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

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:Complete-the-line with a pen (Score 5, Interesting) 709

by garbletext (#25662341) Attached to: In the U.S. election just ended, I voted ...
In Chicago for early voting, we used a system exactly as you describe by Sequoia, which made me feel pretty confident would be difficult to game. It was a pretty clear and easy to use touchscreen, and after you voted, a receipt describing each measure printed out and displayed through a window (you couldn't actually handle the receipt). You're then asked to confirm that everything is as you voted to finalize your vote; if not poll workers assured me the receipt is destroyed and you start over. This is exactly how it should be, an apparently custom OS on simple LCD screens (though I'd prefer buttons that have no possibility of miscalibration) with a voter verifiable paper trail. Receipt paper can't be that expensive, can it?
Security

Damning Report On Sequoia E-Voting Machine Security 200

Posted by kdawson from the worse-than-you-thought dept.
TechDirt notes the publication of the New Jersey voting machine study, the attempted suppression of which we have been discussing for a while now. The paper that the Princeton and Lehigh University researchers are releasing, as permitted by the Court, is "the same as the Court's redacted version, but with a few introductory paragraphs about the court case, Gusciora v. Corzine." What's new is the release of a 90-minute evidentiary video — the researchers have asked the court for permission to release a shorter version that hits the high points, as the high-res video is about 1 GB in size. See TechDirt's article for the report's executive summary listing eight ways the AVC Advantage 9.00 voting machine can be subverted.
Music

Details for Guitar Hero 4 Released 200

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the nothing-like-wailing-on-a-plastic-ukulele dept.
GameSpot is reporting that details for Guitar Hero 4 have been released. The biggest news seems to be that the new release will be adding drums and vocals a la Rock Band. The new drums are to offer three pressure-sensitive pads (which can tell if you are just tapping or really wailing), two elevated cymbals, and a pedal. "The details in Game Informer also clear up the mystery surrounding the 'innovation' which Activision promised was coming to the Guitar Hero series in a recent earnings report conference call. The article outlines the game's studio mode, which will give users a variety of ways to create their own songs. Players will be able to jam along with one of the game's existing tracks, record songs as they're played, or meticulously detail note charts."
Security

How the NSA Took Linux To the Next Level 172

Posted by Soulskill from the not-by-beating-the-end-boss-of-the-previous-level dept.
An anonymous reader brings us IBM Developerworks' recent analysis of how the NSA built SELinux to withstand attacks. The article shows us some of the relevant kernel architecture and compares SELinux to a few other approaches. We've discussed SELinux in the past. Quoting: "If you have a program that responds to socket requests but doesn't need to access the file system, then that program should be able to listen on a given socket but not have access to the file system. That way, if the program is exploited in some way, its access is explicitly minimized. This type of control is called mandatory access control (MAC). Another approach to controlling access is role-based access control (RBAC). In RBAC, permissions are provided based on roles that are granted by the security system. The concept of a role differs from that of a traditional group in that a group represents one or more users. A role can represent multiple users, but it also represents the permissions that a set of users can perform. SELinux adds both MAC and RBAC to the GNU/Linux operating system."
Patents

Submission + - Thousands of Patent Decisions May Be Undone (nytimes.com)

Submitted by prunedude
prunedude writes: According to the NY Times, John F. Duffy, who teaches at the George Washington University Law School, has discovered a constitutional flaw in the appointment process over the last eight years for judges who decide patent appeals and disputes, and his short paper documenting the problem seems poised to undo thousands of patent decisions concerning claims worth billions of dollars. His basic point does not appear to be in dispute. Since 2000, patent judges have been appointed by a government official without the constitutional power to do so. The Justice Department did warn that the impact of Professor Duffy's discovery could be cataclysmic for the patent world, casting "a cloud over many thousands of board decisions" and "unsettling the expectations of patent holders and licensees across the nation." But they did not say Professor Duffy was wrong.
Graphics

Adobe Opens the FLV and SWF Formats 262

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the getting-with-the-program dept.
Wolfcat writes to tell us that Adobe announced today that they are opening the SWF and FLV formats via the Open Screen Project. "The Open Screen Project is supported by technology leaders, including Adobe, ARM, Chunghwa Telecom, Cisco, Intel, LG Electronics Inc., Marvell, Motorola, Nokia, NTT DoCoMo, Qualcomm, Samsung Electronics Co., Sony Ericsson, Toshiba and Verizon Wireless, and leading content providers, including BBC, MTV Networks, and NBC Universal, who want to deliver rich Web and video experiences, live and on-demand across a variety of devices. The Open Screen Project is working to enable a consistent runtime environment — taking advantage of Adobe Flash Player and, in the future, Adobe AIR — that will remove barriers for developers and designers as they publish content and applications across desktops and consumer devices, including phones, mobile internet devices (MIDs), and set top boxes."
The Courts

Lecture Notes Considered Infringement 385

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the great-ways-to-encourage-and-enrich dept.
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "According to a new lawsuit, taking notes in class is copyright infringement. Of course, it's not quite that simple. The professor is partnered with an E-book maker that wants to sell the material themselves, and the people taking notes pay students to take good ones, then sell copies to everyone else. But that just means that the case will hinge upon whether or not lecture notes are fair use. Either way, I wonder how long it will be before you will have to sign a EULA whenever you walk into class"
The Courts

RIAA "Making Available" Theory Rejected 168

Posted by kdawson from the complaint-without-a-complaint dept.
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "In a 25-page decision (PDF) which has been awaited for two years in Elektra v. Barker, Judge Kenneth M. Karas has rejected the RIAA's 'making available' theory and its 'authorization' theory, but sustained the sufficiency of the complaint's allegations of 'distribution' and 'downloading,' and also gave the RIAA 30 days to cure the defects in its complaint by filing a new complaint. The judge left it open for the RIAA to allege that defendant made an 'offer to distribute,' and that the offer was for "'the purpose of further distribution,' which, the judge held, would be actionable."
Science

Hyper-Entangled Photons — 'Superdense' Coding Gets Denser 72

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the so-tangling-is-a-good-thing dept.
ScienceDaily is reporting that researchers at the University of Illinois have broken the record for most information sent via a single photon using the direction of "wiggling" and "twisting" a pair of entangled photons. "Using linear elements, however, the standard protocol is fundamentally limited to convey only one of three messages, or 1.58 bits. The new experiment surpasses that threshold by employing pairs of photons entangled in more ways than one (hyper-entangled). As a result, additional information can be sent and correctly decoded to achieve the full power of dense coding."

What Programming Languages Should You Learn Next? 759

Posted by Zonk from the anything-but-haskell dept.
simoniker writes "Over at Dobbs Code Talk, Chris Diggins has been discussing programming languages beyond C++ or Java, suggesting options such as Ruby ('does a great job of showing how powerful a dynamic language can be, and leverages powerful ideas from Smalltalk, Perl, and Lisp') but suggesting Scala as a first choice ('Very accessible to programmers from different backgrounds.') What would your choice be for programmers extending beyond their normal boundaries?"

Slashdot Top Deals

"Ninety percent of baseball is half mental." -- Yogi Berra

Close