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Submission + - NSA recruitment drive goes horribly wrong

An anonymous reader writes: The Guardian is running a story about a recent recruitment session held by the NSA and attended by students from the University of Wisconsin which had an unexpected outcome for the recruiters.

Attending the session was Madiha R Tahir, a journalist studying a language course at the university. She asked the squirming recruiters a few uncomfortable questions about the activities of NSA: which countries the agency considers to be 'adversaries', and if being a good liar is a qualification for getting a job at the NSA.

Following her, others students started to put NSA employees under fire too. A recording of the session is available on Tahir's blog.

Bitcoin

Submission + - Bitcoin Trading Crashes To $38 After Block Chain Fork Bug Announced (lagunabeachcomputer.com)

Laguna Computer writes: "Today Bitcoin BTC$ crashed to $38 from $48 following news that a block chain fork has occurred. According to realtime chat on the official Mt.Gox Chat Room, the bug occurred after the .8 Bitcoin software version was released. While sources maintain that digital currency wallets are safe, they have asked certain bitcoin miners to cease operation until the block chains can merge. More information to come."
Bitcoin

Submission + - Bitcoin blockchain forked by backward-compatibility issue (bitcointalk.org)

jhantin writes: The Bitcoin blockchain has forked due to a lurking backward-compatibility issue: versions older than 0.8 do not properly handle blocks larger than about 500k, and Slush's pool mined a 974k block today. The problem is that not all mining operations are on 0.8; blocks are being generated by a mix of several different versions of the daemon, each making its own decision as to which of the two forks is preferable to extend, and older versions refuse to honor or extend from a block of this size.

The consensus on #bitcoin-dev is damage control: miners need to mine on pre-0.8 code so the backward-compatible fork will outgrow and thus dominate the compatibility-breaking one; merchants need to stop accepting transactions until the network re-converges on the backward-compatible fork of the chain; and average users can ignore the warning that they are out of sync and need to upgrade.

Comment 1998 called... (Score 3, Interesting) 480

Dallas Semiconductor once had a product called the "Crypto iButton", a small Java CPU + a hardware RSA engine and tamper-resistant memory. With appropriate plugins you could set it up as a security device in your browser and then authenticate remotely using SSL client certificates (with the private key never leaving the iButton).

http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~dinoj/smartcard/javaring.html

Comment Re:I thought I felt (Score 1) 166

Many years ago I had a summer job at the TRIUMF cyclotron. When you stood above the main magnet (on top of a thick layer of concrete shielding blocks) the field was strong enough that you could hold one coin vertically and stick another one onto its bottom edge.

The stray field was too weak to affect credit cards or hard drives, but it did do interesting things to the CRT monitors in nearby offices.

Comment Re:.6 percent (Score 1) 144

And just how, pray tell, do you think they measure the mass of the bars Mr. Nitpicker? Some elaborate physics experiment?

Using either a beam balance, or a force-measuring scale that's locally calibrated with a known reference mass.

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