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Submission + - Emergency Alert System hacked, warns dead rising from graves (krtv.com)

Submitted by
Rawlsian
Rawlsian writes: "Great Falls, Montana, television station KRTC issued a denial of an Emergency Alert System report that 'dead bodies are rising from their graves.' The denial surmises that 'someone apparently hacked into the Emergency Alert System...This message did not originate from KRTV, and there is no emergency.'"
Sun Microsystems

Submission + - Of the Love of Oldtimers - Dusting off a Sun Fire V1280 Server

Submitted by
vikingpower
vikingpower writes: "Today, I decided to acquire a refurbished Sun Fire V1280 server, with 8 CPUs. The machine will soon or may already belong to a certain history of computing. This project is not about high-performance computing, much more about lovingly dusting off and maintaining a piece of hardware considered quirky by 2013 standards. And . Now the question creeps to mind: what software would Slashdotters run on such a beast, once it is upgrade to 12 procs and, say, 24 Gb of RAM ?"
Mars

Submission + - 71 Percent of U.S. See Humans On Mars By 2033 (discovery.com) 2

Submitted by
astroengine
astroengine writes: "In a recent poll funded by the non-profit Explore Mars, 71% of respondents agreed that the US will send a human to Mars within the next two decades. Unfortunately, on average, the sample of 1,101 people surveyed thought the US government allocated 2.4% of the federal budget to NASA — in reality it's only 0.5%. With this in mind, 75% of the respondents agreed/strongly agreed that NASA's budget should be increased to explore Mars through manned and robotic means."
Government

Submission + - More on missile defense: will the Ground-based Midcourse Defense ever work? (thebulletin.org)

Submitted by Lasrick
Lasrick writes: Kingston Reif analyzes GMD (Ground-based Midcourse Defense) and shakes his head over the House Armed Services Committee (last year) authorizing the Pentagon to spend $360 million more than it asked for to expand the flawed system. "The Committee also provided an additional $100 million to begin deploying existing ground-based or SM-3 interceptors — not the interceptors recommended by the National Research Council — on the East Coast of the United States by the end of 2015 to defend against potential future long-range ballistic missiles launched from Iran."
Java

Submission + - Yahoo! Pushing Java Version Released in 2008 (krebsonsecurity.com)

Submitted by futhermocker
futhermocker writes: From TFA:

"At a time when Apple, Mozilla and other tech giants are taking steps to prevent users from browsing the Web with outdated versions ofJava,Yahoo!is pushing many of its users in the other direction: The free tool that it offers users to help build Web sites installs a dangerously insecYahoo! has offered SiteBuilder to its millions of users for years, but unfortunately the tool introduces a myriad of security vulnerabilities on host PCs.SiteBuilder requires Java, but the version of Java that Yahoo! bundles with it isJava 6 Update 7. It’s not clear if this is just a gross oversight or if their tool really doesn’t work with more recent versions of Java. The company has yet to respond to requests for comment.
Games

Submission + - Mojang Releases Minecraft:Pi Edition for the Raspberry Pi

Submitted by hypnosec
hypnosec writes: Mojang has officially released Minecraft:Pi Edition for the credit card sized Raspberry Pi. Back in November last year Minecraft was ported onto the Raspberry Pi and it was revealed at the time that Mojang would release a free version of the game soon. The game is completely free and is now available for download. Even though the game will carry only a limited set of features, the cost of building and hosting a Minecraft lan-party has definitely dropped ten folds.
Security

Submission + - Everything you know about password-stealing is wrong (microsoft.com) 1

Submitted by isoloisti
isoloisti writes: An article by some Microsofties in the latest issue of Computing Now magazine claims we have got passwords all wrong.

When money is stolen consumers are reimbursed for stolen funds and it is money mules, not banks or retail customers, who end up with the loss. Stealing passwords is easy, but getting money out is very hard. Passwords are not the bottleneck in cyber-crime and replacing them with something stronger won’t reduce losses. The article concludes that banks have no interest in shifting liability to consumers, and that the switch to financially-motivated cyber-crime is good news, not bad.

Article is online at computer.org site (hard-to-read multipage format)
http://www.computer.org/portal/web/computingnow/content?g=53319&type=article&urlTitle=is-everything-we-know-about-password-stealing-wrong-
or pdf at author’s site.
http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/161829/EverythingWeKnow.pdf
Government

Submission + - Feds offer $20M for critical open source energy network cybersecurity tools (networkworld.com) 1

Submitted by
coondoggie
coondoggie writes: "The US Department of Energy today said it would spend $20 million on the development of advanced cybersecurity tools to help protect the nation's vulnerable energy supply. The DOE technologies developed under this program should be interoperable, scalable, cost-effective advanced tools that do not impede critical energy delivery functions, that are innovative and can easily be commercialized or made available through open source for no cost."
Education

Submission + - Estonian Schools to Teach Computer-Based Math (wsj.com)

Submitted by Ben Rooney
Ben Rooney writes: Children in the Baltic state will learn statistics based less on computation and doing math by hand and more on framing and interpreting problems, and thinking about validation and strategy.
Crime

Submission + - Spy Drones Used to Hunt Down Christopher Dorner

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "The Express reports that as a task force of 125 officers continue their search for Christopher Dorner in the rugged terrain around Big Bear, it was revealed that Dorner has become the first human target for remotely-controlled airborne drones on US soil. “The thermal imaging cameras the drones use may be our only hope of finding him," says a senior police source. "On the ground, it’s like looking for a needle in a haystack.” The use of drones was confirmed by Customs and Border Patrol spokesman Ralph DeSio, who revealed agents have been prepared for Dorner to make a dash for the Mexican border since his rampage began. “This agency has been at the forefront of domestic use of drones by law enforcement.” Dorner, who was fired from the LAPD in 2008 for lying about a fellow officer he accused of misconduct, has vowed to wreak revenge by “killing officers and their families”. According to San Bernardino County Sheriff John McMahon: "To be honest, he could be anywhere right now. Torching his own vehicle could have been a diversion to throw us off track. Anything is possible with this man.”"
Privacy

Submission + - Flickr privacy bug changes some private photos to public (networkworld.com)

Submitted by colinneagle
colinneagle writes: Flickr has discovered a software bug that made some users' private photos public for as long as 20 days. As a precaution, Flickr set all public photos to private. The result is "bad" links across the web that cause the "currently unavailable" error message.

Ironically, Flickr less than a week ago released some tips for safer photo and privacy sharing settings, as part of Microsoft's Safer Internet Day. At the same time, the company was quietly restoring users' private photos that had been made public.

However, posts to Flickr user forums show that many continue to struggle get their public photos restored or even find out if anyone had seen their private photos.
Games

Submission + - Inside the Project Holodeck VR Game World, First Impressions (roadtovr.com)

Submitted by
Hesh
Hesh writes: "The space-pirates themed Project Holodeck game (http://www.ProjectHolodeck.com) out of USC is a VR game that is initially targeted for the Oculus Rift and will marry VR with a world so interactive and immersive that it feels like you can almost reach out and touch it. Ben Lang over at RoadToVR recently got a chance to sit down with the team and try it out and came out extremely impressed with how immersive the experience was: '...at one point I needed to set the Razer Hydra controllers down to adjust my helmet and I nearly tried to set them down on a virtual table next to me. There was no table in real life — had I not quickly realized what I was about to do, I would have dropped the controllers straight onto the floor below.'"
Medicine

Submission + - Scientists Use Gene Therapy to Cure Dogs of Type 1 Diabetes (gizmag.com)

Submitted by Zothecula
Zothecula writes: Researchers from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) have claimed a first by successfully using a single session of gene therapy to cure dogs of type 1 diabetes. The work has shown that it is possible to cure the disease in large animals with a minimally-invasive procedure – potentially leading the way to further developments in studies for human treatment of the disease.
Media

Submission + - Ballot-stuffing bot skews online polls, news reports (scmagazine.com.au)

Submitted by mask.of.sanity
mask.of.sanity writes: An Australian software dev has built a bot to automatically cast tens of thousands of votes through online polls run by the country's biggest news outlets.

It skewed subsequent media reports on the results which continued for months despite the engineer's efforts to warn reporters of the hoax.

He coupled his simple bash script with Tor that was made to change exit relays every 10 minutes, defeating measures to prevent repeat voting from one IP address.

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