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

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Submission + - '94 Harvard Crimson: Require CS or Grads of 'Much Shittier Schools' Get Jobs

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Produced by Code.org, Computer Science Education Week kicks off on Dec. 8th, which its organizers explain is all about extending CS beyond 'the lucky few'. It's quite a pivot from more than 20 years ago, when the Harvard Crimson reported on a call from a Code.org co-founder for mandatory CS coursework to essentially extend Computer Science to 'the lucky few' in an effort to prevent people from 'much shittier schools' than Harvard from getting hired for computer-related jobs. From the 1994 Crimson article: "It would not be bad if there was some sort of simple math or science or statistic or computer science course required," says Ali Partovi '94. "It is really going to be a big thing in the future. People from much shittier schools will get jobs because they know more about computers." It's nice to see things are pivoting towards computer-science-for-all — heck, Codecademy notes that Asian and White boys are now the only students Google says don't count towards the $1,000 funding bonuses Google's offering to public school teachers who get 10 students to take a JavaScript course!

Submission + - British Spies are free to target Lawyers and Journalists (firstlook.org)

Submitted by Advocatus Diaboli
Advocatus Diaboli writes: British spies have been granted the authority to secretly eavesdrop on legally privileged attorney-client communications, according to newly released documents. On Thursday, a series of previously classified policies confirmed for the first time that the U.K.’s top surveillance agency Government Communications Headquarters (pictured above) has advised its employees: “You may in principle target the communications of lawyers.” The country’s other major security and intelligence agencies—MI5 and MI6—have adopted similar policies, the documents show. The guidelines also appear to permit surveillance of journalists and others deemed to work in “sensitive professions.”

Submission + - Terrorists used false DMCA claims to get personal data of anti-islamic youtuber

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: German newspaper FAZ reports (google translated version) that, after facing false DMCA claims by "FirstCrist, Copyright" and threatened by youtube with takedown, a youtuber running the german version of islam-critic Al Hayat TV had to disclose their identity in order to get the channel back online, in accordance with youtube policy. Later, the channel staff got a mail containing a death threat by "FirstCrist, Copyright", containing: "thank you for your personal data. [...] take care your house gets police protection!". As the staff had already suspected that "FirstCrist, Copyright" were in fact islamists, they had tried to convince youtube youtube to find another way, but in vain.

Submission + - U.S. Army Considers Raising Weight Limit for Cyberwarfare Soldiers

Submitted by blottsie
blottsie writes: Over 70 percent of Americans between ages 17 and 24 can’t become soldiers, the U.S. Army reports, because of three big issues: obesity, lack of education, and criminal records. Weight issues result in 18 percent of military recruiting disqualifications but the number is rising and expected to hit 25 percent by 2025.

The situation is particularly harrowing when it comes to cyberwarfare, one of the crucial military arenas of the 21st century. So in response to the growing weight of America’s potential cybersoldiers, the U.S. Army may relax physical requirements in order to recruit the very best.

Submission + - New music discovered in Donkey Kong for arcade

Submitted by furrykef .
furrykef . writes: Over 33 years have passed since Donkey Kong first hit arcades, but it still has new surprises. I was poking through the game in a debugger when I discovered that the game contains unused music and voice clips. One of the tunes would have been played when you rescued Pauline, and two others are suggestive of deleted cutscenes. In addition, Pauline was originally meant to speak. In one clip she says something unintelligible, but it may be "Hey!", "Nice!", or "Thanks!". The other is clearly a cry for help.

Submission + - JavaScript and the Netflix User Interface (acm.org)

Submitted by CowboyRobot
CowboyRobot writes: Alex Liu is a senior UI engineer at Netflix and part of the core team leading the migration of Netflix.com to Node.js. He has an article at ACM's Queue in which he describes how JavaScript is used at Netflix. "With increasingly more application logic being shifted to the browser, developers have begun to push the boundaries of what JavaScript was originally intended for. Entire desktop applications are now being rebuilt entirely in JavaScript—the Google Docs office suite is one example. Such large applications require creative solutions to manage the complexity of loading the required JavaScript files and their dependencies. The problem can be compounded when introducing multivariate A/B testing, a concept that is at the core of the Netflix DNA. Multivariate testing introduces a number of problems that JavaScript cannot handle using native constructs, one of which is the focus of this article: managing conditional dependencies."

Submission + - Journalists Route Around White House Press Office

Submitted by Tailhook
Tailhook writes: Pool reports written by White House correspondents are distributed to news organizations via the White House Press Office. Reporters have alleged that the Obama White House exploits its role as distributor to `demand changes in pool reports' and has used this power to `steer coverage in a more favorable direction.' Now a group of 90 print journalists has begun privately distributing their work through Google Groups, independent of the Press Office. Their intent is to `create an independent pool-reporting system for print and online recipients.'

Submission + - Edward Snowden Nominated for Nobel Peace Prize (cnn.com)

Submitted by seven of five
seven of five writes: Two Norwegian lawmakers have jointly nominated National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden for the Nobel Peace Prize, they said Wednesday on their party website.

Snowden has "revealed the nature and technological prowess of modern surveillance," and by doing so has contributed to peace, said a joint statement by Bard Vegar Solhjell and Snorre Valen of the Socialist Left Party.

Nominations for this year's Nobel Peace Prize — whose previous winners include such figures as the late South African President Nelson Mandela, Myanmar opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi and President Barack Obama — close on Saturday, with the winner announced in October.

Submission + - Mark Zuckerberg Throws Pal Joe Green Under the Tech Immigration Bus

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: A month after he argued that Executive Action by President Obama on tech immigration was needed lest his billionaire bosses at Mark Zuckerberg's FWD.us PAC have to hire 'just sort of OK' U.S. workers, Re/code reports that Joe Green — Zuckerberg's close friend and college roommate — has been pushed out of his role as President of FWD.us for failing to Git-R-Done on an issue critical to the tech community. "Today, we wanted to share an important change with you," begins 'Leadership Change', the announcement from the FWD.us Board that Todd Schulte is the new Green. So what sold FWD.us on Schulte? "His [Schulte's] prior experience as Chief-of-Staff at Priorities USA, the Super PAC supporting President Obama's re-election," assured Zuckerberg in a letter to FWD.us contributors, "will ensure FWD.us continues its momentum for reform." Facebook, reported the Washington Post in 2013, became legally "dependent" on H-1B visas and subject to stricter regulations shortly before Zuckerberg launched FWD.us with Green at the helm.

Submission + - The Raid-Proof Hosting Technology Behind 'The Pirate Bay'

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Ernesto reports at TorrentFreak that despite its massive presence the Pirate Bay doesn't have a giant server park but operates from the cloud, on virtual machines that can be quickly moved if needed. The site uses 21 “virtual machines” (VMs) hosted at different providers, up four machines from two years ago, in part due to the steady increase in traffic. Eight of the VM's are used for serving the web pages, searches take up another six machines, and the site’s database currently runs on two VMs. The remaining five virtual machines are used for load balancing, statistics, the proxy site on port 80, torrent storage and for the controller. In total the VMs use 182 GB of RAM and 94 CPU cores. The total storage capacity is 620 GB. One interesting aspect of The Pirate Bay is that all virtual machines are hosted with commercial cloud hosting providers, who have no clue that The Pirate Bay is among their customers. "Moving to the cloud lets TPB move from country to country, crossing borders seamlessly without downtime. All the servers don’t even have to be hosted with the same provider, or even on the same continent." All traffic goes through the load balancer, which masks what the other VMs are doing. This also means that none of the IP-addresses of the cloud hosting providers are publicly linked to TPB. For now, the most vulnerable spot appears to be the site’s domain. Just last year TPB burnt through five separate domain names due to takedown threats from registrars. But then again, this doesn’t appear to be much of a concern for TPB as the operators have dozens of alternative domain names standing by.

Submission + - Sen. Jeff Sessions Unfriends Mark Zuckerberg Over US Worker Hiring

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: In a speech on the Senate floor last week, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) challenged Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to "hire American workers for a change." The speech attributed President Obama's plans for executive action on immigration to meetings between White House officials and Zuckerberg's FWD.us PAC. Such presidential action, explained FWD.us, would allow tech companies to recruit the "very best" people from around the world instead of settling for U.S. workers who are "just sort of okay." Facebook, reported the Washington Post in 2013, became legally "dependent" on H-1B visas and subject to stricter regulations shortly before Zuckerberg got immigration reform religion and launched FWD.us. The immigration bill passed last year by the Senate included the so-called "Facebook loophole", legislative slight-of-hand which could make Facebook exempt from H-1B dependent employer rules even if it becomes more dependent on H-1B employees. By the way, in its diversity disclosure, Facebook — like other tech companies led by FWD.us Founders and Major Supporters — opted not to share any info on the countries the best-and-the-brightest employees hail from, as one might find in a university's Statistical Abstract. Must be considered trade secrets, huh?

Submission + - Apple Stock falls 3-4% after "Nude Celeb Scandal" (businessinsider.com)

Submitted by retroworks
retroworks writes: Both the Wall Street Journal (paywall http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat...), USA

Today, and Business Insider are all running stories about the big dip in Apple stock, close to the eve of the iPhone 6 rollout. Huffington Post's Headline is "Apple Stock Getting Killed" http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...

There are two different explanations given for the tanking Apple stock. To be sure, potential liabilities over The iCloud photo scandal and leaked celebrity nude photos gets its share of the blame. But and a note from Pacific Crest analyst Andy Hargreaves telling investors to sell Apple shares seems to carry more weight.

"Last week, the company was flying high as anticipation built for the iPhone 6, and the iWatch, which are expected to be announced next week. The stock was hitting new all-time highs...It all came to a screeching halt over the weekend for Apple, when nude photos of celebrities hit the web. Apple's weak security on iCloud, where the photos were backed up, was blamed for the photos hitting the web."

Apple's new mobile payments feature, as well as health tracking data tied to the iPhone, may feel the pinch from the data security breach (although most of that data is likely to be stored right on the phone, not in the iCloud, BusinessInsider points out). Pacific Crest's Hargreaves says, "We recommend taking profits in Apple."

Submission + - How Big Telecom Smothers Municipal Broadband

Submitted by Rick Zeman
Rick Zeman writes: The Center for Public Integrity has a comprehensive article showing how Big Telecom (aka, AT&T, Comcast, Charter, Time Warner) use lobbyists, paid-for politicians, and lawsuits (both actual and the threat thereof) in their efforts to kill municipal broadband. From the article: "The companies have also used traditional campaign tactics such as newspaper ads, push polls, direct mail and door-to-door canvassing to block municipal networks. And they’ve tried to undermine the appetite for municipal broadband by paying for research from think tanks and front groups to portray the networks as unreliable and costly. " Unfortunately, those think tanks and front groups are also paid for by the companies.

Slashdot Top Deals

He has not acquired a fortune; the fortune has acquired him. -- Bion

Close