Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×
Security

The Real Story On WPA's Flaw 67

Glenn Fleishman writes "The reports earlier today on WPA's TKIP key type being cracked were incorrect. I spoke at length with Erik Tews, the joint author of the paper that discloses a checksum weakness in TKIP that allows individual short packets to be decrypted without revealing the TKIP key. I wrote this up for Ars Technica with quite a bit of background on WEP and WPA. Tews's paper, co-written with Martin Beck, whom he credits as discovering and implementing a working crack (in aircrack-ng as a module), describes a way to use a backwards-compatible part of TKIP to exploit a weakness that remains from WEP. ARP packets and similarly short packets can be decoded. Longer packets are likely still safe, and TKIP hasn't been cracked. Don't believe the hype, but the exploit is still notable."
Linux Business

Red Hat CEO Says Economic Crisis Favors Open Source 191

arashtamere writes "Red Hat president and CEO Jim Whitehurst predicts the enterprise open source software business will emerge from the economic crisis stronger than the proprietary market. 'I've had a couple of conversations with CIOs who said, "We're a Microsoft shop and we don't use any open source whatsoever, but we're already getting pressure to reduce our operating costs and we need you to help put together a plan for us to... use open source to reduce our costs." And we've had other customers literally looking at ripping and replacing WebLogic or WebSphere for JBoss ... I think we'll know in about six to nine months but there is no question that open source will come out of this in relatively better shape than our proprietary competitors,' he told Computerworld."
Cellphones

Submission + - petition to switch off iPhone autocorrection (please-let-us-disable-autocorrection-steve.com)

theonlyholle writes: "A swiss web designer has created an online petition asking Apple to allow users to switch off the auto-correction feature on the iPhone. This has long been one of the more annoying features of the iPhone firmware, especially since it gives preference to its own suggestions over what the user typed. German speaking users have been particularly plagued with the iPhone's strange obsession with umlauts..."
Programming

Submission + - The trouble with the latest AJAX gimmicks (po-ru.com)

theonlyholle writes: "Paul Battley hits it spot on in his blog article on the pains of using so many AJAX pages on small screen devices today. Using the oh-so-popular lightboxes as an example, he shows how they take away user choice and usability (not just, but especially on devices like the EeePC). Commenters suggest that most designers hate these features, but customers want them anyway and sales people are happy for the extra hours to bill them for."

Comment why would she work for IBM... she works for me :) (Score 5, Interesting) 340

At least I've paid her a couple of times and I suspect others have done the same. There are some very convenient donation links on Groklaw and for every donation I have sent so far I have received a friendly "thankyou" email. But even if she *did* work for IBM, that wouldn't change the facts of the case and I would still enjoy reading the legal analysis, which is pretty sound once you take out the sometimes over the top OSS "fangirlism" that I occasionally find a bit annyoing.
Input Devices

Submission + - Surface Wave Touch Technology might be next

ranga_the_don writes: "
Hugo Ortega of UberTablet provides us with an in-depth look at "Surface Wave Technology", a touchscreen that "registers coordinates by interacting with a sound wave that crosses the screen." Video after the jump. Quite literally X and Y coordinates (cursor movements) are recorded by someone breaking this Sound Wave by placing their finger on the screen
"
Media

Submission + - The future of Creative and the sound card market

Hanners writes: "Elite Bastards investigates the future of Creative Labs, and in particular their PC sound card business, which is facing a number of big challenges during 2007. Windows Vista has seen some large changes to the driver model required by audio devices, the abilities of on-board solutions have improved somewhat, and the amount of competition in the market place has ballooned. So what does all of this mean for the traditional leader of this market? As well as outlining all of these issues, they speculate as to what measures Creative may need to take to thrive once more in this changing market."
Games

Submission + - Xbox 360 lacks precautions measures to prevent scr

janp writes: "The Dutch TV program Kassa asked Hardware.Info to investigate the complaints of many Xbox 360 owners that their console scratches their gamediscs and renders them useless. Although they couldn't reproduce the problem completely, Hardware.Info did find out that the Xbox lacks some precaution measures that prevents the lens from scratching discs: where many PC DVD-drives have a sort of cushions around the lens that prevent scratching, the Xbox 360 drive doesn't provide any safety measures whatsoever. Kassa received hundreds of complaints and is now preparing a legal claim against Microsoft."

Slashdot Top Deals

"When the going gets tough, the tough get empirical." -- Jon Carroll

Working...