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Submission Summary: 0 pending, 54 declined, 12 accepted (66 total, 18.18% accepted)

Submission + - Faulty software lands postmasters and postmistresses in prison. (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by Martin S.
Martin S. writes: Today the UK will Court of Appeal will issue its ruling on A group of 42 sub-postmasters and postmistresses will learn later whether convictions for stealing money will be quashed amid a Post Office IT scandal.

This case has been rumbling on for over a decade Post Office scandal: What the Horizon saga is all about

As a software geek, the part I find most troubling is that blind faith that those in authority placed in the software without proper accounting. Accounting systems and Software are deterministic, well they should be. IFF the system/software worked correctly this missing money must have shown up somewhere. Software defects are always traceable. It might be expensive and time consuming but persistence will win in the end. Somebody somewhere is responsible for this and defacto framing of these people is criminal in principle, if not in law.

Submission + - Heathrow security files on found USB ... (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by Martin S.
Martin S. writes: The BBC is reporting a security probe after security data about Heathrow was discovered on a USB found on the street. 'security files found on USB stick'

Heathrow Airport says it has launched an internal investigation after a USB stick containing security information was reportedly found on the street.

What sort of idiots plug in a found USB?

Submission + - UK Conservatives pledge to create government controlled internet (independent.co.uk)

Submitted by Martin S.
Martin S. writes: Theresa May the leader of the UK Conservative party has pledged to create new internet that would be controlled and regulated by government on re-election. An early lead in the polls appears to be slipping but not slowly enough to change the result.

Social Media has rapidly become an intense political battlefield. Known as #Mayhem in some circles, but seemingly able to command significant support from new and old media. Also applying new social media analytics.

Submission + - The rise and rise of Eternal September, fake news and the devolution of trolls (telegraph.co.uk)

Submitted by Martin S.
Martin S. writes: Eternal Eeptember largely predicted the ghettoisation of the internet that is prevalent today, but not its own obscurity, an egregious oversight in hindsight.

Today Sir Tim Berners-Lee has unveiled plans to tackle some of the internets problems, including "unethical" political advertising and the harvesting of data through his Web Foundation.

1) We’ve lost control of our personal data
2) It’s too easy for misinformation to spread on the web
3) Political advertising online needs transparency and understanding

His plans could be considered somewhat naive, they do not address the corporatisation of the internet and they hope to curb rather than harness human nature. I'm wondering what slashdotter would consider to be a solution, or perhaps why a solution is not even necessary.

Submission + - 30 Year anniversary of Challenger disaster (space.com)

Submitted by Martin S.
Martin S. writes: Thirty years ago today, NASA suffered a spaceflight tragedy that stunned the world and changed the agency forever.

When I mentioned this at work most of my collogues are too young to remember this first hand.

Submission + - MtGox's "Transaction Malleability" claim dismissed by researchers (theregister.co.uk)

Submitted by Martin S.
Martin S. writes: The Register reports on a paper Arxiv (abstract below) by Christian Decker and Roger Wattenhofer analyse a year's worth of Bitcoin activity to reach their conclusion.

The Abstract claims

In Bitcoin, transaction malleability describes the fact that the signatures that prove the ownership of bitcoins being transferred in a transaction do not provide any integrity guarantee for the signatures themselves. This allows an attacker to mount a malleability attack in which it intercepts, modifies, and rebroadcasts a transaction, causing the transaction issuer to believe that the original transaction was not confirmed. In February 2014 MtGox, once the largest Bitcoin exchange, closed and filed for bankruptcy claiming that attackers used malleability attacks to drain its accounts. In this work we use traces of the Bitcoin network for over a year preceding the filing to show that, while the problem is real, there was no widespread use of malleability attacks before the closure of MtGox.

Submission + - Top e-commerce sites fail to protect users from stupid passwords. (theregister.co.uk)

Submitted by Martin S.
Martin S. writes: The Register reports Top UK e-commerce sites including Amazon, Tesco and Virgin Atlantic are not doing enough to safeguard users from their own password-related foibles, according to a new study by Dashlane . Who go on to detail how
* 66% accept notoriously weak passwords such as “123456” or “password”, putting users in danger as these are often the first passwords hackers use when trying to breach accounts.
* 66% make no attempt to block entry after 10 incorrect password entries (including Amazon UK, Next, Tesco and New Look). This simple policy prevents hackers from using malicious software that can run thousands of passwords during log-ins to breach accounts.

Submission + - How NASA brought the Saturn-V F1 rocket engine back to life (arstechnica.com) 3

Submitted by Martin S.
Martin S. writes: How NASA Engineers have reverse engineered the F1 engine of a Saturn V launcher, because: every scrap of documentation produced during Project Apollo, including the design documents for the Saturn V and the F-1 engines, remains on file. If re-creating the F-1 engine were simply a matter of cribbing from some 1960s blueprints, NASA would have already done so. A typical design document for something like the F-1, though, was produced under intense deadline pressure and lacked even the barest forms of computerized design aids. Such a document simply cannot tell the entire story of the hardware. Each F-1 engine was uniquely built by hand, and each has its own undocumented quirks. In addition, the design process used in the 1960s was necessarily iterative: engineers would design a component, fabricate it, test it, and see how it performed. Then they would modify the design, build the new version, and test it again. This would continue until the design was "good enough."

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As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality. -- Albert Einstein

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