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Government

Submission + - John Carmack Criticizes Big Government (armadilloaerospace.com)

Submitted by bonch
bonch writes: As a game developer, John Carmack has been silent on political matters, but today he has decided to post a 16-paragraph essay decrying the inefficiency of big government. After admitting to not voting for almost 20 years, he says 'taxes are extracted by the threat of force' and announces his intention this year to vote for candidates most likely to reduce the size and ambition of government. Quote: 'My core thesis is that the federal government delivers very poor value for the resources it consumes, and that society as a whole would be better off with a government that was less ambitious. This is not to say that it doesn’t provide many valuable and even critical services, but that the cost of having the government provide them is much higher than you would tolerate from a company or individual you chose to do business with. For almost every task, it is a poor tool.'
Wireless Networking

Submission + - Mozilla: No 'Kill Switch' for Firesheep Add-On (computerworld.com)

Submitted by CWmike
CWmike writes: Mozilla today said it wouldn't — or couldn't — pull a 'kill switch' to disable Firesheep, the add-on that lets anyone steal log-on and account access information to Facebook, Twitter and other major Web services via Wi-Fi. Mozilla has a 'blocklist' mechanism that it can, and has in the past, applied as a last-resort defense against potentially-dangerous browser add-ons. It automatically cripples or uninstalls unwanted extensions that have been added to Firefox. But Mozilla either can't or won't add Firesheep to the blocklist. '[Firesheep] demonstrates a security weakness in a number of popular websites, but does not exploit any vulnerability in Firefox or other Web browsers,' said Mike Beltzner, director of Firefox, in reply to questions about Mozilla's possible moves. On Tuesday, experts suggested defensive measures to ward off Firesheep-born attacks.
Security

Submission + - China Penetrated NSA's Classified Operating System 2

Submitted by
Pickens
Pickens writes: "Seymour M. Hersh writes in the New Yorker that after an American EP-3E Aries II reconnaissance plane on an eavesdropping mission collided with a Chinese interceptor jet over the South China Sea in 2001 and landed at a Chinese F-8 fighter base on Hainan Island, the 24 member crew were unable to completely disable the plane’s equipment and software. The result? The Chinese kept the plane for three months and eventually reverse-engineered the plane’s NSA.-supplied operating system, estimated at between thirty and fifty million lines of computer code, giving China a road map for decrypting the Navy’s classified intelligence and operational data. “If the operating system was controlling what you’d expect on an intelligence aircraft, it would have a bunch of drivers to capture radar and telemetry,” says Whitfield Diffie, a pioneer in the field of encryption. “The plane was configured for what it wants to snoop, and the Chinese would want to know what we wanted to know about them—what we could intercept and they could not.” Despite initial skepticism, over the next few years the US intelligence community began to “read the tells” that China had gotten access to sensitive traffic and in early 2009, Admiral Timothy J. Keating, then the head of the Pacific Command, brought the issue to the new Obama Administration. "If China had reverse-engineered the EP-3E’s operating system, all such systems in the Navy would have to be replaced, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars," writes Hersch. "After much discussion, several current and former officials said, this was done" prompting some black humor from US naval officers. “This is one hell of a way to go about getting a new operating system.”""
Movies

Submission + - The Movie Industry Is Dying, The 1950s Version (techdirt.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: With all the claims from the entertainment industry about how the movie industry is dying due to the internet, it's worth pointing out that they seem to claim this with every new advancement. Many people know about Jack Valenti's famous "Boston Strangler" comment in reference to the VCR, but even before that, there was always some new technology that was the enemy. In a 1959 interview, Mary Pickford, one of the original Hollywood starlets (dubbed "America's Sweetheart") who also founded United Artists and the Motion Picture Academy, announced that the movie industry was dead because of television. No one would want to leave their house for an expensive movie, she insisted, and promised it would become much worse once the dreaded "pay TV" became common. This was 1959. It seems worth mentioning that, fifty years later, in 2009, Hollywood had its best year ever at the box office.

Submission + - US, China Working on Intellectual Property Rights (itworld.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder is visiting Beijing this week to discuss how China and the US can better coordinate efforts to stop intellectual property rights violations. 'One of the things that has happened in recent years is that counterfeiting has become a globalized industry,' said Christian Murck, the president of the American Chamber of Commerce in China. To effectively shut down these operations, cross-country efforts at strengthening global enforcement like Holder's visit to China are crucial, he added. Coinciding with Holder's visit, China announced it will launch a new national campaign to crack down on intellectual property rights violations. The campaign will take aim at the production and distribution of pirated goods such as DVDs and software products. Violations relating to registered trademarks and patents will also be targeted. The campaign will last for half a year. The commercial value of pirated software in China, at $7.5 billion, is second only to that in the U.S., where it is $8.3 billion, according to the Business Software Alliance and IDC.

Submission + - UK to track all browsing, email, phone calls (telegraph.co.uk)

Submitted by Sara Chan
Sara Chan writes: The UK government plans to introduce legislation that will allow the police to track every phone call, email, text message and website visit made by the public. The information will include who is contacting whom, when and where and which websites are visited, but not the content of the conversations or messages. Every communications provider will be required to store the information for at least a year. Full story in The Telegraph.
Open Source

US Elections Dominated By Closed Source. Again. 403

Posted by CmdrTaco from the pay-no-attention-to-the-bot-behind-the-curtain dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Another American election is almost here, and while electronic voting is commonplace, it is still overwhelmingly run by closed source, proprietary systems. It has been shown that many of these systems can be compromised (and because they are closed, there may be holes we simply cannot know about). Plus they are vulnerable to software bugs and are often based on unstable, closed-source operating systems. By the inherent nature of closed software, when systems are (optionally!) certified by registrars, there is no proof that they will behave the same on election day as in tests. The opportunities for fraud, tampering and malfunction are rampant. But nonetheless, there is very little political will for open source voting, let alone simple measures like end-to-end auditable voting systems or more radical approaches like open source governance. Why do we remain in the virtual dark ages, when clearly we have better alternatives readily available?"

Submission + - US Officials Considering Dropping Out Of ACTA (techdirt.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Here's a shock. The US might not sign on to ACTA after all. In the last few negotiations, US negotiators caved on a number of key points that they had been pushing for, meaning that the resulting agreement has a number of things the US (and various lobbyists) disagree with. Many of the responses from US lobbying groups was tepid, and a key point is that the current document includes patents, which the US did not want included. So, now there's actually serious pressure on US officials not to sign ACTA from the same groups who originally supported it. After three years of hyping ACTA, would the US really walk away?

Submission + - 'EA Louse' Looses Lips (wordpress.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Soon-to-be former employee of EA-Bioware-Mythic, calling himself 'EA Louse', tells his story about why WAR failed and hints to the fate of The Old Republic MMO.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: An author regulatable P2P? 1

Submitted by hotarugari
hotarugari writes: I have the task of revamping a server that has private collections of files made available to subscribers. This site, like so many others, has the issue of bandwidth. Is there any nice way to leverage P2P (like torrents for instance) to allow only a specific set of people to download? From my research, the torrent format only allows sharing with all people, so sometimes the torrent link is on a protected site, but once one person has the link it can be shared with anybody. Is there a P2P out there that can apply some kind of auth (like LDAP) to P2P so that the scope of people able to download the file is truly limited?

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: DoHS Warnings on calls? 2

Submitted by IcyNeko
IcyNeko writes: So I was calling an acquaintance of mine the other day to invite him to hang out with my friends, and after the phone started ringing and right before the person picked up, I got a message saying that the number I'm calling has been marked for observation by the DoHS's watchlist, and that by calling, I may have added myself to the watchlist. Also, that it is illegal for me to notify them that they're on the watchlist. Any chance this is a real warning? If so, why would they let people know who is on the watchlist?

Comment Re:Easy to make qualifications that nobody can mee (Score 1) 450

by prodigyx (#33503026) Attached to: Tech Sector Slow To Hire
6% seems incredibly low considering the number of people in this discipline that managed to get a degree without actually being able to do anything useful or have anything to offer a company. I would love to see a 20% unemployment rate. Then the qualified employees can actually do what they are hired to do, instead of spending their first 6 months on the job cleaning up the messes that the previous 6 incompetent people mucked up. Whats the McDonalds equivalent IT job?

Comment Re:Walk before you run? (Score 1) 462

by prodigyx (#33415560) Attached to: What 'IT' Stuff Should We Teach Ninth-Graders?
This makes me think of the movie "Idiocracy" where they feed Gatorade to their crops because Gatorade "has electrolytes, and thats what plants need". When they were asked what electrolytes were, all they knew was its "what plants need". Everyone who ever knew the "details" of how plants worked was dead, there was no one to explain that plants needed water, because they stopped teaching the "details" to people long ago. I have to agree that teaching people how to get things done is the best way to introduce the subject, and hopefully it will spark enough interest in some people that they actually care about the details and we all dont starve to death 1000 years in the future.

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