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Comment With The Dark Side (Score 1) 211

The Floyd Tribute that I play with, The Pink Floyd Appreciation Society, performed Dark Side Of The Moon in it's entirety for a crowd of about 5k folks in McMinnville, TN. We let the heart beat at the end run through totality then picked up with Set The Controls For The Hear Of The Sun as good ol' Sol peaked around the other side. Great times were had by all.

Comment Re:What Day Is It? (Score 1) 3

Personally, I modded this up because the REAL new ads are making it very difficult to get into the meat without having to wait for ALL of the ads to load, which then screw up my scrolling position, hide the top story, etc... I understand that folks need to make money and ads are how that happens but it's screwing up the site to the point of almost being unusable. It's been annoying enough that I've twice ran offline scans and hand checked cookies, settings and extensions to make sure that I hadn't picked up some adware somehow. If it wasn't still the best "quick-tech-news" site on the interwebs, I'd have donned a babelfish and split a few weeks ago. And if you're about to say "try browser X", I've found the same behavior with Chrome (Linux and Win), Firefox, IE and Edge. So, it's not browser or renderer specific.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot's Older Programmers - What would be more helpful for your careers?

brown.dragon writes: I am an older programmer who has quit his job and is moving to Australia. I want to start an online solution that other programmers find helpful and right now I'm wondering if I should go with "learning new technologies" or "getting really good at the basics". Both are targeted towards giving a career boost to older programmers.

So if you are an older programmer, which of these (if any), would interest you? Would you like to keep in touch with the latest technologies because that's what makes it easy to get jobs or would you like to be really good at answering (Google/Facebook/Amazon) algorithmic interview questions? I am kind of at a crossroads and I'd really like to provide something you would value.

Comment Because that's their platform (Score 1) 1

OK. Let's say that my company has a product that has a C++ backend and a Java frontend with multi-platform support for both and a well functioning automated build system using GCC and Ant. Why would I want someone to start adding C# code? I worked for a dev shop for 15 years that was in exactly this situation. One dev decided to go rogue and start coding in Ruby but, to maintain platform support, wrapped his code up in an interpreter that ran under TomCat with the rest of the front-end. When he left there was a whole project that was completely outside of our dev standards forcing us to take two devs and have them come up to speed on Ruby just to support this and port it back into coding standards. At the end of it all, the company lost around $250k in productivity because someone didn't follow the standards.

Comment WTF?!?! CmdrTaco should kick your butts! (Score 1) 316

Are you kidding me?!?! Did they really just ask "Do you use any Linux-based operating system?" It seems that our fairly new corporate overlords have no understanding of the /. community back-story.
Granted there are more Microsoftians around these days and, sure, WinBlows doesn't blow like it used to but I think the Dice newbs should be forced to go back and re-read the entire site archive, Ludovico style, starting with Chips&Dips.

Comment Degauss (Score 1) 1

The company I worked for a few years ago had a huge replacement cycle and wanted me to "make sure there aint no data left no how". So, being in Nashville, I picked up an old 3M tape degausser from a recording studio that was ditching its analog gear. Many-a-disk have been wiped with that thing. Even better is that it's strong enough that it can take out some chips as well.

Submission + - Would you trust medical data stored on AWS by CareMonkey? (caremonkey.com)

rolandw writes: My teenage daughter's school in the UK wants me to approve the storage of her full medical details in CareMonkey. CareMonkey say that this data is stored on AWS and their security page says that it is secured by every protocol ever claimed by AWS (apparenlty). As a sysadmin and developer who has used AWS extensively for non-secure information my alarm bells are sounding. Should I ignore them and say yes? Why would you refuse?

Submission + - The NSA's delightfully D&D-inspired guide to the Internet (muckrock.com)

v3rgEz writes: In 2007, two NSA employees put together “Untangling the Web,” the agencies official guide to scouring the World Wide Web. The 651-page guide cites Borges, Frued, and Ovid — and that’s just in the preface. MuckRock obtained a copy of the guide under an NSA Freedom of Information request, and has a write up of all the guide's amazing best parts.

Submission + - Attackers Exploiting Critical SAP Flaw Since 2013 (threatpost.com)

msm1267 writes: Three dozen global enterprises have been breached by attackers who exploited a single, mitigated vulnerability in SAP business applications.

The attacks were carried out between 2013 and are ongoing against large organizations owned by corporations in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, China, India, Japan, and South Korea, spanning 15 critical industries, researchers at Onapsis said today.

The severity of these attacks is high and should put other organizations on notice that are running critical business processes and data through SAP Java apps.

The issue lies in the Invoker Servlet, which is part of the standard J2EE specification and enables developers to test custom Java applications. When it is enabled, developers and users can call these servlets over the Internet directly without authentication or authorization controls. Attackers, however, can take advantage of this same functionality to exploit these business critical systems.

Submission + - Hotel Experience With Android Lightswitches (dreamwidth.org)

jones_supa writes: The hotel in which Matthew Garrett was staying at, had decided that light switches are unfashionable and replaced them with a series of Android tablets. In his tour to the system, one was quickly met with a glitch message "UK_bathroom isn't responding". Anyway, two of the tablets had convenient-looking Ethernet cables plugged into the wall, so MacGyver began hacking. He managed to borrow a couple of USB Ethernet adapters, set up a transparent bridge and then stuck his laptop between the tablet and the wall. Tcpdump showed traffic, and Wireshark revealed that it was Modbus over TCP. Modbus is a pretty trivial protocol, and does not implement authentication. The Pymodbus tool could be used to control lights, turn the TV on/off and even close and open the curtains. Then he noticed something. His room number was 714. The IP address he was communicating with was 172.16.207.14. They wouldn't, would they? Indeed, he could access the control systems on every floor and query other rooms to figure out whether the lights were on or not, which strongly implies that he could control them as well.

Submission + - Email inventor Ray Tomlinson dies at 74 (techrepublic.com)

vikingpower writes: ARPAnet pioneer and networking legend Ray Tomlinson, who is best known for his contributions in developing email standards, has died, as reported by TechRepublic..
Tomlinson is supposed to have told a colleague, shortly after showing him his invention: "Don't tell anyone! This isn't what we're supposed to be working on.", according to Sasha Cavender quoting Tomlinson in a Forbes article titled "Legends". May Ray rest in peace in /dev/null.

Submission + - NSA Hacker Chief Explains How To Keep Him Out Of Your System. (wired.com) 1

An anonymous reader writes: Rob Joyce, the nation’s hacker-in-chief, took up the ironic task of telling a roomful of computer security professionals and academics how to keep people like him and his elite corps out of their systems.

Joyce himself did little to shine a light on the TAO’s classified operations. His talk was mostly a compendium of best security practices. But he did drop a few of the not-so-secret secrets of the NSA’s success, with many people responding to his comments on Twitter.

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