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Comment Re:This has already been done - Aquamacs (Score 1) 153

I don't really think a better GUI will help adoption. What would help is a drive to have really top notch IDE integration with the most popular IDEs, such that you could easily switch back and forth between the IDE and Emacs.

It's fairly easy to be able to open a file in emacs from IDEs by setting up emacs server mode and calling emacsclient from the IDE, I have that set up for Visual Studio and Eclipse. It would be nice if it were easy to go the other way, but I haven't found any way to tell either VS or Eclipse to open a file from the command line.
Data Storage

Thanks For the Memories: Touring the Awesome Random Access of Old (hackaday.com) 89

Posted by timothy from the tanks-would-work-just-as-well dept.
szczys writes: The RAM we use today is truly amazing in all respects: performance, reliability, price; all have been optimized to the point you can consider memory a solved problem. Equally fascinating is the meandering path that we've taken over the last half century to get here. Drums, tubes, mercury delay lines, dekatrons, and core memory. They're still as interesting as the day electrons first ran through their circuits. Perhaps most amazing is the cost and complexity, both of which make you wonder how they ever manage to be used in production machines. But here's the clincher: despite being difficult and costly to manufacture, they were all very reliable.
Chrome

eFast Malware Hijacks Browser With Chrome Clone (malwarebytes.org) 183

Posted by timothy from the but-it-looked-right dept.
An anonymous reader writes with a report at The Stack that: eFast Browser, a new malicious adware which disguises itself as Google Chrome, has hijacked internet users' systems in an apparent effort to serve its own ads and harvest user activity to sell to third-party advertisers. It is able to mirror the aesthetics of Chrome as it uses the same source code, available across the open-source project Chromium. Once installed, eFast places ads across existing web pages, linking to third-party e-commerce sites or other malicious platforms.
Crime

University Employees Suspended Due To Guest Worker Scandal 209

Posted by samzenpus from the was-that-wrong? dept.
sethstorm writes: By sponsoring employees for use at an IT staffing firm, Wright State University may have broken new ground in guest worker fraud. According to the Dayton Daily News, 19 individuals were sponsored by the university yet ended up working for WebYoga, a firm controlled by (now-suspended) top Wright State officials. They also cited Wright State's exemptions regarding prevailing wage law and H1-b limits as attractive qualities. This has implications not only for the existing workforce, but to students that see the university putting its own staff ahead of them.

Submission + - Emergency Adobe Flash Patch Fixes Zero Day Under Attack (threatpost.com)

Submitted by msm1267
msm1267 writes: Adobe released an emergency patch for a Flash zero day used in targeted attacks by APT3, the same group behind 2014’s Clandestine Fox attacks.

Adobe said Flash Player 18.0.0.161 and earlier for Windows and Macintosh systems are affected, as is 11.2.202.466 for Linux 11.x versions.

The current iteration of Clandestine Fox attacks shares many traits with last year’s attacks, including generic, almost spam-like phishing emails intent on snaring as many victims as possible that can be analyzed for their value before additional attacks are carried out. The two campaigns also share the same custom backdoor called SHOTPUT, as well as an insistence on using a throwaway command and control infrastructure.

Submission + - HP Researchers Disclose Details of Internet Explorer Zero Day

Submitted by Trailrunner7
Trailrunner7 writes: Researchers at HP’s Zero Day Initiative have disclosed full details and proof-of-concept exploit code for a series of bugs they discovered that allow attackers to bypass a key exploit mitigation in Internet Explorer. The disclosure is a rarity for ZDI. The company typically does not publish complete details and exploit code for the bugs it reports to vendors until after the vulnerabilities are fixed. But in this case, Microsoft has told the researchers that the company doesn’t plan to fix the vulnerabilities, even though the bugs were serous enough to win ZDI’s team a $125,000 Blue Hat Bonus from Microsoft. The reason: Microsoft doesn’t think the vulnerabilities affect enough users.

The vulnerabilities that the ZDI researchers submitted to Microsoft enable an attacker to fully bypass ASLR (address space layout randomization), one of the many mitigations in IE that help prevent successful exploitation of certain classes of bugs. ZDI reported the bugs to Microsoft last year and disclosed some limited details of them in February. The researchers waited to release the full details until Microsoft fixed all of the flaws, but Microsoft later informed them that they didn’t plan to patch the remaining bugs because they didn’t affect 64-bit systems.

Submission + - Is C++ The Right Tool? 8

Submitted by ranton
ranton writes: I am about to start a personal project which I believe should be done in C/C++. The main reasons I have for this are the needs to manage memory usage and disk access at a very granular level and a desire to be cross-platform. Performance is also important but I am unlikely to spend enough time optimizing to be much faster than core libraries of higher level languages.

On the other hand, network access is also a critical part of the project and I am worried about the effort it takes to make cross platform code for both network and disk access. I have been working in the Java / C# world for the past decade and things like TCP/IP and SSL have just been done for me by core libraries. Do libraries like Boost or Asio do a good job of abstracting these aspects away? Or are there other options for doing granular memory and disk management with more high level languages that have better cross-platform library support? I am willing to brush up on my C/C++ skills if necessary but want to spend as much time as possible developing the unique and potentially innovative parts of my project. Thanks for any advice you can provide.
Spam

The Spamming Refrigerator 90

Posted by timothy from the silly-rabbit-spam-is-for-cans dept.
puddingebola writes "The 'Internet of Things' is as susceptible to malware and spam as the rest of the net. From the article, 'A fridge has been discovered sending out spam after a web attack managed to compromise smart gadgets...The spam attack took place between 23 December 2013 and 6 January this year, said Proofpoint in a statement. In total, it said, about 750,000 messages were sent as part of the junk mail campaign. The emails were routed through the compromised gadgets. About 25% of the messages seen by Proofpoint researchers did not pass through laptops, desktops or smartphones, it said.' Read Proofpoint's statement here."
Power

Submission + - iCloud Powered by Landfill-Fueled Bloom Boxes (datacenterknowledge.com) 1

Submitted by 1sockchuck
1sockchuck writes: Apple's North Carolina data center will tap landfills for biogas, which will then be converted into electricity using fuel cells from Bloom Energy. The 24 "Bloom boxes" will have a capacity of 4.8 megawatts of power, and along with a large solar array, will provide Apple with a significant on-site generation of sustainable energy. Microsoft is also developing biogas-powered data plants where modular data centers will be housed near water treatment plants and landfills. GigaOm has a useful primer on biogas in data centers, as well as video of the new higher capacity Bloom boxes that will support Apple's server farm.

Comment Re:Treewalk or OpenDNS (Score 1) 352

by kfhickel (#28963443) Attached to: Comcast the Latest ISP To Try DNS Hijacking

Sorry to pour water on your flame, but....
OpenDNS *used to* have this problem..... I tried them originally and this was a non-started for me because of a VPN situation.

However, I recently tried it again, and they've added a feature to deal with this, you put in the domain for which you want them to return a failure (essentially), and it does! "Viola"....
Medicine

Daily Sex Helps Improve Fertility 174

Posted by samzenpus from the use-it-or-lose-it dept.
mmmscience writes "While fertility studies lately seem to have been exclusively focused on in vitro fertilization [IVF], new data coming out of Australia may help with unaided successful conceptions. The study has found that men who have ejaculate daily produce sperm with less damaged DNA. While such actions decrease sperm concentration, it does increase motility, meaning healthier sperm have a better chance of making it all the way to the egg. Good news, as another report has found severe chromosome abnormalities in over 90% of IVF eggs, meaning artificial insemination is just now discovering a whole new field of problems."
NASA

NASA Requests Help With Von Braun's Notes 148

Posted by CmdrTaco from the yes-actually-it-is-rocket-science dept.
DynaSoar writes "NASA is soliciting ideas from the public on how best to catalog and digitize the collected notes of Wernher von Braun. 'We're looking for creative ways to get it out to the public,' said project manager Jason Crusan. 'We don't always do the best with putting out large sets of data like this.' The PDF notes are those of rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, the first director of NASA's Marshall Spaceflight Center in Huntsville, Alabama and are typed with copious handwritten notes in the margin. According to the official request for information, NASA needs ideas on what format to use (PDF), how to index the notes, and how to create a useful database. The unique nature and historical value of the data, literally discovered in boxes six months ago, is what motivated NASA to ask the public for ideas."

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