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Security

Researchers Discover 110 Snooping Tor Nodes (helpnetsecurity.com) 45

Posted by msmash from the security-woes dept.
Reader Orome1 writes: In a period spanning 72 days, two researchers from Northeastern University have discovered at least 110 "misbehaving" and potentially malicious hidden services directories (HSDirs) on the Tor anonymity network. "Tor's security and anonymity is based on the assumption that the large majority of its relays are honest and do not misbehave. Particularly the privacy of the hidden services is dependent on the honest operation of hidden services directories (HSDirs)," Professor Guevara Noubir and Ph.D. student Amirali Sanatinia explained. "Bad" HSDirs can be used for a variety of attacks on hidden services: from DoS attacks to snooping on them.
The Courts

President Obama Should Pardon Edward Snowden Before Leaving Office (theverge.com) 383

Posted by BeauHD from the right-thing-to-do dept.
An anonymous reader writes from a report via The Verge: Ever since Edward Snowden set in motion the most powerful public act of whistleblowing in U.S. history, he has been living in exile in Russia from the United States. An article in this week's New York Magazine looks at how Snowden may have a narrow window of opportunity where President Obama could pardon him before he leaves office. Presumably, once he leaves office, the chances of Snowden being pardoned by Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump are miniscule. Obama has said nothing in the past few years to suggest he's interested in pardoning Snowden. Not only would it contradict his national security policy, but it will severely alienate the intelligence community for many years to come. With that said, anyone who values a free and secure internet believes pardoning Snowden would be the right thing to do. The Verge reports: "[Snowden] faces charges under the Espionage Act, which makes no distinction between delivering classified files to journalists and delivering the same files to a foreign power. For the first 80 years of its life, it was used almost entirely to prosecute spies. The president has prosecuted more whistleblowers under the Espionage Act than all president before him combined. His Justice Department has vastly expanded the scope of the law, turning it from a weapon against the nation's enemies to one that's pointed against its own citizens. The result will be less scrutiny of the nation's most powerful agencies, and fewer forces to keep them in check. With Snowden's push for clemency, the president has a chance to complicate that legacy and begin to undo it. It's the last chance we'll have."
Movies

You Are Still Watching a Staggering Amount Of TV Every Day (recode.net) 188

Posted by msmash from the love-hate-relationship-with-TV dept.
Peter Kafka, reporting for Recode:TV! It's cooked! Toast! Doneso. Ready for the fork. Except not yet, because Americans are still watching a ton of TV, every day. For some of them, it's the equivalent of a full-time job. The average American watches an astonishing 4.5 hours of TV a day, according to a new report from Nielsen. Add in DVR time, and that number gets up to 5 hours a day. That usage is shrinking over time -- a couple of years ago, Americans were averaging five hours and twenty-three minutes a day.Nielsen's data also shows that people are now consuming more content on their smartphone devices than ever. Compared to just 47 minutes usage in 2014, it is now up to one hour and 39 minutes.
Medicine

Scientists Grow Working Vocal Cord Tissue In the Lab (sciencemag.org) 25

Posted by samzenpus from the giving-a-voice dept.
sciencehabit writes that tissue engineers have for the first time grown vocal cords from human cells. Science reports: "For the first time, scientists have created vocal cord tissue starting with cells from human vocal cords. When tested in the lab, the bioengineered tissue vibrated—and even sounded—similar to the natural thing. The development could one day help those with severely damaged vocal cords regain their lost voices. 'It’s an exciting finding because those patients are the ones we have very few treatment options for,' says Jennifer Long, a voice doctor and scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, head and neck surgery department, who wasn’t involved in the study."
Government

Larry Lessig Reaches Funding Goal and Is Running For President 281

Posted by samzenpus from the going-to-washington dept.
LetterRip writes: Lessig has met his funding goal of one million dollars, and thus is committed to run for President. ABC reports: "After exceeding his $1 million crowd-funding goal, Harvard Law School professor Larry Lessig announced today on “This Week” that he is running for president. 'I think I'm running to get people to acknowledge the elephant in the room,' he told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos. 'We have to recognize -- we have a government that does not work. The stalemate, partisan platform of American politics in Washington right now doesn't work.'”

Comment I'm about to relocate inside Brazil (Score 2) 999

by asr_br (#40987459) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: What's the Best Place To Relocate?

I'm Brazilian and I started working from home recently. Since my wife and I don't like they city we're currently living in, we decided to do some research and find a city where we would like to move to (still inside Brazil). If you can read portuguese, you might find our announcement and the criteria we've used useful: https://plus.google.com/112051803418632798341/posts/BTDpsC9Enta

I have plenty of friends who moved from Europe to Brazil. If you're single, you'll probably enjoy it for quite some time, and you'll probably have fun no matter which part of the country you move to. If you have wife and/or kids, you should be extra extra careful when selecting a city or region to move to. Brazil is huge and the difference in quality of living vary a lot between the different regions. And pay attention: the poorest areas usually have the best offers in the tech field (mostly due to tax incentivies for the tech companies).

Good luck.

Comment Re:Creativity Killer (Score 1) 136

by asr_br (#40946793) Attached to: Scrum/Agile Now Used To Manage Non-Tech Projects

Working in the game industry i found that creativity was heavily hampered by scrum, even after doing several adjustments to the process.

I have a totally different experience (I was working in the mobile phone business, which is kind of similar to the game industry you mention). I worked for two major mobile phone companies "doing scrum" from 2006 to 2011. It took me years to finally see the beauty of scrum really working in my team, and then I realized one important thing:

You can't do agile unless you really want to do agile and make an honest effort to do it "by the book". You can't make compromises and expect it to be "magical". You start making compromises, it stops working, plain and simple. The reality of the industry today is that a lot of people claim to be doing agile, but then you look closely and this is what they tell you:

- I'm using my bug tracking tool, because boards and papers are superfluous
- I still have my project manager (PM) around, because that's the way the hierarchy works in the company
- I don't need a Product Owner, the PM can do its job
- I don't need a dedicated scrum master, we can rotate developers to "conduct meetings"
- Estimating in points doesn't make sense for us, so we use hours instead
- Tracking velocity is too abstract, it never works
- I don't have testing together with the development because my QA team is in China
- 3x4h meetings every sprint? WTF? You expect my whole team to spend 12h in meetings at every interaction?
- ...

You want to do agile? Fire the product managers, hire secretaries to be scrum masters (computer background is a plus, but they're below the developers in the hierarchy) and put a UI designer or customer to be the product owner. And don't expect it to work on a distributed team: UI Designers, Developers and QA should attend all of the core meetings and should all work together in the same room or building. And doing it right is *HARD*. It took my previous team 2-3 years to "get it", but the results were awesome. Now I work as an Engineering Manager for an opensource company, doing upstream development... I don't have any expectation of ever implementing agile/scrum in my team, because I know it won't work in this scenario.
Encryption

Move Over, Quantum Cryptography: Classical Physics Can Be Unbreakable Too 126

Posted by Soulskill from the in-this-house-we-obey-the-laws-of-thermodynamics dept.
MrSeb writes "Researchers from Texas A&M University claim to have pioneered unbreakable cryptography based on the laws of thermodynamics; classical physics, rather than quantum. In theory, quantum crypto (based on the laws of quantum mechanics) can guarantee the complete secrecy of transmitted messages: To spy upon a quantum-encrypted message would irrevocably change the content of the message, thus making the messages unbreakable. In practice, though, while the communication of the quantum-encrypted messages is secure, the machines on either end of the link can never be guaranteed to be flawless. According to Laszlo Kish and his team from Texas A&M, however, there is a way to build a completely secure end-to-end system — but instead of using quantum mechanics, you have to use classical physics: the second law of thermodynamics, to be exact. Kish's system is made up of a wire (the communication channel), and two resistors on each end (one representing binary 0, the other binary 1). Attached to the wire is a power source that has been treated with Johnson-Nyquist noise (thermal noise). Johnson noise is often the basis for creating random numbers with computer hardware."
Mars

NASA Rover May Contaminate Its Samples of Mars 147

Posted by Soulskill from the no-problem-just-launch-another-one dept.
sciencehabit writes "The Curiosity rover will definitely find evidence of an advanced civilization if it lands safely on Mars. That's because rock samples the rover drills are likely to be contaminated with bits of Teflon from the rover's machinery, NASA announced during a press teleconference. The bits of Teflon can then mix with the sample, which will be vaporized for analysis. The problem for the scientists is that Teflon is two-thirds carbon — the same element they are looking for on Mars." Fortunately, this problem isn't a showstopper: "...there are still mitigation steps to take if SAM's analysis is potentially compromised. Contaminant production appears to be stronger in the drill's percussion mode, when it pounds powerfully and rapidly on Martian rock. So ratcheting the percussion down, or switching over to the more gentle rotary mode, may make the issue more manageable. If that doesn't work, the MSL team could just take the drill out of commission, solely scooping soil instead of also boring into rock. Curiosity could still access the interior of some Martian rocks by rolling over them with its wheels, Grotzinger said. But all in all, he's confident that the team will figure things out in the next month or two."
Ubuntu

Ubuntu Will Soon Ship On 5% of New PCs 441

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the and-they-say-gnu-on-the-desktop-will-never-happen dept.
An anonymous reader writes with an excerpt from Phoronix: "Chris Kenyon, the VP of sales and business development for Canonical, just spoke this afternoon at the Ubuntu 12.10 Developer Summit about what Canonical does with OEMs and ODMs. He also tossed out some rather interesting numbers about the adoption of Ubuntu Linux. Namely, Ubuntu will ship on 5% of worldwide PC sales with a number of 18 million units annually."
Technology

Video Plantronics Helps Make Remote Workers' Lives Easier (Video) 233

Posted by Roblimo from the whatever-you-just-said-made-no-sense dept.
If you're working at home or from a coffee shop or, really, anyplace outside your company's offices, they need to hear you when you talk, and you need to hear them. The same goes for dealing with clients via VOIP or video, the two communications techologies that seem to be driving POTS into obsolescence faster than we thought possible just a few years ago. In this video, Plantronics PR person Karen Auby -- who works remotely most of the time herself -- explains how Plantronics products help make work easier in a world of "unified communications."
Android

HP CEO Says Google-Motorola Deal Could Close-Source Android 203

Posted by samzenpus from the yeah-well-that's-just-like-your-opinion-man dept.
swandives writes "WebOS could be an important player in the long run as an open-source mobile OS, because Android could become closed source with Google's purchase of Motorola Mobility, Hewlett-Packard CEO Meg Whitman said during a speech at the HP Global Partner conference in Las Vegas. It may take up to four years for the complete impact of webOS to be felt, Whitman said. HP has said it would release WebOS — originally developed by Palm for phones and tablets — to the open-source community. The company bought Palm in 2010 but late last year announced it will not make devices that use the software."
Biotech

DNA Test To Determine Kids' Sports Futures 240

Posted by timothy from the ok-let's-watch-gattaca-again dept.
bs0d3 writes "Parents are being sold on the idea of buying DNA tests for their kids, to find out which sports they will be better at. The company called Atlas is based in Boulder, Colorado; and is selling DNA tests for $160. They are looking for what's called the ACTN-three gene, the gene behind what is called 'fast-twitch explosive muscles.' Children that don't have ACTN-three will be better suited for endurance sports like long distance running or swimming. Children that have a lot of it will be better suited for sports like football, rugby, wrestling, or hockey. Kids that have some ACTN-three will not be the fastest and not the slowest, they don't burn out the quickest and they don't last the longest. They are categorized as capable of playing just about any type of sport they like."
First Person Shooters (Games)

An FPS Minus the Shooting 172

Posted by Soulskill from the are-you-a-cooper-or-a-geraldo dept.
phaedrus5001 writes "Ars has a story about a first person shooter under development that involves no shooting on the part of the player; at least, no shooting bullets. The game, Warco, has the player in the role of a war correspondent. The object is to immerse yourself in missions and firefights in order to document what happens. From the article: 'Players will experience the process of filming conflicts, going into dangerous situations armed with nothing but a camera. They will then edit the footage into a compelling news story.' While it's an interesting and different concept, it should be even more interesting to see if the developers can actually convince a publisher to release the project."
Google

Google To Honor "Don't-Track-Me-Bro" Requests 129

Posted by samzenpus from the stop-following-me dept.
theodp writes "Someday soon, Google will allow owners of Wi-Fi access points to opt out of a Google service that uses their data to determine the location of others' smartphones. The opt-out service will be available globally, although it was created at the instigation of European privacy regulators, Google Global Privacy Counsel Peter Fleischer explained in a blog post."

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