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Security

Submission + - Dutch ISP discovers 140,000 customers with default password 1

Submitted by bs0d3
bs0d3 writes: In Holland, a major ISP known as KPN has found a major security flaw for their customers. It seems that all customers have had the same default password of 'welkom01'. Up to 140,000 customers had retained their default passwords. Once inside attackers could have found bank account and credit card numbers. KPN has since changed all the passwords of the 140,000 customers with weak passwords. They also do not believe anyone has actually been burglarized since discovering this weak spot in security.
Open Source

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: How to get old commercial software to be open-sourced?

Submitted by Optic7
Optic7 writes: Many gamers have probably dreamed about the idea of an old favorite game or other no longer supported or developed commercial software being converted to an open-source license so that it could be updated to add new features, support new hardware, other operating systems, etc. However, this type of change of license seems exceedingly rare, unless the copyright holder itself decides on its own that it would be beneficial. The only examples I could think of or was able to find in a brief internet search were Blender (3D animation software that had its source code bought from creditors after a crowd-funding campaign) and Warzone 2100 (Game that had its source code released after a successful petition). With those two examples of different strategies in mind, have any of you ever participated in any efforts of this kind, and what did you learn from it that may be useful to someone else attempting the same thing? Even if you have not participated, do you have any suggestions or ideas that may be useful to such an effort?
Data Storage

Submission + - Texas Set To Store Energy In Underground Salt Caverns (vaultelectricity.com)

Submitted by jmasterson
jmasterson writes: Getting electricity out of wind is like coaxing a stubborn mule down a trail. It moves at its own pace and stops and starts when it wants to. The challenge for grid operators is to integrate electricity produced by wind at irregular and unpredictable intervals into the grid which requires a close balance between electricity in and electricity out.

This is good news for electricity rates in Texas. Energy storage capability added to an electricity grid multiplies the capacity of the group without need to add new power plants. This will reduce the amount of new power generation capacity that will need to be built in the future.
Government

Submission + - Feds Look to Fight Leaks With 'Fog of Disinformation' (wired.com)

Submitted by skipkent
skipkent writes: Pentagon-funded researchers have come up with a new plan for busting leakers: Spot them by how they search, and then entice the secret-spillers with decoy documents that will give them away.

Computer scientists call it it “Fog Computing” — a play on today’s cloud computing craze. And in a recent paper for Darpa, the Pentagon’s premiere research arm, researchers say they’ve built “a prototype for automatically generating and distributing believable misinformation and then tracking access and attempted misuse of it. We call this ‘disinformation technology.’”
Microsoft

Submission + - Former Microsoft exec: Microsoft has 'become the thing they despised' (bgr.com) 2

Submitted by zacharye
zacharye writes: Microsoft has a long and storied history of leadership in the tech industry, and the company has driven innovation for decades. In recent years, however, Microsoft has fallen behind the times in several key industries; the company’s mobile position has deteriorated and left it with a low single-digit market share, and Microsoft won’t launch Windows RT, its response to Apple’s three-year-old iPad, until later this year...

Submission + - Journey to the Mantle of the Earth? (newscientist.com) 1

Submitted by Doofus
Doofus writes: New Scientist has an interesting story about a Japanese effort to reach the Earth's mantle. While some mantle material has been recovered from volcanoes, no pure mantle material has been obtained. (We have moon rocks, but nothing from a few km beneath our feet!) Accompanying the article is a gallery of previous attempts at drilling farther and farther into the Earth's crust.
Android

Submission + - Android botnet army spouting spam from Yahoo Mail app (networkworld.com)

Submitted by colinneagle
colinneagle writes: Analysis of spam samples suggests that a malicious application could be using Android devices to spread spam messages, in what Microsoft researcher Terry Zink has called "the next evolution in the cat-and-mouse game that is email security."

Zink believes the botnet was created by a malicious app most likely found in an insecure market. After analyzing the IP addresses that were stamped in the headers of the messages, a routine practice of Yahoo Mail, Zink found that the IPs connected to servers in Chile, Indonesia, Lebanon, Oman, Philippines, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, Ukraine, and Venezuela.

Because downloading a malicious app from the Android Market is highly unlikely, Zink says, the fact that the messages stem largely from developing countries where Android's app community has yet to establish an ecosystem indicates that the devices were infected by an illegitimate app downloaded elsewhere
Programming

Submission + - StackOverflow Man Remakes Net One Answer at a Time (wired.com)

Submitted by
MikeatWired
MikeatWired writes: "Jeff Atwood wants to make software developers better. No, scratch that. He wants to make the entire internet better. Atwood is the co-founder of StackExchange, a network of question-and-answer websites. StackExchange’s original site, StackOverflow, caters exclusively to developers. 'We have a reputation about being jerks about quality, but we want each page we put up to make the internet better, not worse,' Atwood tells Wired. 'Not even the same. Better.' But according to Atwood, StackOverflow’s goal isn’t just to have quality answers or help developers solve technical problems. 'A programmer’s job is to communicate with users to find out what people want,' he explains. 'We’re tricking developers into being better communicators.' By making developers better at the non-technical aspects of programming, Atwood hopes StackOverflow can make the internet better for everyone. At the very least, software developers — and so many others — are listening."
IT

Submission + - Surviving Your Company's Steve Jobs Wannabe (infoworld.com)

Submitted by
snydeq
snydeq writes: "Bob Lewis offers advice for IT departments dealing with one of the worst business diseases: a top-down contagion of Steve Jobs wannabes. These 'Great Dictators' have 'all of Steve Jobs' worst characteristics (except, perhaps, his poor hygiene) without any of his saving graces: the supreme certainty that they're right, without actually being right often enough to justify their high opinions of themselves. Because business culture flows downhill, arrogant autocracy is the company's standard leadership model,' and with everyone thinking they're an 'internal customer,' IT will be on the receiving end of orders from every petty dictator in the company.' The key, of course, is to avoid falling prey to the cowering toadyism that these petty dictators come to expect as the preferred way for folks in IT to 'manage up.'"
Programming

Submission + - When Functional Programming Makes Sense (infoworld.com)

Submitted by
snydeq
snydeq writes: "Unless you've been living under a rock, you know functional programming languages rank among the hottest languages used by so-called alpha geeks, writes Andrew Oliver. While this brave new world is upon us, and before we take things too far, it might be a good time to pause and reflect on the appropriateness of functional programming for everyday application development. 'Functional programming addresses the concurrency problem of state but often at a cost of human readability. Functional programmming may be entirely appropriate for many circumstances. Ironically, it might even help bring computer and human languages closer together indirectly through defining domain-specific languages. But its difficult syntax makes it an extremely poor fit for general-purpose application programming. Don't jump on this bandwagon just yet — especially for risk-averse projects.'"

Submission + - Air France Crash Final Report Published (bbc.co.uk) 1

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: The France's aviation authority, BEA, has released a final crash report on the Air France over the Atlantic in June 2009. The document blames the Airbus A330's ergonomics as well as inappropriate action by the pilots. Going through the events, the disaster began with the malfunctioning of speed sensors known as Pitots during a period of turbulence. The captain was taking a rest break and the co-pilots were in control at the time. The captain returned to the flight deck but was unable to reverse the catastrophic course of events. One of the mistakes of the crew was to point the nose of the aircraft upwards after it stalled, instead of down. 'The crew was in a state of almost total loss of control of the situation,' BEA chief investigator Alain Bouillard summed. The report makes 25 new safety recommendations on top of the 25 called for in a preliminary report last year.
Google

Submission + - Apple announces patent on Head Mounted Display - Like google glass (appleinsider.com)

Submitted by
cygnwolf
cygnwolf writes: "Another salvo is fired in the Apple vs Google war. Apple revealed yesterday that they filed for and have been granted a patent on a Head Mounted Display that bears a curious resemblance to Google Glass

From the article:
The United States Patent and Trademark Office on Tuesday granted Apple's application for a patent describing head-mounted display technology that is tangentially related to see-through, or augmented reality, units like Google's Project Glass."
Google

Submission + - Nexus Q - Not Exactly Made in USA (ifixit.com)

Submitted by sl4shd0rk
sl4shd0rk writes: Among the much ballyhooed tech at Google I/O last week was the Google Nexus Q. Google made an effort to proudly point out the device was "Made in the USA" and even had it stamped on the back of it. A tear-down at ifixit.com however, reveals the guts of the thing are mostly manufactured overseas at the expected locations (China, Taiwan, Japan, Korea, et al). Wired also posted a tear-down in which they reveal a die-casting shop in Wisconsin is the source of the zinc housing, but certainly not the entire device as some news sources reported. It's great that Google decided to utilize the struggling US manufacturing sector for this, but claiming the device is USA made, and being blatantly vaugue about it's origins is quite misleading.

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