Comment Re:Got that finger pointed the wrong way... (Score 1) 314
>All measurements show increasing quality and length of life
I wouldn't say 'All'
Comment Re:Terrible article (Score 1) 314
>The idea that "disconnecting critical infrastructure from the Internet is the best way to protect it" seems simple,
Even disconnected networks are not simple to protect. Stuxnet shows how USB keys can jump the gap. Also the proliferation of wireless makes it very, difficult to verify that your network is truly separate. You still have to spend the money to make sure each host, along with the network is secure.
Comment Re:This is stupid (Score 1) 407
>but that happened back in the '70s when there were hardly any cryptographers or computers in the world.
What? You do realize a large portion of the computers of the time were working on cryptography issues, cold war and all.
Comment Re:This is stupid (Score 2) 407
http://www.ubuntu.com/usn/usn-612-2/
Weaknesses in key generation will create encrypted code that IS AES (or whatever), but it's not cryptographically secure. Huge difference.
Submission + - Snowden, a Comedic Rap Summary
Pav writes: Rap News distills the whole story down to five minutes of hilarious biting satire. Also, in other "news" see Assange get hauled away by nordic babes wearing lingerie and stormtrooper helmets, or Bill O'Reilly literally vomiting excreta. Rap News has plenty more tracks related to internet liberty erosion, politicial and nerdy issues in general. Perhaps they should become house artists for Slashdot?
Comment Re:The government has its rights (Score 2) 172
>Since 9/11, we've also had about 420,000 traffic fatalities.
So spending 1 TRILLION+ on a war when we could have spent it on infrastructure and public safety is a good idea? I'm guessing you reap the benefits of government defense contracts.
Way to make his point for him.
Comment Re:Not going to work and we know why (Score 0) 224
Mmh, the number of Diaspora users grew by almost 40% within the last 12 months, so it seems quite alive and well to me.
40% growth on zero is still zero...
So it's growing faster than G+, then?
Submission + - Shades of Jack Ryan: altering text in eBooks to track pirates (wired.com)
wwphx writes: German researchers have created a new DRM feature that changes the text and punctuation of an e-book ever so slightly. Called SiDiM, which Google translates to “secure documents by individual marking,” the changes are unique to each e-book sold. These alterations serve as a digital watermark that can be used to track books that have had any other DRM layers stripped out of them before being shared online. The researchers are hoping the new DRM feature will curb digital piracy by simply making consumers paranoid that they’ll be caught if they share an e-book illicitly.
Seems like I recall reading about this in Tom Clancy's Hunt for Red October when Jack Ryan used this technique to identify someone who was leaking secrets to the Russians. It would be so very difficult for someone to write a little program that, when stripping the DRM, randomized a couple of pieces of punctuation to break the hash that the vendor is storing along with the sales record of the individual book.
Seems like I recall reading about this in Tom Clancy's Hunt for Red October when Jack Ryan used this technique to identify someone who was leaking secrets to the Russians. It would be so very difficult for someone to write a little program that, when stripping the DRM, randomized a couple of pieces of punctuation to break the hash that the vendor is storing along with the sales record of the individual book.
Submission + - Japanese artist makes better art in Execl than others can do with Photoshop (geek.com) 3
cute_orc writes: MS Excel is notorious for being a boring spreadsheet applications. But 73 years old Japanese artist Tatsuo Horiuchi makes amazing art using autoshape tool of Excel. He makes free-form shapes spanning multiple cells and join them together in into a huge image. His artwork is really amazing and beautiful.
Comment Re:Prices? (Score 1) 172
> What interests me is that if SSDs mount a major invasion of server-rooms and data-centers worldwide it also means that we will now finally start to see SSD pricing drop like rock.
I'd think the opposite may occur. SSD flash is currently limited by the amount we can produce at a reasonable price.
http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/news/2240181971/NAND-shortage-could-slow-pace-of-flash-price-drops-squeeze-SSD-makers
http://www.seagate.com/point-of-view/nand-flash-supply-market-master-pov/
Comment Re:Single component failure not a big deal any mor (Score 1) 172
It depends how many disks it replaces to get the same throughput, and at other times an individual machine will use more power with an SSD because it will spend less time in an IO-WAIT state. In general SSDs reduce the amount of equipment in total needed on most loads because of higher potential processor usage.
Nicaragua Gives Chinese Firm Contract To Build Alternative To Panama Canal 323
McGruber writes with this news from late last week: "The Guardian is reporting that Nicaragua has awarded a Chinese company a 100-year concession to build an alternative to the Panama Canal, in a step that looks set to have profound geopolitical ramifications. The new route will be a higher-capacity alternative to the 99-year-old Panama Canal, which is currently being widened at the cost of $5.2bn. Last year, the Nicaraguan government noted that the new canal should be able to allow passage for mega-container ships with a dead weight of up to 250,000 tonnes. This is more than double the size of the vessels that will be able to pass through the Panama Canal after its expansion, it said."
Apple's War Against Jailbreaking Now Makes Perfect Sense 321
An anonymous reader writes "Apple has always been extremely anti jailbreaking, but it might now have a good reason to plug up the exploits. As Hardware 2.0 argues, Apple's new iOS 7 Activation Lock anti-theft mechanism which renders stolen handsets useless (even after wiping) unless the owner's Apple ID is entered relies on having a secure, locked-down OS. Are the days of jailbreaking iOS coming to a close?" I can see a whole new variety of phone-based ransom-ware based on this capability, too.
Submission + - No black hole or magnetic monopole: Tunguska really was a meteor (nature.com)
davide-nature writes: The mysterious blast that flattened 2,000 square km of a remote Siberian forest in 1908 has been blamed on the most bizarre causes, such as an exotic elementary particle left over from the Big Bang, a black hole or, of course, aliens, including in the double-episode "Tunguska" of The X-Files. But a new analysis of tiny rock samples suggests that a more mundane explanation — a meteor exploding in the atmosphere — may be the right one.
The blast is estimated to have packed between 3 and 5 megatons, 10 times the energy of the meteor that exploded over Russia earlier this year.
The blast is estimated to have packed between 3 and 5 megatons, 10 times the energy of the meteor that exploded over Russia earlier this year.
Submission + - Sir Tim Berners-Lee lambasts NSA's PRISM (paritynews.com)
hypnosec writes: Sir Tim Berners-Lee has lashed out at the recent revelations of internet snooping and PRISM scandal and warned that “unwarranted government surveillance” of the internet is an act that threatens the foundations of a democratic society. In a statement issued through the World Wide Web Foundation he noted that the revelations about US National Security Agency keeps a tab on online activities of uses is ‘deeply concerning.’ Berners-Lee argued that because the use of internet may reveal some rather personal and sensitive information about users, it is vital that robust protections are put into place for protection of such information.
