timothy - Slashdot User

+ - Robot With Broken Leg Learns To Walk Again In Under 2 Minutes 0

Submitted by KentuckyFC on Tuesday July 22, 2014 @07:26AM

KentuckyFC (1144503) writes "When animals lose a limb, they learn to hobble remarkably quickly. And yet when robots damage a leg, they become completely incapacitated. That now looks set to the change thanks to a group of robotics engineers who have worked out how to dramatically accelerate the process of learning to walk again when a limb has become damaged. They've tested it on a hexapod robot which finds an efficient new gait in under two minutes (with video), and often faster, when a leg becomes damaged. The problem for robots is that the parameter space of potential gaits is vast. For a robot with six legs and 18 motors, the task of finding an efficient new gait boils down to a search through 36-dimensional space. That's why it usually takes so long. The new approach gets around this by doing much of this calculation in advance, before the robot gets injured. The solutions are then ordered according to the amount of time each leg remains in contact with the ground. That reduces the dimension of the problem from 36 to 6 and so makes it much easier for the robot to search. When a leg becomes damaged, the robot selects new gaits from those that minimise contact with the ground for the damaged limb. It compares several and then chooses the fastest. Voila! The resulting gaits are often innovative, for example, with the robot moving by springing forward. The new approach even found a solution should all the legs become damaged. In that case, the robot flips onto its back and inches forward on its 'shoulders'."

+ - Open-Source Blu-Ray Library Now Supports BD-J Java-> 0

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 22, 2014 @11:06AM

An anonymous reader writes "Updates to the open-source libbluray, libaacs, and libbdplus libraries have improved the open-source Blu-ray disc support to now enable the Blu-ray Java interactivity layer (BD-J). The Blu-ray Java code is in turn executed by OpenJDK or the Oracle JDK and is working well enough to play a Blu-ray disc on the Raspberry Pi when paired with the VLC media player."
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+ - Black Hat presentation on TOR suddenly cancelled-> 0

Submitted by alphadogg on Tuesday July 22, 2014 @09:22AM

alphadogg (971356) writes "A presentation on a low-budget method to unmask users of a popular online privacy tool, TOR, will no longer go ahead at the Black Hat security conference early next month. The talk was nixed by the legal counsel with Carnegie Mellon’s Software Engineering Institute after a finding that materials from researcher Alexander Volynkin were not approved for public release, according to a notice on the conference’s website. https://www.blackhat.com/lates... Volynkin, a research scientist with the university’s Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) was due to give a talk entitled “You Don’t Have to be the NSA to Break Tor: Deanonymizing Users on a Budget” at the conference, which take places Aug. 6-7 in Last Vegas."
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+ - Why are the world's scientists continuing to take chances with smallpox?-> 0

Submitted by Lasrick on Tuesday July 22, 2014 @12:45PM

Lasrick (2629253) writes "MIT's Jeanne Guillemin looks at the recent blunders with smallpox and H5N1 at the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health to chronicle the fascinating history of smallpox eradication efforts and the attempts (thwarted by Western scientists) to destroy lab collections of the virus in order to make it truly extinct. 'In 1986, with no new smallpox cases reported, the World Health Assembly, the decision-making body of the WHO, resolved to destroy the strain collections and make the virus extinct. But there was resistance to this; American scientists in particular wanted to continue their research.' Within a few years, secret biological warfare programs were discovered in Moscow and in Iraq, and a new flurry of defensive research was funded. Nevertheless, Guillemin and others believe that changes in research methods, which no longer require the use of live viruses, mean that stocks of the live smallpox virus can and should finally be destroyed."
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+ - Elephants may have best noses on Earth-> 0

Submitted by sciencehabit on Tuesday July 22, 2014 @02:51PM

sciencehabit (1205606) writes "Scientists have identified and examined olfactory receptor genes from 13 mammalian species. The researchers found that every species has a highly unique variety of such genes: Of the 10,000 functioning olfactory receptor genes the team studied, only three are shared among the 13 species. Perhaps not surprisingly, given the length of its trunk, the African elephant has the largest number of such genes—nearly 2000, the scientists report online today in the Genome Research. In contrast, dogs have only 1000, and humans and chimpanzees, less than 400—possibly because higher primates rely more on their vision and less on their sense of smell."
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+ - Tor developers vow to fix bug that can uncloak users 0

Submitted by Graculus on Tuesday July 22, 2014 @02:44PM

Graculus (3653645) writes "Developers of the Tor privacy service say they're close to fixing a weakness that researchers for an abruptly canceled conference presentation said provides a low-cost way for adversaries to deanonymize hundreds of thousands of users. The talk previously scheduled for next month's Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas was titled "You Don't Have to be the NSA to Break Tor: Deanonymizing Users on a Budget." The abstract said that the hack cost less than $3,000 and could uncloak hundreds of thousands of users. On Monday, Black Hat organizers said the presentation was canceled at the request of attorneys from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), where the researchers were employed, as well as the Software Engineering Institute (SEI). The attorneys said only that the materials to be presented "have not yet been approved by CMU/SEI for public release." Researchers Alexander Volynkin and Michael McCord have yet to explain why their talk was pulled."

+ - Microsoft Is Testing Developer Biometrics To Predict Software Bugs 1

Submitted by rjmarvin on Tuesday July 22, 2014 @12:03PM

rjmarvin (3001897) writes "Microsoft Research is testing a new method for catching errors and bugs in while developers code: biometrics
http://sdtimes.com/sd-times-bl.... By measuring a developer's eye movements, physical and mental characteristics as they code, the researchers measured alertness and stress levels to predict when a programmer will make a coding error. In a paper entitled "Using Psycho-Physiological Measures to Assess Task Difficulty in Software Development" http://research.microsoft.com/..., the researchers summarized their study of 15 developers where they strapped an eye tracker, an electrodermal sensor and an EEG sensor to developers as they programmed various tasks. The study found that biometrics predicted task difficulty for a new developer 64.99% of the time. For a new development task, the researchers found biometrics to be 84.38% accurate. The researchers did not, however, comment on the invasiveness of biometric sensors to developers."

+ - Brits ignore government's parental-control broadband filters-> 0

Submitted by nk497 on Tuesday July 22, 2014 @07:59AM

nk497 (1345219) writes "Broadband customers are overwhelmingly choosing not to use parental-control systems foisted on ISPs by the government — with takeup in the single-digits for three of the four major broadband providers. Last year, the government pushed ISPs to roll out network-level filters, forcing new customers to make an "active" decision about whether they want to use them or not. Only 5% of new BT customers signed up, 8% opted in for Sky and 4% for Virgin Media. TalkTalk rolled out a parental-control system two years before the government required it and has a much better takeup, with 36% of customers signing up for it. The report, from regulator Ofcom, didn't bother to judge if the filters actually work, however."
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+ - Ask Slashdot: Linux Login and Resource Management/Restriction in a Computer Lab 0

Submitted by rongten on Sunday July 20, 2014 @03:52AM

rongten (756490) writes "I am managing a computer lab composed of various kind of Linux workstations, from small desktops to powerful workstations with plenty of ram and cores. The users' $HOME is NFS mounted, and they either access via console (no user switch allowed), ssh or x2go. In the past the powerful workstations were reseved to certain power users, but now even "regular" students may need to have access to high memory machines for some tasks.
I ask slashdort, is there a sort of resource management that would permit: to forbid a same user to log graphically more than once (like UserLock), to limit the amount of ssh sessions (i.e. no user using distcc and spamming the rest of the machines or even worse running in parallel), to give priority to the console user (i.e. automatically renicing remote users jobs and restricting their memory usage), to avoid swapping and waiting (i.e. all the users trying to log into the latest and greatest machine, so have a limited amount of logins proportional to the capacity of the machine).
The system being put in place uses Fedora 20, ldap PAM authentication, it is puppet managed, and NFS based. In the past I tried to achieve similar functionality via cron jobs, login scripts, ssh and nx management, queuing system.
But it is not an elegant solution and it is hacked a lot.
Since I think these requirements should be pretty standard for a computer lab, I am surprised to see that I cannot find something already written for it.
Does any of you know of a similar system, preferably opensource? A commercial solution could be acceptable as well."

+ - Weev: 'Has the internet forgotten about me?'-> 0

Submitted by blastboy on Tuesday July 22, 2014 @12:45PM

blastboy (3468455) writes "Four years ago notorious troll Andrew "weev" Auernheimer was imprisoned for exposing AT&T's weak security practices. Now he's been released from jail—early, thanks to a technicality—and is back in the game, as offensive as ever, and talking about his time behind bars."
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+ - This Math Explains Why The Next iPhone Will Launch September 12-> 0

Submitted by redletterdave on Tuesday July 22, 2014 @12:07PM

redletterdave (2493036) writes "In 2012, Apple introduced iOS 6 on June 11, and released the mobile operating system on Wednesday, Sept. 19 — exactly 100 days after its unveiling. The iPhone 5 launched two days later on Friday, Sept. 21. Last year, Apple unveiled iOS 7 on June 10, and released it on Sept. 18 — again, a Wednesday, and again, exactly 100 days after the unveiling. The iPhone 5S and 5C launched two days later on Friday, Sept. 20. This year, Apple unveiled iOS 8 on June 2. If the company wants to go 3-for-3 on its 100-day window between the public unveiling and launch dates, we may see iOS 8 launch on Wednesday, Sept. 10, which is, you guessed it, 100 days after it was unveiled at WWDC. And if Apple releases the new iPhone two days after iOS 8, as it’s done in the past, we may see the iPhone 6 release that Friday, Sept. 12."
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+ - "Tor-breaking" talk cancelled from Black Hat-> 0

Submitted by jehan60188 on Tuesday July 22, 2014 @12:05PM

jehan60188 (2535020) writes "A proposed talk by two Carnegie Mellon University researchers demonstrating how to de-anonymise Tor users on a budget of US$3,000 has been axed from the Black Hat USA 2014 conference in Las Vegas next month.

The talk, 'You don’t have to be the NSA to Break Tor: Deanonymizing Users on a Budget' by speakers, Alexander Volynkin and Michael McCord, from Carnegie Mellon University's Computer Emergency Response Team, had reportedly been highly anticipated by punters.

However, the talk was scrapped from the program because it had not been approved by the legal counsel with the university's Software Engineering Institute, according to a statement on the Black Hat website this week.

"Late last week, we were informed by the legal counsel for the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) and Carnegie Mellon University that: 'Unfortunately, Mr. Volynkin will not be able to speak at the conference since the materials that he would be speaking about have not yet been approved by CMU/SEI for public release'," the statement said."
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+ - Snowden's Favourite OS Tails Has Zero-Day Vulnerabilities Lurking Inside 0

Submitted by I Ate A Candle on Tuesday July 22, 2014 @11:50AM

I Ate A Candle (3762149) writes "Tails OS, the Tor-reliant privacy-focused operating system made famous by Edward Snowden, contains a number of zero-day vulnerabilities that could be used to take control of the OS and execute code remotely. At least that's according to zero-day exploit seller Exodus Intelligence, which counts DARPA amongst its customer base. The company plans to tell the Tails team about the issues “in due time”, said Aaron Portnoy, co-founder and vice president of Exodus, but it isn’t giving any information on a disclosure timeline. This means users of Tails are in danger of being de-anonymised. Even version 1.1, which hit public release today (22 July 2014), is affected. Snowden famously used Tails to manage the NSA files. The OS can be held on a USB stick and leaves no trace once removed from the drive. It uses the Tor network to avoid identification of the user, but such protections may be undone by the zero-day exploits Exodus holds."

+ - Netflix Stealthy Reduces Service, Keeps Prices the Same 0

Submitted by Nom du Keyboard on Monday July 21, 2014 @11:48PM

Nom du Keyboard (633989) writes "After seeing a drop in my DVD service from Netflix I got a customer service representative tonight to confirm that Netflix has ceased processing DVD returns on Saturdays nationwide. And that they did this without either notifying their customers, nor reducing prices to compensate for the reduced service. Given that the DVD selection still far outstrips their streaming selection, this may be news to others like myself who don't find streaming an adequate replacement for plastic discs. My experience up until recently, unlike Netflix's promise of a 1-3 day turnaround at their end which gives them lots of wiggle room to degrade service even further, had been of mailing in a DVD on day one, having them receive it and mail out my next selection on day two, and receiving it on day three. Now with them only working 5 days and many US Post Office holidays, they're still getting the same money for significantly less. Is Netflix still the good guy here?"

+ - NVIDIA Launches SHIELD Tablet Powered By Tegra K1 And SHIELD Wireless Controller-> 0

Submitted by MojoKid on Tuesday July 22, 2014 @09:13AM

MojoKid (1002251) writes "NVIDIA just officially announced the SHIELD Tablet (powered by their Tegra K1 SoC) and SHIELD wireless controller. As the SHIELD branding implies, the new SHIELD tablet and wireless controller builds upon the previously-released, Android-based SHIELD portable to bring a gaming-oriented tablet to consumers. The SHIELD Tablet and wireless controller are somewhat of mashup of the SHIELD portable and the Tegra Note 7, but featuring updated technology and better build materials. You could think of the SHIELD Tablet and wireless controller as an upgraded SHIELD portable gaming device, with the screen de-coupled from the controller. The device features NVIDIA's Tegra K1 SoC, paired to 2GB of RAM and an 8", full-HD IPS display, with a native resolution of 1920x1200. There are also a pair of 5MP cameras on the SHIELD Tablet (front and rear), 802.11a/b/g/n 2x2 MIMO WiFi configuration, GPS, a 9-axis motion sensor, and Bluetooth 4.0 LE. In addition to the WiFi-only version (which features 16GB of internal storage), NVIDIA has a 32GB version coming with LTE connectivity as well. NVIDIA will begin taking pre-orders for the SHIELD Tablet and wireless controller immediately."
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