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Submission + - Ubuntu Is In Urgent Need of a SystemD Developer/Maintainer (softpedia.com)

Submitted by devphaeton
devphaeton writes: From TFA: Martin Pitt, a renowned Ubuntu developer, who apparently is in charge of the systemd maintenance/development for the Ubuntu Linux operating system, posted a message on the Ubuntu mailing list asking for assistance in maintaining systemd in Ubuntu:

"I'm working on systemd about 90% of my time these days, but currently this is a one-man show in Ubuntu, and about a 1.3 man show in Debian," says Mr. Pitt. "So please talk to me if you are interested in working on any of this. I'm happy to provide mentoring, guidance, introduction to upstream, etc."
Power

Mystery Company Blazes a Trail In Fusion Energy 144

Posted by Soulskill from the here-comes-the-sun dept.
sciencehabit writes: Of the handful of startup companies trying to achieve fusion energy via nontraditional methods, Tri Alpha Energy Inc. has always been the enigma. Publishing little and with no website, but apparently sitting on a cash pile in the hundreds of millions, the Foothill Ranch, California-based company has been the subject of intense curiosity and speculation. But last month Tri Alpha lifted the veil slightly with two papers, revealing that its device, dubbed the colliding beam fusion reactor, has shown a 10-fold improvement in its ability to contain the hot particles needed for fusion over earlier devices at U.S. universities and national labs. 'They've improved things greatly and are moving in a direction that is quite promising,' says plasma physicist John Santarius of the Fusion Technology Institute at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Security

New SOHO Router Security Audit Uncovers Over 60 Flaws In 22 Models 66

Posted by Soulskill from the my-god,-it's-full-of-flaws dept.
Home and small-office routers have become a hotbed for security research lately, with vulnerabilities and poor security practices becoming the rule, rather than the exception. A new security audit by researchers from Universidad Europea de Madrid only adds to that list, finding 60 distinct flaws in 22 different device models. They posted details of their research on the Full Disclosure mailing list, and the affected brands include D-Link, Belkin, Linksys, Huawei, and others. Many of the models they examined had been distributed to internet customers across Spain by their ISPs. About half of the flaws involve Cross Site Scripting and Cross Site Request Forgery capabilities, though there is at least one backdoor with a hard-coded password. Several routers allow external attackers to delete files on USB storage devices, and others facilitate DDoS attacks.
DRM

The Bizarre Process Used For Approving Exemptions To the DMCA 69

Posted by Soulskill from the assume-a-spherical-librarian dept.
harrymcc writes: The Digital Millennium Copyright Act imposes severe penalties on those who overcome copy-protection technologies. It allows for exemptions for a variety of purposes — but in a weird proviso, those exemptions must be re-approved by the Librarian of Congress every three years. Over at Fast Company, Glenn Fleishman takes a look at this broken system and why it's so bad for our rights as consumers. "The Librarian has opted to require one or more 'champions' or proponents of a carefully defined category, like "Audiovisual works – educational uses – colleges and universities," to file a brief. His office also opens the floor to rebuttals from opponents. Further, the Librarian sunsets every exemption every three years—something not required by the law, and which requires champions to arise again to launch a new defense. The office also doesn't propose its own examples of circumvention that should be permitted, even though the law permits it to do so."

Comment Re:Linux Mint gets it right. (Score 2) 155

I just tore apart my home lab and I'm reassembling it, reshuffling some motherboards and hard drives.

Tried tossing my Windows drive on a new motherboard. It just crashed.

I found *one* disk from my PC-BSD desktop. Plugged it into the oldest motherboard I could find and it just worked(tm). Missing half of the zfs mirror on completely different hardware.

Between ports, pkg and their installer program software is easier than elsewhere.

I honestly wished that Windows 10 would be them scrapping everything and going with a *BSD. (Just like OS X). Admit defeat, and start over with a different code base. No one knows or cares how it works, just that it does. Apple has managed to move complete platforms 4 times (68k -> PPC, OS 9 -> OS X, PPC->Intel, Intel->ARM). Microsoft has just released C# as open source. It shouldn't be hard.

Then everyone who knows and wants a command prompt will have a real one instead of a half assed Power Shell (or as it is everywhere else Batch file).

Nvidia releases hardware drivers for it. PS4 is based on it (Meaning AMD has drivers for it).
Privacy

Senate Passes USA Freedom Act 294

Posted by Soulskill from the agreeing-to-disagree-about-agreeing dept.
schwit1 points out that the U.S. Senate has passed the USA Freedom Act by a vote of 67-32, sending it on to President Obama, who is expected to sign it into law. The bill removes mass metadata collection powers from the NSA, but also grants a new set of surveillance powers to replace them. Telecoms now hang on to that data, and the government can access it if they suspect the target is part of a terrorism investigation and one of the call's participants is overseas. "The second provision revived Tuesday concerns roving wiretaps. Spies may tap a terror suspect's communications without getting a renewed FISA Court warrant, even as a suspect jumps from one device to the next. The FISA Court need not be told who is being targeted when issuing a warrant. The third spy tool renewed is called "lone wolf" in spy jargon. It allows for roving wiretaps. However, the target of wiretaps does not have to be linked to a foreign power or terrorism."
Hardware

Fabs Now Manufacturing Carbon Nanotube Memory, Which Could Replace NAND and DRAM 67

Posted by Soulskill from the still-waiting-on-my-isolinear-chips dept.
Lucas123 writes: Nantero, the company that invented carbon nanotube-based non-volatile memory in 2001 and has been developing it since, has announced that seven chip fabrication plants are now manufacturing its Nano-RAM (NRAM) wafers and test chips. The company also announced aerospace giant Lockheed Martin and Schlumberger Ltd., the world's largest gas and oil exploration and drilling company, as customers seeking to use its chip technology. The memory, which can withstand 300 degrees Celsius temperatures for years without losing data, is natively thousands of times faster than NAND flash and has virtually infinite read/write resilience. Nantero plans on creating gum sticks SSDs using DDR4 interfaces. NRAM has the potential to create memory that is vastly more dense that NAND flash, as its transistors can shrink to below 5 nanometers in size, three times more dense than today's densest NAND flash. At the same time, NRAM is up against a robust field of new memory technologies that are expected to challenge NAND flash in speed, endurance and capacity, such as Phase-Change Memory and Ferroelectric RAM (FRAM).

Comment Re:Linux Mint gets it right. (Score 1) 155

> If any program freezes, the WHOLE DESKTOP freezes

That's what this release specifically addresses.

"In case of a freeze or if you need to restart Cinnamon for any reason, you can now do so via a keyboard shortcut. The default key combination is Ctrl+Alt+Escape. Pressing this combination of keys restarts nemo and cinnamon-settings-daemon in case they had crashed, and launches a brand new instance of the Cinnamon desktop," said Clement Lefebvre, the leader of the Linux Mint project.

They also claim boosts in speed:

Also, the devs have explained that it's no longer necessary to recompile Cinnamon to choose between consolekit and logind support, the load times have been greatly improved, the CPU usage has been diminished by about 40%, and the support for multiple monitors has been improved as well.

"Un-necessary calculations in the window management part of Cinnamon could also be dropped, leading to reduced idle CPU usage (about 40% reduction in the number of CPU wakes per second)," Lefebvre also noted.
Microsoft

Microsoft To Support SSH In Windows and Contribute To OpenSSH 285

Posted by Soulskill from the headlines-you-probably-didn't-expect dept.
An anonymous reader writes: Microsoft has announced plans for native support for SSH in Windows. "A popular request the PowerShell team has received is to use Secure Shell protocol and Shell session (aka SSH) to interoperate between Windows and Linux – both Linux connecting to and managing Windows via SSH and, vice versa, Windows connecting to and managing Linux via SSH. Thus, the combination of PowerShell and SSH will deliver a robust and secure solution to automate and to remotely manage Linux and Windows systems." Based on the work from this new direction, they also plan to contribute back to the OpenSSH project as well.

Comment Ejectrode? (Score 1) 258

by rickb928 (#49825533) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Your Most Unusual Hardware Hack?

I adjusted my ejectrode to jumper the OBDII port on my car and add a new remote to the keyless entry.

But more fun was to buy a remote case/flip key fob for it. And then find a locksmith that would cut the keystub for me. Now I have one of those flippy-key things like the VW and MB owners have, and saved about $35,000 on the car.
Media

Video Cable Companies Hate Cord-Cutting, but It's Not Going Away (Video) 160

Posted by Roblimo from the parting-with-a-cable-company-is-such-sweet-sorrow dept.
On May 29, Steven J. Vaughan Nichols (known far and wide as SJVN) wrote an article for ZDNet headlined, Now more than ever, the Internet belongs to cord-cutters. A few days before that, he wrote another one headlined, Mary Meeker's Internet report: User growth slowing, but disruption full speed ahead. And last December he wrote one titled, Reports show it's becoming a cord cutter's world. SJVN obviously sees a trend here. So do a lot of other people, including cable TV and local TV executives who are biting their nails and asking themselves, "Whatever shall we do?" So far, says SJVN, the answers they've come up with are not encouraging.

NOTE from Roblimo: We're trying something different with this video, namely keeping it down to about 4 minutes but running a text transcript that covers our 20+ minute conversation with SJVN. Is this is a good idea? Please let us know.
Privacy

FBI Is Behind Mysterious Flights Over US Cities 167

Posted by Soulskill from the no-such-bureau dept.
New submitter kaizendojo sends a report from the Associated Press indicating the FBI has a small fleet of planes that fly across the U.S. carrying surveillance equipment. The planes are registered with fictitious companies to hide their association with the U.S. government. The FBI says they're only used for investigations that are "specific" and "ongoing," but they're often used without getting permission from a judge beforehand. "Some of the aircraft can also be equipped with technology that can identify thousands of people below through the cellphones they carry, even if they're not making a call or in public. Officials said that practice, which mimics cell towers and gets phones to reveal basic subscriber information, is rare." The AP identified at least 50 FBI-controlled planes, which have done over 100 flights since late April. The AP adds that they've seen the planes "orbiting large, enclosed buildings for extended periods where aerial photography would be less effective than electronic signals collection."

Comment not exactly no use (Score 1) 258

by dunkelfalke (#49824649) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Your Most Unusual Hardware Hack?

But a bass (Hohner The Jack) modified with two lipstick guitar humbuckers (which I can split or set in series to make it a humcanceller instead of a humbucker). So far nothing too special, right? Well, add a volume and tone control for each pickup. Also not too uncommon at all. Add a blend potentiometer. Yes, lots of controls, but still not a hack.
The actual hack was an active/passive switch. The active switch switches the output to a battery (two batteries actually, one for the filament, the other to power the amplifier) fed tube preamp inside the bass. There are tiny ex military tubes made by Raytheon (6418) that accept low voltage.
It was a "because I can" project, though. I used a solid state preamp there later, after I broke the tube. It sounded actually better.

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