Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Submission + - The sexual threats against Emma Watson are an attack on every woman (vox.com)

Submitted by Lasrick
Lasrick writes: This is an important read. If the speech that Emma Watson gave to the United Nations gathering on September 21st can cause such misogyny, then the very act of women speaking will cause it (which seems to be the case when it comes to the internet). 'Emma Watson makes a wonderful UN Goodwill Ambassador. If the campaign she champions is successful, she will have done tremendous good in the world. There is nothing about her private, consensual sexual life that has any bearing on the value of her work, the validity of her feminist views, or her integrity as a person. If her stolen nude photos are leaked on the internet in retaliation for her work, that will not mean that she was irresponsible or reckless, it will mean that she is brave. Regardless of whether any photos are released, the threats against Watson are already an attack on all of us. And we should all take it personally.'

Submission + - Anita Sarkeesian, creator of Tropes vs. Women, driven from home by trolls (theverge.com)

Submitted by Sonny Yatsen
Sonny Yatsen writes: Anita Sarkeesian, the creator of Tropes vs. Women — a video series exploring negative tropes and misogynistic depictions of women in video games, reports that she driven from her home after a series of extremely violent sexual threats made against her. Her videos have previously drawn criticism from many male gamers, often coupled with violent imagery or threats of violence.

Submission + - Can you put an honest man in charge of your network security?

Submitted by bonehead
bonehead writes: So... For a while now I've been pondering this question.

At my current job I work with a team of 6 other sysadmins. They're all very talented, and all have several years of seniority over me.

One guy, in particular, has taken a very strong interest security lately. And he's been working very, very hard to harden the security on our servers. He's a very honest, and seemingly religious guy (religious in the "golden rule" way, not the "jihad" way. His "good, honest guy" credentials are unimpeachable). While his heart is definitely in the right place, his approach is not. Every measure he takes simply makes things more inconvenient for legit users, and will, unfortunately, do nothing to deter a real attacker. My efforts to argue the point with him fall on deaf ears. (He's also very talented, and as many talented geeks are, hesitant to consider that he might be wrong....)

Me, on the other hand, well, let's just say I've never been an angel. About 15 years ago I decided that being on the straight-and-narrow was the way to go. Not out of any moral sense of duty, mostly as a result of having a personality that is incompatible with incarceration. But when I was young and dumb, well, like I said, not an angel.

What I've noticed is that when news of a new exploit becomes known, my fellow admins jump right into thinking "we should firewall that port" or "maybe we should shut down that service". In other words, extreme answers. Myself, on the other hand, my first thought is "ok, how could I exploit that", followed up by "if I tried, what would trip me up"? Invariably, my answer would prevent attacks while minimizing inconvenience to legit users, but I get outvoted, on grounds of seniority, by admins who favor solutions that cause much more inconvenience for legit users, while not actually hindering the bad guys.

Moving ssh to a non-standard port? Eh, not necessarily a "bad" idea, but if I'm determined to get into your network there are a couple things that come to mind. First, I'll find that port anyway. Tripwire won't save you. Second, ssh probably wouldn't be the attack vector I'd choose. So, it's both ineffective and inconveniences legit users. (I won't even get started on the fact that we ban ssh keys on public facing servers, and require passwords instead.... )

So, after that long-winded mess, my question is this: "Can you really defend yourself against the bad guys if you're not capable of thinking like they do?"

Submission + - DC Comics refuses to license Superman logo for murdered child's memorial. (thestar.com) 1

Submitted by GuyverDH
GuyverDH writes: DC Comics has refused to allow the Superman logo to be used on a memorial for a 5 year old child, Jeffrey Baldwin, that was starved to death by his grandparents.
Jeffrey Baldwin was a huge fan of anything Superman, and when the story came out about the circumstances of his murder, the community wanted to do something for him. They raised funds to create a memorial statue with the Kryptonian S on the chest.
The latest incarnation of the Superman saga, Man of Steel, tells us that it's not an S, but a symbol for "Hope".
What better use for the symbol of hope, than on a memorial to a murdered child, in hopes that nothing like this happens again.
DC Comics doesn't feel that way, perhaps they don't feel at all.
They implied that it would put a stain or stigma on their trademark to allow it to be used for his memorial because of the conditions surrounding his death.
If Superman were real, he would have stood up for Jeffrey, maybe even prevented his death. At the very least he certainly would have been the first one there to carve his symbol on the memorial himself with his heat vision.

Submission + - The Lovelace Test Is Better Than the Turing Test at Detecting AI (vice.com)

Submitted by meghan elizabeth
meghan elizabeth writes: If the Turing Test can be fooled by common trickery, it’s time to consider we need a new standard. The Lovelace Test is designed to be more rigorous, testing for true machine cognition. It was named it after Ada Lovelace, often described as the world's first computer programmer.

An intelligent computer passes the Lovelace Test only if it originates a “program” that it was not engineered to produce. The new program—it could be an idea, a novel, a piece of music, anything—can’t be a hardware fluke. Now here’s the kicker: The machine's designers must not be able to explain how their original code led to this new program.

Submission + - COMCAST and xfinity hotspots

Submitted by Douglas Goodall
Douglas Goodall writes: After a long conversation with a COMCAST technician, I began to understand the xfinity hotspot situation better. He explained that COMCAST had effectively doubled the usable bandwidth at various parts of their infrastructure, including the backhaul from our local pop. He mentioned that they had doubled the number of logical channels between the subscriber's CPE (Customer Premises Equipment) and their local POP (Point of presence). These logical channels are how they manage to deliver television, internet and telephone services. When the external user establishes his connection to the xfinity hotspot, the traffic is not part of the customer's bandwidth or data cap. The customer does however pay for the electricity used to support the extra radio session. In my opinion, COMCAST should give the customer a credit in return for the customer providing the colocation space, cooling, and power for the extra access point.

Submission + - The Simultaneous Rise and Decline of Battlefield (polygon.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Ben Kuchera at Polygon recommends against buying the upcoming Battlefield Hardline first-person shooter. Not because it's bad — in fact, he doesn't really offer an opinion on how good the game is — but because it's time to stop incentivizing poor behavior from Electronic Arts and its Digital Illusions CE development studio. After EA acquired DICE, Battlefield game launches accelerated, and launch issues with each game were hand-waved away as unpredictable. The studio's principled stand against paid DLC evaporated in order to feed ever-hungry beast of shareholder value. Kuchera says, "EA continues this because the Battlefield franchise is profitable; we as players have taught them that we'll buy anyway, and continue to support games that don't work at launch." He suggests avoiding pre-orders, and only buying the game if and when it's in a playable (and fun) state. "Every dollar that's spent on Hardline before the game comes out is a vote for things continuing down an anti-consumer path. If the game is a hit before its launch, that sends a message that we're OK with business as usual, and business as usual has become pretty terrible."

Submission + - Teaching College Is No Longer a Middle Class Job (guernicamag.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: When you think of somebody who teaches at a college, you typically bring to mind moderately affluent professors with nice houses and cars. All that tuition has to go into big salaries, right? Unfortunately, it seems being a college instructor is becoming less and less lucrative, even to the point of poverty. From the article: "Most university-level instructors are ... contingent employees, working on a contract basis year to year or semester to semester. Some of these contingent employees are full-time lecturers, and many are adjunct instructors: part-time employees, paid per class, often without health insurance or retirement benefits. This is a relatively new phenomenon: in 1969, 78 percent of professors held tenure-track positions. By 2009 this percentage had shrunk to 33.5." This is detrimental to learning as well. Some adjunct faculty, desperate to keep jobs, rely on easy courses and popularity with students to stay employed. Many others feel obligated to help students beyond the limited office hours they're paid for, essentially working for free in order to get the students the help they need. At a time when tuition prices are rising faster than ever, why are we skimping on the most fundamental aspect of college?

Submission + - Apple remains mum about fawlty MacBookPro's..petition reaching 4000 signatures

Submitted by kirthn
kirthn writes: (btw found that the support staff at Apple is reading this item and have been downvoting it...)

The petition (found here https://www.change.org/en-AU/p... )against fawlty MBP early 2011 editions have reached almost 4000 out of 5000 and will be send to Tim Cook

Meanwhile more than 347 pages are on the Apple help forums ( https://discussions.apple.com/... ), and Apple remains mum about it

Submission + - High Fidelity Audio Enters The Digital Age (gramophone.co.uk) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In the last month Sony has announced the 35th anniversary Walkman line, consisting of a handheld player (DAP), a mobile boombox, and a component-sized head unit all capable of playing high-resolution digital files up to 24bit depth/192k sampling rate. Ponomusic also launched and took in over $5 million in two weeks on Kickstarter, promising the highest-quality digital masters available and a well-spec'ed mobile player of their own.

13 years after the first iPod made CD's expendable we might finally be entering the end of the compressed mp3 era. And luckily, instead of going back to the CD standard developed in the late 1970's called "Red-book" (16bit depth/44k sampling rate), Neil Young and his pono startup are pushing 24/96 and 24/192 as the new digital audio standards.

Arguments have ignited all over the internet — listeners, iPod owners, audiophiles, programmers — all sounding off on whether they can hear a difference or not. If you can't hear HD don't buy HD! But you might surprise yourself — your ears are very adaptive. They will listen to garbage and still decode it for familiarity. But give them full fidelity and your emotional response goes through the roof.

Submission + - Microsoft won't allow Xbox One and PC Cross-platform play (gizmorati.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: War Thunder Developer Gaijin Entertainment revealed today in an interview that Microsoft will not permit cross-platform play.

In a rather typical move by Microsoft it looks like we’ll never see the cross-platform play that pretty much every gamer would like to see. Microsoft will not allow this cross-platform play because of their process of verifying servers to make sure users have a good experience.

Submission + - Why is Slashdot ignoring the advice of so many developer articles. 2

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Over the years, Slashdot has recycled plenty of articles about lousy UX, lousy design, lousy graceful degradation, lousy development practices, lousy community management, even lousy JavaScript implementations creating security problems. Did Slashdot read any of those articles?

Submission + - Dice Holdings has written off Slashdot Media at the close of 2013 (prnewswire.com) 3

Submitted by moogla
moogla writes: Apparently Dice.com could not make Slashdot work they way they wanted to; with a murky plan to tap into the Slashdot-reader community to somehow drive attention or insight into other Dice Holdings properities, they've burned through

$7.2 million of intangible assets and $6.3 million of goodwill related to Slashdot Media

and have only started to realize some improvement on related sites. With ad revenue declining and not expected to pick up (read: everyone who uses Slashdot uses adblocking softwarwe), it appears that the Slashdot stewardship experiment by Dice Holdings has been a financial failure. Since the site has been redesigned in a user-hostile fashion with a very generic styling, this reader surmises Dice Holdings is looking to transform or transfer the brand into a generic Web 3.0 technology property. The name may be more valuable than the user community (since we drive no revenue nor particularly use Dice.com's services).

Submission + - Fuck beta 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The beta is bad. It's so bad. The comments are reduced in screen width about 50%. Subject lines are deemphasized, scores are minimized, etc.

The discussions are the reason to come to Slashdot, and the beta trivializes them entirely. It looks like the comment section on a generic news site.

The comments now look like an afterthought, whereas they used to be the primary focus of the site.

Submission + - User Backlash at Slashdot Beta Site (slashdot.org) 3

Submitted by hduff
hduff writes: Look at almost any current Slashdot story and see loyal, long-time members rail against the new site design, willing to burn precious karma points to post off-topic rants against the new design and it being forced on users by the Dice Overlords. Discussion has begun to create an alternate site.

Slashdot Top Deals

If you want to put yourself on the map, publish your own map.

Close