dukiebbtwin - Slashdot User

Phishers Defeat Citibank's 2-Factor Authentication 233

Posted by timothy on Tuesday July 11, 2006 @05:18AM from the time-is-of-the-essence dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Crypto experts and U.S. Government regulations (FFIEC) have been pushing the need for financial Web sites to move beyond mere passwords and implement so-called "two-factor authentication" — the second factor being something the user has in their physical possession like a token — as the answer to protecting customers from phishing attacks that use phony e-mails and bogus Web sites to trick users into forking over their personal and financial data. According to a Washington Post Blog, 'SecurityFix,' phishers have now started phishing for the two-factor token ID from the user as well. The most interesting part is that these tokens only give you one minute to log in to the bank until that key will expire. The phishers employ a man-in-the-middle attack against the victim and Citibank to log in via php and conduct money transfers immediately when logged in." (An update to the blog entry notes that the phishing site mentioned has since been shut down.)

Adware Spreads Through Myspace 209

Posted by timothy on Monday July 10, 2006 @09:57PM from the so-doesn't-that-make-it-really-ourspace? dept.

Sandbagger writes "Here's an interesting problem for MySpace — groups of websites that entice MySpace users into placing videos onto their profile pages (under the guise of 'free content'), without disclosing a key piece of information that might make them think twice. When someone visits one of these profiles carrying the video, a DRM acquisition box pops up and attempts to install Zango adware. In all likelihood, the profile owners don't even know these videos are doing this to their visitors. The end result is an Adware affiliate effectively removing himself from the distribution chain and letting kids promote these videos instead, in a strange example of viral marketing gone wrong."

Comment Play-Doh Resistors (Score 3, Interesting) 182

by dukiebbtwin on Thursday May 04, 2006 @03:02AM (#15260448) Attached to: The 50 Year History of Play-Doh

In my college physics lab we used play-doh as a resistor - figuring out how resistance changed with varying surface areas and the like. Also measured whether there were differences in resistance among different colors of play-doh. Needless to say the play-doh got pretty fried at the points where you connected it to the rest of the circuit. Of course the play-doh was used more for constructing artistic masterpieces than using it as a resistor!

Now, why am I paying 40,000 bucks a year for this :x :x :x I had my final earlier tonight too - that was rough - and no mention of play-doh resistors - in fact very little problems dealing with dc circuits at all, the only stuff I was really good at!

The 50 Year History of Play-Doh 182

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday May 03, 2006 @10:41PM from the fun-factory dept.

tanagra writes "50 years ago U.S. Patent No. 3,167,440 was granted to Noah McVicker and Joseph McVicker for a "plastic modeling composition", (which was originally intended to be a wallpaper cleaner) now called Play-Doh. Little did they know that they had created the substance of childhood memories as well as many a childhood meal, unfortunately. Play-Doh persists as one of the most well known and popular children's "toys". As you attempt to clean your children's Play-Doh out of the carpet, the car, and the bathtub; take a look back with us at how it all got started."

Software Lets Programmers Code Hands-free 261

Posted by CowboyNeal on Thursday April 27, 2006 @11:13PM from the look-ma-no-keys dept.

Yetihehe writes "New Scientist is reporting about a new speech recognition tool that promises to let programmers write clean code without ever having to lay a finger on their keyboard. 'The tool, called VoiceCode, has been developed to help programmers with repetitive strain injury (RSI). This is a common affliction for people who spend a lot of time using a keyboard or mouse and causes pain in muscles, tendons and nerves in a sufferer's arms and back. Some estimates suggest 22% of all US computer programmers, or 100,000 people, suffer from the condition.'"

Are National ID Cards a Good Idea? 746

Posted by Cliff on Thursday April 27, 2006 @07:50PM from the we-already-have-driver's-licenses-and-passports dept.

Dracophile asks: "The Sydney Morning Herald recently ran a front-page article about a 'smart card' to access government services and that it would double as a national identity card. The article points out that the current Prime Minister of Australia, John Howard, who fiercely opposed from opposition the Australia Card idea in 1985, is now a supporter. The article goes on to say that about 100 nations have some form of ID card. Is your country one of them? What concerns were raised? How were they addressed? Have welfare fraud and other identity-related crimes decreased? Have National ID cards improved or deteriorated conditions where you live?"

Leaving Early May Cost You Time 678

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Sunday April 23, 2006 @07:29PM from the time-for-a-telecommute dept.

markmcb writes "OmniNerd has an interesting traffic article demonstrating how leaving early for work may cost you time. Brandon Hansen uses a year's worth of data collected on his urban drive to and from work along with statistical analysis to show the effects of varying departure times and considering external factors like nearby school districts' schedules. In the end, a minor shift in his departure time results in saving driving hours equivalent to over a third of the vacation time given annually by his employer."

Self-Parking Cars Coming To U.S. 610

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday April 05, 2006 @12:16AM from the parking-is-hard dept.

Rio writes "Vehicles that are able to parallel park themselves while drivers sit and relax behind the wheel are coming to the United States, according to a Local 6 News report. New Toyota hybrid cars are now available in Britain with a $700 "parking assist" option. Local 6 news showed video of a driver sitting and allowing the car's steering wheel to turn on its own as it pulled into a tight parking spot on a London street. The reporter never touched the wheel as the car parked itself.Toyota says expect to see the technology pop up in the U.S. soon." Here is our previous coverage of their release in Japan.

How Hot Would a Light Saber Really Be? 410

Posted by Cliff on Saturday April 01, 2006 @01:45AM from the whizzz-vroom dept.

Datagod asks: "Has anyone ever calculated the temperature you would need to be able to slice through steel like it was thin air? How hot would a light saber really need to be? Also, I am assuming that at least some of the metal would be vaporized and the expanding gas would fling bits of molten metal at the saber wielder. Wouldn't your average Jedi be horribly scarred from all this."

SpaceX Successful Static Fire 122

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday March 23, 2006 @01:00AM from the to-infinity-and-beyond dept.

ron_ivi writes "SpaceX's website is announced that they had a " great static fire today" where their Falcon rocket successfully had 3 seconds of thrust. Nice pictures and video of the test; and if analysis shows all was well, they'll be launching Thursday."

GoDaddy.com Dumps Linux for Microsoft 445

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday March 22, 2006 @11:45PM from the say-it-aint-so dept.

RobertB-DC writes "Bargain-basement registrar GoDaddy.com has decided to move all its parked domains to Microsoft servers, saying that they'll provide 'a technology platform that is security-enhanced, highly scalable and easy to manage.' This is a shift away from Linux, a decision met with derision by other registrars such as Gandi.net, which greeted the news with the headline 'Go Daddy and never come back'. Late last year, GoDaddy.com had some 'issues', shall we say, with non-Microsoft browsers."

Debugging Expert Wins ACM Dissertation Award 83

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Tuesday March 21, 2006 @11:32PM from the just-a-programmer-with-a-really-big-shoe dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is reporting that Ben Liblit has been awarded the 2005 Doctoral Dissertation Award for his study on understanding and fixing software 'bugs' in the real world. From the article: 'Liblit's dissertation proposes a method for leveraging the key strength of user communities - their overwhelming numbers. His approach uses sparse random sampling rather than complete data collection for gathering information from the experiences of large numbers of software end users. It also simultaneously ensures that the observed data is an unbiased, representative subset of the complete program behavior across all runs.' Slashdot broke the story on this research back in 2003. Apparently the project is still going strong."

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