Submission + - Cop Tries To Sue Woman Who Videotaped Beating (techdirt.com) 4

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 15, 2011 @04:02PM

An anonymous reader writes: A police officer who was disciplined for his role in a massive beating of a guy (many broken bones in his face and permanent partial blindness) is looking to bring criminal wiretapping charges against the woman who caught much of the incident on video. The guy received a 45-day suspension. He does not appear to deny anything that happened in the video. But he apparently thinks it shouldn't have been filmed.

Submission + - SpyEye Trojan Source Code Leaked (securityweek.com)

Submitted by wiredmikey on Monday August 15, 2011 @03:43PM

wiredmikey writes: The SpyEye malware kit has long been both the bane of unsuspecting victims and a boon for cyber-criminals. Now, according to security researchers, the situation may have taken a turn for the worse.

The SpyEye Builder patch source code for release 1.3.45 was leaked by the Reverse Engineers Dream Crew (RED Crew) recently after a crew member was able to locate a copy of SpyEye Builder 1.3.45 and create a tutorial that enables a reader with SpyEye Builder to crack the hardware identification.

The fact that SpyEye has plagued victims around the world is not in doubt. In April, police in the U.K. arrested a handful of people in connection with a bank fraud operation that used SpyEye to steal money and banking information.

Submission + - China praises UK Internet Censorship Plan (zeropaid.com)

Submitted by mormop on Monday August 15, 2011 @01:41PM

mormop writes: The Chinese government has praised UK Prime Minister David Cameron's plan for censoring social networking sites at times when the government feels threatened believing it legitimises China own behaviour.

Submission + - Driver using two cell phones gets year driving ban (networkworld.com) 1

Submitted by

coondoggie

on Monday August 15, 2011 @01:26PM

coondoggie writes: "This guy is the poster boy for why cell phone usage in cars should be banned in more places. According to press out of the United Kingdom, a man who was driving at 70MPH while texting on one phone and talking on the other has been banned from driving for a year. Initial reports said that the driver, David Secker was apparently using his knees to steer the car, an accusation he refuted in court apparently."

Submission + - Mussels With Hydrogen Fuel Cells Found (inhabitat.com)

Submitted by

greenrainbow

on Monday August 15, 2011 @12:37PM

greenrainbow writes: "According to scientists, there are mussels at the bottom of the ocean that are efficiently converting hydrogen into energy in their very own, nature-made hydrogen fuel cells. The mussels were found near hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor and have onboard symbiotic bacteria that convert hydrogen into energy. With this discovery, researchers might be able to clone the hydrogen eating bacteria to create all-natural hydrogen fuel cells to power things other than sea life."

Submission + - Music Copyright War Looming (nytimes.com)

Submitted by quarterbuck on Monday August 15, 2011 @11:19AM

quarterbuck writes: When copyright law was revised in the mid-1970s, musicians, like creators of other works of art, were granted “termination rights,” which allow them to regain control of their work after 35 years, so long as they apply at least two years in advance. Recordings from 1978 are the first to fall under the purview of the law, but in a matter of months, hits from 1979, like “The Long Run” by the Eagles and “Bad Girls” by Donna Summer, will be in the same situation

Comment Twenty Percent, huh? (Score -1) 56

by Zazi on Thursday April 28, 2011 @03:35AM (#35960652) Attached to: Report Critical of FBI Cybercrime-Fighting Ability

So twenty percent (and not even that) indicates the FBI's competence at cyber crime? Right. TFA should come up with a more realistic conclusion.

Comment It's a simple matter of cost... (Score -1) 665

by Zazi on Monday March 21, 2011 @10:23AM (#35558910) Attached to: Why Doesn't Every Website Use HTTPS?

The simple answer is it is just too costly in some environments to do so, and I'm not talking about SSL Certs, which are arguably pretty cheap.

With using HTTPS for everything, you need that much more processing power to encrypt and decrypt all traffic. That needed processing power has to come from somewhere, and that is going to be more hardware, which in turn says a lot more money is needed for security.

Sure, you can minimize the cost a bit by using SSL gateways, but those can get quite expensive as well, especially in larger web environments like Facebook, Twitter, etc.

Don't get me wrong here -- I would love to see every site using HTTPS (and some of the major ones do offer the option like Facebook), but the cost of implementing a solution like this can be prohibitively expensive.

Submission + - Copyright Wiretaps are Hollywood's "PATRIOT (arstechnica.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 18, 2011 @03:07AM

An anonymous reader writes: Ars is reporting that the CCIA is calling the copyright wiretaps requested by the IP Czar 'Hollywood's PATRIOT Act'. For those who don't remember, IP Czar Victoria Espinel recently wrote a report calling for more charges of felony copyright infringement under the NET Act, as well as felony charges for illegal web streaming, authorization for the use of wiretaps in going after copyright infringement cases, and several other measures. In short, this means that the copyright cops are coming online.

Comment This is easy (Score -1) 450

by Zazi on Wednesday December 29, 2010 @03:12AM (#34695976) Attached to: Thin Client, Or Fat Client? That Is the Question

Most of my users are developers. We use VMWare for a majority of our systems, including development environments. Most of my users have one or two laptops, however, they develop inside VMs with all their development tools installed. The question of thin or thick clients isn't really an issue for us, because it doesn't matter. As long as our developers can access their VMs via RDP or SSH, then they're good. Our support personnel are the same way. They can generate a client's entire environment through some of VMWare's solutions, and control it all from their laptop, desktop, or hell their phone if they really wanted to.

I guess my point is, is that for a development environment, what you use to access your virtualized development environment, the medium to access it (laptop, desktop, ipad, etc.) doesn't matter, just as long as you can access the VM and do your work on it.

Operation Payback and Hactivism 101 423

Posted by CmdrTaco on Monday December 13, 2010 @10:50AM from the tread-softly dept.

Orome1 writes "While individual acts of hacktivism are inconvenient, something else happens when hacktivists group together — they commonly perform a DDoS attack. Techniques have advanced to automate the process, making the attacks more powerful and thus more able to bypass security controls — the effect, however, remains the same. Let us take a look at the recent Operation Payback which has gained notoriety in the past few months."

IT Worker's Revenge Lands Her In Jail 347

Posted by samzenpus on Friday December 10, 2010 @02:19PM from the bad-idea dept.

aesoteric writes "A 30-year-old IT worker at a Florida-based health centre was this week sentenced to 19 months in a US federal prison for hacking, and then locking, her former employer's IT systems. Four days after being fired from the Suncoast Community Health Centers' for insubordination, Patricia Marie Fowler exacter her revenge by hacking the centre's systems, deleting files, changing passwords, removing access to infrastructure systems, and tampering with pay and accrued leave rates of staff."

The First Truly Honest Privacy Policy 119

Posted by CmdrTaco on Thursday December 09, 2010 @01:48PM from the honesty-is-the-best-policy dept.

itwbennett writes "You want to know what really happens to your data? Dan Tynan has penned the first completely honest privacy policy — surprisingly free of legalese. We dare you to use it on your website."

Tofu Activists Spoof Meat-Based Indie Game 420

Posted by Soulskill on Thursday December 02, 2010 @04:56AM from the have-a-burger-to-celebrate dept.

Faulkner39 writes "In response to the recently released independently developed platformer Super Meat Boy, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) has released a Flash-based spoof game titled Super Tofu Boy. The spoof attempts to mirror the original by featuring a protagonist made of tofu and an antagonist made of meat in a statement promoting animal rights. Ironically, however, the original game is about a human boy who is vulnerable because he lacks skin (Meat Boy), raising the question: 'is the spoof in reality really about cannibalism?'" The Super Meat Boy team posted a response on their Twitter feed.

Fermilab To Test Holographic Universe Theory 166

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday October 21, 2010 @07:57AM from the getting-some-answers dept.

eldavojohn writes "Scientists at Fermilab have decided that it's high time they build a 'holometer' to test the smoothness of space-time. Theoretical physicists like Stephen Hawking have proposed that space-time is not smooth but it's been a lot of math and no actual data. The Fermilab team plans to build two relatively small devices that act as 'holographic interferometers' to measure the shaking or vibration in split beams of light traveling through a vacuum. If the team finds the shaking in their measurements and records them, the theory of a holographic universe will have some evidence of non-smoothness in space-time and perhaps a foothold in bringing light to the heavily debated theoretical physics."