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Security

Submission + - Critical Vulnerabilities found in Call of Duty:MW3, CryEngine 3 (paritynews.com)

Submitted by hypnosec
hypnosec writes: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 and CryEngine 3 graphics platform suffer from critical vulnerabilities, two security researchers have revealed. ReVuln security consultants Luigi Auriemma and Donato Ferrante presented results of their research at the Power of Community (POC2012) security conference in Seoul and said that not only hackers but also other online gaming companies can benefit by exploiting these vulnerabilities. The security researchers have revealed that online gaming companies can try and steal a competitor's players or shut down a competitor’s game completely.
Security

Submission + - Nike+ FuelBand: Possibly a Big Security Hole For Your Life (hothardware.com)

Submitted by
MojoKid
MojoKid writes: "Nike+ FuelBand, a $149 wristband with LED display that tracks your daily activity, tells you how many calories you've burned, lets you know how much fuel you have left in the tank, and basically keeps track of "every move you make." If you think that sounds like a privacy nightmare waiting to happen, it pretty much is. A source directly connected to Nike reported an amusing, albeit startling anecdote about a guy who got caught cheating on his girlfriend because of the Nike+ FuelBand. "They shared their activity between each other and she noticed he was active at 1-2AM, when he was supposed to be home." That's just one scenario. What if the wristband gets lost or stolen? How much data is actually stored on these sorts of devices? And remember, you're synching it to the cloud with an iOS or Android app."
Security

Submission + - Blizzard Sued over Battle.net Authentication (ign.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A man has initiated a class-action suit against Blizzard over a product used to shore up Battle.net security. Benjamin Bell alleges that Blizzard's sale of Authenticators — devices that enable basic two-tier authentication — represents deceptive and unfair additional costs to their basic games. (Blizzard sells the optional devices for $6.50, and provides a free mobile app as an alternative.) The complaint accuses Blizzard of making $26 million in Authenticator sales. In response, Blizzard made a statement refuting some of the complaint's claims and voicing their intention to 'vigorously defend' themselves.

Submission + - NRC Report Links Climate Change to National Security (nytimes.com)

Submitted by WOOFYGOOFY
WOOFYGOOFY writes: The NY Times and Voice Of America amongst others are reporting on a study by the U.S. National Research Council which was released Friday linking global climate change to national security.

http://www.voanews.com/content/climate-change-security/1543127.html

http://chronicle.com/article/US-Urged-to-Step-Up-Research /135724/

The report which was developed at the request of the C.I.A. characterizes the threats posed by climate change
as "similar to and in many cases greater than those posed by terrorist attacks."

http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=14682&page=1

If the effect of unaddressed climate change is the functional equivalent of terrorist attacks on the nation, does the Executive Branch, as a matter of national security, have a duty and a right to begin to act unilaterally against climate change irrespective of what Congress currently believes?
Education

Submission + - MOOC Mania

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Online education has had a fifty-year road to 'overnight' success (PLATO@50 commemorative booklet). MIT Technology Review calls the emergence of free online education, particularly massive open online courses (MOOCs), The Most Important Education Technology in 200 Years. 'If you were asked to name the most important innovation in transportation over the last 200 years,' writes Antonio Regalado, 'you might say the combustion engine, air travel, Henry Ford’s Model-T production line, or even the bicycle. The list goes on. Now answer this one: what’s been the single biggest innovation in education? Don’t worry if you come up blank. You’re supposed to.' Writing about MOOC Mania in the Communications of the ACM, Moshe Y. Vardi worries that 'the enormous buzz about MOOCs is not due to the technology's intrinsic educational value, but due to the seductive possibilities of lower costs.' And in MOOCs Will Eat Academia, Vivek Haldar writes, 'MOOCs will almost certainly hollow out the teaching component of universities as it stands today...But all is not lost, because the other thing universities do is research, and that is arguably as important, if not more, than teaching.' So, are MOOCs the best thing since sliced bread, or merely the second coming of 1920s Postal Course Mania?
The Courts

Submission + - Tesla Motors Sued By Car Dealers (npr.org) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Car dealers in New York and Massachusetts have filed a lawsuit that seeks to block Tesla from selling its pricey electric vehicles in those states. The dealers say they are defending state franchise laws, which require manufacturers to sell cars through dealers they do not own. Robert O'Koniewski of the Massachusetts State Automobile Dealers Association says, 'Those dealers are investing millions of dollars in their franchises to make sure they comply with their franchise agreements with the manufacturers. Tesla is choosing to ignore the law and then is choosing to play outside that system.'
Twitter

Submission + - Geomapping Racist Tweets After Obama's Re-election 1

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Megan Garber writes that in the age of the quantified self, biases are just one more thing that can be measured, analyzed, and publicized. The day after Barack Obama won a second term as president of the United States, a group of geography academics took advantage of the fact that many tweets are geocoded to search Twitter for racism-revealing terms that appeared in the context of tweets that mentioned "Obama," "re-elected," or "won," sorting the tweets according to the state they were sent from and comparing the racist tweets to the total number of geocoded tweets coming from that state during the same time period. Their findings? Alabama and Mississippi have the highest measures followed closely by Georgia, Louisiana, and Tennessee forming a fairly distinctive cluster in the southeast. Beyond that cluster North Dakota and Utah both had relatively high scores (3.5 each), as did Missouri, Oregon, and Minnesota. "These findings support the idea that there are some fairly strong clustering of hate tweets centered in southeastern U.S. which has a much higher rate than the national average," writes Matthew Zook. "But lest anyone elsewhere become too complacent, the unfortunate fact is that most states are not immune from this kind of activity. Racist behavior, particularly directed at African Americans in the U.S., is all too easy to find both offline and in information space.""
Portables

Submission + - Toshiba Pursues Copyright Claim Against Laptop Manual Site (tim.id.au)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: I'm sure most Slashdot readers have had occasion to suffer through a hardware manufacturer's terrible website in the search of product documentation. It's often hidden away in submenus of submenus, and if the your product is more than a couple years old, you probably have to deal with broken links. One guy has been helping to change that; he runs a site called Tim's Laptop Service Manuals, where he collects by hand materials from many different companies and hosts them together in one spot. Now Toshiba has become aware of his project, and helpfully forced him to remove all of their manuals under a copyright claim.
Apple

Submission + - UK court sanctions Apple for non-compliance (groklaw.net)

Submitted by
drinkypoo
drinkypoo writes: "Per PJ over on Groklaw as always, "Since Apple did not comply with the order in its estimation, adding materials that were not ordered and in addition were "false", the judges ordered Apple to pay Samsung's lawyers' fees on an indemnity basis, and they add some public humiliation". And per the judge, "what Apple added was false and misleading". Your move, Apple."
Google

Submission + - What to do when your page gets nuked by Google Search (wecheck.org) 5

Submitted by
sparkydevil
sparkydevil writes: "Over the past few weeks I've been building up a wiki timeline of the attacks on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, which is now the most comprehensive on the web. As the page grew and more blogs and sites linked to the page it moved up Google's search pages for the search term "Benghazi Attack Timeline" until it was the second listing on the first page. I had a few days of steady traffic (and pride) and then the page just completely disappeared from the search results. Completely gone without a trace. I didn't use any SEO tricks and the page has no ads, so I don't think it could be counted as spam. I don't think it's any kind of conspiracy. Has this happened to anyone else and how did you fix it?"
GNOME

Submission + - GNOME 3.8 To Scrap Fallback Mode (phoronix.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Via LXer, an article at Phoronix tells of GNOME's plans to eliminate "fallback mode" (GNOME classic) in the 3.8 release.
Security

Submission + - How To Tell if Your Hotel Guest Is a Terrorist (schneier.com) 2

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Bruce Schneier takes a look at a list from the Department of Homeland Security which details 19 suspicious behaviors for hotel guests as indicators of possible terrorism. Further discussed is the DHS initiative "If you see something say something", and the possible problems with recruiting amateurs for security, and likely result of getting amateur security in return.
Earth

Submission + - Climate Change Could Drive Coffee to Extinction by 2080 1

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Coffee is the world's favorite beverage and the second-most traded commodity after oil. Now Nick Collins reports that rising global temperatures and subtle changes in seasonal conditions could make 99.7 per cent of Arabica-growing areas unsuitable for the plant before the end of the century and in some areas as soon as 2020. Even if the beans do not disappear completely from the wild, climate change is highly likely to impact on yields and the taste of coffee, a beverage of choice among slashdot readers, will change in future decades. "The worst case scenario, as drawn from our analyses, is that wild Arabica could be extinct by 2080," says Justin Moat. "This should alert decision makers to the fragility of the species." Arabica is one of only two species of bean used to make coffee and is by far the most popular, accounting for 70 per cent of the global market including almost all fresh coffee sold in high street chains and supermarkets in the US and most of Europe. A different bean known as Robusta is used in freeze-dried coffee and is commonly drunk in Greece and Turkey, but Robusta's high caffeine content makes it much less pleasant to most palates. In some areas, such as the Boma Plateau in South Sudan, the demise could come as early as 2020, based on the low flowering rate and poor health of current crops. The researchers used field study and 'museum' data (including herbarium specimens) to run bioclimatic models for wild Arabica coffee, in order to deduce the actual (recorded) and predicted geographical distribution for the species. "Arabica can only exist in a very specific pace with a very specific number of other variables," says Aaron Davis, head of coffee research at the Royal Botanic Gardens. "It is mainly temperature but also the relationship between temperature and seasonality – the average temperature during the wet season for example.""
Security

Submission + - Stuxnet Infected, But Didn't Affect Chevron Network In 2010 (cnet.com)

Submitted by Penurious Penguin
Penurious Penguin writes: CNET and the Wall Street Journal in correspondence with Chevron representatives reveal that back in 2010, Stuxnet did reach Chevron, where it managed to infect, but not significantly affect their network. The issue was, according one Chevron rep, "immediately addressed" and "without incident". Chevron's general manager of the earth sciences department, Mark Koelmel, said to the CIO Journal:

"I don't think the U.S. government even realized how far it had spread," ... "I think the downside of what they did is going to be far worse than what they actually accomplished."

Submission + - Occupy Wall Street's Rolling Jubilee to Bail Out the People (businessinsider.com)

Submitted by Quince alPillan
Quince alPillan writes: Occupy Wall Street has a new plan for helping the 99%. They've set up an old-fashioned telethon they're calling the Rolling Jubilee to buy up bad debt with donations and then forgiving the debt outright. As a test run, they set themselves up as a debt collector and they were able to use $500 to buy $14,000 worth of bad debt, which they then forgave. The telethon will be held at the Le Poisson Rouge on Thursday, November 15. It will also stream online.
Programming

Submission + - Developer or Software Engineer? Can it influence your work? (metaltoad.com)

Submitted by ctrahey
ctrahey writes: Many of us disregard the impact of our titles on various aspects of our lives, both professional and otherwise. Perhaps it's appropriate to ask two questions about the difference between a couple titles familiar to the ./ community: Developer vs Software Engineer.
  1. What are the factors to consider in the appropriate use of the titles?
  2. (more interesting to me), what influence might the use of these titles have on the written code?

Have you observed a difference in attitudes, priorities, or outlooks in talent as a corollary to their titles?
Politics

Submission + - Would Charles Darwin Have Made a Good Congressman? (sciencemag.org) 1

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: It's a good 130 years too late to answer that question empirically, but at least symbolically Charles Darwin has won support from more than 4000 voters in the 10th congressional district of Georgia, thanks to an initiative headed by James Leebens-Mack, a plant biologist at the University of Georgia in Athens.

Like many others, Leebens-Mack was deeply troubled by a speech his Congressman, Paul Broun (R-GA), gave at an Athens church in October deriding teachings on evolution, embryology, and the big bang theory as "lies straight from the pit of Hell." Broun, a medical doctor, is a member of the U.S. House of Representative's Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, and chair of its Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight.

Leebens-Mack says the "protest vote should make it clear to future opponents that there are a lot of people in the district who are not happy with antiscience statements."
News

Submission + - Illiterate villagers learn to use 50 apps each in 4 days (cnn.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: An NGO dropped 20 Motorola tablets, preloaded with mostly literacy apps in an Ethiopian village with no instructions. In 4 minutes, one boy had found the on/off switch, and he then taught the others. In a few days, they were each using about 50 apps each.
The Military

Submission + - Director Of CIA, David Petraeus Resigns (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by Penurious Penguin
Penurious Penguin writes: After serving as Director of the CIA since September 2011, David Petraeus resigned from his position today, November 9. The retired four-star Army general has cited an extramarital affair as reason for the resignation. Michael Morell will now serve as Acting Director of the CIA.

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