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Comment Re:Ah (Score 1) 259

by isham (#52105509) Attached to: Government Spy Truck Is Disguised As A Google Street View Car

Massachusetts used to have a green series of license plates a couple of decades ago that consisted of solely a rear plate. They are no longer issued, having been replaced by the red plates that have front and back plates. The green plates are held on to by those that still have them, for various reasons such as not destroying the looks or aerodynamics at the front of the car.

    There have been several stories alleging that the RMV has "informally" informed the inspectors at the state inspection stations to begin failing cars with the green rear-only plates to force them to "update" to the red front and back plates. Usually they claim it is for lack of readability. Given the age of the plates, sometimes they are hard to read, but often they are quite readable, but are failed anyway.
Security

Cyberlock Lawyers Threaten Security Researcher Over Vulnerability Disclosure 87

Posted by Soulskill from the what-year-is-this dept.
qubezz writes: Security researcher Phar (Mike Davis/IOActive) gave his 30 days of disclosure notice to Cyberlock (apparently a company that makes electronic lock cylinders) that he would release a public advisory on vulnerabilities he found with the company's security devices. On day 29, their lawyers responded with a request to refrain, feigning ignorance of the previous notice, and invoking mention of the DMCA (this is not actually a DMCA takedown notice, as the law firm is attempting to suppress initial disclosure through legal wrangling). Mike's blog states: "The previous DMCA threats are from a company called Cyberlock, I had planned to do a fun little blog post (cause i ... hate blog posts) on the fun of how I obtained one, extracted the firmware bypassing the code protection and figured out its "encryption" and did various other fun things a lock shouldn't do for what its marketed as.. But before I could write that post I needed to let them know what issues we have deemed weaknesses in their gear.. the below axe grinderery is the results. (sic)" What should researchers do when companies make baseless legal threats to maintain their security-through-obscurity? Related: Bitcoin exchange company Coinbase has been accused of spying on a dark net researcher.
China

China Third Country To Be Hit By 'Brown Tide' 129

Posted by timothy from the can-we-find-a-way-to-make-it-edible dept.
ananyo writes "The species of alga that causes 'brown tides' in the United States and South Africa is also to blame for massive blooms along China's east coast on the Bohai Sea, researchers have found. The finding could be the first step to tackling the problem. It is the fourth consecutive year the country has been hit by the bloom (Slashdot's story on the 2010 bloom), with the situation worsening each time the bloom returns."
Cellphones

Nokia Fears Carriers May Try To Undermine N900 307

Posted by Soulskill from the but-the-carriers-are-usually-so-helpful dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Nokia is worried that networks may reject selling the N900 because it won't allow them to mess with the operating system. Nokia has previously showed the N900 running a root shell and it appears to use the same interface for IM and phone functions. Meanwhile, Verizon is claiming that 'exclusivity arrangements promote competition and innovation.' Is it too late to explain to people why $99+$60/month is not better than $600+$20/month?"
Programming

Best Practice For Retiring RSS Feeds? 71

Posted by timothy from the cleaning-up-in-advance dept.
GBJ writes "I work for an organisation that runs seasonal online competition events. Each event has its own news feed which becomes obsolete shortly after the event finishes. We're still getting RSS requests for some events as far back as 2004. I'd like to close a few thousand old feeds and remove the resource hit they cause, but I'm not sure what is the best approach. Currently I'm considering just returning a 404, but I have no idea if there is a better way to handle this. Uncle Google hasn't turned anything up yet, but sometimes it's hard to find something when you don't know what it's called ..."

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