Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror

Submission + - Breast Cancer Gene Patent Is Invalid (aclu.org)

Submitted by shriphani
shriphani writes: The breast cancer gene patent is ruled invalid and hopefully this will go a long way in ensuring that patents on genes do not stand in the way of research.
Security

Submission + - Self-Destructing USB Stick Sold as Un-Hackable 3

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "PC World reports that Victorinox, maker of the legendary Swiss Army Knife, has launched a new super-secure memory stick that sounds like something out of Mission: Impossible. The Secure Pro USB comes in 8GB, 16GB, and 32GB sizes, and provides a variety of security measures including fingerprint identification, a thermal sensor, and even a self-destruct mechanism. Victorinox says the Secure is "the most secure [device] of its kind available to the public." The Secure features a fingerprint scanner and a thermal sensor "so that the finger alone, detached from the body, will still not give access to the memory stick's contents." The product uses an integrated Single Chip Technology, so that there are no external and accessible lines between the different coding/security steps, as on multi-chip solutions making cracking the hardware impossible. Then there's the self-destruct mechanism. While offering no explanation of how it works, Victorinox will only say that if someone tries to forcibly open the memory stick it triggers a self-destruct mechanism that "irrevocably burns [the Secure's] CPU and memory chip." At a contest held in London, Victorinox put its money where its mouth was and put the Secure Pro to the test offering a £100,000 cash prize ($149,000) to a team of professional hackers if they could break into the USB drive within two hours. They failed."

Submission + - MA cyberbullies indicted for causing suicide (nydailynews.com) 1

Submitted by Raul654
Raul654 writes: Massachusetts teenager Phoebe Prince committed suicide on January 14. After her death, it was revealed that she had been the target of cyberbullying for months (and that her teachers were aware of it and did nothing). Today, nine of her classmates were indicted on charges including harassment, stalking, civil rights violations, and statuary rape. Prince's suicide echoes the earlier suicide of Megan Meier, who committed suicide after being cyberbullied by a classmate's mother.

Slashdot Top Deals

Repel them. Repel them. Induce them to relinquish the spheroid. - Indiana University fans' chant for their perennially bad football team

Close