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Comment The problem is who is reviewing solutions (Score 1) 119

by FtDFtM (#37989846) Attached to: DARPA Seeks Input On Securing Networks Against Attackers

The problem is that they have government contractors reviewing potential solutions. The same people who are incapable of coming up with workable solutions themselves. So what makes anyone think they would know a good solution, even if it bit them in the ass?

DARPA announced a grant program for this last August at Black Hat. We spent a month crafting an RA for developing a solution based upon formal methods that would change the advantage from the attacker to the defender. Even if we were full of shit, you'd think DARPA would want to know more, in case we weren't. We got a form letter rejection for "Mudge". Am I bitter I spent a month trying to help out the DoD? you bet. I have better things to do.

It reminds me of when the Web was first emerging and I was getting my MBA - Anderson Consulting came to our school with a "contest" to see who could come up with the best business model for the web. Anyone know where AC is now? The DoD needs a good shot of Darwin.
Privacy

TSA Announces Pilot of Trusted Traveler Program 388

Posted by Soulskill from the another-day-at-the-theater dept.
Bob the Super Hamste writes "CNN reports that the TSA has announced the pilot of their trusted traveler program. This is the program where an individual gives up additional information to the government and then gets expedited security. The pilot program will only be available to certain frequent fliers on Delta passengers flying out of Atlanta and Detroit, and to American Airlines passengers flying out of Miami and Dallas. Plans are in the work to expand this to other airports and other airlines as well."
Security

Submission + - Researcher finds dangerous vulnerability in Skype (networkworld.com)

Submitted by alphadogg
alphadogg writes: A security consultant has notified Skype of a cross-site scripting flaw that could be used to change the password on someone's account, according to details posted online. The consultant, Levent Kayan, based in Berlin, posted details of the flaw on his blog on Wednesday and notified Skype a day later. He said on Friday he hasn't heard a response yet. The problem lies in a field where a person can input their mobile phone number. Kayan wrote that a malicious user can insert JavaScript into the mobile phone field of their profile.
Advertising

Submission + - Study: Ad Networks Not Honoring Do-Not-Track (itworld.com)

Submitted by
itwbennett
itwbennett writes: "According to a new study from Stanford University's Center for Internet Society, almost half of the Network Advertising Initiative (NAI) members that Stanford studied left tracking cookies in place after a Web user opted out of targeted ads. NAI's executive director said that with no consensus on what do-not-track means, ad networks continue to gather data for business reasons other than providing targeted advertising. 'Under the NAI self-regulatory code, companies commit to providing an opt out to the use of online data for online behavioral advertising purposes,' Curran said. 'But the NAI code also recognizes that companies sometimes need to continue to collect data for operational reasons that are separate from ad targeting based on a user's online behavior.'"
Programming

In-Depth Look At HTML5 150

Posted by CmdrTaco from the digging-in-for-the-long-haul dept.
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Peter Wayner offers a four-part series devoted to the new features of HTML5. Each article examines the evolving spec in-depth, focusing on canvas, video, audio, and graphics for display options, including the <canvas> and <video> tags, Scalable Vector Graphics, and WebGL; local data storage, including Web Storage, Web Database, and other APIs designed to transform Web pages into local applications; data communications, for cross-document messaging, WebSockets, and other HTML5 APIs that improve website and browser interactivity; and forms, for increasing control over data input and validation."
News

Submission + - Leslie Valiant Wins 'Nobel Prize' of Computing (ispyce.com)

Submitted by
autospa
autospa writes: "ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery today named Leslie G. Valiant of Harvard University the winner of the 2010 ACM A.M. Turing Award for his fundamental contributions to the development of computational learning theory and to the broader theory of computer science. Valiant brought together machine learning and computational complexity, leading to advances in artificial intelligence as well as computing practices such as natural language processing, handwriting recognition, and computer vision. He also launched several subfields of theoretical computer science, and developed models for parallel computing. The Turing Award, widely considered the "Nobel Prize in Computing", is named for the British mathematician Alan M. Turing. The award carries a $250,000 prize, with financial support provided by Intel Corporation and Google Inc."
Government

Submission + - Senate Passes Landmark Patent Reform Bill (earthweb.com)

Submitted by inkscapee
inkscapee writes: The US Senate is congratulating itself for passing a 'landmark' piece of patent reform legislation. Some key elements are 'first to file' instead of first to invent, and ending fee diversion, which means fees paid to the Patent Office will actually fund the Patent Office. Curiously, this practice has resulted in a backlog of 700,000 patent applications. The House is reportedly working on a similar bill, and soon harmony and rationality will triumph.

Comment six lines (Score 1) 323

by FtDFtM (#35430068) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Privacy Paranoia
If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him. This was true 400 years ago. As peragrin says, its about our ability to collect information and assign it to an individual, fairly or otherwise.

Daniel Solove makes a good case that imbalance between the power of the individual vs society (government and/or corporations) invariably precedes upheaval.
Facebook

Submission + - Facebook may bust up the SMS profit cartel (cnn.com) 3

Submitted by
AndyAndyAndyAndy
AndyAndyAndyAndy writes: " Fortune has a very interesting article today about wireless providers and their exorbitant profit margins for SMS handling, especially when looking at modern data plans.

'Under the cell phone industry's peculiar pricing system, downloading data to your smartphone is amazingly cheap — unless the data in question happens to be a text message. In that case the price of a download jumps roughly 50,000-fold, from just a few pennies per megabyte of data to a whopping $1000 or so per megabyte.'

A young little application called Beluga caught the attention of Facebook, which purchased the company yesterday.

The app aims to bring messaging under the umbrella of data plans, and features group messaging, picture and video messaging, and integration with other apps.

The author argues that, if successful, Beluga (or whatever Facebook ends up calling it) could potentially be the Skype/Vonage or Netflix-type competitor to the old-school cellular carriers and their steep pricing plans."
Science

Submission + - Fact free science is on the move. Beware! (nytimes.com) 6

Submitted by G3ckoG33k
G3ckoG33k writes: Fact free science is not a joke, it is very much on the move and it is quite possibly the most dangerous movement in centuries, for the entire mankind. One can say it began as counter-movement to Karl Popper's ground-breaking proposals in the early 20th century, which insisted that statements purporting to describe the reality should be made falsifiable. A few decades later some critics of Popper said that statements need peer acceptance, which then makes also natural science a social phenomenon. Even later, in 1996, professor Alan Sokal submitted a famous article ridiculing the entire anti-science movement. Now New York Times has an article describing the latest chilling acts of the social relativistic postmodern loons. It is a chilling read, and they may be swinging both the political left and right. Have they been successful in transforming the world yet? How would we know?
Facebook

Submission + - Facebook offers easy commenting alternative (wired.com) 1

Submitted by Spice Consumer
Spice Consumer writes: Facebook has just unvield a "...new system (that) lets website owners replace their current commenting system with Facebook’s simply by dropping in a few lines of Javascript." How widely adopted this new system becomes could greatly affect Facebook's already entrenched position on the web and further compromise individual user's privacy.
Beer

Submission + - Aussie Brewery Creates Space Beer (discovery.com) 1

Submitted by
astroengine
astroengine writes: "An Australian brewing company has created the world's first beer that can be consumed in space. 4-Pines Brewing Company teamed up with Saber Astronautics Australia, tirelessly testing different brews on zero-G flights last year. They have now finalized the winning formula, calling the beer "Vostok" — after the spacecraft flown by Yuri Gagarin in 1961. The beverage is a strong-tasting stout with reduced carbonation to avoid the dreaded microgravity "wet burp.""

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