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Social Networks

Submission + - Reddit Was Built By A Horde of Fake Accounts (vice.com)

Submitted by derekmead
derekmead writes: How, exactly, did Reddit get so big? Well, according to Reddit cofounder Steve Huffman, in the early days the Reddit crew just faked it ‘til they made it. In a video for Udacity, an online source for education and lectures, Huffman describes how the first Redditors populated the site’s content with tons of fake accounts.

These days, with the site’s users wary of people using expendable accounts to try to seed their own content, it seems nuts that an army of fakers would be seeding content all over the site. But early on, Huffman said that using fake accounts driven by the founders was key to building the tone they wanted to the site. Basically, by populating the site with accounts whose strings they pulled, the Reddit crew could shape the discourse and sharing of the site in the direction they wanted, and as the real user base grew, those standards held, allowing the fake accounts to fade away.
Security

Submission + - Women Have Edge On 'Brogrammers' at DEFCON Social Engineering CTF (threatpost.com)

Submitted by
chicksdaddy
chicksdaddy writes: "Men may dominate the ranks of vulnerability researchers and hackers, but could women be the superior social engineers? That's a question that the organizers of the annual Social Engineering Capture the Flag (CTF) contest at DEFCON will try to answer.

In a break from recent years, the third annual DEFCON Social Engineering CTF will pit ten men against ten women in a battle of the sexes to see who can better weasel, cajole and worm their way into obtaining sensitive information from some of the U.S.'s leading corporations. And, according to one of the contest's organizers, the smart money is on the women.

"Unfortunately, there's a chauvinist consensus that females don't get security," said Chris Hadnagy of Social-Engineer.org, which sponsors the annual Capture the Flag contest. "The truth is that, as social engineers, women do better. We've seen hacktivists like Anonymous and LulzSec used females as part of their attacks.""
Privacy

Submission + - DEA wants to scan all license plates on Utah's 'drug corridor' (sltrib.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Everyone driving on Interstate 15 in southwest Utah may soon have their license plate scanned by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.

The DEA and two sheriffs are asking permission to install stationary license plate scanners on the freeway in Beaver and Washington counties. The primary purpose would be to catch or build cases against drug traffickers, but at a Utah Legislature committee meeting Wednesday, the sheriffs and a DEA representative described how the scanners also could be used to catch kidnappers and violent criminals.

  That, however, wasn’t the concern of skeptical legislators on the Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice Interim Committee. They were worried about the DEA storing the data for two years and who would be able to access it.

Comment Socialized French Internet (Score 1) 1

by jfalcon (#40025399) Attached to: Government of France Consults Public Over Net Neutrality
Hmm, if it's like their road system, it will be heavily regulated with rules and regulations that will require all users to purchase multiple forms of compulsory licenses and insurance, pay a use taxes by the router hop on top of your subscription fees and taxes and require that users write only in caps when they have issues with their connectivity. And they can block services that aren't "French" enough by arbitrary decision. It will be like using a cable modem with only one head end. Everyone will affect everyone else. Sometimes it will be fast. Most of the time it will crawl or be barely adequate. When service is upgraded, it's done at a collective level where the fringes are unlikely to see any benefit for years. We won't discuss what happens when you call for tech support...

Comment Use the "Fragmentation" feature of the Internet (Score 1) 230

The Internet was designed to be a network where it can grow and *shrink* as needed. If they want to "control" the Internet, let them be like Iran or China and control their own little sandbox. If people want to "join" them, let it be a opt-in decision. If not, leave the rest of us alone. Personally, I think there is a lot of benefit to Internet fragmentation. Yes, it creates bottlenecks (we already have that). But it also strengthens the members within those networks by allowing them to focus resources.
Android

Submission + - Malware Scans Finally Come to Android Market

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "For years, critics have said Google doesn't do enough to police its own servers for apps that steal user data, rack up expensive charges, and carry out other undisclosed abuse. Now Google has announced that it has added a new layer of security to the Android Market, dubbed Bouncer, that will scan apps for evidence of malware. "Here's how it works: once an application is uploaded, the service immediately starts analyzing it for known malware, spyware and trojans," wrote Hiroshi Lockheimer, Google's vice president of engineering. "It also looks for behaviors that indicate an application might be misbehaving, and compares it against previously analyzed apps to detect possible red flags." Google says it runs every app in its cloud infrastructure to simulate how it might work on an Android device to look for anything fishy. Developer accounts are also scrutinized to guard against banned individuals making a reappearance. Lockheimer says the service has been looking for malicious apps in Market for a while now, and that between the first and second halves of 2011, there was a 40% decrease in the number of potentially-malicious downloads from Android Market. "While it’s not possible to prevent bad people from building malware, the most important measurement is whether those bad applications are being installed from Android Market — and we know the rate is declining significantly.""

Submission + - 26,000 Customers Lost Internet Access Friday

Submitted by AcidTag
AcidTag writes: My girlfriend discovered Friday night that her ISP OpenRange had ceased operations with no warning. It had been previously reported that OpenRange would continue operations through the end of the year. Her and 26,000 other rural customers are now without Internet access.
Android

Submission + - Woz gets an android phone (telegraph.co.uk)

Submitted by whoever57
whoever57 writes: Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, has accepted an Android phone from Google. He was given a Samsung Galaxy Nexus when he visited Google's campus. Woz had earlier told the newspaper De Telegraph that Android was better than IOS, although he later claimed to have been misquoted and that he would never say that IOS was better than Android.
Robotics

Submission + - Nine of The Most Advanced Robots Today (txchnologist.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Robbie the Robot was all wrong. Today’s robots, loosely defined as mechanical or virtual “agents” that can perform some autonomous tasks, aren’t ungainly bubble people that issue plangent warnings.

In some cases, such as Boston Dynamics’ terrifying “Big Dogs,” they’re physically able but essentially dumb machines. In other cases, such as the virtual scientist Eureqa,they’re highly able pieces of software that can learn on their own but have almost no physical expression. As Joseph Engelberger, one of the early fathers of robotics, once cheekily said, “I can’t define a robot, but I know one when I see one.”

Despite our best efforts, we haven’t created machines that are both physically able and intelligent. But a look at this array of robots shows that we’ve come far in recent years.
HP

Submission + - Is HP Paying Intel To Keep Itanium Alive? (itworld.com) 1

Submitted by
itwbennett
itwbennett writes: "In a court filing, Oracle accused HP of secretly contracting with Intel to keep making Itanium processors so that it can continue to make money from its locked-in Itanium customers and take business away from Oracle's Sun servers. Oracle says that Intel would have long ago killed off Itanium if not for these payments from HP. For its part, HP called the filing a 'desperate delay tactic' in the lawsuit HP filed against Oracle over its decision to stop developing for Itanium."

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