An anonymous reader writes "A friend works as CIO at a medium sized publicly traded company. The company was contacted by a hacking group and told to pay $100,000 to prevent their company from being hacked/attacked. They actually paid the extortion (told authorities after). The authorities said the company could be charged with supporting Terrorists. Seeing that most publicly known hacks are costing companies this size nearly a million dollars, Is this supporting terrorists or supporting stockholders?"

An anonymous reader writes "I have been using Gentoo Linux for a long time now and have always been satisfied with one of its many disk encryption tools: cryptsetup (dm-crypt and LUKS). However, I recently gave FreeBSD a try and, although I concluded BSD is not for me, I was amazed at geli(8), FreeBSD's disk encryption tool. It happens this tool also provides what it calls an 'authentication mode.' Besides encrypting the disk sector-by-sector, it also stores checksums (sha256 in my case) in it on every write. On reads, if the checksum mismatchs, it propagates the error up, resulting in, say, a read() error. Thus I do not have to trust my disk (except of course for the boot partition) any longer: any data inconsistency will be detected before the data is used. Having searched for a long time without answers, I want to ask: is there something similar to this in Linux? Note: Using Btrfs is a valid solution, but is far from stable (got a few oopses during my tests)."

MouseR writes "It seems we can't rely on software, in particular Web site editing software, to exist for the long haul. Every time I rely on something, it takes only a couple of years before it gets trashed. I have used GoLive's CyberStudio before it got engulfed as GoLive from Adobe. Both got trashed. I eventually used Apple's .Mac HomePage. It got trashed and replaced with iWeb. I then used iWeb, hosted on MobileMe, and Apple just killed it again, along with the hosting. So, as I'm preparing to move my stuff on various web sites, onto my own hosting server (outsourced), I'm wondering what kind of visual web site editor(s) I could use, for the long haul. I'm rather sick of changing tools every other year and as a software developer, would rather spend my time editing my web site rather than code it. Any suggestions?"

An anonymous reader writes "I study Computer Science at a university in Melbourne, Australia. I recently went to a 'Directions of IT' seminar run by our central IT department, where students were invited to discuss issues with the senior management of IT. During discussion about proposed changes to our campus-wide wireless network, I asked if the new system would support Macs, Linux and other Operating Systems. Several of the managers laughed at this question, and one exclaimed 'Linux!' as if it was the punchline to a joke. The head of IT at least treated my question seriously, but I didn't get a concrete answer. So, I would like to ask Slashdot: Does your university/college provide support for Linux/BSD/etc users to connect to the on-campus wireless? How does IT support Linux users generally? Have IT staff ever ridiculed you for asking questions about Linux?"

seattle_coder writes "Many have advocated for the elimination of software patents. The arguments generally are that software patents are handed out too easily, and that they're too difficult and expensive to fight. Some say that patents just plain don't make sense for software, which is such a dynamic technology. Given that the standard patent lifetime is 20 years, and software changes so rapidly, is the life-span the problem for software patents? Would reducing the software patent lifetime to 5 years or even less be the thing to do?"

vrimj writes "I have a common enough first name / last name combination that I sometimes get other people's email at my firstname.lastname@gmail.com account. It isn't a big deal if it is a person; I let them know, they fix it. The big problem I am having is with companies and websites. These emails are often no-reply, which means I can't send back a quick note. I got someone's credit card bills for three months before I realized there was nothing for it but calling the company (I tried a couple of emails first). Recently I got a notice about someone's kid signing up for a website. I don't have any option but to hit the response button, and tell them that I first have to say I am that kid's parent or guardian. I didn't know where to go from there. Today I get an invoice from a cable company; it is for a different state. I can't reply. I go to the online support, they tell me my only choice is to call the sales office. I gave in for the bank, but I am not talking to someone else's cable company. Is there any way to make emails to an improperly formatted gmail address bounce or do something else obvious? Is there a technical solution I am overlooking. I doesn't happen that often but it is an increasing PITA with no-reply email addresses. I hate just setting up a filter because that cuts off these other people who made a typo or had someone not enter something correctly, but it is looking like the best choice. It isn't spam, but it isn't my meat."

BertieBaggio writes "I am a medical student at the end of an academic year trying to get my notes organised. I'm looking for a software document organisation system to organise a mix of text notes, journal articles, diagrams and scans. Ideally such a system would permit full-text and metadata search, multiple categorisations (eg tags), preserve the underlying files and be cross-platform (Linux/Windows/OS X). While I'm not averse to paying for such a complex solution, ideally the software would be FOSS so that extension or migration are possible if necessary. Desktop search (eg Google Desktop) probably does 90% of what I want apart from multiple categorisations, which is the feature I'm most interested in. Searching turned up a similar question over at 43folders which pointed me in the direction of Papers and DevonThink, but these are OS X only and seem to be aimed more at academic paper organisation. What recommendations does the Slashdot community have for categorising and organising a heterogeneous mix of files?"

canolecaptain writes "One of my daughters (10 years old) has become interested in adventure games, and started playing Fate. It's been awhile since I've had time to play this type of game (since the Diablo 2 days), and I'd like to know what Slashdotters thought would be the best set of adventure games to start her on (PC preferred). Nothing too scary yet, so unfortunately, Diablo is out for the time being. I'd prefer one with multi-player so that we could quest together on ocassion."

cloud-yay writes "I work for an IT consulting firm and recently I've been tasked with heading up our engineering consulting team — which without the fancy corporate speak means that we're trying to empower our engineering team to think a little like sales people instead of being purely service orientated. To clarify, our technical people are viewed by our customers as trusted advisors and when they see a opportunity for a complementary sale/network refresh/project they often involve our sales team, however when the customer sees the sales people, they always clam up because they're 'sales people' and customers think they are just interested in alleviating them of their money! I'm interested in what the Slashdot community thinks of how we should remunerate engineering teams for this 'sales' work (which would cost us commission to sales people anyway) but in a way that doesn't foster any animosity between sales and tech staff because in the end sales people live and die on commission. Has anyone worked in this environment anywhere and what works/doesn't work in your experience?"

crutchy writes "When I was setting up my secure website I got really paranoid about SSL encryption, so I created a certificate using OpenSSL for SHA-512 encryption. I don't know much about SHA (except bits that I can remember from Wikipedia), but I figure that if you're going to go to the trouble (or expense) of setting up SSL, you may as well go for the best you can get, right? Also, what would be the minimum level of encryption required for, say, online banking? I've read about how SHA-1 was 'broken', but from what I can tell it still takes many hours. What is the practical risk to the real internet from this capability? Would a sort of rolling key be a possible next step, where each SSL-encrypted stream has its own private/public key pair generated on the fly, and things like passwords and bank account numbers were broken up and sent in multiple streams with different private/public key pairs? This would of course require more server grunt to generate these keys (or we could take a leaf from Google's book and just have separate server clusters designed solely for that job), but then if computing performance was a limiting factor, the threat to security of these hashes wouldn't be a problem in the first place." (Continued below.)

ragnvaldr writes "I'm the 'IT guy' for an office of about a dozen people. And when I say IT guy, I mean I'm the only one here who can use google well enough to figure out how to make things work. We have a 500GB Mac server with a Drobo with 6TB of storage attached. So far all this server does is back up data, and I want to make it a little more useful. We also have a Filemaker server on it, which I have yet to learn how to use at all, let alone efficiently. Any suggestions to make this machine a little more useful?"

edi_guy writes "I'm getting ready to launch a small commercial website that will contain customer information in a MySQL database that will be run by a web-hosting service. While I have good experience with SQL databases from a programming point of view, I'm not an expert on securing them. Given all of the publicity around break-ins and data theft on a seemingly daily basis, it seems prudent to review this now rather than later. What are suggestions on resources that would help verify that both myself and my hosting service are following best practices on securing a database backed website?"

dingo_kinznerhook writes "I grew up in a homeschooling family, and was homeschooled through high school. ( I went on to get a B.S. and M.S. in computer science; my mom has programming experience and holds bachelor's degrees in physics and math — she's pretty qualified to teach.) Mom is still homeschooling my younger brother and sister and is looking for a good computer science curriculum that covers word processing, spreadsheets, databases, intro to programming, intro to operating systems, etc. Does the Slashdot readership know of a high school computer science curriculum suitable for homeschooling that covers these topics?"

Hardhead_7 writes "Our recent discussion about how much your degree is worth got me thinking. I've been working in the IT field for several years now, but I don't have anything to my name other than an A+ certificate and vendor specific training (e.g., Dell certified). Now I'm looking to move up in the IT field, and I want some stuff on my resume to demonstrate to future employers that I know what I'm doing, enough that I can get in the door for an interview. So my question to Slashdot is this: What certifications are the most valuable and sought-after? What will impress potential employers and be most likely to help land a decent job for someone who doesn't have a degree, but knows how to troubleshoot and can do a bit of programming if needed?"

SJrX writes "I am planning on visiting the Pacific Northwest for several weeks, and was looking for the best smartphone option available. Roaming data rates and SMS rates are ridiculously high (best plans are $0.80 / MB, and $0.75 / message). Beyond AT&T and Verizon Prepaid, are there any other options? (I'm on an iPhone 4 so GSM is a must.) I assume in the US, I have no credit history for which to qualify for a plan, and a contract is obviously out of the question. Data and SMS are the only important things, with a few hundred minutes being plenty. I'm only planning on being in the US for 2 or 3 weeks, but mainly in rural areas (US Route 101) so large (3G) coverage is important."

DrKnark writes "I am not an IT professional, even so I am one of the more knowledgeable in such matters at my department. We are now planning to build a new cluster (smallish, ~128 cores). The old cluster (built before my time) used Redhat Fedora, and this is also used in the larger centralized clusters around here. As such, most people here have some experience using that. My question is, are there better choices? Why are they better? What would be recommended if we need it to fairly user friendly? It has to have an X-windows server since we use that remotely from our Windows (yeah, yeah, I know) workstations."

obarthelemy writes "Skype having just been borged, now may be a good time to hedge our bets and look for a replacement. I'm *not* looking for something that interfaces with POTS, but just a simple PC-to-PC video chat tool that is very easy to configure and use, reliable, multiplatform (my family has Windows, Linux, MacOS; iOS and Android would be nice extras), and has good video/voice quality. We're almost only skyping with each other. What would you recommend?"

Uncrase writes "I'm a contract software developer, and have been working for a small startup for over a year now. Not a bad position to be in of course. The company consists of a handful of people, all of which (I believe) are contractors (by their own choice), however we're doing very very well and have a very significant revenue already. Call me greedy, but I've worked hard (as the main IT guy essentially) to get the company to where it is now, and of course get paid contractor rates for this. I would like to get some kind of equity (options) in this. The company is continuing to grow its operations and I am basically indispensible for the continuation of this growth. I'm definitely not planning in any way to force a hand, but I would like to know what could be a good way to approach this. I'd essentially like to ask for a raise — being a contractor — but in the form of equity. Any experience with this? Am I completely off here?"

Javaman59 writes "I am a one person company developing a web site from home. The site is hoped to attract millions of accounts and daily hits (just to give an idea of the scale of things, as its important to the question). My infrastructure is currently Visual Studio 2010 on a PC. To progress the site I need to set up version control, continuous integration, and staging. I have a Win2008 server VM, with all the Windows software (free and legal) to do this. However, I am only just competent as a Win admin, and I foresee each step of the way (setting up a domain; SQL-Server, etc) as a slow, risky process, and a big disruption to development. Should I forget my VM server (it will make a nice games machine!) and just go straight to the cloud for all my infrastructure?"

Okian Warrior writes "Since the rapture is tomorrow (May 21) at 6:00 pm local time (everywhere), I was just wondering: what plans does everyone have? I've got no specific plans for what to do. What will you be doing around 6:00 pm tomorrow?" If you're on the IT staff, you might want to consult this checklist of things to do or not do in the interim.