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Comment Re:youtube ads (Score 1) 185

by alostpacket (#45226335) Attached to: Google Testing Banner Ads On Select Search Results

I have noticed this too, but you can usually still ad-block them (at least the dynamic ones). Although they have been getting better about forcing it, there is also usually an option to skip after 5 seconds.

Still, you had to kind of expected that with YouTube. But these giant image ads on search results are surprising to me, and disappointing.

Though most of all I find video ads on YouTube mobile to be more irritating. Using my bandwidth. And most of all ? The complete fail of the aggressive attempts to push people to use real names on youtube. (I understand why, but they should have stopped pushing it after I said no the first time).
Advertising

Google Testing Banner Ads On Select Search Results 185

Posted by timothy from the you-must-have-enough-advertisees dept.
cagraham writes "Google promised in 2005 to never "ever" put banner ads on their search results, but that appears to be changing. The company confirmed to SearchEngineLand that it is running a "small experiment" involving large-scale banners on searches for Southwest Airlines, Virgin Atlantic, and Crate&Barrel, among others. The ads are being shown in less than 5% of searches, and only in the US, for now. Interestingly enough, the Google exec who wrote the no banner ads promise was Marissa Mayer, now CEO of Yahoo."
Government

The Cost of the US Government Shutdown To Science 355

Posted by Soulskill from the all-about-the-benjamins dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Richard Schiffman writes in The Guardian that the Republican-led shutdown of the U.S. government caused significant damage to many scientific programs. For example: shortly before the shutdown started, over a hundred scientists had gathered to perform critical equipment tests on the James Webb Space Telescope — Hubble's successor — and that work was unable to continue without the government around. 'Not only did this delay cost the program an estimated $1M a day, but, given NASA's tight schedule, some tests may never get done now.' It doesn't stop there: 'This is only one of untold thousands of projects that were mothballed when Congress's failure to approve a budget defunded the US government at the start of the month. Federal websites were taken offline, scientists couldn't receive emails, attend meetings, or interact with their colleagues. Crucial environmental, food safety and climate monitoring programs were either suspended, or substantially scaled back.' Schiffman provides a few more examples, including one project that's losing a year's worth of work and equipment that will end up buried under snow in Antarctica. But it goes beyond even the basic funding issues; in many cases, scientific work is simply too intertwined with the government to continue without it. Andrew Rosenberg, the director of the Union of Concerned Scientists' center for science and democracy, said, 'It is all so interconnected now. Federal researchers collect data that is utilized by researchers in academia, by people working in industry, at state and local levels, so when you ask how dependent are we on the federal government in terms of science, it's a bit like asking: do you need your left leg?'"
Communications

No Zombie Uprising, But Problems Persist With Emergency Alert System 54

Posted by Soulskill from the can-it-be-aliens-next-time-please dept.
chicksdaddy writes "More than six months after hacked Emergency Alert System (EAS) hardware allowed a phony warning about a zombie uprising to air in several U.S. states, a security consulting company is warning that serious issues persist in software from Monroe Electronics, whose equipment was compromised in the earlier attack. In a blog post, Mike Davis of the firm IOActive said patches issued by Monroe Electronics, the Lyndonville, New York firm that is a leading supplier of EAS hardware, do not adequately address problems raised earlier this year, including the use of 'bad and predictable' login credentials. Further inspection by Davis turned up other problems that were either missed in the initial code review or introduced by the patch. They include the use of “predictable and hard-coded keys and passwords,” as well as web-based backups that were publicly accessible and that contained valid user credentials. Monroe’s R-189 CAP-EAS product was the target of a hack in February during which EAS equipment operated by broadcasters in Montana, Michigan and other states was compromised and used to issue an alert claiming that the 'dead are rising from their graves,' and advising residents not to attempt to apprehend them. CAP refers to the Common Alerting Protocol, a successor to EAS. A recent search using the Shodan search engine by University of Florida graduate student Shawn Merdinger found more than 200 Monroe devices still accessible from the public Internet. 66% of those were running vulnerable versions of the Monroe firmware."

Comment Re:Same as it ever was (Score 1) 219

by alostpacket (#45178327) Attached to: How PR Subverts Wikipedia

Wikipedia is not a place to list every grievance anyone has on a particular topic.

Indeed, this is a common problem. Some people will post a litany of criticism (complete with sources) just to use Wikipedia as a soapbox. Many things that have fallen out of favor become targets on Wikipedia by zealous users just as PR companies are trying to do the opposite.
Security

Security Researchers Want To Fully Audit Truecrypt 233

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the brought-to-you-by-the-makers-of-stuxnet dept.
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "TrueCrypt has been part of security-minded users' toolkits for nearly a decade — but there's one problem: no one has ever conducted a full security audit on it. Now Cyrus Farivar reports in Ars Technica that a fundraiser reached more than $16,000 in a public call to perform a full security audit on TrueCrypt. 'Lots of people use it to store very sensitive information,' writes Matthew Green, a well-known cryptography professor at Johns Hopkins University. 'That includes corporate secrets and private personal information. Bruce Schneier is even using it to store information on his personal air-gapped super-laptop, after he reviews leaked NSA documents. We should be sweating bullets about the security of a piece of software like this.' According to Green, Truecrypt 'does some damned funny things that should make any (correctly) paranoid person think twice.' The Ubuntu Privacy Group says the behavior of the Windows version [of Truecrypt 7.0] is problematic. 'As it can't be ruled out that the published Windows executable of Truecrypt 7.0a is compiled from a different source code than the code published in "TrueCrypt_7.0a_Source.zip" we however can't preclude that the binary Windows package uses the header bytes after the key for a back door.' Green is one of people leading the charge to setup the audit, and he helped create the website istruecryptauditedyet.com. 'We're now in a place where we have nearly, but not quite enough to get a serious audit done.'"

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