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Comment Re:Hmm (Score 5, Insightful) 941

by shogarth (#31189156) Attached to: PA School Spied On Students Via School-Issued Laptop Webcams

Let's assume for a minute that the complaint is correct and that the school was remotely monitoring some set of students. (This might not be correct. Did the snapshot come from some public source like FaceBook?).

If it were my daughter's computer, I would not be talking about a class-action suit with a civil attorney. I would be sitting down at police HQ and the district attorney's office pursuing criminal charges against the individuals involved. They would need to face the felony charges that their behavior warranted. Once that was rolling, I would go after the individuals (not the district) for civil damages.

Why give a pass to the deep pockets? Simply because I don't want to have to look my neighbors in the face when a fractional point increase in their property taxes is required to pay a civil settlement that made me wealthy. I have no problems bankrupting the people who authorized and deployed the tech.
Image

Bark Beetles Hate Rush Limbaugh and Heavy Metal 220

Posted by samzenpus from the tiniest-minds dept.
Aryabhata writes "According to scientists, climate change and human activity have allowed bark beetle populations to soar. They decided to fight the beetles by using the 'nastiest, most offensive sounds' that they could think of. These sounds included recordings of Guns & Roses, Queen, Rush Limbaugh and manipulated versions of the insects' own sounds. The research project titled 'Beetle Mania' has concluded that acoustic stress can disrupt their feeding and even cause the beetles to kill each other."
Graphics

NVIDIA Shows Off "Optimus" Switchable Graphics For Notebooks 102

Posted by Soulskill from the that's-some-prime-namespace dept.
Vigile writes "Transformers jokes aside, NVIDIA's newest technology offering hopes to radically change the way notebook computers are built and how customers use them. The promise of both extended battery life and high performance mobile computing has seemed like a pipe dream, and even the most recent updates to 'switchable graphics' left much to be desired in terms of the user experience. Having both an integrated and discrete graphics chip in your notebook does little good if you never switch between the two. Optimus allows the system to seamlessly and instantly change between IGP and discrete NVIDIA GPUs based on the task being run, including games, GPU encoding or Flash video playback. Using new software and hardware technology, notebooks using Optimus can power on and pass control to the GPU in a matter of 300ms and power both the GPU and PCIe lanes completely off when not in use. This can be done without being forced to reboot or even close out your applications, making it a hands-free solution for the customer."
Hardware Hacking

Hardware TPM Hacked 327

Posted by Soulskill from the matter-of-time dept.
BiggerIsBetter writes "Christopher Tarnovsky has pulled off the 'near impossible' TPM hardware hack. We all knew it was only a matter of time; this is why you shouldn't entrust your data to proprietary solutions. From the article: 'The technique can also be used to tap text messages and email belonging to the user of a lost or stolen phone. Tarnovsky said he can't be sure, however, whether his attack would work on TPM chips made by companies other than Infineon. Infineon said it knew this type of attack was possible when it was testing its chips. But the company said independent tests determined that the hack would require such a high skill level that there was a limited chance of it affecting many users. ... The Trusted Computing Group, which sets standards on TPM chips, called the attack "exceedingly difficult to replicate in a real-world environment."'"
Space

Signs of Water Found On Saturnian Moon Enceladus 79

Posted by Soulskill from the moon-names-that-make-me-hungry dept.
Matt_dk writes "Scientists working on the Cassini space mission have found negatively charged water ions in the ice plume of Enceladus. Their findings, based on analysis from data taken in plume fly-throughs in 2008 and reported in the journal Icarus, provide evidence for the presence of liquid water, which suggests the ingredients for life inside the icy moon. The Cassini plasma spectrometer, used to gather this data, also found other species of negatively charged ions including hydrocarbons."
Microsoft

Microsoft Phasing Out FAST Search For Linux, Unix 146

Posted by Soulskill from the going-away dept.
viralMeme writes "Microsoft plans to begin phasing out Unix and Linux platform support for its FAST enterprise search products, as of its next release. According to a Thursday blog post from Microsoft Distinguished Engineer Bjørn Olstad, 'We’ve continued to sell, support, and update the Linux and UNIX versions of FAST ESP, and we’ve designed the next wave of FAST products (scheduled for release in the first half of calendar year 2010) to include a cross-platform search core that has been extended to take advantage of web services and support mixed-platform deployment models. With our 2010 products scheduled for release in a few months, we’ve just started to plan for our next wave of products. As a part of that planning process, we have decided that in order to deliver more innovation per release in the future, the 2010 products will be the last to include a search core that runs on Linux and UNIX. Many of our customers run FAST ESP on Linux and UNIX today, and we recognize that our future focus on Windows means change. To ease the transition, we’re investing in interoperability between Windows and other operating systems, reaffirming our commitment to 10 years of support for our non-Windows products, and taking concrete steps to help customers plan for the future.'"

Comment Re:It's the database, stupid. (Score 3, Insightful) 151

by shogarth (#30038524) Attached to: Oracle Outlines Plans for Sun Products, Casts Doubt on NetBeans

SPARC is still quite relevant; there are few things as nice as running a multi-threaded set of applications on the Sun Niagara chips. If I were a database software outfit I would want to make sure there were two architectures out there (IBM POWER and something else) focusing on enterprise performance rather than media creation/encoding.

Take a look. Is there anything in the Intel or AMD product pipeline that will get you 2 x 10 Gb ethernet, 64 thread pipelines, and 128 GB of RAM in a 1U box? Even better, the price is really competative with buying the same performance worth of x86 gear in multiple boxes by the time you think about rack space, cooling networking and all the rest of the data center head aches.

Comment Re:Dumbass (Score 5, Informative) 344

by shogarth (#29698861) Attached to: When Do You Fire a Headhunter?

Not only have courts said it, it happens all the time. My wife (a human incarnation of Catbert) has fired maybe 20 people over the last decade because they lied on their application paperwork.

Normally it plays out that something questionable happens and the employee starts to get scrutinized. Then looky, looky, they lied on their application and are a problem. Time for security to walk them out of the building...
Security

Cyber-criminal Left In Charge of Prison Computer Network 389

Posted by samzenpus from the fox-in-the-hen-house dept.
samzenpus writes "A 27-year-old man serving six years for stealing £6.5million using forged credit cards over the internet was recruited to help write code needed for the installation of an internal prison TV station. He was left unguarded with unfettered access to the system and produced results that anyone but prison officials could have guessed. He installed a series of passwords on all the machines, shutting down the entire prison computer system. A prison source said, 'It's unbelievable that a criminal convicted of cyber-crime was allowed uncontrolled access to the hard drive. He set up such an elaborate array of passwords it took a specialist company to get it working.'"

Comment Corporate welfare (Score 1) 317

by shogarth (#29609009) Attached to: New Bill Proposes Open Source Requirement for Publicly Funded Books

Will a bill such as this endanger publishing companies in the same way Internet journalism endangers traditional journalism?

If the book was authored using federal funding, then publishers should not expect any level of protection; it isn't their work (or rather their "work-for-hire") to begin with. Any copyright protection to the publisher in this case should be based on that entity purchasing the rights from the funding agency (ideally at a valuation based on estimated future sales). If they have been getting a better deal than that, then it's just a case of federally-funded corporate welfare.

Panasonic 3D TV Does Not Disappoint 143

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the do-it-without-the-glasses dept.
Engadget recently had a chance to try out Panasonic's 3D demo rig, and, aside from the goofy glasses, report some impressive results. "Active shutter 3D technology once again did not fail to impress, though large format action content like the Beijing Olympics Opening Ceremony and action sports footage was far more impressive than the movie trailer. The benefit of a picture where everything, regardless of distance from the camera, is in focus is one of the biggest benefits 3D has going for it and nothing makes that more apparent than video from a large stadium. Aside from a few glitches from a pair of the glasses being low on battery and flickering annoyingly throughout, the framerate was smooth and the picture sharp, a marked difference from the jittery motion we witnessed during JVC's 3D demo earlier in the day."
Technology

A.I. Developer Challenges Pro-Human Bias 234

Posted by timothy from the what-it-is-you-intend-to-practice dept.
destinyland writes "After 13 years, the creator of the Noble Ape cognitive simulation says he's learned two things about artificial intelligence. 'Survival is a far better metric of intelligence than replicating human intelligence,' and "There are a number of examples of vastly more intelligent systems (in terms of survival) than human intelligence." Both Apple and Intel have used his simulation as a processor metric, but now Tom Barbalet argues its insights could be broadly applied to real life. His examples of durable non-human systems? The legal system, the health care system, and even the internet, where individual humans are simply the 'passive maintaining agents,' and the systems can't be conquered without a human onslaught that's several magnitudes larger."
Image

DHS Tries to Safeguard Against Giant Monster Attack 77

Posted by samzenpus from the why-do-the-gigantic-creatures-hate-us dept.
KnightShift writes "Earlier this month the Department of Homeland Security halted the publication of the Monsterpocalypse Series 3: All Your Base Strategy Guide due to 'national security concerns.' In a statement on its website Privateer Press, which publishes the popular kaiju-inspired collectible miniatures game, reported that 'Homeland Security pulled the shipment for an intensive examination last week when it arrived in the United States. While no comment was made to the nature of the investigation, several crew members within Privateer Press believe the government became concerned over some of the more radical ideals espoused by several factions within the Monsterpocalypse game.' Privateer Press Chief Creative Officer Matt Wilson added that 'I am confident that the investigation's outcome will reaffirm the rights of free speech and protest of the radical environmental group Green Fury at the perceived devastation man is having on our planet as well as the freedom of people to practice religion without governmental oversight — even those religions which may very well bring forth the minions of the ancient Lords of Cthul.'"
AMD

ARM Hopes To Lure Microsoft Away From Intel 333

Posted by timothy from the there-would-be-this-software-ecosystem dept.
Steve Kerrison writes "With the explosion of netbooks now available, the line between PC and mobile phone is becoming much less distinct. ARM, one of the biggest companies behind CPU architectures for mobile phones (and other embedded systems), sees now as an opportunity to break out of mobiles and give Intel a run for its money. HEXUS.channel quizzes Bob Morris, ARM's director of mobile computing, on how it plans to achieve such a herculean task. Right now, ARM's pushing Android as the OS that's synonymous with the mobile Internet. But it's not simply going to ignore Microsoft: 'What if Microsoft offered a full version of Windows (as opposed to Windows Mobile or Windows CE) that used the ARM, rather than X86 (Intel and AMD) instruction set? Then it would be a straight hardware fight with Intel, in which ARM hopes its low power, low price processors will have an advantage.'"
Security

Null Character Hack Allows SSL Spoofing 280

Posted by timothy from the cannot-anticipate-all-evil dept.
eldavojohn writes "Two researchers, Dan Kaminsky and Moxie Marlinspike, came up with exact same way to fake being a popular website with authentication from a certificate authority. Wired has the details: 'When an attacker who owns his own domain — badguy.com — requests a certificate from the CA, the CA, using contact information from Whois records, sends him an email asking to confirm his ownership of the site. But an attacker can also request a certificate for a subdomain of his site, such as Paypal.com\0.badguy.com, using the null character \0 in the URL. The CA will issue the certificate for a domain like PayPal.com\0.badguy.com because the hacker legitimately owns the root domain badguy.com. Then, due to a flaw found in the way SSL is implemented in many browsers, Firefox and others theoretically can be fooled into reading his certificate as if it were one that came from the authentic PayPal site. Basically when these vulnerable browsers check the domain name contained in the attacker's certificate, they stop reading any characters that follow the "\0 in the name.'"

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