Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Submission + - Dogs' Brains Have Human-like "Voice Area" (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: When you hear a friend’s voice, you immediately picture her, even if you can’t see her. And from the tone of her speech, you quickly gauge if she’s happy or sad. You can do all of this because your human brain has a “voice area.” Now, scientists using brain scanners and a crew of eager dogs have discovered that dog brains, too, have dedicated voice areas. The finding helps explain how canines can be so attuned to their owners’ feelings.

Submission + - Slashdot's new interface could kill what keeps Slashdot relevant (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Technology Lab / Information Technology
Slashdot’s new interface could kill what keeps Slashdot relevant
Flashy revamp seeks to draw new faces to the community—at the cost of the old.

by Lee Hutchinson — Feb 12 2014, 6:55pm E

        Web Culture

131

In the modern responsive Web Three Point Oh Internet, Slashdot stands like a thing frozen in time—it's a coelacanth stuck incongruously in an aquarium full of more colorful fish. The technology news aggregator site has been around since 1997, making it positively ancient as websites are reckoned. More importantly, Slashdot's long focus on open source technology news and topics has caused it to accrete a user base that tends to be extremely technical, extremely skilled, and extremely opinionated.

That user base is itself the main reason why Slashdot continues to thrive, even as its throwback interface makes it look to untrained eyes like a dated relic. Though the site is frequently a source of deep and rich commentary on topics, the barrier for new users to engage in the site's discussions is relatively high—certainly higher than, say, reddit (or even Ars). This doesn't cause much concern to the average Slashdot user, but tech job listing site Dice.com (which bought Slashdot in September 2012, along with Sourceforge and a number of other digital properties) appears to have decided it's time to drag Slashdot's interface into the 21st century in order to make things comfortable for everyone—old and new users alike.

Comment Re:Why not a different discussion (Score 1) 2

by fireman sam (#46178039) Attached to: Unofficial front page discussion of why /. BETA is bad

The new site can be improved by rolling back to the existing site - or even previous versions.

IMO, the best layout is the firehose layout where all I see are titles. I get to see a lot in a little amount of space. The new site is so full of wasted space (eg: Sony is selling Viao - do we really need a large picture of a viao netbook? This is supposed to be news for nerds, surely we would know that Viao is a laptop)

Crap for the sake of crap is nothing more than crap.

Submission + - Slashdot is dead 3

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: I saw it with my own eyes

Submission + - BOOOO

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: BETA BOOOOOOOO

Submission + - Developer Loses $50,00 Twitter Name Through Extortion

Submitted by Hugh Pickens DOT Com
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: Naoki Hiroshima, creator of Cocoyon and a developer for Echofon, writes at TNW that he had a rare one-letter Twitter username, @N and had been offered as much as $50,000 for its purchase. "People have tried to steal it. Password reset instructions are a regular sight in my email inbox," writes Hiroshima. "As of today, I no longer control @N. I was extorted into giving it up." Hiroshima writes that a hacker used social engineering with paypal to get the last four digits of his credit card number over the phone then used that information to gain control of his GoDaddy account. "Most websites use email as a method of verification. If your email account is compromised, an attacker can easily reset your password on many other websites. By taking control of my domain name at GoDaddy, my attacker was able to control my email." Hiroshima received a message from his extortionist. "Your GoDaddy domains are in my possession, one fake purchase and they can be repossessed by godaddy and never seen again. I see you run quite a few nice websites so I have left those alone for now, all data on the sites has remained intact. Would you be willing to compromise? access to @N for about 5 minutes while I swap the handle in exchange for your godaddy, and help securing your data?" Hiroshima writes that it'’s hard to decide what’s more shocking, the fact that PayPal gave the attacker the last four digits of his credit card number over the phone, or that GoDaddy accepted it as verification. Hiroshima has two takeaways from his experience: Avoid custom domains for your login email address and don’t let companies such as PayPal and GoDaddy store your credit card information.

Submission + - Who Owns The Federal Reserve - YouTube (youtube.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Who Owns The Federal Reserve?"Each one of the twelve banks is a separate closely-held corporation. We're literally owned by the banks in our district. Since we are private corporations we pay property tax and everything else."~ Jerry Nelson, Corporate Communications for the Federal Reserve, 2009Top 50 Sharholders of The Federal Reserve As Shown Here:http://www.ffiec.gov/nicpubweb/nicweb/Top50Form.aspxHere's the Top 10:JPMORGAN CHASEhttp://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/toprecips.php?id=D000000103&cycle=2012BANK OF AMERICAhttp://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/toprecips.php?id=D000000090&cycle=2012CITIGROUP INChttp://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/toprecips.php?id=D000000071&cycle=2012WELLS FARGO & COMPANYhttp://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/toprecips.php?id=D000019743&cycle=2012GOLDMAN SACHS GROUPhttp://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/toprecips.php?id=D000000085&cycle=2012MORGAN STANLEYhttp://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/toprecips.php?id=D000000106&cycle=2012AMERICAN INTERNATIONAL GROUPhttp://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/toprecips.php?id=D000000123&cycle=2012GENERAL ELECTRIC CAPITAL CORPORATIONhttp://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/toprecips.php?id=D000000125&cycle=2012BANK OF NEW YORK MELLON CORPORATIONhttp://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/summary.php?id=D000021765U.S. BANCORPSee How Much Money These Multinational Corporations Give To Your Elected Officials Here:http://www.opensecrets.org/Thanks For Watching and Please Share and Subscribe:http://www.youtube.com/user/MrPeaceandLibertyTagswho owns the federal reserve,who really owns the federal reserve,who owns the federal reserve rothschild,history of the federal reserve,who owns the federal reserve yahoo,who owns the federal reserve wikipedia,who owns the federal reserve central banks,federal reserve conspiracy,federal reserve history,federal reserve bank,federal reserve jobs,federal reserve interest rates,federal reserve act,federal reserve system

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

Submission + - Juniper: 92% of Known Mobile Threats Target Android

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Mobile malware is becoming “an increasingly profit-driven business,” according to Juniper Networks, which today released its third annual Mobile Threats Report. The total amount of mobile malware across all mobile platforms grew 155 percent in 2011, while between March 2012 through March 2013, the figure rocketed 614 percent to 276,259 total malicious apps.

The exact numbers might be shocking at first glance but they aren’t too worrying: they are completely expected given the general trend of moving to mobile. As Juniper rightly points out, this simply indicates that more attackers are shifting at least part of their efforts away from the PC market.

Submission + - The Firefly Shakespeare episode that never happened (shadowlocked.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: While promoting his film adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing, which stars Amy Acker and Alexis Denisof:
“Joss Whedon revealed a previously unknown piece of Firefly trivia. In his own words:

"I had planned to do an episode of Firefly with Amy [Acker] and Alexis [Denisof] and James Marsters as part of a travelling Shakespeare troupe...But, I don't know if you know this, but we were cancelled..."

Fred and Wesley and Spike performing Shakespeare on Serenity? Best. Hypothetical. Episode. Ever. ...This would probably have been the most awesome episode of anything ever, surpassing even Whedon's own musical episode of Buffy, 'Once More, With Feeling'. And, as such, it just makes Firefly's cancellation all the more painful.”
[More at the link]

Submission + - PlayStation 4 Will be Running Modified FreeBSD 1

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: This discovery comes nicely along the celebration of FreeBSD's 20th birthday, for all the UNIX nerds. It has been exposed that the operating system powering the PlayStation 4 is Orbis OS, which is a Sony spin of FreeBSD 9.0. It's not a huge surprise FreeBSD is being used over Linux, in part due to the more liberal licensing. The PlayStation 4 is x86-64 based now rather than Cell-based, which makes it easier to use FreeBSD. BSDs in general currently lack manufacturer supported full-feature AMD graphics driver, which leads to the conclusion that Sony and AMD have likely co-developed a discrete driver for the PS4. Some pictures of the development kit boot loader (GRUB) have been published too.

Submission + - Microsoft fails to acquire Nokia 1

Submitted by MouseTheLuckyDog
MouseTheLuckyDog writes: Ars is reporting a failed attempt by Microsoft to acquire Nokia. Ars is also reported that talks are not likely to restartt. I see things a bit differently.

Given Nokia's position Elop's job is very much at risk. Should Elop be fired, the directors will be bringing in someone with a new plan. One which deemphasises the use of WP. This would be a disaster for MS already low market share in the phone arena.

Another aspect is that should Elop get fired, for the first time in history "Someone will have been fired for using Microsoft." A fact that could potentially reverberate very badly in other areas of MS.

For these two reasons, there is severe pressure on MS to acquire Nokia before Elop gets fired.

There is however another aspect to this deal. WIth Nokia's large portfolio, it is very likely that both Apple and Google will complain to antitrust authorities in the EU and the EU anitrust people have not been kind to MS.

Slashdot Top Deals

If you want to put yourself on the map, publish your own map.

Close