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Comment firehol (Score 3, Interesting) 187

by demerson3 (#46672101) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: User-Friendly Firewall For a Brand-New Linux User?
I'm a little surprised nobody has mentioned firehol - http://firehol.org/. I've been using it for my simple needs, and it is fabulous. Easy to learn, simple language, great results, and CLI-friendly. (Prior to discovering it, I used guarddog, which I found to be good but which isn't anywhere near as good as firehol.) From the firehol page: FireHOL is an iptables firewall generator producing stateful iptables packet filtering firewalls, on Linux hosts and routers with any number of network interfaces, any number of routes, any number of services served, any number of complexity between variations of the services (including positive and negative expressions).
China

Submission + - Where Next Generation Rare Earth Metals May Come From (theatlantic.com)

Submitted by
retroworks
retroworks writes: "Great piece in The Atlantic by Kyle Wiens of IFIXIT.org, who visited and photographed the Molycorp Mountain Pass rare earth facility in California's Mojave Desert. The mine is the only source of rare earths in North America, one of the only alternatives to the mineral cartels in China, and one of the only sources for the key metals such as tantalum needed in cell phones. There is of course actually one other source of rare earth metals in the USA — recycled cell phones. Is the best "state of the art" mining as good as the worst state of the art recycling? If the US Department of Energy subsidizes the mine, will China open the floodgates and put it out of business? Or will electronics be manufactured with alternative materials before the mine ever becomes fully scaleable?
       "

Comment a simple policy for a simple situation... (Score 5, Interesting) 332

by demerson3 (#38711938) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Setting Up a Wireless Catch-and-Release
At my church we have a pretty simple policy: the network is protected with WPA2 encryption, it has an easy-to-remember password, and we give it to everyone who needs it. Make sure staff knows not to tell the password to your basketball guests, etc. We change the password about once a year, and let the new password spread organically. It works pretty well. People in the congregation ask each other for the password (or more likely, ask someone whom they know is on the tech-savvy side) and so those who need it are able to get back on. Another thing that you can do is give the network an essid name like "Sunday School Only" -- that will make your guests less likely to try to gain access, and also the Sunday School patrons will know that they should feel free to ask for the password.

Comment ditch the email reports (Score 1) 2

by demerson3 (#38365614) Attached to: How to get non-developers to send meaningful bug r
Having worked professionally in QA, I know how to write a good bug report. But it's not obvious to average Joe. You really have to hold their hand and ask them questions-- you know this. The key is to have a template for them to fill out that invites them to answer the most relevant questions up-front. This is never going to happen if they are writing a free-form email. You've got to get them to fill out a form, probably in a web browser. A good example of such a form is here: https://bugs.opera.com/wizarddesktop/ (I might suggest adding "complaint" and "feature request" to the list of kinds of problems)
Piracy

Submission + - Sony, Universal, Fox caught pirating TV, movies, m (extremetech.com)

Submitted by Bad_Feeling
Bad_Feeling writes: Ernesto, the piratical kingpin of TorrentFreak, has discovered that US movie and TV studios, including Sony Pictures, Fox Entertainment, and NBC Universal, are eager pirates as well. Sony employees were caught downloading dubstep music and a rip of Conan the Barbarian. Someone at the NBC Universal office in Fort Lauderdale downloaded the entirety of Game of Thrones season one. If the problem of piracy has taken root within the walls of the publishers and producers, suing hapless consumers seems stupendously hypocritical.
Programming

Submission + - The Rise of Git (infoworld.com)

Submitted by
snydeq
snydeq writes: "InfoWorld takes a look at the rise of Git, the use of which has increased sixfold in the past three years. Buoyed in large part by interest among the Ruby community and younger developers, Git has been gaining share for open source development largely because of its distributed architecture, analysts note. And the version control system stands to gain further traction on Subversion in the years ahead, as Eclipse is making Git its preferred version control system, a move inspired by developers and members."
Idle

Submission + - Crowdsourcing ancient Egyptian scrolls (zooniverse.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Dons at Oxford University were on the BBC Radio 4 'Today' programme this morning asking for help from listeners to transcribe unearthed ancient Egyptian texts and scrolls via their website. Visitors to the site are asked to match-up letters on scanned fragments of papyrus with an on-screen Greek alphabet. By doing so, they can help reveal some of the amazing documents that the ancient Egyptians last read. You too can become a papyrologist!
Crime

Submission + - 8GB of Data Stolen From Italian Cybercrime Unit (net-security.org)

Submitted by Orome1
Orome1 writes: Evidence servers of the Italian National Anti-Cybercrime Center for the Protection of Critical Infrastructure (CNAIPIC) have been breached and some its contents published by a group of hackers calling themselves "Legion of Anonymous Doom", who apparently got on board the AntiSec campaign. The group has made clear that its sitting on around eight GB of stolen data and that it plans to release it all.

Submission + - Verizon Wireless to issue $90 Million in refunds (tekgoblin.com)

Submitted by tekgoblin
tekgoblin writes: Verizon Wireless had somehow been charging customers extra money on their bills for data that they actually hadn't been using. Approximately 15 million customers were affected by the erroneous billing error. According to BGR the FCC had been pressuring Verizon to resp0nd to the hundreds of complaints that had been piling up. So Verizon's answer was to refund all of the overcharged money as soon as possible.

Submission + - FSF 25 years October 3, 1985 (wikipedia.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: 25 years of the Free Software Foundation. On this day, 25 years ago, Richard Stallman created the Free Software Foundation. He had been the director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Artificial Intelligence Lab. Tired of seeing software that he and others had written appropriated (without acknowledgement or compensation) by disreputable software companies and then told to pay for software they had written, Stallman took action, creating the foundation. The original license was written by Stallman. Stallman had subsequently written a large number of GNU tools, but the license was his most important contribution.
Space

Submission + - Brooklyn Father, Son Launch Homemade Spacecraft (wpix.com)

Submitted by Adair
Adair writes: A father and son team from Brooklyn successfully launched a homemade spacecraft nearly 19 miles (around 100,000 feet) above the Earth's surface. The craft was a 19-inch helium-filled weather balloon attached to a Styrofoam capsule that housed an HD video camera and an iPhone. The camera recorded video of its ascent into the stratosphere, its apogee where the balloon reached its breaking point, and its descent back to earth. They rigged a parachute to the capsule to aid in its return to Earth, and the iPhone broadcast its GPS coordinates so they could track it down. The craft landed a mere 30 miles from its launch point in Newburgh, NY, due to a quick ascent and two differing wind patterns. The pair spent 8 months researching and test-flying the craft before launching it in August. Columbia University Professor of Astronomy Marcel Aguera said, "They were very good but also very lucky."
Education

Submission + - IBM High School to Churn Out IT Pros 2

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: This week, NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg announced that the City University of New York and IBM are creating a computer science-focused school in the city that will span grades 9-14 (students leave with an associate's degree). Graduates who pass muster will reportedly be first in line for jobs at IBM. 'The idea is to create a new [educational] model for science, technology, engineering, and math -areas where companies are aggressively hiring,' explained IBM's Stanley Litow.' If you look at hiring requirements, you won't see a huge amount of difference in a lot of entry-level IT jobs.' No word yet on the school colors or whether a uniform will be required. IBM is giving the city $250,000 to create the school, which might have looked pretty generous if that Zuckerberg kid hadn't upped the ante with his $100,000,000 donation.

Submission + - Bittorrent to Replace Standard Downloads?

Submitted by
Max Sayre
Max Sayre writes: "Have you ever tried to download an operating system update only to have it fail and have to start all over? What about patches for your favorite games? World of Warcraft already uses Bittorrent technology as a way to distribute large amounts of content at a lower cost to the company and faster speeds to all of their clients. Torrents are totally in these days. So why haven't they replaced the standard downloading options built into any major OS? No more anxious waiting as download speeds begin to drop... 95% done and you can update all of those servers, 96% or play your current gaming addiction, only to have the connection drop, download die, or power go out. Who knows? Companies like Opera are including the downloading of torrents in their products already and extensions have been written for Firefox to download torrents in-browser. Every day Bittorrent traffic is growing. So why do we insist on prolonging user suffering with these failed downloads? In many countries bandwidth is still at a premium and capped usage limits apply to everyone. Replacing the standard 'download' function in all the major operating systems with default torrenting functionality would see an end to a plague some feel are a punishment worse than death. Failed downloads would no longer be a risk where bandwidth is scarce.

Sites like OpenBittorrent already exist and DHT doesn't even require a tracker. So why isn't everyone doing it? Is it finally time to see all downloads replaced with Bittorrent?"
Microsoft

Submission + - 66% Of All Windows Users Still Use Windows XP (conceivablytech.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Almost one year after the introduction of Windows 7 it appears that the hype surrounding the operating has faded. The overall market share of Windows has turned into a slight decline again. Windows 7 is gaining share, but cannot keep pace with the loss of Windows XP and Vista. Especially Windows XP users seem to be happy with what they have and appear to be rather resistant to Microsoft’s pitches that it is time to upgrade to Windows 7.

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