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

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
User Journal

Journal Journal: Bear witness to the STUPIDITY of some of your fellow humans:

"And every day there will be multiplications," he continued. "You look at your toilet paper and you think I'm going to run out of toilet paper, but you have another roll where that one was and you don't know how did that even take place."
Can you believe, in the year 2020, in the United States, that there are members of our species that actually believes nonsense like this? Literal Magical Thinking? Worst of all: this son-of-a-bitch is leading them all to their deaths as he e

Submission + - Vint Cerf Has Covid-19, says Watch John Oliver (gizmodo.com) 1

NoMoreACs writes: Gizmodo reports the following sad news:

Tech pioneer Vint Cerf, one of the co-creators of the modern internet, has tested positive for covid-19, according to a tweet Cerf sent out Monday morning.

The 76-year-old tweeted out a clip from HBOâ(TM)s Last Week Tonight with John Oliver about the U.S. response to the global pandemic.

âoeI tested positive for COVID-19 and am recovering,â Cerf tweeted. âoeListen to what John Oliver has to say about our national response so far.â

Cerf helped create the modern internet in the 1970s while working at UCLA with other pioneers like Bob Kahn and Leonard Kleinrock. Cerf worked on packet switching for the APRANET under Kleinrock and TCP/IP protocols with ARPA (now DARPA), the plumbing that makes the internet function.

DARPA tweeted its support of Cerf, telling him to get well soon.

Submission + - Petnet's Smart Pet Feeder Goes Offline For a Week, Can't Answer Customers At All (arstechnica.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Petnet began posting messages on Twitter on February 14 advising customers that some of its SmartFeeders "will appear offline," although they still would nominally work to dispense food. Of course, when something doesn't work, most people will try to turn it off and back on again, as that's the first-line repair for basically everything with a power switch. That, alas, was not the solution here, and Petnet explicitly advised against turning feeders off or on, adding, "We will continue to provide updates on this matter." The next update to the company's Twitter feed came four days later, on February 18, when it said it was working with a third-party service provider and would "release more information as we learn more." Finally on February 21, a full week after users began to notice something was amiss, Petnet said it had resolved the problem and would be pushing a reset and an update to affected customers.

Users were distinctly unhappy, not only with the outage but also with the company's lack of response and a clear lack of avenues for contacting them. "Does that same third party pick up your phones, answer your emails, pay your lease (property address is available for rent) and support your customers?" one customer tweeted on February 18. Another, on February 21, said, "Why were your emails not delivering? Why isnt anyone answering the phone or returning calls? Your website still claims support Mon-Sat by phone email and twitter. You've been silent for a week." Customers aren't the only ones unable to reach the company. Ars' request for comment sent to the press contact Petnet lists on its company website bounced back with an error indicating the email address does not exist.

Submission + - Should Facebook, Google Be Liable For User Posts? (reuters.com)

An anonymous reader writes: U.S. Attorney General William Barr on Wednesday questioned whether Facebook, Google and other major online platforms still need the immunity from legal liability that has prevented them from being sued over material their users post. “No longer are tech companies the underdog upstarts. They have become titans,” Barr said at a public meeting held by the Justice Department to examine the future of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. “Given this changing technological landscape, valid questions have been raised about whether Section 230’s broad immunity is necessary at least in its current form,” he said.

Section 230 says online companies such as Facebook Inc, Alphabet Inc’s Google and Twitter Inc cannot be treated as the publisher or speaker of information they provide. This largely exempts them from liability involving content posted by users, although they can be held liable for content that violates criminal or intellectual property law. The increased size and power of online platforms has also left consumers with fewer options, and the lack of feasible alternatives is a relevant discussion, Barr said, adding that the Section 230 review came out of the Justice Department’s broader look at potential anticompetitive practices at tech companies. Lawmakers from both major political parties have called for Congress to change Section 230 in ways that could expose tech companies to more lawsuits or significantly increase their costs. Barr said the department would not advocate a position at the meeting. But he hinted at the idea of allowing the U.S. government to take action against recalcitrant platforms, saying it was “questionable” whether Section 230 should prevent the American government from suing platforms when it is “acting to protect American citizens.”

Submission + - US Natural Gas Plant and Pipelines Shut After Ransomware Attack (infosecurity-magazine.com)

Garabito writes: The Department of Homeland Security has revealed that an unnamed US natural gas compression facility was forced to shut down operations for two days after becoming infected with ransomware.

The plant was targeted with a phishing e-mail, that allowed the attacker to access its IT network and then pivot to its OT (control) network, where it compromised Windows PCs used as human machine interface (HMI), data historians and polling servers, which led the plant operator to shut it down along with other assets that depended on it, including pipelines.

According to the DHS CISA report, the victim failed to implement robust segmentation between the IT and OT networks, which allowed the adversary to traverse the IT-OT boundary and disable assets on both networks.

Robotics

Small Robots Could Build Landing Site For Moon Base 199

A new NASA-sponsored study suggests that small lawnmower-sized robots could be used to build a landing site for a moon outpost. In order to be efficient a landing pad would have to be close to any structures created, but without an atmosphere to slow down the lunar sand it would sandblast the outpost, creating the need for some sort of protection. By using small robots to either build protective berms or collect rocks to "pave" a landing pad, NASA hopes to provide protection against the sand-blasting effects of a landing on the moon.
The Internet

Comcast Discontinues Customers' USENET Service 327

An anonymous reader writes "Comcast has discontinued its provided usenet service, once provided to all its high speed customers. First with the cap put on its customers several years ago on amount of traffic provided as part of the customer high-speed package, as of September 16, the service is no longer provided. Without fanfare, this bastion of the internet is being removed from the mainstream."
Programming

Journal Journal: Quicky: Seven Step Svn (subversion) Setup 6

HOWTO: Getting subversion (svn) to run under SUSE linux in 5 minutes (3 minutes or less with practice and a fast machine :-)

You can apply these instructions to redhat/slackware distros by substituting /var/svn in place of /srv/svn. You can even set it up in your home directory: /home/username/whatever/svn

Slashdot Top Deals

Dynamically binding, you realize the magic. Statically binding, you see only the hierarchy.

Working...