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Comment one thing seemingly missed (Score 3, Insightful) 341

by yagu (#43966603) Attached to: What Can You Find Out From Metadata?
I hear over and over in this discussion the salve "only the metadata has been recorded".

I'm guessing that's simply a function of limited technology, i.e., "today" that's just too much data to store. But in keeping with technologies amazing storage capacity growth, it's only a matter of time before the content is also recorded and archived. It's just too tempting not to.

Comment most excellent! (Score 1) 8

by yagu (#43915591) Attached to: New job
congratulations! you have moved into one of the better settings of taking over predecessor's work! (unfortunately, I'm not making that up.)
Mars

4-Billion-Pixel Panorama View From Curiosity Rover 101

Posted by samzenpus from the take-a-look dept.
A reader points out that there is a great new panorama made from shots from the Curiosity Rover. "Sweep your gaze around Gale Crater on Mars, where NASA's Curiosity rover is currently exploring, with this 4-billion-pixel panorama stitched together from 295 images. ...The entire image stretches 90,000 by 45,000 pixels and uses pictures taken by the rover's two MastCams. The best way to enjoy it is to go into fullscreen mode and slowly soak up the scenery — from the distant high edges of the crater to the enormous and looming Mount Sharp, the rover's eventual destination."
Networking

Misconfigured Open DNS Resolvers Key To Massive DDoS Attacks 179

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the check-your-sources dept.
msm1267 writes with an excerpt From Threat Post: "While the big traffic numbers and the spat between Spamhaus and illicit webhost Cyberbunker are grabbing big headlines, the underlying and percolating issue at play here has to do with the open DNS resolvers being used to DDoS the spam-fighters from Switzerland. Open resolvers do not authenticate a packet-sender's IP address before a DNS reply is sent back. Therefore, an attacker that is able to spoof a victim's IP address can have a DNS request bombard the victim with a 100-to-1 ratio of traffic coming back to them versus what was requested. DNS amplification attacks such as these have been used lately by hacktivists, extortionists and blacklisted webhosts to great success." Running an open DNS resolver isn't itself always a problem, but it looks like people are enabling neither source address verification nor rate limiting.
Google

Google Pledges Not To Sue Any Open Source Projects Using Their Patents 153

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the now-and-forever dept.
sfcrazy writes "Google has announced the Open Patent Non-Assertion (OPN) Pledge. In the pledge Google says that they will not sue any user, distributor, or developer of Open Source software on specified patents, unless first attacked. Under this pledge, Google is starting off with 10 patents relating to MapReduce, a computing model for processing large data sets first developed at Google. Google says that over time they intend to expand the set of Google's patents covered by the pledge to other technologies." This is in addition to the Open Invention Network, and their general work toward reforming the patent system. The patents covered in the OPN will be free to use in Free/Open Source software for the life of the patent, even if Google should transfer ownership to another party. Read the text of the pledge. It appears that interaction with non-copyleft licenses (MIT/BSD/Apache) is a bit weird: if you create a non-free fork it appears you are no longer covered under the pledge.

Comment cut the pseudo-intellectualism (Score 0, Offtopic) 823

by yagu (#41766299) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Rectifying Nerd Arrogance?
"Like some Slashdot users, I began attending university last month for computer science. The experience represents my first time away from home and I'm almost constantly with my peers, many of whom are also computer science students. Recently, I have become cognizant of the many negative opinions associated with a 'normal' person's perspective of what a nerd is like. Conversing with my college computer science peers (many of whom are quite nerdy), I have noticed that many of them are extremely arrogant. Upon introspection, I have come to the realization that I am also very similar to them and am very curious, but worried. I have noticed similar personality characteristics on Slashdot. Where does this nerd arrogance come from? How can it be rectified? I am concerned that, if I do not abolish these annoying tendencies, I may have trouble later on in life with my career and relationships. Has anybody run into problems in life with the arrogance that seems to be so prevalent with nerds? If so, how did you handle the situation?"

You might start by dialing back the flowery and mostly unnecessary vocab. Eschew obfuscation!

Comment any questions? (Score 4, Insightful) 360

by yagu (#41747101) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: How To Avoid Working With Awful Legacy Code?

Not sure how those questions would indicate, you didn't specify. I could see some thinking "recent" technology means "good", but my personal experience provides little evidence to correlate "new technology" with good. I could even make a case that it's a red flag. (I worked on a disastrous project where by fiat we had to develop with .NET. Horrible)

Code reviews? Meh. Some think they're doing code review, they're not... or they're horrible at it.

I always ask what their turnover is, and why the position being filled was vacated. YMMV.

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