Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Security

Submission + - P2P network exposes Obama's safehouse location (computerworld.com)

Submitted by
Lucas123
Lucas123 writes: "The location of the safe house used in times of emergency for the First Family was leaked on a LimeWire file-sharing network recently, a fact revealed today to members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Along with the safe house location, the LimeWire networks also disclosed presidential motorcade routes, as well as sensitive but unclassified document that listed details on every nuclear facility in the country. Now lawmakers are considering a bill to ban P2P use on government, contractor networks."
Security

Submission + - Microsoft 'Typo' Code Bug Gave Hackers IE Exploit (computerworld.com)

Submitted by
CWmike
CWmike writes: "Microsoft has confirmed that a single superfluous character in its own development code, an '&', is responsible for the bug that has let hackers exploit Internet Explorer since early July. Two German researchers who analyzed a vulnerability in a Microsoft-made ActiveX control came to the same conclusion three weeks ago. "The bug is simply a typo," Michael Howard, a principal security program manager in Microsoft's security engineering and communications group, said in a post Tuesday to the Security Development Lifecycle blog. Howard, who is probably best known for co-authoring Writing Secure Code, went on to say that the typo is the "core issue" in the MSVidCtl ActiveX control. Adobe stepped forward to acknowledge that it's the first major third-party vendor to have used Microsoft's flawed development code in its products, the Windows versions of Adobe's Flash Player (to be fixed Thursday) and Shockwave Player (already fixed)."

Comment Shaka Zulu (Score 2, Interesting) 895

by whitefox (#28603625) Attached to: Researcher Trolls MMO, Surprised When Players Hate Him

Heros don't hang out and chat with villains. They fight. What we have here was people that didn't actually want to play the game. They just wanted to rack up (dubious) "achievements".

Reminds me of a scene from the television series "Shaka Zulu" where a young Shaka eagerly looks forward to proving himself in battle but instead observes a "battle" where the opponents simply dress up, dance, and hurl insults at each other to determine the winner. This method of warfare and Shaka's subsequent shakeup seems to be backed up by WikiPedia:

A number of historians argue that Shaka 'changed the nature of warfare in Southern Africa from 'a ritualised exchange of taunts with minimal loss of life into a true method of subjugation by wholesale slaughter'.

Not that this has any bearing on the subject at hand but interesting none the less. Or does it?
Education

Submission + - GeoEdu now exceeds 100,000 questions (geoedu.info)

Submitted by
Ghislaine Bovy
Ghislaine Bovy writes: "GeoEdu is an Atlas but also a game based on the worldwide geography. The new version is now available allowing you to get questions in 3 levels of difficulty, based on your country of residence and the continents you know best.
There is also an updated version of the Atlas with more details on Indonesia for example.

GeoEdu is a software in two parts. A brand new Atlas with interactive maps and details for each country including the capital, the flag, the land and water borders, the length of the coasts, the population from 2000 to 2008, the official language(s), the internet and country code, the currency, their membership to international organizations, the driving side and much more.

GeoEdu is also a Game offering up to 104.927 questions on the worldwide geography. The game doesn't impose a limit of time to respond but rather gives the player the possibility to give a direct answer or to choose either clues or up to 4 multiple choices (3, 6, 9 or 12 answers) to give an answer. Having answered, the player views his score and the detailed data for the territory which allows him to learn more before answering more questions.

GeoEdu, available for Macintosh and Windows (XP/Vista), is available for download at www.geoedu.info

The Game can be tested free of charge for North, Central and South America. To play with all continents, a code can be purchased on line for the price of US $10 or 8,25 or the currency of your choice. The code gives you access to all the continents and all the options of the game.

The Atlas is totally free."
Data Storage

Submission + - What happened to 5.25" hard drives? 12

Submitted by
indolering
indolering writes: "While scouring the usual suspects for cheap a HD I got to thinking about the old 5.25" hard drives of the 90's. I'm on a tight budget (as is everyone else these days) but I don't have room for another 3.5" hard drive. So I have to get an exponentially larger drive or an eSATA case. Since 5.25" inch disks have roughly twice the surface area, why wouldn't we still be making these suckers? The larger capacity would allow for more bad sectors/manufacturing defects, the SOHO, media center, and vanilla consumer NAS market doesn't seem to care if they are larger; users just hide the units behind the couch or stick them into a supplies closet. Is it more economical because of part overlap between the 2.5" and 3.5" disks, is the additional raw material more expensive than just increasing memory density, what?"
Space

First Light Images From Herschel Satellite Released 35

Posted by Soulskill from the pretty-pictures dept.
davecl writes "The first images from the Herschel satellite have been released by ESA. The images are of the galaxy M51 and show a lot of structure and other features never seen before. Coverage of these results can be found on the ESA website and on the Herschel mission blog. There's a lot of work still to be done on tuning the satellite and instruments for optimum performance, but these very early results already show the promise of this mission. I work on this project and can say that these results are really impressive at this early stage!"
Patents

Submission + - Microsoft Trying to Patent Parallel Processing 2

Submitted by
theodp
theodp writes: "Microsoft may have been a Johnny-come-lately when it comes to parallel programming, but that's not stopping the software giant from trying to patent it. This week, the USPTO revealed that Microsoft has three additional parallel-processing patents pending — 1. Partitioning and Repartitioning for Data Parallel Operations, 2. Data Parallel Searching, and 3. Data Parallel Production and Consumption. Informing the USPTO that 'Software programs have been written to run sequentially since the beginning days of software development,' Microsoft adds there's been a '[recent] shift away from sequential execution toward parallel execution.' Before they grant the patents, let's hope the USPTO gets a second opinion on the novelty of Microsoft's parallel-processing patent claims."
Image

Penguin Poop Seen From Space 86

Posted by samzenpus from the don't-eat-the-brown-ice dept.
Scientists have found ten new emperor penguin colonies by spotting their skid marks on the Antarctic ice from satellite images (video on page). The ice around the penguins gets very dirty because they congregate in a small area in very large colonies for months. Peter Fretwell, Mapping Expert, British Antarctic Survey says, "What we find is that we can see the guano (excrement) from space. They stay in the same space in very large colonies for eight months of the year and the ice around them gets very dirty, and it's that that we can see on the satellite images."

Comment Commas Suck (Score 2, Informative) 46

by whitefox (#28119491) Attached to: Beginning Python Visualization

Yes, I know commas are part of the CSV acronym but seriously they suck. A lot of the data I've worked with over the years (names, addresses, etc) was usually bound to have some records with embedded commas in the field values thus generating import exceptions.

I learned early on to use tabs for any CSV exports I had to create. And Excel has no problem interpreting tab-delimited files.
Space

UI Customization and Capital Ships In Jumpgate Evolution 41

Posted by Soulskill from the make-mine-look-like-an-x-wing dept.
ZAM got a chance to speak with NetDevil's Scott Brown at the recent LOGIN 2009 conference about various aspects of upcoming space MMO Jumpgate Evolution. He mentioned that massive ships will be limited in scope and role to begin with, but may expand and evolve as they figure out what users like. He also made some interesting comments about UI customization: "We built it with the goal of letting people mod the UI. There's still a little bit more work to do that, so I don't know if it'll be ready at launch, but all of our UI is built in Flash. This is with the idea that anybody can build something with Flash and put it in the game. Now, there are problems, for example, if you do certain things in Flash that might cause the game to perform really slowly. We've still got to figure out how to educate people or how we verify this so that you don't make a mod that I download and my game experience is destroyed. We want it to be easier than that. I think that there will be some work to do, but the goal is that, eventually, people will be able to, using Flash, make their own UI."
Image

Giant Spiders Invade Australian Outback Town 373

Posted by samzenpus from the welcome-to-my-sleepout-said-the-spider-to-the-bloke dept.
youth68 writes "Australia is known around the world for its large and deadly creepy crawlies, but even locals have been shocked by the size of the giant venomous spiders that have invaded an Outback town in Queensland. Scores of eastern tarantulas, which are known as 'bird-eating spiders' and can grow larger than the palm of a man's hand, have begun crawling out from gardens and venturing into public spaces in Bowen, a coastal town about 700 miles northwest of Brisbane."

Slashdot Top Deals

Diplomacy is the art of saying "nice doggy" until you can find a rock.

Close