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Businesses

Justine Sacco, Internet Justice, and the Dangers of a Righteous Mob 399

Posted by samzenpus from the everyone-loves-a-loser dept.
An anonymous reader writes "So what exactly was the injustice that everyone was fighting against here? There were no pro-Sacco factions, nobody thought her comment was funny, and it became clear early on that her employers were not going to put up with this. It was quite easy for groups to unite against her precisely because it was such an obviously idiotic comment to make. By the time Valleywag had posted her tweet, the damage to her career was already done; there wasn't any 'need' for further action by anyone. The answer is a bit darker – this wasn't really about fairness, it was about entertainment."

Comment Re:How about GMT? (Score 1) 545

by stderr_dk (#45313213) Attached to: A Plan To Fix Daylight Savings Time By Creating Two National Time Zones

The UK isn't on Zulu time - they have daylight savings time (don't know about Portugal and W. Africa).

DST in the EU starts on the last Sunday of March and ends on the last Sunday of October, so for Portugal it's:

$ TZ=Europe/Lisbon date -d "Oct 27 00:59:59 UTC 2013"
Sun Oct 27 01:59:59 WEST 2013
$ TZ=Europe/Lisbon date -d "Oct 27 01:00:00 UTC 2013"
Sun Oct 27 01:00:00 WET 2013

I don't know the DST rules for the various countries in West Africa, but (shameless plug) tzdata-javascript.org has a demo where you can compare the time in two different timezones.
Beer

The Fascinating Science Behind Beer Foam 73

Posted by timothy from the ok-now-explain-my-flickering-lights dept.
RenderSeven writes "Science has so far been at a loss to explain why tapping a beer bottle with another causes it to explosively foam over. Thanks to a grant from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, a research team at the University of Madrid studying fluid mechanics has found the answer with some fascinating slow-motion video. Their soon-to-be-published paper found that tapping the bottle (or shooting it with a laser) causes a series of compression and expansion waves, that generate unstable buoyant plumes, quickly turning most of the liquid into foam. PhysicsBuzz notes that the process is very rapid and nearly unstoppable once started."

Submission + - Dice Ruins Slashdot (slashdot.org) 12

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In an attempt to modernize Slashdot, Dice has removed everything that made Slashdot unique and worthwhile and has turned it into a generic blog site. User feedback has been unanimously negative, but this is to no avail, and users will have to head elsewhere for insightful and entertaining commentary on tech news.

Submission + - Change.org petition, ARM SoC changes for Linux 3.12 invite Torvalds' fury (paritynews.com) 1

Submitted by hypnosec
hypnosec writes: Linus Torvalds, in response to a petition on Change.org to remove RdRand from /dev/random, has lambasted the petitioner by called him ignorant for not understanding the code in Linux Kernel. Kyle Condon from UK raised a petition on Change.org to get Linus to remove RdRand from /dev/random in a bid “to improve the overall security of the linux kernel.” In his response, Torvalds asked the Condon and the supports of the petition to gain an understanding of Linux drivers, cryptography and then "come back here and admit to the world that you were wrong." Torvalds stressed that kernel maintainers knew what they were doing and the petitioner didn’t. Torvalds, in a similar outburst just yesterday, hoped that "ARM SoC hardware designers all die in some incredibly painful accident." This came in response to a message from Kevin Hilman when he noted that there were quite a few conflicts in the ARM SoC pull request for Linux 3.12, which were a result of the platform changes conflicting with driver changes going in to the V4L tree.

Submission + - How to foil NSA sabotage: use a dead man's switch (theguardian.com) 4

Submitted by mspohr
mspohr writes: Cory Doctorow has an interesting idea published in todays Guardian on how to approach the problem of NSA "gag orders" which prevent web sites, etc. from telling anyone that they have been compromised. His idea is to set up a "dead man" switch where a site would publish a statement that "We have not been contacted by the government" ... until, of course, they were contacted and compromised. The statement would then disappear since it would no longer be true.
He points out a few problems... Not making the statement could be considered a violation of disclosure... but, can the government force you to lie and state that you haven't been contacted when you actually have?
Input Devices

Former Lockheed Skunkworks Engineer Auctioning a Prototype "Spy Rock" 119

Posted by timothy from the for-that-price-I'd-expect-at-least-two-rocks dept.
ilikenwf writes "For a cool $10,000,000.00, the prototype of a surveillance rock full of spy gadgets could be yours! More importantly, server backups from the gentleman's time at Lockheed are included, being the real valuable in this auction, as it contains schematics and such. The seller seems to think that the current xBee radio products are actually based on his work with Lockheed. The proceeds will go towards legal action the seller is apparently taking against his former employer." This may be the most unusual eBay product description I've ever encountered, and one of the most interesting, too.

Comment Re:Really? Why not just query the NSA directly? (Score 1) 97

Why would you limit yourself to ssh, when there's so many useful unpatched exploits for so many other server applications? Among other things, you're missing out on all the easily exploitable Windows ME boxen out there.

ssh defaults to port 22. Port 23 is usually telnet.
Software

Ask Slashdot: Tags and Tagging, What Is the Best Way Forward? 142

Posted by timothy from the spray-and-pray dept.
siliconbits writes "The debate about tagging has been going for nearly a decade. Slashdot has covered it a number of times. But it seems that nobody has yet to come up with a foolproof solution to tagging. Even luminaries like Engadget, The Verge, Gizmodo and Slashdot all have different tagging schemes. Commontag, a venture launched in 2009 to tackle tagging, has proved to be all but a failure despite the backing of heavyweights like Freebase, Yahoo and Zemanta. Even Google gave up and purchased Freebase in July 2010. Somehow I remain convinced that a unified, semantically-based solution, using a mix of folksonomy and taxonomy, is the Graal of tagging. I'd like to hear from fellow Slashdotters as to how they tackle the issue of creating and maintaining a tagging solution, regardless of the platform and the technologies being used in the backend." A good time to note: there may be no pretty way to get at them, but finding stories with a particular tag on Slashdot is simple, at least one at a time: Just fill in a tag you'd like to explore after "slashdot.org/tag/", as in "slashdot.org/tag/bizarro."
China

After a User Dies, Apple Warns Against Counterfeit Chargers 457

Posted by timothy from the risk-vs-reward dept.
After a Chinese woman was earlier this month evidently electrocuted while talking on her iPhone while it was plugged in to charge, Apple is warning users to avoid counterfeit chargers. From CNet: "Last week, reports surfaced in China that suggested the woman, Ma Ailun, might have been using a third-party charger designed to look like the real thing. Although third-party chargers are not uncommon, they vary widely in terms of safety and quality. Earlier this year, safety consulting and certification company UL issued a warning that counterfeit Apple USB chargers were making the rounds and that consumers should be on the lookout for them due to their lower quality and possibly dangerous defects. The company posted the guidance on its site after a woman was allegedly electrocuted while answering a call on her iPhone."

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