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Comment: Re:Paging Cory Doctorow to find my remote (Score 1) 67

by fostware (#39010317) Attached to: Scientists Print Cheap RFID Tags On Paper

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps6386/tsd_products_support_series_home.html

Properly configured Cisco 2700-series wireless location appliance, 6500-series wireless lan controller, and certain Cisco AP's together can locate RFID tags, and track them using a wireless control server.

That came out in 2006 I think...

Came close to recommending it as an absentee system for private schools, but we couldn't overcome the practicalities of students swapping shoes, ties, bags, students cards, etc. All a student needs to do is hand their tagged item of clothing or equipment to someone else to drag to school, and the absenteeism would slip the school by and subject the administration to duty of care questions.

Comment: Re:Problem here is "racism" (Score 1) 914

by fostware (#39009321) Attached to: Journalist Arrested By Interpol For Tweet

"we sort of gave Iraq back to the Iraqis"
"we gave Kuwait back too"
"we gave Panama back as well"

The US gave them back their countries, once they had been introduced to US-style democracy idealism and US-run companies capitalism.
The result of those conflicts is US businesses got first dibbs on a lot of infrastructure and utility projects - thus guaranteeing business and political back-door power.
Kind of how the US people have a democracy, but it's run by capitalists.

"last we checked in on S. East Asia, the countries there appear to want to be snuggle bunnies with the U.S"
Being strong-armed by Free-Trade Agreements & foreign policies, IP threats, the influx of US-based multinationals, and China being more overtly imperialistic are the more likely reasons.

Programming

Virtualizing an Entire Environment - Multiple Times?

Submitted by Rozine
Rozine writes "My company is being split off from a larger, more hide-bound organization after decades. We're using this opportunity to expand our development team and to change a lot of the development processes that we've lived with for a long time. One of the areas that we'd like to change is our environment setup. Currently, we have development, QA, and production environments running. Our production environment consists of hundreds of machines running hundreds of different processes in a massively complex and scaled up system, almost all on a customized Red Hat Linux (RHEL3-5), with a few AIX and Solaris we're looking to eventually decommission, and one or two Windows boxes. Dev is always broken and lacks some major features that we develop for production. QA has most of what production has, but it's a huge task managing process rollouts that can conflict with UAT needs, especially when sometimes developers perform development in the QA environment due to lack of features or stability in dev. We've recently discussed adding more environments to the mix — a real UAT environment so that clients can have a stable onboarding experience, and multiple dev or QA environments so that we can isolate changes and eliminate wasted time dealing with stability issues. We have support from senior management where cost is "not an issue" (although I'm sure that has limits). We've run into trouble, though, because our complex software only supports the three current environments and it would be an insane task to add more. Has anyone had experience with more sophisticated environment setups in the past? Is it possible to virtualize an entire environment, so that applications think they're the only dev environment and connect to the same "machines", but are really on separate boxes? Does this scale to twenty environments easily, or should we set our sights lower? Is this the wrong approach?"
Programming

Coding tricks of game developers->

Submitted by damian2k
damian2k writes "Game developers often experience a horrific "crunch" (also known as a "death march"), which happens in the last few months of a project leading up to the game's release date. Failing to meet the deadline can often mean the project gets cancelled or even worse, you lose your job. So what sort of tricks do they use while they're under the pump, doing 12+ hour per day for weeks on end?

How about changing the background story of a game to suit a bug, or even just leaving the bug in there and making it a humorous feature of the game! There's also the game studio who keep a pair of white gloves handy, just in case you need to code up some particularly nasty hack and you don't want to feel dirty when you do it! Read more at the article here: http://www.dodgycoder.net/2012/02/coding-tricks-of-game-developers.html"
Link to Original Source
Security

The Evolution of Targeted Attacks and Exploit Kits->

Submitted by
Orome1
Orome1 writes "There's been a significant growth in cybercrime, via sophisticated targeted attacks and social media scams, as well as a rise in malicious email attachments, despite a four-year low in spam volumes last year, according to M86 Security. It is now mainstream practice for spammers to use bogus social media notifications to dupe users into clicking on infected links. Perhaps even more troubling is the success with which cybercriminals capitalize on user trust and familiarity to make Facebook, for example, a conduit for spam and malware propagation. Many of these campaigns are spread virally by enticing users to share posts for “rewards” or “gift cards” with their friends."
Link to Original Source

Dutch largest ISP hacked, shuts down all 2M e-mailaccounts to contain damage->

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "Hackers that managed to gain access to servers of KPN, the largest ISP in the Netherlands, have provided proof of their actions by publishing a list of 500+ email accounts — including names, addresses and unhashed passwords — on pastebin.com. As a precaution, KPN has temporarily disabled all email accounts of 2 million subscribers."
Link to Original Source

Smart Camera Tells Tobacco from Marijuana->

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "A new smart camera technology not only takes a picture but also assays chemical composition, allowing photographers to tell whether that hand-rolled cigarette contains tobacco or marijuana. Designed to speed industrial inspection systems--such as detecting whether food is spoiled--the new smart camera includes spectral filters that make images of corn fields appear differently from hemp. Spectral cameras have been available for decades, but this microchip version should be cheap enough for almost any application--including law enforcement."
Link to Original Source

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