What the Frag - Slashdot User

Comment Re:Free Complexity at the cost of speed (Score 1) 199

by What the Frag on Wednesday July 04, 2012 @07:17AM (#40540097) Attached to: How Open Source Hardware Is Driving the 3D-Printing Industry

Cost of speed: yes. But this is not a big problem since the printers scale pretty linear.
In the future we may have "3d copy shops" where they have like 10 printers being able to do small to medium size production runs quickly enough.

Comment Have you asked Bear McCreary for the soundtrack? (Score 1) 100

by What the Frag on Monday June 04, 2012 @11:50AM (#40209463) Attached to: Ask the <em>Space Command</em> Team About All Things Sci-Fi

As being very impressed by Bear McCreay as soundtrack componist: Have you asked or are you planning to ask Bear McCreary for writing the sound track for Space Command?

Sony To Delete Virtual Goods 171

Posted by Soulskill on Friday March 02, 2012 @05:30PM from the satisfaction-is-not-guaranteed dept.

New submitter dommer2029 writes "A few years back, Sony bought up a small company running an online collectible card game called Star Chamber: The Harbinger Saga. Two days ago, they announced that the servers will be shutting down on March 29, 2012. All of our virtual collectible cards? Poof. It's not surprising — the user base is small and dwindling — but it's proof that any server-based digital goods you 'own' can vanish on a corporation's whim."

Comment Re:Assembling the machine is the easy part (Score 1) 129

by What the Frag on Monday January 30, 2012 @07:19PM (#38871015) Attached to: Assembling Your Own 3D Printer

I'd suggest #reprap on Freenode for being the easiest way to get information like this. In fact, you should try out Printrun and Slic3r.

Assembling Your Own 3D Printer 129

Posted by Soulskill on Monday January 30, 2012 @06:28PM from the build-to-build dept.

adeelarshad82 writes "Following a tour of a 3D printer factory, analysts at PCMag wanted to explore the option of building a 3D printer themselves. With the help of a 3D printer manufacturer, Buildatron, they were able to compile a step-by-step guide on how to build a 3D printer."

Submission + - UK Police by covert cellphone surveillance system (guardian.co.uk) 1

Submitted by digitig on Sunday October 30, 2011 @07:51PM

digitig writes: UK Metropolitan Police have purchased a "covert surveillance technology that can masquerade as a mobile phone network, transmitting a signal that allows authorities to shut off phones remotely, intercept communications and gather data about thousands of users in a targeted area."

Other customers apparently include "the US Secret Service, the Ministry of Defence and regimes in the Middle East."

Comment Re:Well at least (Score 2) 184

by What the Frag on Wednesday August 24, 2011 @02:33PM (#37194284) Attached to: Russian Supply Vehicle To ISS Burns

Too bad it's in a museum now.

Women Arrested For Refusing TSA Search of Children 1017

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday July 13, 2011 @07:17PM from the tiniest-terrorist dept.

CelticWhisper writes "A Tennessee mother was arrested for refusing to allow TSA screening clerks to subject her child to a body scan or patdown. This comes in the wake of a promise by the TSA Administrator to make repeated attempts at non-physical screening of children, after which another video of a child patdown surfaced. This event may signify a tipping point in the public's willingness to tolerate invasive and inappropriate security procedures at airports."

Comment Please give us a legal download service. (Score 4, Insightful) 259

by What the Frag on Thursday July 07, 2011 @12:29PM (#36684282) Attached to: Illegal Film Downloading Up 33% In the UK

I live in Germany and I admire many BBC productions. The problem is, after many years of the industry 'fighting piracy', they are still missing the obvious.

Yes, I consider myself a "TV show pirate". Why am I pirating? Let's say I want to watch the newest Doctor Who. There are a few ways to watch it:

- legally: Visit UK: Expensive.
- legally: Buy a huge satellite dish and watch/record it. Expensive and complicated, not possible anywhere.
- legally: Wait month for DVD.
- legally: Wait 5 years for any TV station to pick the show up again and show it in Germany with bad synchronization.
- somewhat legally: watch it on BBCs iplayer via Proxy: Complicated to set up, often slow
- probably illegally: download it from Filehoster/Newsgroup: easiest and cheapest, also fast.

So why am I pirating: I'm always picking the fastest, most comfortable and maybe the cheapest way. But I would pay for it, as I would pay for a filehoster or newsgroup provider.

BBC and others: If you want me to stop piracy, please make a platform that
- is available everywhere where I have internet access
- that provides TV shows or movies to an affordable price, with original audio
- that provides TV shows in decent quality (720p), unencrypted
- that provides TV shows immediately after being screened.

I will be your customer.

The Most Dangerous Programming Mistakes 213

Posted by Soulskill on Friday July 01, 2011 @09:31AM from the it's-probably-fine,-we'll-test-it-live dept.

snydeq writes "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister discusses the most dangerous programming mistakes, and what can be done to avoid them. 'Even more than input validation errors, this year's list is rife with application security blunders of all kinds. Some of them sound fairly esoteric, such as "inclusion of functionality from untrusted control sphere." But of all such errors, the highest-ranking one on the list is "missing authentication for critical function" — in other words, the attacker was able to gain access because there was no lock on the door to begin with,' McAllister writes. 'With the pace of Internet attacks accelerating, now is not the time to cut QA staff or skimp on testing and code review.'"

Comment Bitcoin is an accounting system, what comes next? (Score 1) 768

by What the Frag on Tuesday June 14, 2011 @01:40PM (#36438668) Attached to: Ask Amir Taaki About Bitcoin

As I see it, Bitcoin is a cryptographic peer-to--peer accounting system, with a virtual currency 'attached' to it. For me it looks like it's an experimentation platform for the accounting system itself, as well as for free markets. From my point of view, the Bitcoin other FIAT money exchangers show what happens on 'really' free 24/7 markets.

Currently, just wasting energy for mining accounting data makes not much sense for me (apart from someone else would pay you some kind of FIAT money for the results). The network adapts well to more and more miners added to the network, but basically adding more and more miners just increase the total power consumption, which is not proportional to the amount of security gained.

I believe Bitcoin is not end of the line. What will be the systems in planning building onto or what we learn from Bitcoin?

Comment Hit a Honeypot ? (Score 1, Interesting) 303

by What the Frag on Monday May 23, 2011 @05:10AM (#36215286) Attached to: Sony Music Greece Falls To Hackers

http://pastebin.com/WqLysjiN

If these is actually an excerpt of the actual data, then it looks like test data for me. Look at the passwords. They repeat a lot but grouped with ascending order. For example in the middle of the file there are a lot of "123456" passwords, but nowhere else. As the data seems to be ordered by u_usr this seems to be very unlikely.

What Happens If You Get Sucked Out of a Plane? 327

Posted by Roblimo on Sunday April 10, 2011 @05:20AM from the do-not-try-this-at-home dept.

astroengine writes "We've all wondered about it. When flying at 30,000ft, you look around the cramped economy class cabin thinking 'I wonder if I'd survive being sucked out of this plane if a hole, say, just opened above my head?' That's probably around the time that you should fasten your seat belt. According to medical experts interviewed by Discovery News in the wake of the Southwest Airlines gaping hole incident, the rapid depressurization, low oxygen levels and freezing cold would render you unconscious very quickly. Assuming you don't get chopped in half as you exit through the hole and hit the tail, you'd be long dead before you hit the ground. Nice."

France Outlaws Hashed Passwords 433

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday April 07, 2011 @03:53AM from the keep-your-receipt dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Storing passwords as hashes instead of plain text is now illegal in France, according to a draconian new data retention law. According to the BBC, '[t]he law obliges a range of e-commerce sites, video and music services and webmail providers to keep a host of data on customers. This includes users' full names, postal addresses, telephone numbers and passwords. The data must be handed over to the authorities if demanded.' If the law survives a pending legal challenge by Google, Ebay and others, it may well keep some major services out of the country entirely."

Toshiba Develops 3-D Monocle 69

Posted by Soulskill on Friday April 01, 2011 @10:52AM from the pirates-rejoice dept.

For years, adoption of 3-D technology has been hampered by the cumbersome viewing glasses needed to properly perceive the , not to mention the loss in market share of people who have suffered the injury or loss of one of their . Now, Toshiba has laid those concerns to rest with the creation of the world's first 3-D monocle, dubbed the "Spectacle." "Two triangular polarizing lenses were melded in parallel and encased in black-plated tungsten carbide for a lightweight and durable ." The elegant, minimalist design leaves your second eye free for other .

Slashdot Top Deals