Xamataca - Slashdot User

Submission + - Iran Demands (Legal) Retaliation For Stuxnet (itworld.com) 1

Submitted by

jfruhlinger

on Monday April 18, 2011 @01:48PM

jfruhlinger writes: "The Stuxnet virus is widely believed to have been cooked by U.S. and Israeli intelligence to disable Iran's nuclear program. Now an Iranian official is demanding retribution. But, bad news for fans of apocalyptic wars: The revenge will take the form of legal action against Siemens, which the Iranians believe helped with the attack."

Submission + - Iran Says Siemens Helped US, Israel Build Stuxnet (computerworld.com) 1

Submitted by

CWmike

on Monday April 18, 2011 @01:16PM

CWmike writes: "Iran's Brigadier General, Gholam Reza Jalali, accused Siemens on Saturday with helping U.S. and Israeli teams craft the Stuxnet worm that attacked his country's nuclear facilities. 'Siemens should explain why and how it provided the enemies with the information about the codes of the SCADA software and prepared the ground for a cyber attack against us,' Jalali told the Islamic Republic News Service. Siemens did not reply to a request for comment on Jalali's accusations. Stuxnet, which first came to light in June 2010 but hit Iranian targets in several waves starting the year before, has been extensively analyzed by security researchers. Symantec and Langner Commuications say Stuxnet was designed to infiltrate Iran's nuclear enrichment program, hide in the Iranian SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) control systems that operate its plants, then force gas centrifuge motors to spin at unsafe speeds. Jalali suggested that Iranian officials would pursue Siemens in the courts, and claimed that Iranian researchers traced the attack to Israel and the U.S. He said information from infected systems was sent to computers in Texas."

Submission + - Chrome Shields Websites From DDoS Attacks (conceivablytech.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 18, 2011 @01:12PM

An anonymous reader writes: Google has an interesting idea how to take the edge off denial of service attacks. The latest developer builds of Chrome 12 have an option called http throttling which will simply deny a user to access a website once the browser has received error messages from a certain URL. Chrome will react with a "back-off interval" that will increase the time between the requests to a website. If there are enough chrome requests flooding a website under attack, this could give webmasters some room to recover from a nasty DDoS attack.

Submission + - Why are A: and B: lost on so many computers?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 08, 2011 @05:21AM

An anonymous reader writes: A: used to be my floppy drive, and B: was sometimes there on computers with two of them. But I haven't had a floppy drive for many years. Now pretty much all PCs I see (I repair them) have drive partitions from C: and on, with DVD drives and removable media (SD, etc.) coming after. If I plug in an SD card into my laptop it comes up as G: by default; I set it to A:. Why isn't A: the default?

Submission + - 92,000 Lego Robots To Take Over Peruvian Schools w (olpcnews.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 08, 2011 @05:20AM

An anonymous reader writes: The president of Peru, Alan Garcia, decided to celebrate the 500,000th One Laptop Per Child XO laptop in that country in style, announcing orders for half a million more and 20,000 additional Lego education WeDo robot kits for public schools. The latest OLPC laptop, the XO-1.75, has the lowest power draw ever thanks to a Marvell Armada 600 ARM processor and runs Fedora GNU/Linux with dual desktops Sugar (in Spanish, Aymara, and Quechua) and GNOME. For the first time, the XOs will be manufactured locally; the previous 2 million, including the blue high school variant with grownup keyboard, were all made by Quanta Computer. Meanwhile, parallel development continues on the upcoming XO-3 tablet; OLPC's New Technologies director is exploring software paths including GTK3 for Sugar, Android and Chrome. I, for one, salute our new plastic Peruvian overlords.

Submission + - Twitter To Offer Facebook-Style Fan Pages (eweekeurope.co.uk)

Submitted by jhernik on Friday April 08, 2011 @05:03AM

jhernik writes: Twitter is looking into opening up new revenue streams with its own brand pages

Micro-blogging site Twitter could soon offer dedicated Facebook-style pages, as part of an attempt to further tap into and monetise the business activity taking place on its platform.

Sources familiar with the project told Marketing Magazine that Twitter chief executive Dick Costolo and president of revenue Adam Bain are championing the idea, as part of an attempt to create fresh revenue streams. The pages would allow companies to tout their brands and deliver tailored content to their followers.

Submission + - Swedish health board forbids SMS reminder (thelocal.se)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 08, 2011 @04:44AM

An anonymous reader writes: The swedish health board (Socialstyrelsen) decides that the appointment reminder sent out by SMS is breaking patient confidentiality because it is not encrypted. However, they say nothing about the snail mail appointment reminder sent by post card.

Submission + - France Outlaws Hashed Passwords (bbc.co.uk) 3

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 06, 2011 @01:46PM

An anonymous reader writes: Storing passwords as hashes instead of plain text is now illegal in France, according to a draconian new data retention law. According to the BBC, "[t]he law obliges a range of e-commerce sites, video and music services and webmail providers to keep a host of data on customers. This includes users' full names, postal addresses, telephone numbers and passwords. The data must be handed over to the authorities if demanded." If the law survives a pending legal challenge by Google, Ebay and others, it may well keep some major services out of the country entirely.

Submission + - Katamari Hack for Chrome (and compatible browsers) (kathack.com) 1

Submitted by skaet on Sunday March 13, 2011 @12:35PM

skaet writes: Using CSS3 transforms and HTML5 canvas, the Katamari Hack for Google Chrome (and other compatible browsers) allows you to turn any website into a game of Katamari Damacy! The script was created by Alex Leone, David Nufer, and David Truong, and won the 2011 Yahoo HackU contest at University of Washington. Don't like the new Slashdot design? Go to town on it!

Submission + - Japan Battles Partial Nuclear Meltdown

Submitted by

Hugh Pickens writes

on Sunday March 13, 2011 @06:48AM

Hugh Pickens writes writes: "The Financial Times reports that Japanese nuclear experts are working to contain a partial meltdown at an earthquake-stricken nuclear power plant (reg. may be required) north of Tokyo, as fears grow that the death toll from Friday’s massive quake and tsunami could reach the tens of thousands. A partial meltdown, experts said, would likely mean that some portion of the reactors’ uranium fuel rods had cracked or warped from overheating, releasing radioactive particles into the reactors’ containment vessels. Some of those particles would have escaped into the air outside when engineers vented steam from the vessels to relieve pressure building up inside. Adding to problems at the site, hydrogen was building up inside the Number Three reactor’s outer building, threatening an explosion like the one that blew apart the Number One reactor building’s roof and outer walls on Saturday. However, it remains unclear how far radiation has spread from the facility. Some local residents and health workers were diagnosed with radiation poisoning in precautionary tests, but they show no outward symptoms of distress. "Even if you have a radiation release, although that’s not a good thing, it’s not automatically a harmful thing. It depends on what the level turns out to be," says Steve Kerekes, a spokesman for the Nuclear Energy Institute, a US industry group, adding that a person exposed to the highest radiation levels measured at the Fukushima site would absorb in two to three hours the same amount of radiation that he would normally absorb in 12 months – a significant but not necessarily injurious amount, especially if exposure time was short."

Submission + - Prosecutors to Use Secret Code in NSA Leak Trial

Submitted by

Hugh Pickens writes

on Sunday March 13, 2011 @12:19AM

Hugh Pickens writes writes: "The Baltimore Sun reports that that the US government wants to invoke a little-used rule that allows prosecutors to use code words in the courtroom — making portions of a public trial private in the trial of Thomas Drake, an employee at the National Security Agency accused of sharing classified documents with journalist Siobhan Gorman that revealed that NSA's Trailblazer Program was was a boondoggle of sorts — and that the agency had removed several of the privacy safeguards that were put in place to protect domestic conversations and e-mails from being stored and monitored. The "silent witness rule," is meant to minimize the disclosure of classified information by allowing only those directly involved in a case — the judge, jury, witnesses, lawyers and defendants — to see the evidence. Any public discussion of the secret details must be done in code. "They literally have a key, a glossary, that the jury would have that the public would not," says Abbe D. Lowell, a Washington, DC defense attorney who gave an example of what the code would sound like: "When [the defendant] and I were talking about Country A, we discussed the fact that there was a possibility that Leader 1 might not appreciate the United States' sanction on Topic C." That's impossible for a jury to follow, and it will cripple a defendant's rights to really cross-examine and confront the evidence against him says Lowell. Drake's defense attorneys say Drake is more whistleblower than traitor. "The documents at issue in this case concern NSA's waste, fraud, and abuse," says Maryland federal public defender James Wyda, who represents Drake. "Most importantly, Mr. Drake's activities relating to these documents were intended to reveal the waste, fraud, and abuse that cost the taxpayers money, weakened our civil liberties, and hindered our nation's ability to identify potential threats against our security.""

Submission + - Tech Expertise Not Important in Google Managers 1

Submitted by

Hugh Pickens writes

on Saturday March 12, 2011 @06:12PM

Hugh Pickens writes writes: "For much of its 13-year history, Google has taken a pretty simple approach to management: Leave people alone but if employees become stuck, they should ask their bosses, whose deep technical expertise propelled them into management in the first place. Now the NY Times reports that statisticians at Google looking for characteristics that define good managers have gathered more than 10,000 observations about managers — across more than 100 variables, from various performance reviews, feedback surveys and other reports and found that technical expertise ranks dead last among Google’s eight most important characteristics of good managers (reg. may be required). What Google employees value most are even-keeled bosses who made time for one-on-one meetings, who helped people puzzle through problems by asking questions, not dictating answers, and who took an interest in employees’ lives and careers. “In the Google context, we’d always believed that to be a manager, particularly on the engineering side, you need to be as deep or deeper a technical expert than the people who work for you,” says Laszlo Bock, Google’s vice president for “people operations,” which is Googlespeak for human resources. “It turns out that that’s absolutely the least important thing. It’s important, but pales in comparison. Much more important is just making that connection and being accessible.”"

Submission + - Twitter discards client UI community (google.com)

Submitted by Antique Geekmeister on Saturday March 12, 2011 @02:38PM

Antique Geekmeister writes: Twitter has just decided to discard the community of developers who've created interesting, innovative, and exciting to start-up company applications. The announcement at http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-api-announce/browse_thread/thread/c82cd59c7a87216a?hl=en shows that they intend to switch from the "bazaar" model of development to the "cathedral", with much tighter control of user interfaces for "security" and "consistency".

Submission + - Pricing mobile apps: Why EA is losing money (wordpress.com)

Submitted by

Anonymous Coward

on Saturday March 12, 2011 @11:40AM

Anonymous Coward writes: "A blog belonging to a two-man Swiss company follows up on Slashdot's post "Crime Writer Makes a Killing With 99 Cent E-Books" and explains how publishing companies are getting it wrong with the pricing of e-products.

"Let'(TM)s take Dead Space by Electronic Arts as an example. It's an exceptional game, we love it. After launch it climbed up the top-grossing list, reaching the second place by the end of January 2011, right after Angry Birds, despite a 6.99$ on its price tag. One month later, Angry Birds is still on top, but where is Dead Space? It even disappeared from the top-10! Where did it land? Beyond place 50. So, what does Angry Birds have that Dead Space has not? This is the question that should keep Electronic Arts' management awake at night.""

Submission + - Why we should buy music in FLAC (blogspot.com)

Submitted by

soodoo

on Saturday March 12, 2011 @07:52AM

soodoo writes: "We have plenty of HDD space and broadband internet. Why don't we demand full CD quality audio in an accessible format from online music stores?
The advantage of lossless is not only the small audio quality improvement, but better future proofing and converting capabilities. FLAC is a good, free and open format, well suited for this job."

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