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Submission + - Verizon Posts Message in Morse Code to Mock FCC's Net Neutrality Ruling

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Chris Matyszczyk reports at Cnet that Verizon has posted a message to the FCC titled: FCC’s ‘Throwback Thursday’ Move Imposes 1930s Rules on the Internet” written in Morse code. The first line of the release dated February 26, 1934 in old typewriter type reads: "Today (Feb.26) the Federal Communications Commission approved an order urged by President Obama that imposes rules on broadband Internet services that were written in the era of the steam locomotive and the telegraph." The Federal Communications Commission voted 3-2 along party lines in favor of new Internet service rules that prohibit blocking, slowing or prioritizing traffic. The rules, which have not yet been released, are opposed by cable and telephone companies that fear it will curb Internet growth and stifle payback on network investment. "It isn't a surprise that Verizon is a touch against Thursday's order. In 2012, it insisted that the very idea of Net neutrality squished its First and Fifth Amendment right," writes Matyszczyk. "I wonder, though, who will be attracted by this open mockery. Might this be a sign that Verizon doesn't think the fight is over at all?"

Submission + - Vintage Nasa photographs for sale (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by Art Challenor
Art Challenor writes: Vintage Nasa photographs for sale

A collection of vintage photographs by Nasa's pioneering astronauts goes under the hammer at Bloomsbury Auctions in London on 26 February 2015.

It includes images not published before, some taken on the surface of the Moon during the early days of space exploration.

Submission + - Exelon-backed bill seeks $2 more a month for nuclear power plants (chicagotribune.com)

Submitted by mdsolar
mdsolar writes: Electricity users would have to dip into their pockets a little more to help cover costs of Exelon's nuclear power plants under legislation unveiled Thursday that the influential corporation maintained would save jobs and keep service steady and reliable.

Exelon is backing the proposal because it could prop up what it says are three money-losing nuclear plants that produce relatively clean energy compared to other sources of power. Opponents question whether Exelon would get an unnecessary bailout when a trio of its other nuclear plants are in the black, and supporters of a separate bill prefer a broader approach that would build up renewable resources.

Submission + - Fake Komodia root SSL certs in use by over +100 companies (forbes.com)

Submitted by Billly Gates
Billly Gates writes: Lenovo and Superfish are not the only companies who used the fake root SSL certificates by Komodia to spy and decrypt network traffic. Komodia advertises its products including a SSL-digestor to rid the obtrusive thing we call encryption and security. So far game accelerators are mentioned as some have seen these certs installed with Asus lan accelerator drivers.

Submission + - Recursion - Love it or Hate It?

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: "Yet another example of how AP exams are loaded with poor coding practices," quipped Alfred Thompson, referring to a recursive code example that prints the numbers 0 to 6, which was posted to the (closed) AP Computer Science Facebook group. "We are often forced to use code examples that are not ideal coding practice," Thompson notes. "We do that to make things clear and to demonstrate specific concepts in a sort of isolation that we might not normally use. We seem to do that a lot with recursion because the examples that require recursion tend to be fairly complex." So, while asking students to use recursion instead of a loop to print '0123456' serves the purpose of teaching recursion, Thompson opines that it's also a poor example of code practice. "Someone raised on functional programming where recursion is a pretty standard way of doing looping might disagree of course," he adds. "There is a saying that when all you have is a hammer all your problems look like nails. This seems, in a way, to be the case with recursion and loops. If your first tool of choice (or what you have learned first) for iteration is loops you tend not to think of recursion as a solution. Similarly if you start with recursion (as is common with functional programming) you are a lot more likely to look at recursion as a tool for iteration." So, do you tend to embrace or eschew recursion in your programming?

Submission + - Explaining the Big Data Productivity Gap (thevarguy.com)

Submitted by Mcusanelli
Mcusanelli writes: The slow adoption and lack of productivity associated with Hadoop and other big data technologies likely stems from poor planning and lack of big data training and expertise, among other factors.

Submission + - Reverse Engineering the Nike+ FuelBand's Communications Protocol (evilsocket.net)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Security researcher Simone Margaritelli has reverse engineered the Bluetooth low-energy communications protocol for his Nike+ FuelBand SE, a wrist-worn activity tracker. He learned some disturbing fact: "The authentication system is vulnerable, anyone could connect to your device. The protocol supports direct reading and writing of the device memory, up to 65K of contents. The protocol supports commands that are not supposed to be implemented in a production release (bootloader mode, device self test, etc)." His post explains in detail how he managed this, and how Nike put effort into creating an authentication system, but then completely undermined it by using a hard-coded token. Margaritelli even provides a command list for the device, which can do things like grab an event log, upload a bitmap for the screen, and even reset the device.

Submission + - Computers are evil in early education (nytimes.com) 2

Submitted by nbauman
nbauman writes: Middle school students who got computers did worse in school. They wasted their time on games, social media, and entertainment (just like adults), according to Susan Pinker in the New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01... Computers only help when they're used by good, trained teachers. Infants who interact with parents do better in school. Screen time reduces interaction with parents.

In the early 2000s, economists tracked the academic progress of nearly one million disadvantaged middle-school students against the dates they were given networked computers. They assessed math and reading skills for 5 years.

“Students who gain access to a home computer between the 5th and 8th grades tend to witness a persistent decline in reading and math scores,” they wrote. The Internet was also linked to lower grades in younger children.

Weaker students (boys, African-Americans) were affected more than others. When their computers arrived, their reading scores fell off a cliff.

Technology has a role in education — but only when it’s perfectly suited to the task, and only when it's deployed as a tool by a terrific, highly trained teacher.

Submission + - Could mining helium-3 from the Moon solve Earth's energy problems? (inhabitat.com) 1

Submitted by Kristine Lofgren
Kristine Lofgren writes: Scientists believe that mining rare helium-3 from the moon could help solve the Earth's energy crisis. Although the gas is relatively rare here on our planet, it's abundant on the moon — and tapping this resource could power the Earth for 10,000 years without the use of dirty fossil fuels.

Submission + - WordPress, PHP Apps, Subject to Ghost glibc Attacks (threatpost.com)

Submitted by msm1267
msm1267 writes: Less than 48 hours after the disclosure of the Ghost vulnerability in the GNU C library (glibc), researchers have uncovered that PHP applications, including the WordPress content management system, could be another weak spot and eventually in the crosshairs of attackers.

Ghost is a vulnerability in glibc that attackers can use against only a handful of applications right now to remotely run executable code and gain control of a Linux server. The vulnerability is a heap-based buffer overflow and affects all Linux systems, according to experts, and has been present in the glibc code since 2000.

“An example of where this could be a big issue is within WordPress itself: it uses a function named wp_http_validate_url() to validate every pingback’s post URL,” wrote Sucuri research Marc-Alexandre Montpas in an advisory published Wednesday. “And it does so by using gethostbyname(). So an attacker could leverage this vector to insert a malicious URL that would trigger a buffer overflow bug, server-side, potentially allowing him to gain privileges on the server.”

Submission + - Armed hacker takes hostages at Dutch TV studio

Submitted by sciencewatcher
sciencewatcher writes: A man armed with a gun and claiming to be a hacker and part of a hackers collective walked into the most prominent Dutch TV studio and took at least one person as a hostage. The news broadcast did not start, but after an hour the events in the studio were broadcasted as a news item. The man could be seen while being overrun by the Dutch police. The appearance of the man during is atypical for such events indeed. Is the distrust in the government of some hackers changing into a distrust in society as a whole?

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