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We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

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Comment: Astroscan (Score 1) 187

by dangle (#47741581) Attached to: Slashdot Asks: Cheap But Reasonable Telescopes for Kids?

Speaking to their durability, a family friend gave his childhood Astroscan to our son for his fifth birthday. Our son is an adult now, and we still enjoy using it at home and on trips.

Dan Rutter has a nice Astroscan review that includes some other telescope suggestions:

http://www.dansdata.com/astros...

-Dangle

+ - Private company leads to arrests of three hackers ten years after attack 2

Submitted by Jdogatl
Jdogatl (836125) writes "I was intruiged by a bit of news that reports that 10 years after a digital attack, a forensic investigation company, Digital Investigation, lead to the arrest of three hackers (actually two hackers hired by a third party). They were asked in 2013 to investigate an attack on a lawfirm 9 years after the initial attack. The investigating company says that someone hacked and leaked a DDoS commercial service's userdatabase and was able to eventually track down the hackers because one of them logged did not login through a VPN once. Oops.

The company lays out the details of their investigation and though it is in Dutch it was interesting that the conclusion was largely due to "someone" leaking the information about the hacker. It raises a couple of questions, if you were a security company and obviously not going to get anywhere would you hack a company's user database (regardless of the legality of the service provided) and say that it was leaked by "some" hacker to avoid being charged yourself? Also, is it not a bit odd that the information that brought down the hackers was still retained 9 years after the attacks? Or that being stupid once, 10 years ago, can still bring you down. Should there not be a push for statute of limitations on cyber crime?

Sorry, the link is in Dutch.
http://www.digital-investigati..."

+ - Endeavor stack being rebuilt piece by piece->

Submitted by dangle
dangle (1381879) writes "The Exposition Park museum in LA is working to rebuild the Endeavor launch stack, a display that will take thousands of pieces to complete due to parts that are scattered at NASA facilities, museums and other places across the U.S. Most are one of a kind and impossible to replicate. Dennis Jenkins, who spent his entire 30-plus year career sending the shuttles into space, is playing a key role in locating essential parts using his own and his colleagues' institutional memory. Employed by NASA contractor Martin Marietta, he helped write the software used in loading and controlling the liquid oxygen needed to launch the 2,250-ton shuttle assembly into low Earth orbit. Now, with the program part of a bygone era of exploration, the 57-year-old works for the California Science Center, helping officials figure out how to rebuild Endeavour."
Link to Original Source

+ - Windows XP can put SOX, HIPAA, credit card security-compliance at risk ->

Submitted by coondoggie
coondoggie (973519) writes "When Microsoft stops supporting Windows XP next month businesses that have to comply with payment card industry (PCI) data security standards as well as health care and financial standards may find themselves out of compliance unless they call in some creative fixes, experts say. Strictly interpreted, the PCI Security Standards Council requires that all software have the latest vendor-supplied security patches installed, so when Microsoft stops issuing security patches April 8, businesses processing credit cards on machines using XP should fall out of PCI compliance,"
Link to Original Source

Comment: Re:Overstating their case (Score 1) 168

by dangle (#45567741) Attached to: Why Competing For Tenure Is Like Trying To Become a Drug Lord

Exactly. For a while I was "going for it" to see how far I could rise in academics. I used to joke that I had risen from street thug to one of the guys that gets to sit at the bar in the local don's place. But I always added the caveat "at least I don't have to kill anyone or worry about being killed."

+ - Syrian Electronic Army Hacks Domain Data for Twitter, NY Times

Submitted by Trailrunner7
Trailrunner7 (1100399) writes "The Syrian Electronic Army, a group known for attacking high-profile media sites in the last year or so, has in the last few hours compromised the domain information for a large number of sites, including the New York Times home page and some of Twitter’s domains. Security researchers say that the most likely attack vector was the domain registrar used by the companies.

Both the Times and Twitter, as well as a long list of other companies including Google and Yahoo, use a company called Melbourne IT as a domain registrar. Researchers following the attack say that the WHOIS and domain information for the Times and Twitter domains was changing back and forth between legitimate data and the hacked SEA data for much of the last few hours. The Times home page was offline sporadically Tuesday afternoon and the paper reported that the company’s CIO told employees to be cautious sending email “until this situation is resolved”."

+ - NSA to cut 90% of Sysadmins->

Submitted by dangle
dangle (1381879) writes "In an attempt to prevent future data leaks, Army Gen. Keith B. Alexander, the NSA’s director, has announced plans to cut almost all the agency's system administrators. “What we’re in the process of doing – not fast enough – is reducing our system administrators by about 90 percent,” he said last week at Fordham University in New York. Many of those systems administrators are contractors, like Snowden was. Instead of the 1,000 systems administrators NSA uses, Alexander wants to move more of the operation to the cyber cloud, called the Intelligence Community’s Information Technology Enterprise (ICITE), which relies on a network of computers linked on the Internet. “We’ve put people in the loop of transferring data, securing networks and doing things that machines are probably better at doing,” Alexander said."
Link to Original Source

+ - Astronomers Identify Asteroids That Can Easily Be Captured

Submitted by Hugh Pickens DOT Com
Hugh Pickens DOT Com (2995471) writes "Long overlooked as mere rocky chunks leftover from the formation of the solar system, asteroids have recently gotten a lot more scrutiny as NASA moves forward with plans to capture, tow, and place a small asteroid somewhere near our planet and two different private space companies, Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries, plan to seek out and mine precious metals and water from near-Earth asteroids. Now Adam Mann reports that astronomers have identified 12 candidate Easily Retrievable Objects (EROs) ranging in size from approximately 2 meters to 60 meters in diameter that already come (cosmically) close enough to our planet, that it would take a relatively small push to put into orbits around Lagrange points near Earth using existing rocket technology. For example, 2006 RH120, could be sent into orbit around L2 by changing its velocity by just 58 meters per second with a single burn on 1 February 2021. Moving one of these EROs would be a “logical stepping stone towards more ambitious scenarios of asteroid exploration and exploitation, and possibly the easiest feasible attempt for humans to modify the Solar System environment outside of Earth (PDF),” write the authors in Celestial Mechanics and Dynamical Astronomy. None of the 12 ERO asteroids are new to astronomers; in fact one of them became briefly famous when it was found to be temporarily orbiting the Earth until 2007. But until now nobody had realized just how easily these bodies could be captured."

+ - NASA tests software algorithm that could precisely land future spacecraft->

Submitted by coondoggie
coondoggie (973519) writes "magine if you had developed, built and flown a spacecraft that successfully traversed the cosmos but upon landing, spun out of control or hit something that destroyed the ship. Such nightmare scenarios are exactly what NASA engineers are developing sophisticated software technology to avoid. NASA is currently testing one of the more important components of such software — the algorithms that incorporate the spacecraft's trajectory, speed and landing information to guide a ship to a safe arrival. The latest algorithm, known as Fuel Optimal Large Divert Guidance algorithm (G-FOLD) is being flight-tested in conjunction with Masten Space Systems at the Mojave Air and Space Port in California."
Link to Original Source
Intel

+ - Intel challenges ARM on power consumption... and wins.->

Submitted by GhostX9
GhostX9 (1525571) writes "Tom's Hardware just published a detailed look at the Intel Atom Z2760 in the Acer Iconia W510 and compared it to the NVIDIA Tegra 3 in the Microsoft Surface. They break it down and demonstrate how the full Windows 8 tablet outperforms the Windows RT machine in power consumption. They break down power consumption to include the role of the CPU, GPU, memory controller and display. Anandtech is also reporting similar findings, but only reports CPU and GPU utilization."
Link to Original Source
Transportation

+ - The New Ethanol Blend May Damage Your Vehicle 1

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes "About 80 percent of the gasoline consumed in the US is blended with ethanol, primarily E10 meaning gasoline with a 10 percent mix of ethanol, generally derived from corn. Now Kate Sheppard writes that the Environmental Protection Agency has approved a new policy that will allow states to raise the blend to up to 15 percent ethanol (also known as E15), approved for use for cars and light trucks from the model year 2001 and later. A few weeks ago, AAA issued a statement saying that the EPA's new policy creates the "strong likelihood of consumer confusion and the potential for voided warranties and vehicle damage." The worry is that people will put E15 in their cars without realizing it. AAA surveyed vehicle manufacturers, and found that only about 12 million of the 240 million vehicles on the roads today are built to use E15 gasoline. The EPA will require that gas pumps with E15 bear a warning sign noting the blend and that it is not recommended for cars older than the 2001 model year. But what happens if you accidentally use it? "Nobody really knows what negative effects [E15 is] going to have on the vehicle," says Brian Lyons, Toyota's safety and quality communications manager. "We think that there needs to be a lot more study conducted to make sure there are no longer term effects on the vehicle. So far everything we've seen says there will be." The concern is that repeated, long-term exposure could cause the higher-alcohol-content fuel to degrade engine parts like valves and cylinder heads—which could potentially cost thousands of dollars to replace. Gas station owners don't like it very much either, because they'd likely have to upgrade their equipment to use it. Nor are environmental groups big fans of the EPA's decision arguing that increasing the use of ethanol can drive up food prices, and isn't the best means of reducing our reliance on foreign fuels. The ethanol lobby is the only group that really seems to like the new rule. "We've force fed a fuel into every American's car that benefits a few thousand corn farmers and ethanol refiners at the expense of virtually every other American," says Scott Faber."

Whenever a system becomes completely defined, some damn fool discovers something which either abolishes the system or expands it beyond recognition.

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