stevek - Slashdot User

Would Someone Please Release a MacOS X Virus!-> 3

Submitted by Shannon Love on Friday February 05 2010, @06:28PM

Shannon Love writes "Would Someone Please Just Release a Mac OS X Virus Already? For eight plus years we've been told that Mac OS X is just as easy to subvert in the real world as Windows. For eight plus years, I've waited for the predicted malware tsunami to hit the Mac. Yet, it's never happened and the suspense is killing me!

Some intrepid hacker needs to put an end to this debate and put Mac users out the misery of eight plus years of waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Unless of course, they can't. After all this time, with Apple being the highest profile computing company in the world and with tens of millions of supposedly bare assed Macs out there why hasn't anyone actually succeeded at making a Mac OS X virus or worm? Shouldn't someone have done so by now at least as a prank or a proof of concept?

At what point do we begin to suspect that we've misunderstood something important about Macs and self-reproducing malware?"
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SPAM: Apple Restricts Mobile Ad Apps 0

Submitted by IP-192.com on Friday February 05 2010, @11:14AM

IP-192.com writes "Apple has notified developers not to use location-based services such as the Core Location framework to deliver ads to iPhone, iPod touch, and future iPad owners based on where they are.

“If you build your application with features based on a user’s location, make sure these features provide beneficial information. If your app uses location-based information primarily to enable mobile advertisers to deliver targeted ads based on a user’s location, your app will be returned to you by the App Store Review Team for modification before it can be posted to the App Store,” Apple said.

The company claims the GPS data can only be used to provide “beneficial information to users.” Looks like Apple is going to keep location-based advertising to them,” said Twitterific developer Greg Hockenberry in a recent tweet.

One of the ad networks that has had success with in-app advertising on the iPhone is AdMob, a company Apple tried to get control over but that Google is now in the process of acquiring. Several news outlets reported that Apple is now in the process of acquiring mobile ad company Quattro Wireless, a direct competitor to AdMob. Sounds like that it’s only a matter of time before Quattro will be the exclusive provider of in-app advertising on all Apple devices."
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The pain of open-sourcing Symbian-> 0

Submitted by Barence on Friday February 05 2010, @10:57AM

Barence writes "PC Pro has an enlightening interview with John Forsyth, part of the Symbian Foundation’s Leadership Team, in which he pulls no punches when talking about open-sourcing such a huge project. When asked about the hurdles he faces, Forsyth replied: "What you’re really doing is taking a bunch of human beings who work on a live code base that is their livelihood, and saying ‘you used to do this in private, so when you screwed up, or couldn’t figure out the solution to something, or made a bad choice, or were doing something that was a great idea and you didn’t want your competitors to know, it was behind closed doors. It’s all different now’. We’re doing this in the open, where you’ve got to start networking within the community, having rocks thrown at you because maybe your code isn’t as good as some guy who’s not even working for a company, who’s a graduate student and could have fixed this hole you haven’t even spotted.""
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Mozilla says Firefox add-ons contained Trojan code-> 0

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 05 2010, @10:40AM

An anonymous reader writes "Approximately 4,600 people are feared to have downloaded add-ons for Firefox that were infected by Trojan horses.

Mozilla has acknowledged that the Master Filer add-on was infected by the LdPinch password-stealing Trojan, and Sothink Web Video Downloader version 4.0 was infected by a version of the Bifrose backdoor Trojan horse. Mozilla removed Master Filer from addons.mozilla.org on January 25th, and version 4 of Sothink Web Video Downloader on February 2nd 2010.

According to security firm Sophos, only Windows users will have been infected by the malware."
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SPAM: Teens don’t like Twitter 3

Submitted by IP-192.com on Thursday February 04 2010, @11:25AM

IP-192.com writes "Teens and young adults like Facebook, but they are not so keen on Twitter, according to the Pew Internet Project’s report. “Out of all the data, we think in some ways it’s most surprising to see a decline in blogging, Social Media and Mobile Internet Use Among Teens and Young Adults,” says Pew researcher and co-author Amanda Lenhart.

Not surprisingly, teens are wired: 93 percent of teens surveyed went online; 63 percent on a daily basis. Lenhart says blogging among teens and young adults has dropped to half what it was in 2006. In that year, 28 percent of teens ages 12-17 and adults ages 18-29 were bloggers. In contrast, by the fall of 2009, the numbers had dropped to 14 percent of teens and 15 percent of young adults. During the same period, the percentage of online adults over 30 who were bloggers rose from 7 percent in 2006 to 11 percent in 2009.

“What we think is really going on here – why young people aren’t doing blogs anymore – is that there’s been a move from MySpace, which put blogging front and center, to Facebook, which doesn’t have that,” Lenhart says. One student said teenagers had lost interest in blogging because they needed to type quickly and “people don’t find reading that fun”.

Twitter hasn’t gained much ground with teens. Only 8 percent of 12- to 17-year-olds who go online say they ever use it. That’s unusual, because teenagers have a history of being early adopters of nearly every online activity, according to Lenhart.

The study found that almost seven in ten teens own a computer, with two-thirds of those between 18 and 29 owning a laptop. About 58 percent of adults own a desktop.

The study was conducted by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project."
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Developer teamwork problem 3

Submitted by compsci06 on Thursday February 04 2010, @11:12AM

compsci06 writes "I am a developer that works on many large projects of varying complexity. I also have a side business that does web development. In both environments, there always seems to be one developer that consistently delivers uncommented code at the last minute that does not follow agreed interfaces (because their way was "better"). These developers usually work well alone. They deliver very efficient code that works well if you don't have to touch the code again. It seems their code is usually difficult to maintain. Have any of the other developers on slashdot come across this? What is the best way to deal with developers like this in a way that keeps the work environment from becoming a war zone? I'm sure there is a productive way to get maintainable code from them. I just have not found it."

Why is Slashdot written in invalid html?-> 0

Submitted by abloylas on Tuesday February 02 2010, @09:58AM

abloylas writes "I find it a little bizarre that Slashdot doesn't use valid markup. See http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://slashdot.org/. Would anybody like to comment on why it seems to be so hard, even for a geek site like Slashdot, to use proper code?"
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New Twitter, Facebook Attacks Using IP Geolocation-> 0

Submitted by Trailrunner7 on Monday February 01 2010, @11:40AM

Trailrunner7 writes "Attackers have been focusing a lot of attention on social networking destinations such as Facebook, Twitter and even LinkedIn for some time now, but they recently have begun shifting their tactics to make their attacks much more effective and precise through the use of geolocation and profiling. "If the advertisers are doing it, and it's working, there's no reason the bad guys won't," said Stefan Tanase of Kaspersky Lab. "They're now automating the targeted attacks. That's a dangerous thing. The complexity of these attacks will get bigger and bigger and the social engineering attacks are getting more complicated.""
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SPAM: Accusations fly over voice encyption hack 0

Submitted by ChiefMonkeyGrinder on Monday February 01 2010, @11:13AM

ChiefMonkeyGrinder writes "SecurStar has been accused of being behind an apparently independent test of voice encryption products that found many of its rivals could be hacked using a $100 phone-tapping program. But Fabio Pietrosanti, CTO of Khamsa, alleges the independent test was a marketing exercise. The researcher, an unnamed ‘Notrax', was subsequently traced to an IP address connected to SecurStar after the individual followed a link embedded in a blog Pietrosanti had posted.
[spam URL stripped]"
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Intel Next-Gen CPU Has Memory Controller and GPU

Submitted by

NetworkingNed

on Wednesday March 28 2007, @02:12PM

NetworkingNed writes "Today Intel talked to analysts about their upcoming CPU architectures including the Penryn and Nehalem cores. While most of the Penryn information was already known, like the move to 45nm, SSE4 instructions and up to 12MB L2 cache, the information on Nehalem was much more interesting. Intel divulged that Nehalem was going to be a completely scalable architecture and would feature anywhere from 1-8 cores with 1-16 threads (SMT is back!) depending on the market segment. Not only that, but on-die memory controllers and on-die GPUs are planned as well. Could this be the answer to AMD's Fusion technology? This PC Perspective article has a lot more information on the technology plans introduced today."