arcanehl - Slashdot User

Submission + - OpenBSD's Systrace broken by Cambridge researcher (lightbluetouchpaper.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 08, 2007 @03:40PM

An anonymous reader writes: University of Cambridge researcher Robert Watson has published a paper at the First USENIX Workshop On Offensive Technology (WOOT07) in which he describes serious vulnerabilities in OpenBSD's Systrace, Sudo, Sysjail, the TIS GSWTK framework, and CerbNG, and that the technique is also effective against many commercially available anti-virus systems. His slides include sample exploit code that bypasses access control, virtualization, and intrusion detection in under 20 lines of C code consisting solely of memcpy() and fork(). Sysjail has now withdrawn their software recommending against any use, and NetBSD has disabled Systrace by default in their upcoming release.

Submission + - BitTorrent Closes Source Code (slyck.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 08, 2007 @01:51PM

An anonymous reader writes: "There are two issues people need to come to grips with," BitTorrent CEO Ashwin Narvin told Slyck.com. "Developers who produce open source products will often have their product repackaged and redistributed by businesses with malicious intent. They repackage the software with spyware or charge for the product. We often receive phone calls from people who complain they have paid for the BitTorrent client." As for the protocol itself, that too is closed, but is available by obtaining an SDK license.

Submission + - Procedural Programming: The Secret behind Spore (bonafidereviews.com) 1

Submitted by

imashoe

on Saturday August 04, 2007 @05:08PM

imashoe writes: "Ever wonder how Spore works under the hood? The game seems to be insanely huge and how is it that there can be an infinite amount of different creates created in the game? The answer is Procedural Programming. Read on to learn what exactly it is and how it differs from the traditional way games are made."

Submission + - Dateline NBC Mole Caught at DefCon (wired.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 03, 2007 @06:31PM

An anonymous reader writes: Dateline NBC allegedly attempted to infiltrate the DefCon hackerfest with a producer using a hidden camera. The show allegedly hoped to tape hackers admitting to illegal activities, but DefCon got wind of the plot and displayed the would-be-mole's photo before every presentation. Dateline refused to deny the planned infiltration.

Submission + - The science of bridge collapse prevention (computerworld.com)

Submitted by

toddatcw

on Friday August 03, 2007 @05:54PM

toddatcw writes: "In the wake of the Minneapolis Interstate 35W bridge collapse this week, Computerworld investigates ongoing research that is underway even as the collapse occurred which could someday help to prevent future disasters. Acoustic emissions detection systems, which listen for the sounds of metal snapping on structures, already are being sold and fitted, while a new generation of detector systems that include sensors that monitor for tilting of bridge columns and piers are being designed, prototyped and researched. Get the scoop here."

Submission + - Newfound Planet Has Earth-Like Orbit (space.com)

Submitted by

Raver32

on Friday August 03, 2007 @12:12PM

Raver32 writes: "The new planet, spotted using the Hobby-Eberly Telescope at the McDonald Observatory in West Texas, circles its bloated parent star every 360 days and is located about 300 light-years away, in the constellation Perseus. The red giant star is twice as massive and about 10 times larger than the sun. Its planet is about the size of Jupiter or larger and was discovered using the so-called wobble technique, in which astronomers look for slight wiggles in a star's motion created by the gravitational tug of orbiting planets. The discovery could help astronomers understand what will happen to our sun's brood of planets when it exhausts its store of hydrogen fuel and its outer envelope begins to swell. When that happens in an estimated 5 billion years, our sun will be so big that it will engulf the inner planets and most likely Earth. But long before that happens, life on our planet will have perished and its seas will have boiled away."

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