Security

Has the Data Security Problem Become an Epidemic? 75

Posted by Cliff from the so-much-for-privacy dept.
telstar asks: "Lately, it seems like an almost weekly occurrence: confidential customer data is exposed online, despite the assurance that security measures were in place to prevent such a problem. ChoicePoint Inc., LexisNexis, and DSW Inc. were all victims of online security breaches. Ameritrade and Bank of America both admitted lost physical data tapes containing confidential client account information. Recently, Carnegie Mellon notified 19,000 students, alumni, faculty and staff that their confidential information may have been compromised. An April 2005 GAO report found that though the IRS is making progress fixing security holes in systems that it operates, they aren't keeping pace with new vulnerabilities, risking exposure of sensitive financial data of the taxpaying population of the country. To top things off, these are only the cases that we're aware of, which begs the question of how many security breaches have gone unnoticed, or unannounced. What about companies like Google? As they expand their service offerings with GMail and Google Search History, where they are increasingly responsible for retaining client data, will they become a bigger target for attackers? This is the problem. What is the solution? Are there any tips for people to help protect their identity and confidential financial information? What firms go above and beyond the call of duty to ensure that their client data is secure?"
Businesses

Moving a Business to Canada? 105

Posted by Cliff from the moving-to-the-maple-leaf dept.
An anonymous reader asks: "I am an independent consultant working in Sweden. After working over here for nearly 10 years, I'm considering moving my family back to Canada. I enjoy working through my own company and the freedom it offers. One of the concerns I have is whether it is feasible for me to even try to work as an independent consultant in Canada, since I have no contact network over there to speak of. I'm also considering the idea of working as a regular employee for a consultancy company until I can build up a contact net. The major disadvantage of doing so is the lack of freedom and vacation time. Over here in Sweden, 5 weeks vacation is standard and 6 weeks isn't that uncommon. As we have relatives in Sweden we would like to spend a few weeks here a year, and still have some vacation left over to do something else. How hard is it to negotiate a 5 week vacation at an employer even if 3 weeks are unpaid? Is going through a company, that charges a commission for finding consultants work, a viable option? What cities in Ontario have a large enough customer base to support independent consultants? As much as I like Toronto, I don't want to raise my family there, nor do I want to spend hours commuting to it everyday."

Hack IIS6 Contest 545

Posted by CmdrTaco from the get-your-crackz0r-on dept.
ThePurpleBuffalo writes "This just came in across a BugTraq mailing list from Roger Grimes: 'Starting May 2nd and going until June 8th, the server located at http://www.hackiis6.com/ will welcome hackers to attack it. If you can deface the web site or capture the "hidden" document, you win an X-box! Read contest rules for what does and doesn't constitute a successful hack. We've tried to be as realistic as possible in what constitutes a successful hack, and in mimicking a basic HTML and ASP.NET web site. ' "
Data Storage

Distributed Storage Systems for Linux? 52

Posted by Cliff from the spread-out-all-ova-tha-place dept.
elambrecht asks: "We've got a _lot_ of data we'd like to archive and make sure it is accessible via the web 24/7. We've been using a NetApp for this, but that solution is just waaaay to expensive to scale. We want to move to using a cluster of Linux boxes that redundantly store and serve up the data. What are the best packages out there for this? GFS? MogileFS?"
The Courts

Patents Role in US/AU Gov't Use of Open Source? 212

Posted by Cliff from the mired-in-red-tape dept.
An anonymous reader asks: "How do governments (esp. US and Australia) deal with possibility of a patent lawsuit from some company against a specific OSS product, which might be deployed by a given government department? Is there any danger for various (government or not for that matter) agencies being told 'not to use this or that software from now on' because some commercial company might be winning the patent battles in court against this particular piece of software? I can see how a small business may take such a risk, but government agencies in the US and Australia could be put off by possibility, since the costs associated with migrating to open source and then back would be rather extreme (note that we are not talking about Europe which has different take on Software Patents and consequently Munich case is not really a strong example in the US/AU context). Personally I do not like software patents and think that they only inhibit software development processes, but how would Slashdot community reason for government-wide adoption of OSS in view of possible trouble with patents?"
Graphics

Unix Graphing Programs? 85

Posted by Cliff from the pretty-informational-pictures dept.
An anonymous reader asks: "For university I am looking for a program to make some nice 2D or 3D graphs to represent some data for statistics. I am currently using RedHat Fedora as my Linux distro but KChart, Gnumeric, OpenOffice, and the other ones I found weren't suitable. It would be nice if the "template" was easily configurable so I could standarize all of my work. i.e. have the actual value next to the bar etc.. It's mainly bar graphs that I need. Does anyone have any recommendations for good easy Linux programs to graph general data? professor didn't have any ideas for Linux."
Music

Organizing MP3s and Other File Collections? 174

Posted by Cliff from the virtual-file...filing dept.
Anonymous Coward asks: "After trying to merge several sets of media files that I've had laying around across several PC's (and looking at the short-comings of my own Perl script), I began looking at some commercial products and was overwhelmed. Does Slashdot have advice for organizing MP3 collections and what software works well for them?"
Security

Managing Code Signing Digital IDs for Open Source? 103

Posted by Cliff from the project-security dept.
Saqib Ali asks: "What are the best practices for managing Code Signing Digital IDs for Open Source projects, where the developers are dispersed throughout the globe? For our project there is NO central office, where we can secure the private key for the Code Signing Digital ID. Who should have the possession of the private key? Multiple people, or just the project manager? What Key Escrow (recovery) techniques can be used, in case the private key holder is not available? Who should be allowed to digitally sign the build? Currently one person handles the signing responsibility, but I think that is surely a single point of failure. Any thoughts/ideas?"
Operating Systems

Free Alternatives to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.0? 113

Posted by Cliff from the more-crimson-caps dept.
looper_man writes "I'm a hardware design engineer, and our tools have been migrating to Linux over the last years. I've been running Red Hat Linux 9.0 on our compute servers for a while now without a problem. The latest release of one of our CAD tools requires Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.0, and will *not* run with RH9.0. I'm not very happy with the (yearly!) licensing fees that Red Hat wants for RHEL3.0, so I'm looking for alternatives. I plan on running one real RHEL3.0 server (for any OS/tool issues if I need to verify that the problem is real), and the rest of the machines running a RHEL3.0 clone. I've seen CentOS, TaoLinux, WhiteBox, and a few others. I don't have the time to spare to test these out, so I was looking for recommendations from the Slashdot masses. I need something that's stable, easy to install/maintain, and closely tracks RHEL3.0. Any words of wisdom?"
Education

Engine for Collaborative Science Education MMOG? 56

Posted by Cliff from the outside-of-the-FPS-box dept.
plisdku asks: "My research advisor wants to create an online, collaborative science education game for middle- to high-school students; we need a 3D engine! A pioneer in internet-assisted laboratories (iLabs), he has developed real experiments that students can operate remotely over the internet. We envision a game where students wander a campus, solving Caltech-style 'stacks,' and learning collaboratively as they perform the great experiments of the history of science in simulated and real laboratories. What we need is a 3D engine and content creation system with which our team of artists and bright student developers can produce a prototype within a year. Requirements: customizable avatars, flexible integration with other technology (iLabs, CompEdu, etc.), and reasonable licensing fees (open source would be great). Our last project used SGI tools -- what are our modern-day options?"

Secure Video Conferencing via Quantum Cryptography 163

Posted by timothy from the hello-a77ghlfiyu-82md022x1x-bye dept.
Roland Piquepaille writes "If you use a webcam to talk with your mom, this tool is not for you. But if you're working for a company and that you have to routinely discuss about sensitive future projects or the possible acquisition of another company, you need more security, and this new video conferencing system based on quantum cryptography is a tool you need. According to this article from Nature, researchers from Toshiba have developed a system which can generate 100 quantum 'keys' every second, fast enough to protect every frame in a video exchange. This technology, which today is working over a distance of about 120 kilometers, could become commercially available within two years at an initial cost of $20,000. This overview contains more details and references."
Networking

Application Level Routing in a Mesh Router? 23

Posted by Cliff from the intelligent-packet-control dept.
faisaladeem asks: "Are there such mesh routers that can re-route the traffic based on QoS? (I'm not talking about traffic shaping) For example, if data rate of a video stream decreases due to an increase in congestion along the path then the router will re-route the stream dynamically to a different path to ensure the QoS for the video traffic. Since a mesh network has many paths or routes, it can be assumed that a less congestive path can be found if the existing path becomes bandwidth constrained. I heard that MPLS supports this kind of functionality? Secondly, can a router estimate the latency/bandwidth on a specific route ?"
Worms

Handling Viruses in an Uncontrolled Network? 579

Posted by Cliff
An anonymous reader asks: "Recently I've gotten a (volunteer) job looking after a small (approximately 500 computer) network, located within a large block of student flats. We've been having numerous problems with viruses over a few years. They spread like crazy on our network, with 100megabit connections in every residents room. Every so often they 'go off' and start a flood, which of course takes the entire residence network down. I've tried desperately to educate users on the virus problem, but those that are the problem don't care - they ignore every warning they get and just buy a faster computer to compensate for their systems sluggishness. As we only need two or three ping flooding computers to bring down the network it's hard to keep our network up whenever a worm starts its payload. What solutions have Slashdot readers came up with this and similar problems?"
Supercomputing

Distributed Computing For Businesses? 28

Posted by Cliff from the parallel-processing-for-the-bottom-line dept.
Meostro asks: "I've run several distributed computing clients in the past, and it felt nice to contribute to these projects that are saving the world. I recently became the admin of my company's branch datacenter, so my access to computing power has gone from 4 assorted boxes up to 20 servers and around 400 desktops. My ambition has grown by equal bounds, so I want to do some distributed processing on at least a few of these. We do food warehousing and distribution, so there's no protein folding, DSP or weather modelling work that would significantly contribute to our business. I've done some simple work with optimizing routes for our trucks, but our business doesn't seem to present many other problems that require lots of processing. What are some good business-specific tasks you have used distributed or grid computing to work through?"

The Pseudoscience of Intelligent Design 3315

Posted by Hemos from the mixing-things-that-shouldn't-be dept.
Mime Narrator writes "An article over at Kuro5hin discusses the controvery over the Intelligent Design movement. The Dover, Pennsylvania school board recently adopted a policy requiring that high school science teachers teaching evolution tell their students that evolutionary theory, a theory that has been shown to explain the origins of life time and time again, is flawed, and that intelligent design is a valid alternative. The ACLU, along with the AUSCS (Americans United for the Separation of Church and State), and 11 parents, are suing the school board, accusing the board of violating the separation of church and state. "

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