or at least an SFTP/SMB/WebDAV client that is a bit smarter. Here's hoping the collective intelligence of Slashdot will prevail :)

Submission + - Open source mapping plays important role in humanitarian response (opensource.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Open source and crowdsourcing—uttering these words at a meeting of the United Nations before the year 2010 would have made you persona non grata. In fact, the fastest way to discredit yourself at any humanitarian meeting just five years ago was to suggest the use of open source software and crowdsourcing in disaster response. Then, a tragic earthquake occured in Haiti in 2010, and OpenStreetMap and Ushahidi were deployed in the aftermath.

Their use demonstrated the potential of free and open source crowdsourcing platforms in humanitarian contexts.

Then, Typhoon Ruby in the Philippines occured five years later. What technology was used?

Submission + - IoT devices not secured by design (zdnet.com)

Submitted by irl_4795
irl_4795 writes: Internet of Things devices are not originally built to be robust against attacks, resulting in vulnerabilities that can lead to severe repercussions if left unchecked, such as data that's being collected and acted upon in Singapore's smart nation plan.

Submission + - Hillary Clinton Used Personal Email at State Dept., Possibly Breaking Rules (nytimes.com) 1

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: The NYT reports that Hillary Rodham Clinton exclusively used a personal email account to conduct government business as secretary of state, State Department officials said, and may have violated federal requirements that officials’ correspondence be retained as part of the agency’s record. Clinton did not have a government email address during her four-year tenure at the State Department. Her aides took no actions to have her personal emails preserved on department servers at the time, as required by the Federal Records Act. “It is very difficult to conceive of a scenario — short of nuclear winter — where an agency would be justified in allowing its cabinet-level head officer to solely use a private email communications channel for the conduct of government business,” says Jason R. Baron. A spokesman for Clinton defended her use of the personal email account and said she has been complying with the “letter and spirit of the rules.”

Submission + - Google Quietly Backs Away From Encrypting New Lollilop Devices by Default

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Although Google announced in September 2014 that Android 5.0 Lollipop would require full-disk encryption by default in new cell phones, Ars Technica has found otherwise in recently-released 2nd-gen Moto E and Galaxy S6. It turns out, according to the latest version of the Android Compatibility Definition document (PDF), full-disk encryption is currently only "very strongly recommended" in anticipation of mandatory encryption requirements in the future. The moral of the story is don't be lazy; check that your full-disk encryption is actually enabled.

Submission + - Blackphone 2 caters to the enterprise, the security-minded and the paranoid (betanews.com)

Submitted by Mark Wilson
Mark Wilson writes: Yep, we know all about the NSA, thanks Edward. Yeah, it's possible (probable?) that a government agent somewhere is listening to or recording your conversations. And yes, even if you're not one of the tin-foil hat brigade, there's a danger that someone could tap into your phone. But you don’t have to be paranoid to want security; there are plenty of companies and enterprise customers for whom security is of the utmost importance.

While much of the news coming out of MWC 2015 has been dominated by Microsoft's Lumia 640, the Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge, and tablets from Sony, there's always room for something a little different. Following on from the security-focused Blackphone, Silent Circle used the Barcelona event to announce the follow-up — the Blackphone 2.

Submission + - Feds admit Stingray can disrupt bystanders' communications

Submitted by linuxwrangler
linuxwrangler writes: The government has fought hard to keep details about use and effects of the controversial Stingray device secret. But this Wired article points to recently released documents in which the government admits that the device can cause collatoral damage to other network users. The controversy has heated to the point that Florida senator Bill Nelson has made combative statments that such devices will inevitably force lawmakers to come up with new ways to protect privacy — a comment that is even more remarkable considering that the Stingray is produced by Harris Corporation which is headquartered in Nelson's home state.

Submission + - Cameras to "see" cancer

Submitted by Champaklal
Champaklal writes: Inspired by the mantis shrimp's ability to see polarized light, scientists are working on developing cameras to detect cancerous cells. The mantis shrimp has compound eyes which has 16 different kinds of photocells (compared to humans, we have only 3).

The camera uses aluminum nano wires to replicate the polarization sensitive ommatidia photocells in shrimps. They placed the nanowires on top of photodiodes to finally convert image into electrical signals. The complete paper can be found here.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Multimedia based wiki for learning and business procedures?

Submitted by kyle11
kyle11 writes: I'm scratching my head at how to develop a decent wiki for a large organization I work in. We support multiple technologies, across multiple locations, and have ways of doing things that become exponentially convoluted. I give IT training to many of these users for a particular technology, and other people do for other stuff as well.

Now, I hate wikis because everyone who did one before failed and gave them a bad name. If it starts wrong, it is doomed to failure and irrelevance.

What I'm looking for would be something like a Wiki with Youtube built in — make a playlist of videos with embedded links for certain job based tasks. And reuse and recycle those videos in other playlists of other tasks as they may be applicable. It would go beyond the actual IT we work with and would include things like "welcome to working in this department, here's 20 videos detailing stupid procedures you need to go through to request access to customer's systems/networks/databases to even think about doing your job"

I tried MediaWiki and Xwiki, and maybe I'm doing it wrong, but I can't seem to find a way to tweak them to Youtube-level simplicity for anyone to contribute to without giving up on the thing cause its a pain in the butt.

My only real requirement is that it not be cloud-based because it will contain certain sensitive information and I'd like it all to live on 1 virtual machine if at all possible.

I can't be the only one with this problem of enabling many people to contribute and sort their knowledge without knowing how an HTML tag works, or copying files into something more complicated than a web browser. What approaches have any of you out there taken to trying to solve a similar problem?

Submission + - From the Maker of Arduboy: Tetris on a Bracelet

Submitted by timothy
timothy writes: Kevin Bates showed off his tiny ("credit card sized") homebrewed game-playing rig at OSCON this summer; not content with merely wallet sized, he's now squeezed enough display — three of them, lacking a curved display to wrap around the wrist — input sensors, and processing power (Atmega 328p) to play Tetris on a tiny, multi-segmented bracelet (video). Sure, there's been Tetris on watches before, but from large-budget companies, not — at least not that I've ever seen — from hackers. Bates' post gives some more technical details, too.

Submission + - Struck By Lightening

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Ferris Jabr writes in Outside Magazine that every year, more than 500 Americans are struck by lightning. Roughly 90 percent of them will survive but those that survive will be instantly, fundamentally altered in ways that still leave scientists scratching their heads. For example Michael Utley was a successful stockbroker who often went skiing and windsurfing before he was struck by lightening. Today, at 62, he lives on disability insurance. “I don’t work. I can’t work. My memory’s fried, and I don’t have energy like I used to. I aged 30 years in a second. I walk and talk and play golf—but I still fall down. I’m in pain most of the time. I can’t walk 100 yards without stopping. I look like a drunk.” Lightning also dramatically altered Utley's personality. “It made me a mean, ornery son of a bitch. I’m short-tempered. Nothing is fun anymore. I am just not the same person my wife married." Utley created a website devoted to educating people about preventing lightning injury and started regularly speaking at schools and doing guest spots on televised weather reports.

Mary Ann Cooper, professor emerita at the University of Illinois at Chicago, is one of the few medical doctors who have attempted to investigate how lightning alters the brain’s circuitry. According to Cooper the evidence suggests that lightning injuries are, for the most part, injuries to the brain, the nervous system, and the muscles. Lightning can ravage or kill cells, but it can also leave a trail of much subtler damage and Cooper and other researchers speculate that chronic issues are the result of lightning scrambling each individual survivor’s unique internal circuitry. "Those who attempt to return to work often find they are unable to carry out their former functions and after a few weeks, when coworkers get weary of 'covering' for them, they either are put on disability (if they are lucky) or fired," writes Cooper. "Survivors often find themselves isolated because friends, family and physicians do not recognize their disability or feel they are 'faking'. (PDF)"

Submission + - Researchers Develop Purely Optical Cloaking

Submitted by Rambo Tribble
Rambo Tribble writes: Researchers, at the University of Rochester, have developed a remarkably effective visual cloak using a relatively simple arrangement of optical lenses. The method is unique in that it uses off-the-shelf components and provides cloaking through the visible spectrum. Also, it works in 3-D. As one researcher put it, "This is the first device that we know of that can do three-dimensional, continuously multidirectional cloaking, which works for transmitting rays in the visible spectrum." Bonus: The article includes instructions to build your own.

Submission + - Why the Z-80's data pins are scrambled (righto.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Z-80 microprocessor has been around since 1976, and it was used in many computers at the beginning of the PC revolution. (For example, the TRS-80, Commodore 128, and ZX Spectrum.) Ken Shirriff has been working on reverse engineering the Z-80, and one of the things he noticed is that the data pins coming out of the chip are in seemingly random order: 4, 3, 5, 6, 2, 7, 0, 1. (And a +5V pin is stuck in the middle.) After careful study, he's come up with an explanation for this seemingly odd design. "The motivation behind splitting the data bus is to allow the chip to perform activities in parallel. For instance an instruction can be read from the data pins into the instruction logic at the same time that data is being copied between the ALU and registers. ... [B]ecause the Z-80 splits the data bus into multiple segments, only four data lines run to the lower right corner of the chip. And because the Z-80 was very tight for space, running additional lines would be undesirable. Next, the BIT instructions use instruction bits 3, 4, and 5 to select a particular bit. This was motivated by the instruction structure the Z-80 inherited from the 8080. Finally, the Z-80's ALU requires direct access to instruction bits 3, 4, and 5 to select the particular data bit. Putting these factors together, data pins 3, 4, and 5 are constrained to be in the lower right corner of the chip next to the ALU. This forces the data pins to be out of sequence, and that's why the Z-80 has out-of-order data pins."

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