Please create an account to participate in the Slashdot moderation system

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
Security

Sun Pushes Emergency Java Patch 90

Posted by timothy from the emergency-shot-of-soy-latte dept.
Trailrunner7 writes "In a sudden about-face, Sun has rushed out a Java update to fix a drive-by download vulnerability that exposed Windows users to in-the-wild malware attacks. The patch comes less than a week after Sun told a Google researcher it did not consider the issue serious enough to warrant an out-of-cycle patch and less than a day after researchers spotted live exploits on a booby-trapped Web site. The flaw, which was also discovered independently by Ruben Santamarta, occurs because the Java-Plugin Browser is running 'javaws.exe' without validating command-line parameters. Despite the absence of documentation, a researcher was about to figure out that Sun removed the code to run javaws.exe from the Java plugin. The about-face by Sun is another sign that some big vendors still struggle to understand the importance of working closely with white hat researchers to understand the implications of certain vulnerabilities. In this case, Google's Tavis Ormandy was forced to use the full-disclosure weapon to force the vendor into a proper response."
Programming

Simpler "Hello World" Demonstrated In C 582

Posted by kdawson from the non-obfuscated dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Wondering where all that bloat comes from, causing even the classic 'Hello world' to weigh in at 11 KB? An MIT programmer decided to make a Linux C program so simple, she could explain every byte of the assembly. She found that gcc was including libc even when you don't ask for it. The blog shows how to compile a much simpler 'Hello world,' using no libraries at all. This takes me back to the days of programming bare-metal on DOS!"
PHP

Eight PHP IDEs Compared 206

Posted by timothy from the colonic-extraction dept.
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Rick Grehen provides an in-depth comparative review of eight PHP IDEs: ActiveState's Komodo IDE, CodeLobster PHP Edition, Eclipse PHP Development Tools (PDT), MPSoftware's phpDesigner, NetBeans IDE for PHP, NuSphere's PhpED, WaterProof's PHPEdit, and Zend Studio. 'All of these PHP toolkits offer strong support for the other languages and environments (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, SQL database) that a PHP developer encounters. The key differences we discovered were in the tools they provide (HTML inspector, SQL management system) for various tasks, the quality of their documentation, and general ease-of-use,' Grehen writes.'"
NASA

Dying Man Shares Unseen Challenger Video 266

Posted by Soulskill from the new-perspective-on-an-old-tragedy dept.
longacre writes "An amateur video of the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger explosion has been made public for the first time. The Florida man who filmed it from his front yard on his new Betamax camcorder turned the tape over to an educational organization a week before he died this past December. The Space Exploration Archive has since published the video into the public domain in time for the 24th anniversary of the catastrophe. Despite being shot from about 70 miles from Cape Canaveral, the shuttle and the explosion can be seen quite clearly. It is unclear why he never shared the footage with NASA or the media. NASA officials say they were not aware of the video, but are interested in examining it now that it has been made available."
Science

Antarctic's First Plane, Found In Ice 110

Posted by timothy from the ice-tractor-cometh dept.
Arvisp writes "In 1912 Australian explorer Douglas Mawson planned to fly over the southern pole. His lost plane has now been found. The plane – the first off the Vickers production line in Britain – was built in 1911, only eight years after the Wright brothers executed the first powered flight. For the past three years, a team of Australian explorers has been engaged in a fruitless search for the aircraft, last seen in 1975. Then on Friday, a carpenter with the team, Mark Farrell, struck gold: wandering along the icy shore near the team's camp, he noticed large fragments of metal sitting among the rocks, just a few inches beneath the water."

Comment Re:Obvious choice (Score 1) 481

by Smelly Jeffrey (#29955548) Attached to: If I Had To Choose, I'd Be A ...

There are easily well 200 vehicles in one salvage yard local to me with "$$ for clunker" or just "CC" written all over them in paint-pen. There are at least 100 more in the parking lot waiting for a place inside the yard. It is my understanding that the crankcases of all of these vehicles were drained of their oil and filled with sodium silicate.
 
For more information, google sodium silicate cash for clunker.
 
This renders the majority of the engine's internal components unusable, and has filled the salvage yard with vehicles that are very pretty, have great body panels, interiors, chassis, and so on.
 
However, these vehicles are entirely useless for things like:

  • engine block
  • pistons
  • crankshaft
  • camshaft
  • cylinder heads
  • valves
  • timing chains
  • rocker arms
  • rings
  • valve springs
  • lifters
  • timing gears
  • oil pumps
  • distributors

It's sad that they didn't just "destroy the oil filter sealing land and threaded fastener boss" to render the vehicle undrivable. This could have been a real boon for anyone rebuilding a vehicle, and for the salvage yards. What a waste!

Slashdot Top Deals

Never buy what you do not want because it is cheap; it will be dear to you. -- Thomas Jefferson

Close