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Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Security Digests for the Home Network Admin?

Submitted by
halcyon1234
halcyon1234 writes: "I'm currently cutting the webhost cord, and setting up a simple webserver at home to host a couple hobby websites and a blog. The usual LAMP stuff. I have just enough knowledge to be dangerous; I know how to get everything set up and get it up to date, but not enough to be sure I'm not overlooking common, simple security configurations. And then there's the issue of new vulnerabilities being found that I'm not even aware of. The last thing I want is to contribute to someone's botnet or spam relay.
What readings/subscriptions would you recommend for security discussions/heads up? Obviously I already read (too much) Slashdot daily, which I credit for hearing about some major security issues. Are there any RSS feeds or mailing lists you rely on for keeping up to date on security issues?"

Submission + - Quantum Dots Are Behind New Displays (ieee.org)

Submitted by ArmageddonLord
ArmageddonLord writes: "Liquid crystal displays dominate today’s big, bright world of color TVs. But they’re inefficient and don’t produce the vibrant, richly hued images of organic light-emitting diode (OLED) screens, which are expensive to make in large sizes. Now, a handful of start-up companies aim to improve the LCD by adding quantum dots, the light-emitting semiconductor nanocrystals that shine pure colors when excited by electric current or light. When integrated into the back of LCD panels, the quantum dots promise to cut power consumption in half while generating 50 percent more colors. Quantum-dot developer Nanosys says an LCD film it developed with 3M is now being tested, and a 17-inch notebook incorporating the technology should be on shelves by year’s end." --IEEE Spectrum

Comment Re:Bad examples, anyway (Score 1) 640

I'd love to see a citation of this assertion.

Kaplan, Matt (2011). "Archaeopteryx no longer first bird". Nature, published online 27 July 2011. doi:10.1038/news.2011.443

Lee, M.S.Y. and Worthy, T.H. (2011). "Likelihood reinstates Archaeopteryx as a primitive bird. Biology Letters, published online before print October 26, 2011, doi:10.1098/rsbl.2011.0884

Xing Xu, Hailu You, Kai Du and Fenglu Han (28 July 2011). "An Archaeopteryx-like theropod from China and the origin of Avialae". Nature 475 (7357): 465–470. DOI:10.1038/nature10288

Comment Bad examples, anyway (Score 5, Informative) 640

Whichever side of the origins debate one subscribes to, good riddance to the horse and Archaeopteryx examples!

The typical horse progression still shown in many textbooks is oversimplified and incorrect. The "horses" shown in the progression, particularly Eohippus, really belong on "branches" of a quite complex tree. I know I've personally met creationists for whom learning about the incorrectness of that picture was the turning point in their abandonment of textbook paleobiology.

Likewise, the Archaeopteryx is often criticized as a particularly weak example even by the most dedicated evolutionists. Archaeopteryx may yet be accepted as an early member of Avialae, but there just isn't sufficient evidence of that yet.
Space

Submission + - NRO gives NASA two space spy telescopes more powerful than Hubble (nasawatch.com)

Submitted by mknewman
mknewman writes: "The U.S. government's secret space program has decided to give NASA two telescopes as big as, and even more powerful than, the Hubble Space Telescope. Designed for surveillance, the telescopes from the National Reconnaissance Office were no longer needed for spy missions and can now be used to study the heavens. They have 2.4-meter (7.9 feet) mirrors, just like the Hubble. They also have an additional feature that the civilian space telescopes lack: A maneuverable secondary mirror that makes it possible to obtain more focused images. These telescopes will have 100 times the resolving power of the Hubble, according to David Spergel, a Princeton astrophysicist and co-chair of the National Academies advisory panel on astronomy and astrophysics."
Security

Submission + - Flame Abused Windows Update to Spread (net-security.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: You have probably already heard that Microsoft released an out-of-band update that revokes three rogue certificates that were used to sign a couple of modules of the recently discovered Flame (SkyWiper) toolkit. What you might still not have heard is how some of the malware's modules — namely ones called "Gadget" and "Munch" — were responsible for spreading Flame to other machines in the same network as an already infected one. Initially, Kaspersky Lab experts thought computers were infected via an unknown 0-day vulnerability, as fully patched Windows 7 machines were being infected over the network in a very suspicious manner.
NASA

Submission + - NASA Gets Two Military Spy Telescopes for Astronomy (washingtonpost.com) 1

Submitted by
SomePgmr
SomePgmr writes: "The U.S. government’s secret space program has decided to give NASA two telescopes as big as, and even more powerful than, the Hubble Space Telescope. Designed for surveillance, the telescopes from the National Reconnaissance Office were no longer needed for spy missions and can now be used to study the heavens."
Security

Submission + - The Cost of Crappy Security in Software Infrastructure (oreilly.com)

Submitted by blackbearnh
blackbearnh writes: Everyone these days knows that you have to double and triple check your code for security vulnerabilities, and make sure that your servers are locked down as tight as you can. But why? Because our underlying operating systems, languages, and platforms do such a crappy job protecting us from ourselves. A new article suggests that the inevitable result of clamoring for new features, rather than demanding rock-solid infrastructure, is that the developer community wastes huge amounts of time protecting their applications from exploits that should never be possible in the first place. TFA: The next time you hear about a site that gets pwned by a buffer overrun exploit, don't think "stupid developers!", think "stupid industry!"
Android

Submission + - Gnuplot now Running on Android (kickstarter.com) 2

Submitted by MathIsTasty
MathIsTasty writes: While it looks like the previously discussed campaign to raise funds for Octave and gnuplot development for Android is quite short of its goal, it looks like the developer has forged ahead and released a decent and only slightly buggy version of gnuplot running on Android already. Though it can create 2D and 3D plots and even output to a PostScript file, it looks like there is no pinch-zoom and similar. Maybe that is one of the things the requested funds are for. I just wonder whether the only person working on the project should have spent more time on marketing as opposed to development.

Comment Re:Photographic prints! (Score 1) 350

by ColoradoAuthor (#39931079) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Best Option For Printing Digital Photos?

The big box stores are usually a triple-win for cost, convenience, and quality, but there are some things to watch for. Do a preliminary scouting trip and look for:

  1. What machine are they using? Some of the stores have put in new models of photo printers that I don't quite trust. I prefer a machine that's new enough to be in good shape, but old enough to have been evaluated by the archival crowd. The Fuji Frontier machines are generally very good. Whatever they're using, look up light fastness test results on a site like http://www.aardenburg-imaging.com./
  2. What paper are they using? Extra points for Fuji Crystal Archive, though again there are many good and many poor options out there.
  3. How are they handling the prints? Is the tech wearing gloves? Are they super-careful not to bend the corners?

Before you print a big batch of photos, print a couple of test images. Print a really light details on a light background, a dark one, one with lots of blue sky, and one with big areas solid gray tone. Some stores (I don't know about Costco) calibrate their machines only once or twice a year. They may print very well after calibration, but eventually they can drift and produce not-so-good prints.

Finally, if you're keeping your archival copies on DVD or CD, keep in mind that there is a huge difference in longevity depending on the construction of the disc. Be prepared to pay for true archival quality with a gold reflective layer.
Android

Submission + - Android Ported From Java To C# (itworld.com)

Submitted by
itwbennett
itwbennett writes: "When working on how to improve the performance of its tool for Android, development tools vendor Xamarin hit a wall because of performance issues with Dalvik, which is Android's virtual machine, according to a post on the company blog. One idea the Xamarin team had was to translate Android's source code to C#. A few months later skunkworks project XobotOS was born. The result of the project's efforts is that most of Android's layouts and controls have been ported to C#, and the code is available on GitHub, according to the blog post."
Entertainment

Submission + - Running Apps from the Dashboard: A Good Idea? (blogspot.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: I guess is was inevitable, now that BMW is letting you view and make tweets from behind the wheel, but is it really a good idea to let people run smartphone apps from their dashboard monitor? I guess for navigation you could run your favorite map-app there, but there is nothing to stop people from running other apps on their dashbaord too. It might be better than texting from the handset, but I'm not sure I want people playing Angry Birds while they drive.
Security

Submission + - Symantec: More Malware on Religious Sites Than Porn Sites (esecurityplanet.com) 1

Submitted by
kongshem
kongshem writes: "According to Symantec's annual Internet Security Threat Report, religious and ideological websites have far more security threats per infected site than adult/pornographic sites. Why is that? Symantec's theory: "We hypothesize that this is because pornographic Web site owners already make money from the Internet and, as a result, have a vested interested in keeping their sites malware-free — it's not good for repeat business,""
Privacy

Submission + - Maintain privacy by poisoning the privacy well (openthefuture.com) 1

Submitted by Boawk
Boawk writes: Can we protect our privacy by flooding the internet with false information about ourselves?

It’s the last approach that really interests me: Pollution. Poisoning the data stream. Putting out enough false information that the real information becomes unreliable. At that point, anyone wishing to know the truth about me has to come to me directly, allowing me to control access. It’s hardly a perfect option — the untrue things can be permanently connected to you, and it does kind of make you hard to trust online — but it’s the one approach to opacity that’s purely social and extremely difficult to stop.

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