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Ask Slashdot: How To Best Setup a School Internet Filter? 454

Posted by samzenpus from the watch-how-you-play dept.
An anonymous reader writes "I was recently volunteered to be the network/computer admin for a small non-profit school. One of the items asked of me had to do with filtering inappropriate content (i.e. stuff you wouldn't want your mother to see). Essentially we want to protect people who aren't able to protect themselves, at least while on campus. Basic site filtering is fairly easy — setup squid with one of the many filtering engines and click to filter the categories your interested. Additionally, making the computer lab highly visible uses public shame and humiliation to limit additional activity. The real question — How do you filter Facebook? There is a lot of great content and features on Facebook, and its a great way to stay in contact with friends, but there is also a potentially dark side. Along with inappropriate content, there is a tendency to share more information than should be shared, and not everyone follows proper security and privacy guidelines. What's the best way to setup campus-wide security/privacy policies for Facebook?"
KDE

Amarok 2.6 Music Player Released 100

Posted by Soulskill from the onward-and-upward dept.
jrepin writes "KDE is proud to announce version 2.6 of Amarok music player. While it brings a reasonable set of new features, the focus of this release was on bug fixing and improving the overall stability. The new features are a complete overhaul of the iPod, iPad and iPhone support including solid support for device playlists; transcoding for iPod-like and USB Mass Storage devices; the Free Music Chart service is now activated by default; embedded cover support for Ogg and FLAC files; and album art support for tracks on the filesystem and USB Mass Storage devices."
Security

Companies Advise Tighter Security After Honan Hack 99

Posted by samzenpus from the add-another-security-question dept.
In the wake of the hacking of Mat Honan's accounts, Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple are just a few of the companies making their security policies tougher, and they are advising people to do the same. From the article: "Even as those companies’ teams moved to patch the holes, others moved to offer security tips. Matt Cutts, head of Google’s Webspam team, used his personal Website to urge Gmail users to embrace two-factor authentication. 'Much of the story is about Amazon or Apple’s security practices, but I would still advise everyone to turn on Google’s two-factor authentication to make your Gmail account safer and less likely to get hacked,' he wrote in the August 6 posting."

Comment It's "Lua" not "LUA" (Score 4, Informative) 477

by Cthefuture (#40870077) Attached to: Most Useful Scripting Language To Learn?

Lua is not an acronym. From the Lua web page:
"Lua" (pronounced LOO-ah) means "Moon" in Portuguese. As such, it is neither an acronym nor an abbreviation, but a noun.

LuaJIT is probably the fastest scripting language in existence. I have found for math-heavy algorithms it's as fast as optimized compiled C code. Plus it's FFI interface is stunningly fast, allowing easy fast access to native libraries.
Power

Existing Solar Tech Could Power Entire US, Says NREL 589

Posted by Soulskill from the could-but-won't dept.
derekmead writes "A new report from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory finds that solar holds more potential to generate more power (PDF) than any other clean energy source. The NREL broke things down into four groups: urban and rural utility-scale photovoltaics (giant solar plants, basically) as well as rooftop solar and concentrated mirror arrays. Between those technologies, which are all already on the market, the NREL reckons there's a proven potential for solar to hit a capacity of 200,000 gigawatts in the United States alone. For some perspective, 1 gigawatt is what a single nuclear power plant might generate, and it's more than most coal plants. A gigawatt of capacity is enough to power approximately 700,000 homes."

Comment Re:Wipe (Score 1) 547

by Cthefuture (#40791461) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: How To Clean Up My Work Computer Before I Leave?

I boot off a DVD/USB to a minimal Linux system then write over the whole drive with cryptographically secure random data. That is a bit overkill but I work in security/cryptography and often have or had extremely sensitive data on my machine. "dd if=/dev/zero" works faster and is plenty good for normal people. This "nukes" the whole drive to a blank slate.

From there I'm usually able to install whatever OS they are using and set the machine up fresh. If the company has draconian IT policies and I can't install the OS then I let them re-image the drive. I only do this after I completely wipe the drive myself though. A re-image on top of your existing system most likely will not wipe all your old data.
IOS

Apple Yanks Privacy App From the App Store 136

Posted by timothy from the earwigs-in-the-glass-garden dept.
wiredmikey writes "Back in May of this year, Internet security firm Bitdefender launched 'Clueful,' an iOS App that helps identify potentially intrusive applications and show users what they do behind their back, and giving users an inside look at all the information app developers can gather about a user. Seems legit, right? Apple doesn't think so. Or at least they have an issue with something behind the App that sparked them to pull it from the App Store. After initially reviewing and approving the App that was released on May 22, Apple has had a change of heart and has just removed the App from the AppStore. It's unclear [why it was yanked], and Bitdefender told SecurityWeek that the company is under NDA as far as explanations for the removal. Interestingly, Bitdefender did share some data that they gathered based on Clueful's analysis of more than 65,000 iOS apps so far, including the fact that 41.4 percent of apps were shown to track a user's location unbeknownst to them."
Crime

Google Joining Fight Against Drug Cartels 253

Posted by Soulskill from the who-gets-to-define-illicit dept.
Several readers sent word that Google has announced its intention to start fighting drug cartels and other 'illicit networks.' According to a post on the official blog, the company thinks modern technology plays a key role in helping to 'expose and dismantle global criminal networks, which depend on secrecy and discretion in order to function.' They're holding a summit in Los Angeles this week, which aims to 'bring together a full-range of stakeholders, from survivors of organ trafficking, sex trafficking and forced labor to government officials, dozens of engineers, tech leaders and product managers from Google and beyond. Through the summit, which lasts until Wednesday, we hope to discover ways that technology can be used to expose and disrupt these networks as a whole—and to put some of these ideas into practice.'
Earth

Mysterious Sprite Photographed By ISS Astronaut 86

Posted by samzenpus from the pretty-pictures dept.
astroengine writes "A very rare and beautiful view of a red sprite has been photographed by Expedition 31 astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) hovering just above a bright flash of lightning in a thunderstorm over Myanmar. First documented in a photo in 1989, red sprites are very brief flashes of optical activity that are associated with powerful lightning discharges in storms — although the exact mechanisms that create them aren't yet known. But the orbiting outpost seems like the perfect vantage point to learn more about them!"
Desktops (Apple)

OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion) Won't Support Some 64-bit Macs With Older GPUs 417

Posted by Soulskill from the not-invited-to-the-mountain-lion's-reindeer-games dept.
MojoKid writes "Apple is pitching Mac OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion) as the cat's meow, with over 200 new features 'that add up to an amazing Mac experience' — but that only applies if you're rocking a compatible system. Some older Mac models, including ones that are 64-bit capable, aren't invited to the Mountain Lion party, and it's likely because of the GPU. It's being reported (unofficially) that an updated graphics architecture intended to smooth out performance in OS X's graphics subsystem is the underlying issue. It's no coincidence, then, that the unsupported GPUs happen to be ones that were fairly common back before 64-bit support became mainstream."
Piracy

BitTorrent Usage Increases In Europe, Following the Pirate Bay Blockade 272

Posted by samzenpus from the I-didn't-want-to-until-you-told-me-I-couldn't dept.
MrSeb writes "In a twist that will surprise no one except the RIAA, MPAA, BREIN, and other anti-piracy lobbies, the amount of BitTorrent traffic has stayed the same or increased in Europe following the blockade of The Pirate Bay in the UK, Netherlands, and other countries. This news comes from XS4All, one of the largest European ISPs, which has published a graph of the network traffic associated with the BitTorrent protocol — and sure enough, since the Dutch Pirate Bay blockade began in February 2012, traffic has stayed the same or increased slightly. There are probably a few reasons for this: a) The European blockades created a lot of publicity (and no publicity is bad publicity); b) TPB isn't the only torrent site out there, and many of its torrents are available elsewhere; and c) Internet denizens are a lot more savvy (proxies, VPNs, etc.) than the MPAA and co give them credit for."

Comment Re:Does this affect desktop distros? (Score 1) 284

by Cthefuture (#40509765) Attached to: The Leap Second Is Here! Are Your Systems Ready?

My up-to-date Arch workstation went haywire (kernel 3.4.4). mysqld, firefox, and ksoftirq were using a massive amount of CPU. Stopping the processes made the CPU usage go away but as soon as I restarted them they would go nuts again. I had to reboot the machine.

I have an Ubuntu 12.04 server and Debian stable server that apparently were not affected. My Linux based routers also seemed unaffected although they don't run ntp as a daemon which probably makes a difference.

Comment Almost all VPN services are fly-by-night ops (Score 2) 349

by Cthefuture (#40505545) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: VPN Service For a Deployed US Navy Ship?

Almost all VPN services are fly-by-night ops. Just don't do it. Seriously, they come and go like the wind. I'm sure there are legit and have been around for a long time but it's nigh impossible to vet any of these companies.

Instead find a good hosting providing and rent yourself a server with the amount of bandwidth you need and the location in the US you want (most providers have data centers in various places). For more security I would get a whole machine, not a VPS. Run OpenVPN or whatever on it and you're good to go. It wouldn't need much disk or RAM.

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