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

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror

Submission + - Market sell-off caused by trader's fat-finger (cnbc.com)

Submitted by s122604
s122604 writes: Stock market's extraordinary volatility may have been caused by fat-fingered entry.
Article is reporting that the catalyst for today's extradorinary price swing (at one point the Dow lost almost 9 percent in less than an hour) may have been because a trader entered a 'B' for billions instead of an 'M' for millions on a trade of Procter and Gamble:

"According to multiple sources, a trader entered a "b" for billion instead of an "m" for million in a trade possibly involving Procter & Gamble, a component in the Dow. (CNBC's Jim Cramer noted suspicious price movement in P&G stock on air during the height of the market selloff."
br. Unbelievable there are no safeguards to protect against this.
Communications

Submission + - Spam Causes Microsoft to Kill Newsgroups (theregister.co.uk)

Submitted by eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes: Some two thousand public and twenty two hundred private newsgroups devoted to and managed by Microsoft support are going to be phased out in favor of forums. The reason being? Newsgroup spam. The Register calls it "killing newsgroups" but Microsoft eloquently calls it "the evolution of communities." Always managing to spin it in a positive light! Let's hope the spam posts and voting bots in their forums remain controllable.

Submission + - Texting Underground Can Save Lives And Caves : NPR (npr.org)

Submitted by Gulthek
Gulthek writes: Sixteen-year-old Alexander Kendrick has created a device that allows texting and other data transfer from almost 1000 feet underground. The tech could allow rapid emergency communication with the surface and opens the potential for scientific measurements without the need to continually visit (and disturb) the cave environment.
Technology

Submission + - CompTIA changes their tune about lifetime certs (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by garg0yle
garg0yle writes: Recently, it was reported that CompTIA had changed their A+, Network+, and Security+ certifications — rather than being "for life", there would now be a recertification requirement through continuing-education credits (and an accompanying fee). Needless to say, this made a lot of people very unhappy, and today it was announced that CompTIA has reversed their decision. Basically, any certification obtained before 2011 will still be "for life".

Submission + - WHO Handling Of Swine Flu To Be Investigated

Submitted by krou
krou writes: With swine flu fading in the UK (projected winter deaths of 65,000 have been downgraded to 1,000, and new cases are decreasing) the UK government has been left with millions of unused vaccines, and (unlike its contract with Baxter) no clear break-clause to get out of its contract with GlaxoSmithKlein. Although the amount paid for vaccines has not been disclosed, it likely cost the UK government several hundred million pounds. Other governments are also in a similar position: the US ordered 251 million doses of the vaccine, and France and Germany are aiming to cut back on their orders considerably. To say that the case for the pandemic has been over-estimated appears to be an understatement. Now, the WHO has announced that it is to investigate whether or not it bowed to pressure from drugs companies to overplay the threat. The Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly has also announced an investigation into the matter after a resolution [pdf] from Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg, Chairman of the Subcommittee on Health, was adopted. Dr. Wodarg labelled swine flu as a "false pandemic", and claims in the resolution that '"in order to promote their patented drugs and vaccines against flu, pharmaceutical companies influenced scientists and official agencies responsible for public health standards to alarm governments worldwide and make them squander tight health resources for inefficient vaccine strategies, and needlessly expose millions of healthy people to the risk of an unknown amount of side-effects of insufficiently-tested vaccines."' By some estimates, GSK was expected to net over £1 billion from vaccine sales.

Submission + - Best Buy $39.95 optimization exposed as a scam (consumerist.com)

Submitted by DCFC
DCFC writes: The Consumerist deconstructs the appliing scam that Best Buy call "optimzation". BB charge 40 bucks to give you a slower PC, and make bizarre claims that it makes it go 200% faster.
Yes, 200% faster.
Security

Submission + - NetBIOS Design Allows Traffic Redirection (skullsecurity.org) 1

Submitted by iago-vL
iago-vL writes: Security researchers at SkullSecurity released research demonstrating how the NetBIOS protocol allows trivial hijacking due to its design; they have demonstrated this attack in a tool called 'nbpoison' (in the package 'nbtool'). If a DNS lookup fails on Windows, the operating system will broadcast a NetBIOS lookup request that anybody can respond to. One vector of attack is against business workstations on an untrusted network, like a hotel; all DNS requests for internal resources can be redirected (Exchange, proxy, WPAD, etc). Other attack vectors are discussed here. Although similar attacks exist against DHCP, ARP, and many other LAN-based protocols, and we all know that untrusted systems on a LAN means game over, NetBIOS poisoning is much quieter and less likely to break other things.
Bug

Submission + - Dell Defect Turns 2.2GHz CPU into 100MHz CPU (chambana.net)

Submitted by jtavares2
jtavares2 writes: In what is being dubbed as Throttlegate, scours of users on many message boards have been complaining about inexplicably aggressive throttling policies on their Dell Latitude E6500 and E6400 laptops which cause its CPUs to be throttled to less than 5% of its theoretical maximum even while in room temperatures! In many cases, the issue can triggered just by playing a video or performing some other trivial, but CPU intensive, task. After being banned from the Dell Forums for revealing "non-public information", one user went so far as to write and publish a 59-page report explaining and diagnosing the throttling problem in incredible detail. Dell seems to be silent on the issue, but many users are hoping for a formal recall.

Comment Ahah. So that's who's doing it... (Score 1) 88

by rickb928 (#30246388) Attached to: Massive Badware Campaign Targets Google's "Long Tail"

But I just shrugged these off as random malware.

Blogs are going to be another morass of evil, because of so many that just regurgitate/copy/mimic each other, the insecurity problem, and the general lameness of nobody saying nothing.

And Google gets to look good on this, which is not really making me feel warm & fuzzy.
Idle

Submission + - Bomb-Proof Wallpaper Developed (inhabitat.com)

Submitted by MikeChino
MikeChino writes: Working in partnership with the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers, Berry Plastics has rolled out a new breed of bomb-proof wallpaper. Dubbed the X-Flex Blast Protection System, the wallpaper is so effective that a single layer can keep a wrecking ball from smashing through a brick wall, and a double layer can stop blunt objects (i.e. a flying 2×4) from knocking down drywall. According to its designers, covering an entire room takes less than an hour.
Earth

Submission + - Engineered Bacteria Glows to Reveal Land Mines (inhabitat.com)

Submitted by MikeChino
MikeChino writes: Sifting through minefields to remove hidden threats is currently a dangerous, tedious, and expensive process, however scientists at the University of Edinburgh recently announced that they have engineered a strain of bacteria that glows green in the presence of explosives, making mine detection a snap. The new strain of bacteria can be sprayed onto local affected areas or air dropped over entire fields of mines. Within a few hours the bacteria strain begins to glow wherever traces of explosive chemicals are present.

Slashdot Top Deals

Did you know that if you took all the economists in the world and lined them up end to end, they'd still point in the wrong direction?

Close