andrewpmk - Slashdot User

Submission + - Card-sniffing malware on Diebold ATMs (goodgearguide.com.au)

Submitted by

angry tapir

on Tuesday March 17, 2009 @08:52PM

angry tapir writes: "Diebold has released a security fix for its Opteva automated teller machines after cyber criminals apparently broke into the systems at one or more businesses in Russia and installed malicious software. Diebold learned of the incident in January and sent out a global security update to its ATM customers using the Windows operating system. It is not releasing full details of what happened, including which businesses were affected, but said criminals had gained physical access to the machines to install their malicious program."

Submission + - Does Auto Safety Tech Encourage Dangerous Driving? (popularmechanics.com)

Submitted by

longacre

on Tuesday March 17, 2009 @01:45PM

longacre writes: "Modern highway planning schemes designed to make roads safer combined with the comfort and safety technology found in the modern automobile may actually be putting us in danger, according to a compelling piece by Glenn Reynolds. Citing studies and anecdotal evidence, Reynolds makes the case that a driver on a narrow mountain road will probably drive as if their life depends on it, but the same driver on an eight lane freeway with gradual curves and little traffic may be lulled into speeding while chatting on his cellphone. From the article: "Modern cars are quiet, powerful and capable of astonishing grip in curves, even on wet pavement. That's swell, of course, until you suddenly lose traction at 75 mph. The sense of confidence bred by all this capability makes us feel safe, which causes us to drive faster than we probably should. We don't want to make cars with poor response, but perhaps we could design cues — steering-wheel vibration devices, as in video games? — that make us feel less safe at speed and encourage more care. Designers could make cars feel faster at lower speeds, instead of slower at higher speeds. Done right, this might even make driving more fun. In college I drove an Austin-Healey 3000 that somehow felt faster at 45 mph than my Mazda RX-8 (or even my Toyota Highlander Hybrid) feels at 75 mph. That was a good thing.""

Submission + - Wikileaks pages banned in Australia (wikileaks.org) 1

Submitted by

cpudney

on Tuesday March 17, 2009 @12:10AM

cpudney writes: "The Sydney Morning Herald reports that the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) has added several Wikileaks pages to its controversial blacklist. The blacklisted pages contain Denmark's list of banned websites. Simply linking to addresses in ACMA's blacklist attracts an $11,000 per-day fine as the hosts of the popular Australian broadband forum, Whirlpool, discovered last week when they published a forum post that linked to an anti-abortion web-site recently added to ACMA's blacklist. The blacklist is secret, immune to FOI requests and forms the basis of the Australian government's proposed mandatory ISP-level Internet censorship legislation. Wikileaks' response to notification of the blacklisting states: "The first rule of censorship is that you cannot talk about censorship.""

Comment Submitted to change.gov (Score 3, Interesting) 589

by andrewpmk on Saturday January 17, 2009 @07:10PM (#26501137) Attached to: MS Silverlight To Stream Obama Inauguration Events

http://citizensbriefingbook.change.gov/ideas/viewIdea.apexp?id=087800000005BUn

Online Collaboration Creates 'Map-Making For the Masses' 61

Posted by Zonk on Monday December 31, 2007 @07:22AM from the many-hands-make-light-work dept.

The Science Daily site has up a piece on the effect user-generated content can have on map-making. Scientists are appreciative of the data enthusiastic mappers can provide, updating maps on changes in local geographic information. "Goodchild's paper looks at volunteered geographic information as a special case of the more general Web phenomenon of user-generated content. It covers what motivates large numbers of individuals (often with little formal qualifications) to take part, what technology allows them to do so, how accurate the results are and what volunteered geographic information can add to more conventional sources of such information."

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