Krakustu - Slashdot User

Snapchat Sued For Facilitating 107 MPH Car Crash (patch.com) 496

Posted by msmash on Thursday May 05, 2016 @01:30PM from the technology-facilitating-damage dept.

An anonymous reader writes: A Georgia couple is suing Snapchat, a popular instant messaging and photo sharing app, after a car accident last year seriously injured the husband, leaving him permanently brain damaged. According to media reports, Wentworth Maynard, the victim, was driving in a 55-mile-per-hour zone when 18-year-old Christal McGee crashed into him traveling at 107 miles per hour. McGee, according to lawsuits, was attempting to use Snapchat's "speed filter" -- a feature that overlays the speed one is traveling on a picture. "Snapchat's speed filter facilitated McGee's excessive speeding," reads the lawsuit. "McGee was motivated to drive at an excessive speed in order to obtain recognition through Snapchat by the means of a Snapchat 'trophy.'"

Earth's Libration Visualized For the First Time Above the Moon's Far Side 33

Posted by timothy on Saturday February 07, 2015 @07:50PM from the can-you-see-your-house-from-there dept.

StartsWithABang writes Thanks to the fact that the Moon is tidally locked, we can only see 50% of its surface on any given night. Over time, the fact that the Moon's orbit is elliptical, and that it moves faster at perigee and slower at apogee means that up to another 9% is visible over the course of many years. The observed "rocking" and growing/shrinking of the Moon over time is known as lunar libration, an incredibly interesting phenomenon. But now, for the first time, we've been able to visualize how the Earth appears to move as seen from above the far side of the Moon.

With Insider Help, ID Theft Ring Stole $700,000 In Apple Gift Cards 57

Posted by samzenpus on Friday February 06, 2015 @01:31AM from the a-whole-lot-of-apples dept.

itwbennett writes The Manhattan District Attorney's office has indicted five people for using personal information stolen from around 200 people to fund the purchase of hundreds of thousands of dollars in Apple gift cards, which in turn were used to buy Apple products. "Using stolen information to purchase Apple products is one of the most common schemes employed by cybercrime and identity theft rings today," District Attorney Cyrus Vance said in a statement. "We see in case after case how all it takes is single insider at a company—in this instance, allegedly, a receptionist in a dentists' office—to set an identity theft ring in motion, which then tries to monetize the stolen information by purchasing Apple goods for resale or personal use," he said.

Why Aren't We Using SSH For Everything? 203

Posted by Soulskill on Saturday January 03, 2015 @01:48PM from the ssh-to-the-gym dept.

An anonymous reader writes: A post at Medium asks why, in this age of surveillance and privacy-related bogeymen, we aren't making greater use of SSH for our secure computing needs?

"SSH is one of the most accessible secure protocols ever, second only to HTTPS of course. Let's see what we have so far: Binary protocol, mandatory encryption, key pinning, multiplexing, compression (yes, it does that too). Aren't these the key features for why we invented HTTP/2?

Admittedly, SSH is missing some pieces. It's lacking a notion of virtual hosts, or being able to serve different endpoints on different hostnames from a single IP address. On the other hand, SSH does have several cool features over HTTP/2 though, like built-in client authentication which removes the need for registration and remembering extra passwords."

How Galaxies Are Disappearing From Our Universe 174

Posted by Soulskill on Saturday January 03, 2015 @12:20PM from the really-big-cloaking-devices dept.

StartsWithABang writes: You've heard of dark energy before, and you know that it causes the expansion of our Universe to be accelerating. Instead of slowing down, distant galaxies are speeding up in their recession from us, rendering them unreachable from our point of view. But even though we can't see the light emitted from them today, we can still see the galaxies themselves! This article explains how this works, how no information gets lost, and what it means for the Big Bang.

Doxing -- Something To Expect More of In 2015 171

Posted by Soulskill on Saturday January 03, 2015 @06:15AM from the can't-we-just-be-excellent-to-each-other dept.

HughPickens.com writes: When asked about trends to expect in 2015, Bruce Schneier points to doxing as a likely candidate. Doxing is not new, dating back to at least 1987 when Robert Bork's video tape rentals were leaked to the press. Usually it's things like an address and phone number, but it can also be credit card details, medical information, private e-mails—pretty much anything an assailant can get his hands on. "Everyone from political activists to hackers to government leaders has now learned how effective this attack is. Everyone from common individuals to corporate executives to government leaders now fears this will happen to them. And I believe this will change how we think about computing and the Internet."

Red Hat Engineer Improves Math Performance of Glibc 226

Posted by Soulskill on Friday January 02, 2015 @06:01PM from the performance-enhancing-devs dept.

jones_supa writes: Siddhesh Poyarekar from Red Hat has taken a professional look into mathematical functions found in Glibc (the GNU C library). He has been able to provide an 8-times performance improvement to slowest path of pow() function. Other transcendentals got similar improvements since the fixes were mostly in the generic multiple precision code. These improvements already went into glibc-2.18 upstream. Siddhesh believes that a lot of the low hanging fruit has now been picked, but that this is definitely not the end of the road for improvements in the multiple precision performance. There are other more complicated improvements, like the limitation of worst case precision for exp() and log() functions, based on the results of the paper Worst Cases for Correct Rounding of the Elementary Functions in Double Precision (PDF). One needs to prove that those results apply to the Glibc multiple precision bits.

Google Fiber's Latest FCC Filing: Comcast's Nightmare Come To Life 221

Posted by timothy on Thursday January 01, 2015 @05:00PM from the just-want-to-seek-some-of-the-same-rents dept.

An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from BGR: What's every incumbent ISP's worst nightmare? If we had to guess, it looks something like the filing that Google just made with the Federal Communications Commission. As The Wall Street Journal reports, Google this week told the FCC that reclassifying broadband providers under Title II of the Telecommunications Act would have a big side benefit for Google Fiber because it would give Google Fiber the same access to utility poles and other key infrastructure currently enjoyed by Comcast, AT&T and other big-name ISPs.

Sony PlayStation Network Back Up Now, Supposedly 75

Posted by timothy on Sunday December 28, 2014 @01:18PM from the nothing's-perfect dept.

jfruh (300774) writes Sony's PlayStation Network, brought down in a Christmas Day hacking attack, now seems to be back online. Of course, Sony also said the same thing on Saturday, but outages and problems lingered. From the article: At around 1 a.m. U.S. Eastern Time on Sunday, Sony declared its online gaming platform fixed and, as it had done the day before, blamed the problems on a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. ... The company jumped the gun early Saturday when it trumpeted that the PlayStation Network was gradually getting back to normal, announcing the good news at around 4 a.m. via its Ask PlayStation Twitter account and triumphantly changing the PlayStation Network status to “online” in the support website a few hours later.

Lizard Squad Targets Tor 83

Posted by Soulskill on Friday December 26, 2014 @06:35PM from the reasons-"torget"-should-be-a-word dept.

mrspoonsi tips news that Lizard Squad, the hacker group who knocked Xbox Live and the PlayStation Network offline on Christmas morning, has now turned its attention to Tor. After tweeting that they were targeting a Tor-related zero-day flaw, the group is now in control of 3,000 exit nodes — almost half of them. "If one group is controlling the majority of the nodes, it could be able to eavesdrop on a substantial number of vulnerable users. Which means Lizard Squad could gain the power to track Tor users if it infiltrates enough of the network."

Recipe For Building a Cheap Raspberry Pi Honeypot Network 68

Posted by timothy on Saturday August 02, 2014 @03:02AM from the you-forgot-the-sledgehammer dept.

mask.of.sanity (1228908) writes "Honeypots are the perfect bait for corporate IT shops to detect hackers targeting and already within their networks and now a guide has been published to build a dirt cheap battalion of the devices from Raspberry Pis. "By running honeypots on our internal network, we are able to detect anomalous events. We gain awareness and insight into our network when network hosts interact with a Raspberry Pi honeypot sensor," the author explained."

United States Begins Flying Stealth Bombers Over South Korea 567

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday March 28, 2013 @09:01PM from the nice-day-for-a-flight dept.

skade88 writes "The New York Times is reporting that the United States has started flying B-2 stealth bomber runs over South Korea as a show of force to North Korea. The bombers flew 6,500 miles to bomb a South Korean island with mock explosives. Earlier this month the U.S. Military ran mock B-52 bombing runs over the same South Korean island. The U.S. military says it shows that it can execute precision bombing runs at will with little notice needed. The U.S. also reaffirmed their commitment to protecting its allies in the region. The North Koreans have been making threats to turn South Korea into a sea of fire. North Korea has also made threats claiming they will nuke the United States' mainland."

Comment Forget the price of Gas, who gets that money? (Score 0) 736

by Krakustu on Friday March 23, 2012 @09:46AM (#39450441) Attached to: Domestic Drilling Doesn't Decrease Gasoline Prices

Forget the price of Gas. Who gets the dollar we spend for energy is a more pertinent question. The price of oil is determined in LARGE part by OPEC and the value of the US Dollar. If we produce more oil domestically, OPEC will produce less to keep prices up. The real benefit to domestically produced oil is in keeping our energy spend in the US. This would balance our trade deficit and maybe even increase the value of the dollar. Cheap gas will require increasing the value of the dollar. If we can't do that the least we can do is keep our money here.

Comment Stay with Firefox 3.6 (Score 0) 807

by Krakustu on Sunday March 04, 2012 @01:24AM (#39236419) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Life After Firefox 3.6.x?

Stay with Firefox 3.6. No worries. Now I have always used multiple browsers. So I work recommend you supplement withe Internet Explorer 5.0, and Mosaic 3.0. For web pages that refuse to render in the stable tried and true web browser try the latest Lynx Browser version v2-8-3.

Congress May Permit Robot Calls To Cell Phones 619

Posted by timothy on Thursday September 29, 2011 @12:21PM from the your-time-is-very-important-to-us-please-hold dept.

TCPALaw writes "While many hoaxes have circulated in the past about cell phone numbers being opened up to telemarketers, it now may actually happen. A bill, HR 3035 (PDF), has been introduced in Congress, that would create numerous exceptions to the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, which banned autodialed and prerecorded robot calls to cell phone numbers. If passed, HR 3035 would permit a wide range of autodialed and prerecorded calls to cell phones that are currently prohibited, and would preempt practically all state laws providing similar protections. This is being applauded by debt collectors and banks (PDF) ... as if the bailouts weren't enough, now they get to make you pay for their calls to you."

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