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Submission + - Everything we know about cybercrime is wrong (theregister.co.uk)

Submitted by isoloisti
isoloisti writes: Two interesting piece in the Register explode several cybercrime myths. Study of criminal demographics by a criminologist finds "cybercrime is far from the preserve of tech-savvy youths — nearly half (43 per cent) of cyber-crooks are over 35 years old, and less than a third (29 per cent) are under 25."
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/03/29/cybercrime_myths_exploded/

Study by Microsoft finds that "money mules, and not bank customers are the real victims when money is stolen" and that "passwords are not the bottleneck in the cybercrime pipeline." http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/03/30/ms_money_mule_victims/
Crime

Submission + - Visa and MasterCard warn of "Massive" Breach at Card Processor (majorgeeks.com) 1

Submitted by
concealment
concealment writes: "Visa and MasterCard are warning of what they call a “massive breach” that could involve as many as 10 million compromised credit card numbers.

The breach occurred between January 21, 2012 and February 25th 2012. They say that this information, known as full Track 1 and Track 2 data, could be used to counterfeit new cards."
Businesses

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: How Have You Handled Illegal Interview Topics (salary.com) 1

Submitted by kodiaktau
kodiaktau writes: Salary.com profiles 14 questions that interviewers may or may not ask during the interview process such as the standards of age, gender and sexual orientation. They also profile several lesser known illegal or border line questions like height/weight, military background, country of origin and family status.

With the recent flap over companies asking potential employees for passwords during the interview process it is important to know and review your legal rights before entering the interview.

Have you been confronted with borderline or illegal interview questions in the past? How have you responded to those questions?
Games

Submission + - Prince of Persia creator finds lost source code (geek.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Jordan Mechner may not be a name many of you know unless you are up-to-date with your video gaming history. He’s probably better known as the creator of Prince of Persia back in 1989.

Since that release 23 years ago on the Apple II, Mechner has gone on to develop the sequel, Prince of Persia 2: The Shadow and the Flame and then joined Ubisoft to reinvigorate the series for a new audience in 2001. Along the way, he managed to misplace the original source code for that first Prince of Persia game and has been searching for it ever since.

Yesterday he found it, and the discovery is all thanks to his father. The three packs of 3.5 Apple ProDOS disks had been safely stored away in a brown box along with a load of Amstrad copies of his 1984 game Karateka.
Ubuntu

Submission + - The world's slowest Linux PC (extremetech.com)

Submitted by
MrSeb
MrSeb writes: "Hackers are masochists. Almost by definition, hackers push hardware and software (and themselves) beyond breaking point to find out, once and for all, whether something is possible or not. In Dmitry Grinberg’s case, he decided to find out the lowest spec possible for a Linux PC. Barring exceptional circumstances, Linux generally requires a 32-bit processor with a modern memory management unit (MMU) and more than 1MB of RAM — Grinberg, obviously not a fan of excess bits, has successfully booted Ubuntu Linux (Jaunty) with an ATmega1284p, 8-bit RISC microcontroller clocked at 24MHz and equipped with no less than 16KB of SRAM and 128KB of flash storage. Of course, Ubuntu wouldn't boot on an 8-bit RISC chip, so Grinberg had to write an ARMv5 emulator. The effective speed of the computer, after emulation, is just 6.5KHz. It takes 2 hours to boot to command line, a further 4 hours to load Ubuntu, and if you want to open an actual window manager, Grinberg simply says 'starting X takes a lot longer.'"

Comment Bad idea (Score 3, Insightful) 106

by wired_parrot (#39440473) Attached to: When Social Media Meets TV, Are the Results Worth Watching?
Letting fans take control of tv shows is a bad idea, and will make tv scripts be written like so much bad fan fiction. The key issue for me is that the crowdsourcing of fans tends to favour the familiar and desirable. This discourages creativity, as you can't introduce new characters and situations without removing the familiar first, and fans will always agitate to maintain the familiar. What you get in the end is a melow saccharinne version of the show, with no unexpected twists that might shake the diehard fan's loyalty, but that ends up alienating those very same fans

Submission + - Growth of pseudoscience harming Australian universities (theconversation.edu.au)

Submitted by wired_parrot
wired_parrot writes: The international credibility of Australia’s universities is being undermined by the increase in the “pseudoscientific” health courses they offer, two academics write in a recent article decrying that a third of australian universities now offer courses in such subjects as homeopathy and traditional chinese medicine, which undermines science based medicine. "As the number of alternative practitioners graduating from tertiary education institutions increases, further health-care resources are wasted, while the potential for harm increases."
Privacy

Submission + - FOIA Request Shows Which Printer Companies Cooperated With U.S. Government (scribd.com)

Submitted by
Dave_Minsky
Dave_Minsky writes: "The U.S. Secret Service responded to a FOIA request on Monday that reveals the names of the printer companies that cooperate with the government to identify and track potential counterfeiters. The Electronic Frontier Foundation revealed in 2005 that the U.S. Secret Service was in cahoots with selected laser printer companies to identify and track printer paper using tiny microscopic dots encoded into the paper.

The tiny, yellow dots--less than a millimeter each--are printed in a pattern over each page and are only viewable with a blue light, a magnifying glass or a microscope. The pattern of dots is encodes identifiable information including printer model, and time and location where the document was printed."
Security

Submission + - Adobe's strategy for Vulnerability Management (darkreading.com)

Submitted by
EliSowash
EliSowash writes: "Adobe's head of product security, Brad Arkin, had an opportunity to discuss his firm's approach to vulnerability management at Kaspersky's
Security Analyst Summit 2012. He's urging fellow security researchers to adopt a similar strategy, namely: Focus less on finding and exploiting vulnerabilities, and more on defensive mechanisms like DEP, ASLR, and sandboxing.

His argument is that security researchers are doing half the work for attackers — that by finding vulnerabilities in the software, we're making the job of writing exploit code easier.

To me, it comes of a little like sour grapes: Adobe's products are regularly exploited. Is Arkin trying to deflect some of the responsibility of a developer to produce safe product?"
Android

Submission + - Google Starts Scanning Android Apps (blogspot.com)

Submitted by eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes: A recent blog post has Android developers talking about Google finally scanning third party applications for malware. Oddly enough, Google claims this service (codenamed 'Bouncer') has been active for some time: 'The service has been looking for malicious apps in Market for a while now, and between the first and second halves of 2011, we saw a 40% decrease in the number of potentially-malicious downloads from Android Market. This drop occurred at the same time that companies who market and sell anti-malware and security software have been reporting that malicious applications are on the rise.' So it appears that they allow the software to be sold even before it is scanned and it also appears that no one has been bitten by a false positive from this software. Apparently Bouncer is not as oppressive as Apple's solution although given recent news its effectiveness must be questioned. Have any readers had their apps flagged or pulled by Bouncer?

Submission + - Dutch Supreme Court sees game objects as goods (newser.com)

Submitted by thrill12
thrill12 writes: The Dutch Supreme Court ruled on January 31st that the taking away of possessions in the game Runescape from a 13-year-old boy was in fact theft because the possessions could be seen as actual goods. The highest court explained this not by arguing it was software that was copied, but by stating that the game data were real goods that were acquired through "effort and time investment" and "the principal had the actual and exclusive dominion of the goods" — up until the moment the other guy took them away, that is.
Cloud

Submission + - 'World Shaker' Crossbreeds Processor With Memory C (wired.com)

Submitted by
Eric Smalley
Eric Smalley writes: "Processors include a small amount of cache memory, which reduces the number of times the processor has to fetch data from main memory, but Venray goes further. It puts the processor and main memory on the same chip. It’s called processor-in-memory, or PIM, and it’s not exactly a new idea. Fish and others have been pursuing the idea for decades. But its time may finally have come.

In today's world, biomedical research and other Big Data applications that juggle enormous amounts of information are butting up against that memory wall, and if we’re to achieve personalized medicine --" where we tailor drugs and other treatments to an analysis of an individual’s genetic makeup --" we need chips that can push through that wall."
Privacy

Submission + - Surveillance Cameras Become a Tool to Track Custom (technologyreview.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Technology Review reports on a startup with software used by stores to track, count and log people captured by security cameras. Prism Skylab's technology can produce heatmaps showing where people went and produce other statistics that the company claims offer tracking and analytics like those used online for the real world. One use case is for businesses to correlate online promotions and deals — such as Groupon offers — with real world footfall and in store behavior.
Censorship

Submission + - WikiLeaks to Ship Servers to Micronation of Sealan (foxnews.com) 1

Submitted by Velcroman1
Velcroman1 writes: Julian Assange’s investors are in the process of purchasing a boat to move Wikileaks servers offshore in an attempt to evade prosecution from U.S. law enforcement, FoxNews.com has learned. Multiple sources within the hacker community with knowledge of day-to-day Wikileaks activities say Assange's financial backers have been working behind the scenes on the logistics of moving the servers to international waters.
One possible location: the Principality of Sealand, a rusty, World War II-era, former anti-aircraft platform off the coast of England in the North Sea. Based on a 1968 British court ruling that the facility is outside the jurisdiction of the United Kingdom, Sealand's owner has declared the facility a sovereign state, or "micro-nation."

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