Duxkhead - Slashdot User

Submission + - Ransomware Completely Shuts Down Ohio Town Government (techcrunch.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 02, 2017 @03:58PM

An anonymous reader writes: In another interesting example of what happens when you don’t manage your backups correctly, the Licking County government offices, including the police force, have been shut down by ransomware. Although details are sparse, it’s clear that someone in the office caught a bug in a phishing scam or by downloading it and now their servers are locked up. Wrote Kent Mallett of the Newark Advocate: "The virus, accompanied by a financial demand, is labeled ransomware, which has hit several local governments in Ohio and was the subject of a warning from the state auditor last summer. All county offices remain open, but online access and landline telephones are not available for those on the county system. The shutdown is expected to continue at least the rest of the week." The county government offices, including 911 dispatch, currently must work without computers or office phones. “The public can still call 911 for emergency police, fire or medical response,” wrote Mallett.

Submission + - Netherland abandons machine vote counting as insecure (independent.co.uk)

Submitted by Bruce66423 on Thursday February 02, 2017 @01:13PM

Bruce66423 writes: Following revelations about the lack of security of the software, the Dutch government has decided to abandon the use of it to count the ballots at the forthcoming election in March. (For comparison the UK has NEVER had machine counting)

Submission + - Cisco Prime Home Flaw Allows Hackers To Reach Into People's Homes (helpnetsecurity.com)

Submitted by Orome1 on Thursday February 02, 2017 @10:26AM

Orome1 writes: Cisco has patched a critical authentication bypass vulnerability that could allow attackers to completely take over Cisco Prime Home installations, and through them mess with subscribers’ home network and devices. The vulnerability (CVE-2017-3791), found internally by Cisco security testers, affects the platform’s web-based GUI, and can be exploited by remote attackers to bypass authentication and execute any action in Cisco Prime Home with administrator privileges.

Study: Ancient Mosasaurs Gave Birth In Open Sea 24

Posted by samzenpus on Sunday April 12, 2015 @08:38PM from the we're-going-to-need-a-bigger-doula dept.

An anonymous reader writes A new study published in the journal Palaeontology finds that Mosasaurs, the large marine lizards that once populated the waters about 65 million years ago, gave birth to live young in the open ocean. "Mosasaurs are among the best-studied groups of Mesozoic vertebrate animals, but evidence regarding how they were born and what baby mosasaur ecology was like has historically been elusive," said Daniel Field, lead author of a study published online April 10 in the journal Palaeontology. Field is a doctoral candidate in the lab of Jacques Gauthier in Yale's Department of Geology and Geophysics."

Tao3D: a New Open-Source Programming Language For Real-Time 3D Animations 158

Posted by timothy on Saturday November 01, 2014 @05:26AM from the not-quite-minecraft dept.

descubes (35093) writes "Tao3D is a new open-source programming language designed for real-time 3D animations. With it, you can quickly create interactive, data-rich presentations, small applications, proofs of concept, user interface prototypes, and more. The interactivity of the language, combined with its simplicity and graphical aspects, make it ideal to teach programming.

Tao3D also demonstrates a lot of innovation in programming language design. It makes it very easy to create new control structures. Defining if-then-else is literally a couple of lines of code. The syntax to pass pass blocks of code to functions is completely transparent. And it is fully reactive, meaning that it automatically reacts as necessary to external events such as mouse movements or the passage of time.

The source code was just made available under the GNU General Public License v3 on SourceForge [as linked above], GitHub and Gitorious."

Hair-Raising Technique Detects Drugs, Explosives On Human Body 162

Posted by samzenpus on Friday July 11, 2014 @05:35AM from the charge-and-detect dept.

sciencehabit writes Scientists have found a way to combine Van de Graaff generators with a common laboratory instrument to detect drugs, explosives, and other illicit materials on the human body. In the laboratory, scientists had a volunteer touch a Van de Graaff generator for 2 seconds to charge his body to 400,000 volts. This ionized compounds on the surface of his body. The person then pointed their charged finger toward the inlet of a mass spectrometer, and ions from their body entered the machine. In various tests, the machine correctly identified explosives, flammable solvents, cocaine, and acetaminophen on the skin.

Comment Re:My outage has been longer (Score 1) 408

by Duxkhead on Wednesday September 02, 2009 @10:33AM (#29285267) Attached to: GMail Experiences Serious Outage

Hey, I took the middle ground and reported it without complaining early Tuesday morning. I certainly don't think Google is omniscient. Although, I'd certainly know if my email server at work was sending out piles of notifications. Then again, if they're alerted of issues via email, you've got a pretty little chicken and egg issue. I'm sure they're smarter than that though.

Comment My outage has been longer (Score 1) 408

by Duxkhead on Tuesday September 01, 2009 @06:28PM (#29279155) Attached to: GMail Experiences Serious Outage

I've not received any emails via my gmail address since yesterday. I do, however, get emails that gmail fetches from my POP3 and IMAP accounts. According to my exim logs, gmail accepts the mail, it's getting lost internally. I'm now getting mail delivery delay notifications from 10.90.242.1 somewhere inside Google.

At the same time the delivery issues started, gmail started complaining that it wasn't able to load my contacts list either. But my contacts list on Google Voice appear to be just peachy, and I thought they were the same list.

Eh, who knows, I just hope they get it fixed. I'm not going to complain about something I get for free.

How Facebook Runs Its LAMP Stack 111

Posted by Soulskill on Saturday April 11, 2009 @09:19AM from the very-carefully-and-sometimes-not dept.

prostoalex writes "At QCon San Francisco, Aditya Agarwal of Facebook described how his employer runs its software stack (video and slides). Facebook runs a typical LAMP setup where P stands for PHP with certain customizations, and back-end services that are written in C++ and Java. Facebook has released some of the infrastructure components into the open source community, including the Thrift RPC framework and Scribe distributed logging server."

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