Nyder - Slashdot User

Submission + - Anti-Piracy Chief Patents "Pay Up or Disconnect" Scheme (torrentfreak.com)

Submitted by Nyder on Monday December 17, 2012 @09:46PM

Nyder writes: Sick of patents? Well, this will make you puke. This Patent: http://www.freepatentsonline.com/y2012/0310846.html which is from Digital Right Corp’s CTO Robert Steele. The patent starts with a general description of the monitoring and notification process.

“The present disclosure provides a system, a method, and a computer program that may mine a data stream of infringement data over a period of time, process the mined data to find correlations in the data, and identify specific sets of IP addresses and ports associated with acts of copyright infringement,” it reads.

I guess next the Mafia will be patenting the protection scheme...

Submission + - Oracle confirms it paid journalists (bbc.com)

Submitted by Nyder on Sunday August 19, 2012 @02:01PM

Nyder writes: Oracle released 2 names it paid to "journalists" during the trial, Oracle said it had relationships with blogger Florian Mueller and Stanford University's Prof Paul Goldstein.
Google of course, said it paid no one, but "it needed further guidance before being able to disclose others it had financial ties to".

Submission + - Goatse invades the Olympics (liveleak.com)

Submitted by Nyder on Saturday August 04, 2012 @07:11AM

Nyder writes: While sharing viewers ideas of what the Olympics symbol should of looked like, the BBC London News team exposed London to something a bit more...

1min 2 secs for the goodies and yes, this is safe for work.

Submission + - Richard Stallman says DRM is wrong for Linux, but that's okay maybe. (gnu.org)

Submitted by Nyder on Tuesday July 31, 2012 @06:00PM

Nyder writes: Richard Stallman speaks out on Steam coming to Linux, seems he is not a fan, but says this (among other things):

Nonfree game programs (like other nonfree programs) are unethical because they deny freedom to their users. (Game art is a different issue, because it isn't software.) If you want freedom, one requisite for it is not having nonfree programs on your computer. That much is clear. However, if you're going to use these games, you're better off using them on GNU/Linux rather than on Microsoft Windows. At least you avoid the harm to your freedom that Windows would do.

I think Steam DRM isn't that bad myself, and any big Developer making games for Linux is a good thing, DRM or not. Does Richard have a point, or has he done too far?

Submission + - Mom charged with hacking her kids schools computer system. (go.com)

Submitted by Nyder on Monday July 23, 2012 @06:23AM

Nyder writes: A Pennsylvania mom faces six felony charges for allegedly hacking into her children's school computer to change their grades and read school officials' emails.

Catherine Venusto, 45, of New Tripoli, worked for the Northwestern Lehigh School District from 2008 through April 2011 and has at least two children in the district, according to the District Attorney's office.

She has been accused of changing her daughter's failing grade from an F to an M for "medical" in June 2010, and then changing her son's 98 to a 99 in February 2012, nearly a year after she quit her job as an administrative office secretary to work at another school district.

One of those moms who probably did her kids homework also, so it's not surprising to me that she's going to have to hack the computer system to change the grades, since they will fail on tests. What sort of lessons does this teach her kids?

Submission + - Nvidia Forums Hacked

Submitted by Nyder on Friday July 13, 2012 @06:51AM

Nyder writes: I received the following email:

Dear NVIDIA Forum User,

We suspended operations of the NVIDIA Forums last week in response to suspicious activity and immediately began an investigation. We apologize that our continuing investigation is taking this long. Know that we are working around the clock to ensure that secure operations can be restored.

Our investigation has identified that unauthorized third parties gained access to some user information, including:

username
email address
hashed passwords with random salt value
public-facing “About Me” profile information

NVIDIA did not store any passwords in clear text. “About Me” optional profiles could include a user’s title, age, birthdate, gender, location, interests, email and website URL – all of which was already publicly accessible.

NVIDIA is continuing to investigate this matter and is working to restore the Forums as soon as possible. We are employing additional security measures to minimize the impact of future attacks.

All user passwords for our Forums will be reset when the system comes back online. At that time, an email with a temporary password, along with instructions on how to change it, will be sent to your registered email address.

As a precautionary measure, we strongly recommend that you change any identical passwords that you may be using elsewhere.

NVIDIA does not request sensitive information by email. Do not provide personal, financial or sensitive information (including new passwords) in response to any email purporting to be sent by an NVIDIA employee or representative.

Check back on the NVIDIA Forums for updates.

Seems to me they are in denial a bit, because they don't want to admit passwords got stolen, though hashed and salted, still. Guess being cheap on Internet security isn't the way to go...

Submission + - McDonalds DNA Spray to Stop Thieves (news.com.au)

Submitted by Nyder on Thursday January 19, 2012 @07:06AM

Nyder writes: McDonalds is testing out a new DNA spray in some of it's Australian outlets. Developed by an UK Cop & Chemist, it's a synthetic DNA solution, invisible under normal light, visible under UV. If the tests go well, they'll deploy it to all 730 outlets across Australia.

While I can see the use of this for somethings, McDonalds? Is people stealing napkins and straws that bad down under? Not surprised by people making this though. Just waiting on my fake DNA crime covering spray.

Submission + - Fixing Harddrives

Submitted by Nyder on Saturday July 16, 2011 @04:47AM

Nyder writes: Like most of us, I get harddrive problems. The problem? Hard to find info on what exactly is wrong, is if fixable, how to fix it and when to give up.

I have 4 harddrives that can be seen by the bios, seen inside windows (cept they can't be initialzed), but I can't get any old info off of them, or new info onto them.

Forums of various harddrive companies tend to have people complaining about it happening, but never any real solutions.

And these aren't the dead harddrives of yesteryear. Usually when harddrives died, they died. You knew they were dead, you moved on. Today? They don't seem dead, in fact, it seems more like a scam to sell more harddrives then anything else.

Hoping someone has some good ideas on how to fix these yourself, or what the problem is. I don't mind losing the occasional harddrive, but i've lost about as many harddrives in the last year or so, then I've ever lost in my 20+ years computing. I got 40mb IDE harddrives (and scsi of course) that are still going strong.

Submission + - Apple Lied: Filed Patent for Mobile Device Trackin (infosecisland.com)

Submitted by Nyder on Friday April 29, 2011 @06:57PM

Nyder writes: Apple filed for a patent in September of 2009 titled "Location Histories for Location Aware Devices" with the intent to develop services based around the company's ability to locate and track mobile devices running the iOS operating system.

The abstract of the patent reads as follows:

"A location aware mobile device can include a baseband processor for communicating with one or more communication networks, such as a cellular network or WiFi network. In some implementations, the baseband processor can collect network information (e.g., transmitter IDs) over time. Upon request by a user or application, the network information can be translated to estimated position coordinates (e.g., latitude, longitude, altitude) of the location aware device for display on a map view or for other purposes. A user or application can query the location history database with a timestamp or other query to retrieve all or part of the location history for display in a map view."

The patent text goes on to outline how the tracking data could be accessed by applications, indicating Apple intends to build salable services around the collected data and allow third parties the ability to access it:

"A user or application can query the location history database with a timestamp or other query to retrieve all or part of the location history for display in a map view. In some implementations, the size and "freshness" of the location history database can be managed by eliminating duplicate entries in the database and/or removing older entries. The location history can be used to construct a travel timeline for the location aware device. The travel timeline can be displayed in a map view or used by location aware applications running on the location aware device or on a network. In some implementations, an Application Programming Interface (API) can be used by an application to query the location history database."

The patent application then goes on to describe how the location tracking data can include transmitter identifiers that correlate the data to a specific phone — which means a specific user — and how the data can be transmitted to network servers for processing:

"In some implementations, the network information can include transmitter identifiers (IDs). For example, Cell IDs can be tracked and recorded. The Cell IDs can be mapped to corresponding cell tower locations which can be used to provide estimated position coordinates of the location aware device. When a location history is requested by a user or application (e.g., through an API), the transmitter IDs can be translated to position coordinates of the location aware device which can be reverse geocoded to map locations for display on a map view or for other purposes. In other implementations, the network information can include WiFi scan data (e.g., access point IDs) which can be used to determine position coordinates of the location aware device, which can be reverse geocoded for display on a map view. In some implementations, the network information can be sent to a network server, which can translate the network information into position coordinates, which can be returned to the location aware device for processing by a location aware application."

Revelations of the patent application now confirm suspicions that Apple was quite aware of the storage of geolocation tracking data, that it was not merely a database of Wi-Fi locations, and the building of location histories on their customers was not due to a software glitch.

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