Pyro - Slashdot User

Submission + - Hackers May Have Nabbed Over 200 SSL Certificates (computerworld.com)

Submitted by

CWmike

on Wednesday August 31, 2011 @05:43PM

CWmike writes: "Hackers may have obtained more than 200 digital certificates from a Dutch company after breaking into its network, including ones for Mozilla, Yahoo and the Tor project — a considerably higher number than DigiNotar has acknowledged earlier this week when it said 'several dozen' certificates had been acquired by attackers. Among the certificates acquired by the attackers in a mid-July hack of DigiNotar, Van de Looy's source said, were ones valid for mozilla.com, yahoo.com and torproject.org, a system that lets people connect to the Web anonymously. Mozilla confirmed that a certificate for its add-on site had been obtained by the DigiNotar attackers. 'DigiNotar informed us that they issued fraudulent certs for addons.mozilla.org in July, and revoked them within a few days of issue,' Johnathan Nightingale, director of Firefox development, said Wednesday. Looy's number is similar to the tally of certificates that Google has blacklisted in Chrome."

Submission + - kernel.org compromized (kernel.org) 2

Submitted by JoeF on Wednesday August 31, 2011 @05:33PM

JoeF writes: There is a note posted on the main kernel.org page, that kernel.org has been compromised earlier this month:
"Earlier this month, a number of servers in the kernel.org infrastructure were compromised. We discovered this August 28th. While we currently believe that the source code repositories were unaffected, we are in the process of verifying this and taking steps to enhance security across the kernel.org infrastructure."

The note goes on to say that it is unlikely to have affected the source code repositories, due to the nature of git.

Submission + - German Ban on "Doom" Finally Lifted (ign.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 31, 2011 @04:04PM

An anonymous reader writes: 18 Years after its debut, "Doom", the game that almost single-handedly popularized the FPS genre (remember when we just called them "Doom Clones"?) is finally seeing the light of legality in the nation of Germany. The lifting of the ban also applies to the beloved sequel "Doom II". A release date has yet to be set. I recommend that Germans who have not found some way to play this game over the last 18 years, please do so upon its release. Despite its age, it's still fun as hell. (Pun very much intended.)

Submission + - Chemical Cocktail Turns Mice Clear (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit on Wednesday August 31, 2011 @03:12PM

sciencehabit writes: Researchers have serendipitously discovered that a mixture of urea, glycerol, and soap makes membranes transparent. When they tried the mixture on a developing mouse fetus, they found that it removed all of the pigment from the cells, rendering the fetus completely transparent. The technique allowed scientists to see fluorescent neurons buried several millimeters in the brain.

Comment Best wishes and a big thank you for everything! (Score 1) 1521

by Pyro on Thursday August 25, 2011 @12:03PM (#37207468) Attached to: Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda Resigns From Slashdot

Been reading Slashdot since 98 at my first job at a dotcom start up as the MIS manager. (Whoever thought giving a kid straight out of high school that job was nuts; what times that was. But then again our CEO was the same one that thought it would be a good idea to give us packs of bottles of custom labeled beer to give to customers, clients and partners at Comdex '99 as some kind of guerrella marketing thing... We mostly passed it out to people we knew personally or those in the industry we respected instead; which meant we made a stop at the Slashdot booth and unloaded a backpack full... Good times...)

There are plenty of other tech/geek/whatever news sites out there, but this is home and the only one I read daily. Thank you again! I wish you all the best in your future endeavors (btw, write that book!)

Submission + - Ohio man gets a $16.4 million cable bill (yahoo.com)

Submitted by wiredmikey on Friday March 25, 2011 @07:07PM

wiredmikey writes: You may have heard the story about the man living in a 14x60 trailer who got a $12,864 electric bill, or the Corpus Christie man who was billed $7.7 million by his water company, or the Canadian whose cell phone provider hit him up for $85,000...

In this case an Ohio man's attempt to make a payment on his cable bill to Time Warner was rejected, and he learned that the company had calculated his past-due amount at more than $16 million.

Apple Hides Account Info in DRM-Free Music 669

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Wednesday May 30, 2007 @05:17PM from the tabs-keeping-tabs dept.

Alvis Dark writes "Apple launched iTunes Plus earlier today, the fruit of its agreement with EMI to sell DRM-free music. What they didn't say is that all DRM-free tracks have the user's full name and account e-mail embedded in them. Is this to discourage people from throwing the tracks up on their favorite P2P platform? 'It would be trivial for iTunes to report back to Apple, indicating that "Joe User" has M4As on this hard drive belonging to "Jane Userette," or even "two other users." This is not to say that Apple is going to get into the copyright enforcement business. What Apple and indeed the record labels want to watch closely is, will one user buy music for his five close friends?'"

Palm Unveils Foleo, Linux-Based "Mobile Companion" 301

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Wednesday May 30, 2007 @04:34PM from the too-little-too-late-or-lifesaver dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Contrary to recent rumors, it's not Palm's first Linux smartphone, and no, it's not a competitor to Nokia's Linux-based N800 Internet Tablet. Rather, Palm today unveiled the Foleo, which it's calling a 'new class' of mobile device. The device is designed to expand the email, Internet, and productivity application capabilities of mobile phones such as the Palm Treo, by adding a full-size keyboard and a larger screen. Company founder Jeff Hawkins predicts that the Foleo will be more successful than Palm's original Palm Pilot, which he designed, and more successful than its current Treo smartphones. He touts its simplicity: 'Press a button, it's on. Press it again, it's off. There are no other modes.'"

McCain on Net Neutrality, Copyright, Iraq 511

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Wednesday May 30, 2007 @03:53PM from the everyone-has-an-opinion dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Sen. John McCain kicked off the All Things Digital conference Tuesday night with some interesting comments about net neutrality among other things. His take: there should be as little government regulation of broadband as possible. The market should be allowed to solve the Net-neutrality issue: 'When you control the pipe you should be able to get profit from your investment.'"

How to Keep Your Code From Destroying You 486

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Wednesday May 30, 2007 @03:09PM from the i-have-been-sent-here-to-destroy-you dept.

An anonymous reader writes "IBM DeveloperWorks has a few quick tips on how to write maintainable code that won't leech your most valuable resource — time. These six tips on how to write maintainable code are guaranteed to save you time and frustration: one minute spent writing comments can save you an hour of anguish. Bad code gets written all the time. But it doesn't have to be that way. Its time to ask yourself if its time for you to convert to the clean code religion."

New Gentoo 2007.0 Release Gets Mixed Review 273

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Wednesday May 30, 2007 @01:15PM from the resounding-meh dept.

lisah writes "Gentoo's recently released version 2007.0 gets a fair-to-middling review from Linux.com. Installation was a headache from the live CD and DVD versions, but the Gentoo Linux Installer saved the day and gets high marks for being 'far better than it's predecessor.' The user experience is also mixed — on the one hand, the distribution boots quickly, has great hardware support, and new, user-friendly artwork. On the other hand, 'for some strange reason, the installed Gentoo doesn't allow normal users to run any administrative applications.' Overall, it doesn't look like Gentoo offers any compelling reasons to switch to 'Secret Sauce' if they're happy with their current, uh, flavor."

Who's Trading Your E-mail Addresses? 355

Posted by CmdrTaco on Wednesday May 30, 2007 @11:49AM from the checking-the-nasdaq-now dept.

Bennett Haselton is back with another piece on e-mail privacy. He starts "On April 14, 2007, I signed up for an AmeriTrade account using an e-mail address consisting of 16 random alphanumeric characters, which I never gave to anyone else. On May 15, I started receiving pump-and-dump stock spams sent to that e-mail address. I was hardly the first person to discover that this happens. Almost all of the top hits in a Google search for "ameritrade spam" are from people with the same story: they used a unique address for each service that they sign up with, so they could tell if any company ever leaked their address to a spammer, and the address they gave to AmeriTrade started getting stock spam. (I don't actually do that with most companies where I create accounts. But after hearing all the AmeriTrade stories, I created an account with them in April just for the purpose of entering a unique e-mail address and seeing if it would get leaked.)" Bennett continues on if you're willing to click the link.

Can a Blogroll Be Defamatory? 142

Posted by kdawson on Wednesday May 30, 2007 @03:06AM from the way-out-of-control dept.

An anonymous reader clues us that the wildly litigious Canadian Wayne Crookes, who has been suing the Internet for defamation, has added Michael Geist to his hit list. Geist is a well-known Canadian law professor and blogger. His offense: linking on his blog to site that links to another site that contains material allegedly of a defamatory nature. (Others would characterize that material as historical facts about Crooks's tenure at the helm of the Canadian Green Party.)

DNS Complexity 93

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday May 29, 2007 @11:57PM from the loosely-specified dept.

ChelleChelle writes "Paul Vixie of Internet Systems Consortium guides us on a journey into the sublime details of the domain name system. Although it contains just a few simple rules, DNS has grown into a system of enormous complexity. This article explores the supposed and true definitions of DNS, and shows some of the tension between the two definitions through the lens of the philosophy of Internet development protocol."

Is Computer Science Still Worth It? 434

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Wednesday November 08, 2006 @04:49PM from the was-it-ever dept.

prostoalex writes "Is it a good idea to go into Computer Science? Yes, there are certainly pending labor shortages as Indian companies outsource to the United States, but speakers of Stanford Computer Forum generally agree that it's a good career choice. From the article: 'To ensure job security, students must learn business, communication and interpersonal skills, Vardi recommended. The personal touch will become as important as technological expertise, he said. "There are jobs galore," agreed Suzanne Bigas, assistant director of the Stanford Computer Forum.'"

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