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Security

+ - SPAM: Hacker writes rootkit for Cisco's routers

Submitted by alphadogg
alphadogg writes "A security researcher has developed malicious rootkit software for Cisco Systems' routers, a development that has placed increasing scrutiny on the routers that carry the majority of the Internet's traffic. Sebastian Muniz, a researcher with Core Security Technologies, developed the software, which he will unveil on May 22 at the EuSecWest conference in London. "An IOS rootkit is able to perform the tasks that any other rootkit would do on desktop computer operating systems," Muniz said in an e-mail interview."
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NASA

+ - SPAM: Using satellite imagery to explore ancient Mexico

Submitted by
Roland Piquepaille
Roland Piquepaille writes "An interdisciplinary team of researchers at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) is using satellite imagery to peer into the ancient Mexican past. Bill Middleton, an archeologist, is teaming up with computer scientists to build the most detailed landscape map of the southern state of Oaxaca in order to learn more about the Zapotec civilization. According to Middleton, who probably spoke only about Mexico, the Zapotec people 'had the first writing system, the first state society, the first cities.' The project is funded by National Geographic and NASA which is providing three years of images taken by Earth Observing 1 and Landsat satellites. But read more for additional details and a picture of Middleton, a wacky professor according to some of his students."
The Courts

+ - SPAM: Wal-Mart tele-scammers ordered to forfeit $28.2M

Submitted by
coondoggie
coondoggie writes "The Federal Trade Commission today said court actions against a nationwide telemarketing scheme dubbed the "Wal-Mart Shopping Spree" scam will force the scammers to pay back $28.2 million of their nefarious gains. The court actions also ban Brian MacGregor, the architect of the scheme, from engaging in any aspect of telemarketing or the selling of program memberships. In this scam, consumers were falsely promised free gifts and wrongfully paid monthly fees for "program memberships" such as discount buyers' and travel clubs..MacGregor and Membership Services Direct, Inc., also known as Continuity Partners, Inc., have been ordered to pay the $28.2 million to the agency, representing the scheme's net profits. [spam URL stripped]"
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Enlightenment

+ - Book Review: "The Starfish and the Spider"->

Submitted by
nightcats
nightcats writes "Cindy Sheehan is leaving the anti-war movement to which she gave so much life, energy, and focus. She will be back, no doubt, in some form. I wish her well in restoring herself and renewing her own life. But I firmly disagree (and this is a blue-moon moment) with William R. Pitt that "Anyone glad for her departure from activism is celebrating a disaster." While I doubt I'd use the word "glad" to describe my own feelings, certainly "relieved" qualifies. At any rate, in no way does "disaster" describe this moment. Quite the contrary: this woman endured everything from divorce to death threats to arrest to public taunting and ridicule from the mass media; it is time she retreated and renewed. There is also a broader theme to this, which I am going to explain with a book review. Yes, a book review. The book is The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations. The authors are Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom, and they have written one of the most crystalline gems of social insight that I have seen in any non-fiction these past 20 years. In a mere 200 pages of text, these two Stanford grads provide more clarity of perspective on our society, its group psychologies and cultural transformations, than you are likely to get from a shelf full of punditry or a year's worth of television. I do not think I am overstating the case for this book: it is the most important and clarion piece of non-fiction to arise in this first decade of the 21st century. It is a book made for, and by, its era. The metaphor of the title is a comparison of "top-down", hierarchically-structured groups and organizations, such as we are all familiar with in corporate America and government (that's the spider, who can be made lame from the loss of its legs and dead from decapitation); and the fresh wave of decentralized, leaderless, or non-hierarchical organizations that have become such a force in society over the past decade of the Internet (this is the "starfish," which can be chopped up into numerous pieces, each of which will respond by growing a new organism or member). The book opens with a heady analysis of how a starfish phenomenon evolved in one particular category: the P2P file sharing services in the Napster/Grokster model. The authors show how the early versions of these spontaneous organizations got stuck in "spider" mode, and were therefore eventually trapped and killed by big corporate media and its legal juggernaut. But these Napster-type experiments benefited from such attacks by a response of ever-increasing differentiation, diversification, and "starfish"-style regrowth. Brafman and Beckstrom finally lead the reader to the eMule service, which took decentralization to the point of anonymity and total leaderlessness. Big Media cannot attack an entity like eMule, because it has no head, no governance, no bank accounts: there is nothing for a legal or corporate machine to assault, except for individual users of the service, who, aside from being virtually innumerable, are mostly children and rarely wealthy. The authors go on to reveal both the beauty and the danger inherent in the starfish-mode of organizational being, drawing examples as diverse as Wikipedia and al Qaeda. Along the way, they present portraits of environmental groups, activist organizations, online merchants, and Internet services. But if this book stopped with mere sketches of eBay, Alcoholics Anonymous, Apache, craigslist, Goodwill Industries, and IBM, then it would be merely an interesting intellectual snack for the MBA crowd. The Starfish and the Spider becomes a banquet of cultural insight because it digs past the surface that so many pundits and social commentators stop to admire. Brafman and Beckstrom turn the starfish on its back, examine it in varying light, carry it into vastly disparate environments, and constantly ask questions of it. In doing so, they discover some principles and characteristics common to starfish organizations and the people who inspire and influence their growth. One of their most fascinating discoveries is in the figure of what they term "the catalyst." It is here that we are brought back to Cindy Sheehan (this is my own connection, so if you think it's a stupid association, don't blame the authors of the book). The catalyst is the person who founds a starfish group, the one who gives it form, ideas, value, focus, and meaning. Examples of catalysts that Brafman and Beckstrom offer are: # Granville Sharp, leader of the abolitionist movement against slavery in England # Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who founded the women's suffrage movement that Susan B. Anthony later took up with still greater energy # Craig Newmark of craigslist # Bill Wilson of AA One thing the authors point out is that a catalyst is like the architect of a house: he's essential to the long-term structural integrity, but he doesn't move in. In fact, when the catalyst stays around too long and becomes absorbed in his creation, the whole structure becomes more centralized. So one common feature to the life and health of a growing decentralized movement or organization is that the catalyst almost always leaves or at least recedes into the mesh of the whole, once the group has matured enough to work autonomously and to withstand assault. Whenever a catalyst attempts to assume a traditional, CEO-type of leadership role, the organization loses its dynamism, its life as a starfish, and becomes a centralized, hierarchical spider — much easier to mark, and then suppress or assimilate. For a corporate entity, this may not necessarily be a bad thing: growth-as-profit, after all, can be nurtured in a traditional corporate management structure. But growth-as-message can become stilled or silenced when there's a top dog in place, approving this, denying that; or simply being a figurehead in a particular place as the focus of activism or just attention. The anti-war movement has benefited enormously from Cindy Sheehan's presence, personality, experience, and energy. We have admired her from afar for some two years now: I first wrote about her here (note also that the fractiousness and in-fighting that Sheehan noted in her parting statement existed way back then, too). Since then, however, the movement has grown, thanks largely to Sheehan's example and leadership. But I agree with Brafman and Beckstrom, that a time inevitably comes for every starfish organization when its formative human force must retreat. In our own democracy's formative stage, George Washington had to decline the crown that his followers attempted to place on his head. Other catalysts have had to spurn a crown or a corner office, and always for the good of the whole, for the sake of the movement's continued growth. Since Sheehan first camped out in George Bush's backyard, Code Pink, IVAW, and hundreds of other "starfish arms and legs" have formed around her and taken on their own life in the anti-war sea. It is time that these organisms were allowed to share in both the light and the tribulation, the accolades and the calumny. The blogosphere — itself a starfish organization — has benefited from Sheehan's influence and example. I think she recognizes this as well, and thus chose Daily Kos as the forum for her parting message. It is perhaps only seemingly ironic that the world wide web is perhaps the least "spidery" vehicle of communication on earth today. Only on the Internet, for example, could you find a science writer for a stodgy paper like the New York Times writing a scathing indictment of the Bush administration — it happened today. As Brafman and Beckstrom point out in their book, this kind of seeming chaos is unique to a starfish-style organization: "When you give people freedom, you get chaos, but you also get incredible creativity." Even on the website of a spider organization like the New York Times. Clearly, we probably need more chaos; and we certainly need more creativity. Congress has failed to carry out the will of the people, because it cannot respond to the fluid movement of the starfish; it is too mired in its own iron-stranded matrix of excess, corruption, deceit, and self-indulgence. As the authors of The Starfish and the Spider indicate, we can only overcome the turgid inertia of Washington politics by redoubling the starfish energy of the anti-war movement. In other words, it is time for a catalyst to step into the background, so that the whole is given renewed life. And so that a long-suffering and heroic Mom can once more feel the quiet joys of private life that the rest of us so often take for granted."
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Education

Journal: Our Solar system was adopted? 4

Journal by mandark1967
Our Solar System is traveling at a 60 to 90 degree angle compared to the rest of the Milky Way Galaxy and scientists have now discovered why. It seems our solar system originated not in the Milky Way Galaxy, but in the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy, which is in the process of being eaten by the Milky Way.
Space

+ - Tunguska Impact Crater "Found"->

Submitted by
BigBadBus
BigBadBus writes "An Italian Team is claiming to have found the impact crater resulting from the 1908 Tunguska impact. From the BBC website:
A University of Bologna team says a lake near the epicentre of the blast may be occupying a crater hollowed out by a chunk of rock that hit the ground. Lake Cheko — though shallow — fits the proportions of a small, bowl-shaped impact crater, say the Italy-based scientists. Their investigation of the lake bottom's geology reveals a funnel-like shape not seen in neighbouring lakes. In addition, a geophysics survey of the lake bed has turned up an unusual feature about 10m down which could either be compacted lake sediments or a buried fragment of space rock."
Of course, this is highly controversial, but its a hell of a lot better than the gas eruption theory mentioned in one of Arthur C.Clarke's "Mysterious World" books."
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PC Games (Games)

+ - Blizzard makes WoW wish virtual reality

Submitted by UberHoser
UberHoser writes "A member of my guild pointed me to this rather interesting article about Blizzard. Kinda refreshing.
http://www.ocregister.com/ocregister/money/article _1702706.php
Blizzard makes WoW wish virtual reality. Make-A-Wish and a willing company help a grade schooler become the first outsider to create a new character in World of Warcraft.
For World of Warcraft players hanging out in Shadowmoon Valley last Friday, bizarre events occurred that can only be explained by a small group of people inside the headquarters of Blizzard Entertainment. At the helm of the strangeness sat 10-year-old Ezra Chatterton, who directed Warcraft's lead game designer Jeff Kaplan to blast ferocious-looking monsters, or "bosses," with a single death ray. Chatterton cleared the Black Temple for a European clan to fight the volcano-summoning Supremus. All that power. Heh, heh."
XBox (Games)

+ - End of Red VS Blue

Submitted by
UberHoser
UberHoser writes "Now I am not sure if this is an April Fool's joke or not, but it seems that the series Red vs Blue is coming to an end.

Taked directly from the post that Bernie made:

"That's why we wanted to let you all know first that Episode 100 is going to be the last installment of The Blood Gulch Chronicles. One hundred is a great number, and it seems like the perfect place to call it a show."

You can read the whole post here: http://rvb.roosterteeth.com/forum/viewTopic.php?id =2205248"

"Papers, Please"->

From feed by bsfeed
Great essay from 1990 by Bill Holm: No papers, no pay. It's an interesting equation, and I think it has not surfaced before in Minnesota. Neither of my Icelandic grandfathers, for instance, had papers enough to work in Marshall, and...
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Wii

+ - One Wii Please?

Submitted by Ineda Wii
Ineda Wii writes "Does anyone know when Nintendo will be shipping enough Wiis to allow for regular store purchase (i.e.: no special orders, no ebay, etc.)? Am I better off just buying one now off the second-hand market instead of waiting)?"
Space

+ - New Horizons photographs Earth-sized storm

Submitted by
Matthew Sparkes
Matthew Sparkes writes "The New Horizons spacecraft has taken the closest ever photos of Jupiter's Little Red Spot, which is actually a storm the size of Earth which has been raging since 2005. New Horizons targeted the storm when it passed Jupiter to gain speed for its journey to Pluto. The source of the red hue remains an open question. Some scientists believe hurricane-like winds lift material from beneath Jupiter's cloud-tops up to an altitude where radiation from the Sun can chemically alter it, producing the red colour. Scientists have estimated that winds in the storm were whipping around the atmosphere at 180 metres per second."
Security

+ - What to Do When Your Security is Breached

Submitted by ancientribe
ancientribe writes "When you've got a full-blown security breach on your hands, what do you do? If you've been smart, you'll already have a computer security incident response team — and a plan — in place. But many companies are too resource-strapped to have a full-blown, fully-tested incident response strategy. Here are some tips on what to do — and what not to do.

http://www.darkreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=120 172&WT.svl=news1_2"

"If it's not loud, it doesn't work!" -- Blank Reg, from "Max Headroom"

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