Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Because, clearly, all conspiracy theories are bunk (Score 1) 213

If they want to outlaw free speech considering conspiracy theories, then they are either implying that conspiracies do not exist by definition, or that they should not be exposed. Which of these two is it, as both of them are quite objectionable?

Comment Re:Why should it promote 5G? (Score 3, Insightful) 49

> it's the vendor of equipment that might be used that would compromise national security

You mean, China *might* do this, as opposed to (say) the US which will most definately make use of backdoors and weakened encryption schemes for spying, and which has a massive track record to prove that this has already happened (Echelon + Boeing, Cisco backdoors, ..).

Submission + - Cisco Removed Its Seventh Backdoor Account This Year, And That's A Good Thing (zdnet.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Cisco, the world's leading provider of top networking equipment and enterprise software, has released today 15 security updates, including a fix for an issue that can be described as a backdoor account. This latest patch marks the seventh time this year when Cisco has removed a backdoor account from one of its products.

Five of the seven backdoor accounts were discovered by Cisco's internal testers, with only CVE-2018-0329 and this month's CVE-2018-15439 being found by external security researchers. The company has been intentionally and regularly combing the source code of all of its software since December 2015, when it started a massive internal audit. Cisco started that process after security researchers found what looked to be an intentional backdoor in the source code of ScreenOS, the operating system of Juniper, one of Cisco's rivals.

Juniper suffered a massive reputational damage following the 2015 revelation, and this may secretly be the reason why Cisco has avoided using the term "backdoor account" all year for the seven "backdoor account" issues. Instead, Cisco opted for more complex wordings such as "undocumented, static user credentials for the default administrative account," or "the affected software enables a privileged user account without notifying administrators of the system." It is true that using such phrasings might make Cisco look disingenuous, but let's not forget that Cisco has been ferreting these backdoor accounts mainly on its own, and has been trying to fix them without scaring customers or impacting its own stock price along the way.

Submission + - 0day exploit for VirtualBox which allows to p0wn the host OS has been published (github.com) 1

Artem Tashkinov writes: Sergey Zelenyuk, a security engineer from Russia, has published a VirtualBox exploit which allows a root user in the guest operating system to gain complete control over the host operating system by utilizing bugs in the data link layer of the default E1000 network interface adapter which makes this vulnerability critical for everyone who uses virtualization to run untrusted code. Currently there's no statement from Oracle, fix or a CVE entry available because the researcher is highly dissatisfied with the state of security research and bug-bounty programs which often do not work as intended: he mentions the fact that, companies often take too much time to analyze the issues they get notified about, they don't have formal rewards ranges for the found vulnerabilities, and the rewards to be paid are not enough to cover the time and effort spent on researching them.

Comment Re:The Homer! (FP?) (Score 1) 417

I have to agree to many things you say e.g. the car being noisy and audio being much distorted (it's mainly the car's DAC though). But again, why do *other* people have to decide what *I* hear. I really don't get this?

In my personal opinion > 99% are used to compression, don't listen to real physical classical instruments daily, and just don't care. Or maybe their ears are trained to filter out the artifacts, the human brain is truly amazing in that respect (e.g. you don't hear the air conditioning noise until it shuts down at 18.00). Lossless would indeed be of no added value. Totally agree. But please leave the option open for those 1% who truly care.

I will be the first to admit there are many audiophile insanities [http://www.head-fi.org/t/486598/testing-audiophile-claims-and-myths].

Comment Re:The Homer! (FP?) (Score 1) 417

Happy to do a blind test, with classical music, while driving. It's not just tiny details, it's the punch/speed/phase/artifacts. Even if you doubt that ... should the option to play lossless audio be removed, because *other* people decide that *I* cannot hear the difference?

PS Volvo C30 with laminated windows and High Performance audio.

Comment Re:The Homer! (FP?) (Score 1) 417

That's what USB connectors are for: you can plug in flash drives with your music collection on them.

USB is great indeed ... and of course, we need support for lossless audio formats. My 2009 Volvo supports .wav on a 250 GB partition. That's a lot of lossless music. Current Volvo models do not support any lossless audio format. And, their user interface is much much slower. I've been shopping around and most brands (even the top ones) seem to focus now on mp3 and bluetooth solutions only, even in their top audio systems. AFAIK the bluetooth connections shall be lossy (A2DP / SBC) by default?

Regardless of this, I am still not sure if I shall even have the guts to buy a car without a real HAND brake ... which seems to be another trend.

Slashdot Top Deals

The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent. -- Sagan

Working...