Comment Re:Sensationalist bullshit (Score 1, Insightful) 25
Agreed, this story is bullshit. The problem is not with Apple Mail, but with GPG Tools. Disable or remove GPT Tools and you are good to go.
FCC To Officially Rescind Net Neutrality Rules On Thursday (reuters.com) 124
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The U.S. Federal Communications Commission is expected to publish on Thursday its December order overturning the landmark Obama-era net neutrality rules, two sources briefed on the matter said Tuesday. The formal publication in the Federal Register, a government website, means state attorneys general and advocacy groups will be able to sue in a bid to block the order from taking effect. The Republican-led FCC in December voted 3-2 to overturn rules barring service providers from blocking, slowing access to or charging more for certain content. The White House Office of Management and Budget still must sign off on some aspects of the FCC reversal before it takes legal effect. Congressional aides say the publication will trigger a 60-legislative-day deadline for Congress to vote on whether to overturn the decision. U.S. Senate Democrats said in January they had the backing of 50 members of the 100-person chamber for repeal, leaving them just one vote short of a majority. The December FCC order will be made public on Wednesday and formally published on Thursday, the sources said.
Submission + - Neuroscience Does Not Compute (economist.com)
mspohr writes: The Economist has an interesting story about two neuroscientists/engineers who decided to test the methods of neuroscience using a 6502 processor. Their results are published in the PLOS Computational Biology journal.
Neuroscientists explore how the brain works by looking at damaged brains and monitoring inputs and outputs to try to infer intermediate processing. They did the same with the 6502 processor which was used in early Atari, Apple and Commodore computers.
What they discovered was that these methods were sorely lacking in that they often pointed in the wrong direction and missed important processing steps.
Neuroscientists explore how the brain works by looking at damaged brains and monitoring inputs and outputs to try to infer intermediate processing. They did the same with the 6502 processor which was used in early Atari, Apple and Commodore computers.
What they discovered was that these methods were sorely lacking in that they often pointed in the wrong direction and missed important processing steps.
Comment Own Goal :) (Score 1) 2
It seems the host serving the site has been used to torrent itself
Comment They don't own what's in your brain (Score 1) 122
I agree with the previous comment about asking your company for permission to release the fixes. But if that is not practical, it's easy enough for you to write up a description of the bug and was was needed to resolve it and then circulate this information. If someone else then resolves it by writing their own code, you are safe from copyright liability.
That being said, watch out for NDAs that you may have signed - be cautious if you think someone else may gain a competitive advantage over your former company if you release this information.
Comment Not so fast (Score 1) 2
The PoE splitters you see on Ebay do not work on standard 802.1af PoE. The standard supplies -48v (I think the newer one is -56v). It is not 12v. While you still could build a DC power supply to provide the 5v that USB requires, it's not as easy as hooking up a few wires.
Comment This is not BYOD (Score 1) 1
This is not a Bring Your Own Device policy, as you are not bringing your device.
This is a you buy yourself a device according to our standards policy. It's time to say no and either use a computer that they provide, or move on to a new contract.
Moon Express Signs Launch Contract For Possible First Private Lunar Landing 73
MarkWhittington writes: According to a story in Space.com, Moon Express, one of the leading contestants in the Google Lunar X Prize competition, has made a giant leap toward its goal of being the first private group to land on the moon. The company has signed a contract with Rocket Lab, a new launch company based in New Zealand, for five launches of its upcoming Electron rocket. The first two launches will take place in 2017 and will be attempts to land the MX-1 lander on the lunar surface in time to win the prize by the current deadline by the end of that year.
Boston Tracks Vehicles, Lies About It, Leaves Data Exposed 88
An anonymous reader writes: License plate readers have been in the news a lot lately for the invasion of privacy they represent. Boston is the latest city to make mistakes with the technology. Two weeks ago, a reporter realized that the City of Boston had accidentally exposed records for their automated license plate reader system online. Anyone could have downloaded "dozens of sensitive files, including hundreds of thousands of motor vehicle records dating back to 2012." What's worse is that the Boston Police Department claimed in 2013 that it had stopped using license plate readers. A look through the accidentally-public database shows "hundreds of emails" dating from 2013 to the present, indicating that the police were still getting that data with help from the Transportation Department.
Cheap Smartphones Quietly Becoming Popular In the US 209
An anonymous reader writes: Bloomberg reports that ZTE and its cheap Android smartphones have been grabbing more and more of the market in the U.S. It's not that the phones are particularly good — it's that they're "good enough" for the $60 price tag. The company has moved up to fourth among smartphone makers, behind Apple, Samsung and LG. That puts them ahead of a lot of companies making premium devices: HTC, Motorola, and BlackBerry, to name a few. ZTE, a Chinese manufacturer, seems to be better at playing the U.S. markets than competitors like Xiaomi and Huawei, and they're getting access to big carriers and big retailers. "Its phone sales are all the more surprising because it's been frozen out of the more lucrative telecom networking market since 2012. That year, the House Intelligence Committee issued a report warning that China's intelligence services could potentially use ZTE's equipment, and those of rival Huawei Technologies, for spying. Huawei then dismissed the allegations as 'little more than an exercise in China bashing.'"
Intel Launches Onslaught of Skylake CPUs For Laptops, Hybrids and Compute Stick 54
MojoKid writes: Intel is following up on its Skylake launch bonanza by opening the floodgates on at least two dozen SKUs mostly covering the mobile sector. The company is divvying up the range into four distinct series. There's the Y-Series, which is dedicated to 2-in-1 convertibles, tablets, and Intel's new Compute Stick venture. Then there's the U-Series, which is aimed at thin and light notebooks and "portable" all-in-one machines. The H-Series is built for gaming notebooks and mobile workstations, while the S-Series is designated for desktops, all-in-one machines, and mini PCs. Also, the Y-Series that was previously known as simply the Core M, (the chip found in products like the 12-inch Apple MacBook and Asus Transformer Book Chi T300) is now expanding into a whole family of processors. There will be Core m3, Core m5, and Core m7 processors, similar to Intel's Core i3, Core i5, and Core i7 CPU models in other desktop and notebook chips.
Submission + - Eye drops could dissolve cataracts
An anonymous reader writes: As Slashdot readers age, more and more will be facing surgery for cataracts. The lack of cataract surgery in much of the world, is a major cause of blindness. Researchers at University of California San Diego have identified lanosterol as a key molecule in the prevention of cataract formation that points to a novel strategy for cataract prevention and non-surgical treatment.
The abstract is freely available from Nature. If you have cataracts, you might want to purchase a full reprint while you can still read it.
The abstract is freely available from Nature. If you have cataracts, you might want to purchase a full reprint while you can still read it.
Submission + - US Government detained Laura Poitras every time she flew .. (techdirt.com) 1
An anonymous reader writes: Since the 2006 release of “My Country, My Country,” Poitras has left and re-entered the U.S. roughly 40 times. Virtually every time during that six-year-period that she has returned to the U.S., her plane has been met by DHS agents who stand at the airplane door or tarmac and inspect the passports of every de-planing passenger until they find her (on the handful of occasions where they did not meet her at the plane, agents were called when she arrived at immigration).
Each time, they detain her, and then interrogate her at length about where she went and with whom she met or spoke. They have exhibited a particular interest in finding out for whom she works.
Each time, they detain her, and then interrogate her at length about where she went and with whom she met or spoke. They have exhibited a particular interest in finding out for whom she works.
Submission + - SF Says AdWare Bundled with Gimp Is Intentional (google.com) 5
tresf writes: In response to a Google+ post from the Gimp project claiming that "[Sourceforge] is now distributing an ads-enabled installer of GIMP", Sourceforge had this response:
In cases where a project is no longer actively being maintained, SourceForge has in some cases established a mirror of releases that are hosted elsewhere. This was done for GIMP-Win.
Editor's note: Gimp is actively being maintained and the definition of "mirror" is quite misleading here as a modified binary is no longer a verbatim copy. Download statistics for Gimp on Windows show SourceForge as offering over 1,000 downloads per day of the Gimp software. In an official response to this incident, the official Gimp project team reminds users to use official download methods. Slashdotters may remember the last time news like this surfaced (2013) when the Gimp team decided to move downloads from SourceForge to their own FTP service.
Therefore, we remind you again that GIMP only provides builds for Windows via its official Downloads page.
Note: SourceForge and Slashdot share a corporate parent.
Submission + - How Does One Verify Hard Drive Firmware? 1
An anonymous reader writes: In light of recent revelations from Kaspersky Labs about the Equation Group and persistent hard drive malware, I was curious about how easy it might be to verify my own system's drives to see if they were infected. I have no real reason to think they would be, but I was dismayed by the total lack of tools to independently verify such a thing. For instance, Seagate's firmware download pages provide files with no external hash, something Linux distributions do for all of their packages. Neither do they seem to provide a utility to read off the current firmware from a drive and verify its integrity.
Are there any utilities to do such a thing? Why don't these companies provide such a thing to users? Has anyone compiled and posted a public list of known-good firmware hashes for the major hard drive vendors and models? This seems to be a critical hole in PC security.
I did contact Seagate support asking for hashes of their latest firmware; I got a response stating that '...If you download the firmware directly from our website there is no risk on the file be tampered with." [their phrasing, not mine]. Methinks somebody hasn't been keeping up with world events lately.
Are there any utilities to do such a thing? Why don't these companies provide such a thing to users? Has anyone compiled and posted a public list of known-good firmware hashes for the major hard drive vendors and models? This seems to be a critical hole in PC security.
I did contact Seagate support asking for hashes of their latest firmware; I got a response stating that '...If you download the firmware directly from our website there is no risk on the file be tampered with." [their phrasing, not mine]. Methinks somebody hasn't been keeping up with world events lately.
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/earth: file system full.
