Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Java

Submission + - VMWare acquiring SpringSource (reuters.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: "Business software maker VMware Inc has agreed to buy privately held SpringSource for $420 million, its biggest-ever acquisition, to beef up a portfolio of programs that help companies run data centers."
Security

Submission + - Voting Machine Attacks are Practical

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Every time a bunch of academics show vulnerabilities in electronic voting machines the critics complain that the attacks aren't realistic, that attackers won't have access to source code, or design documents, or be able to manipulate the hardware, etc. So this time a bunch of computer scientists from UCSD, Michigan and Princeton offer a rebuttal. They completely 0wn the AVC Advantage using no access to source code or design documents and deliver a complete working attack in a plug in cartridge that could be used by anyone with a few private minutes with the machine. Moreover, they came up with some cool tricks to do this on a machine protected against traditional code injection attacks (the AVC processor will only execute instructions from ROM). Paper from this weeks USENIX EVT here.
Privacy

Submission + - Sensor to Monitor TV Watchers Demoed at Cable Labs

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Do we really need cable and/or video service operators knowing this? It seems cable operators at the semi-annual CableLab's Onnovation Showcase have informally voted (http://www.cablefax.com/cfp/just_in/Future-Gazing-at-CableLabs-Innovation-Showcase_37042.html) a product developed by Israeli company PrimeSense (http://www.primesense.com/) that can determine via a sensor in a set top box how many people are watching a TV as best new product.

The PrimeSense product lets digital devices see a 3-D view of the world. In other words, that cable set-top box will know whether 3 people are sitting on the sofa watching TV and how many are adults vs children. It all happens via a chip that resides in a camera that plugs into the STB. The images look more like something from thermal imaging.
Social Networks

Submission + - People getting fired for Social Networking leaks (ksl.com)

Submitted by
Efialtis
Efialtis writes: "We have read stories about job interviews going south because of comments made on social networking sites, but this story looks at how company secrets might end up on those sites as well.
http://www.ksl.com/?nid=148&sid=7491222
"Some people on social-networking sites like Facebook or LinkedIn may be a little too social.
The e-mail security vendor Proofpoint recently released its sixth report on Outbound Email Security and Data Loss Prevention.
'Seventeen percent, nearly one-in-five large U.S. companies, actually investigated a leak of confidential information to a social-networking site,' the company's director of market development, Keith Crosley, said.""
Java

Submission + - VMWare acquires SpringSource

Submitted by
sundling
sundling writes: "Creator of the popular Java Spring Framework, SpringSource has been acquired by VMWare. SpringSource itself has acquired a number of companies itself including G2One (the company behind Grails, the Java contender for the Ruby on Rails crowd) and Hyperic. SpringSource has also become home to other important Java projects like AspectJ for Aspect Oriented programming. Of all the open source Java Enterprise players, Spring tends to have vision that will definitely expand into the cloud. It was already putting the pieces together, but being acquired by VMWare should accelerate that direction."

Comment Re:I'd like to see some OSS hurdles addressed... (Score 2, Insightful) 99

by edwardd (#28780607) Attached to: New Coalition To Promote OSS To Feds

Mod parent up.

These are certainly areas that need improvement, and if garnering government adoption is a goal, they should be addresses. It's not that there are no open source solutions to these problems, it's that they are not yet mature (as is the case with TrouSers and Samba 4) or that they are not as fully integrated. More importantly, the solutions that are available don't have a massive marketing machine behind them.

Just about everything that you can do with closed source software, you can do with open source. The problems are largely around usability and marketing. PHB's go with the "politically safe" choices, government PHB's even more so.
Privacy

Submission + - SPAM: The NSA wiretapping story that nobody wanted

Submitted by alphadogg
alphadogg writes: They sometimes call national security the third rail of politics. Touch it and, politically, you're dead. The cliché doesn't seem far off the mark after reading Mark Klein's new book, "Wiring up the Big Brother Machine ... and Fighting It." It's an account of his experiences as the whistleblower who exposed a secret room at a Folsom Street facility in San Francisco that was apparently used to monitor the Internet communications of ordinary Americans. Klein, 64, was a retired AT&T communications technician in December 2005, when he read the New York Times story that blew the lid off the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping program. Secretly authorized in 2002, the program lets the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) monitor telephone conversations and e-mail messages of people inside the U.S. in order to identify suspected terrorists. Klein knew right away that he had proof — documents from his time at AT&T — that could provide a snapshot of how the program was siphoning data off of the AT&T network in San Francisco.
Link to Original Source
Privacy

Submission + - The NSA wiretapping story nobody wanted (computerworld.com)

Submitted by
CWmike
CWmike writes: "They sometimes call national security the third rail of politics. Touch it and, politically, you're dead. The cliché doesn't seem far off the mark after reading Mark Klein's new book, "Wiring up the Big Brother Machine ... and Fighting It." It's an account of his experiences as the whistleblower who exposed a secret room at a Folsom Street facility in San Francisco that was apparently used to monitor the Internet communications of ordinary Americans. Amazingly, however, nobody wanted to hear his story. In his book he talks about meetings with reporters and privacy groups that went nowhere until a fateful January 20, 2006, meeting with Kevin Bankston of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). Bankston was preparing a lawsuit that he hoped would put a stop to the wiretap program, and Klein was just the kind of witness the EFF was looking for. He spoke with Robert McMillan for an interview."
Space

Submission + - Long-time CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite dies @92

Submitted by spazekaat
spazekaat writes: Just found out a few minutes ago......long time CBS news reporter/anchor has died at the age of 92. Report is on CNN (http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/07/17/walter.cronkite.dead/index.html). He had a long and varied career, but I personally remember him as a child as the "voice" who reported to the joe-public during the American space missions. Most poignant to me personally was his coverage of the Apollo 11 mission, the 40th anniversary is being celebrated now. I really feel bad that his death came only a couple of days of the actual landing anniversary, it would have made a great interview. "Godspeed" Walter Cronkite, I for one shall miss this great reporter. BTW -I am Canadian, but Walter had influences all over the world, I'm sure.
Space

Submission + - Arduino in Spaaaace!!!

Submitted by Migraineman
Migraineman writes: In addition to the primary ISS construction mission, STS-127 is carrying two 19-inch spherical satellites scheduled for deployment on Mission Day 16. The two spheres, Castor and Pollux, are part of the Atmospheric Neutral Density Experiment (ANDE) that studies atmospheric perturbations in the LEO environment. Castor contains an ARM processor, while Pollux is running an Atmel ATMega CPU. Pollux also contains student payloads developed with Arduino on Atmel AVRs. Both satellites transmit telemetry using the FX.25 FEC format developed by the Stensat guys. Many components are commercial-grade, purchased from Digikey. This is the second ANDE mission, following the successful deployment of MAA and FCal on STS-116 (both also flying commercial components.) Yes, I'm involved.
Technology (Apple)

Submission + - Amazon Makes "1984" And "Animal Farm& (nytimes.com) 2

Submitted by
Oracle Goddess
Oracle Goddess writes: "In a story just dripping with irony, Amazon Kindle owners awoke this morning to discover that "1984" and "Animal Farm" had mysteriously disappeared from their e-book readers. These were books that they had bought and paid for, and thought they owned. Apparently the publisher changed its mind about offering an electronic edition, and apparently Amazon, whose business lives and dies by publisher happiness, caved. It electronically deleted all books by this author from people's Kindles and credited their accounts for the price. Amazon Customer service responded to queries by stating that. "We've always been at war with Eastasia.""
Databases

Submission + - Foreign Keys in Enterprise Databases

Submitted by Detro
Detro writes: I work for a fortune 500 company and we generate over a billion dollars a year on our website. We have 3 production data centers, a qual and a staging environment. The current database design is pretty sloppy and the tables are not very normalized. We are trying to clean that up and want to make an intelligent database design. We (the developers) want to enforce Foreign Keys on our tables. Our DBAs are fighting tooth and nail for us NOT to use them. They claim that when the FKs are in place they will be unable to move data between centers and will not be able to setup data replication between the production centers. So I ask all the DBAs out there...what is your opinion on Foreign Keys and should they be used in enterprise applications?

Slashdot Top Deals

To be a kind of moral Unix, he touched the hem of Nature's shift. -- Shelley

Close