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Submission + - Under New Management (bizx.info)

Submitted by kodiaktau
kodiaktau writes: DHI Group, Inc. (NYSE: DHX), today announced that it completed the sale of its Slashdot and SourceForge businesses (together referred to as "Slashdot Media") to BIZX, LLC in a transaction that closed on January 27, 2016. Financial terms were not disclosed.

DHI first announced its plan to sell Slashdot Media in July 2015 as part of its strategy to focus on its core brands, as Slashdot Media no longer fits within the Company's core strategic initiatives.

KeyBanc Capital Markets Inc. served as the Company's exclusive financial advisor for the transaction.

Submission + - Attackers Use Microsoft Office To Push BlackEnergy Malware (csoonline.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: Researchers at SentinelOne reverse engineered the latest variant of the BlackEnergy 3 rootkit (the same malware used in recent attacks against Ukraine's critical infrastructure) and found indicators that suggest it is being used by insiders and that it is the byproduct of a nation-sponsored campaign. 'BlackEnergy 3 exploits an Office 2013 vulnerability that was patched some time ago, so it only works if the target machine isn't patched or an employee (either deliberately or after being tricked into it) executes the malicious Excel document,' writes CSO's Steve Ragan.

Submission + - The Lone Gunmen are not dead (comicbook.com)

Submitted by He Who Has No Name
He Who Has No Name writes: It may have been one of Slashdot's most memorable front-page gaffes, but apparently there's no harm and no foul — because the Lone Gunmen are set to ride again in the X-Files return. Comicbook.com reports, "The Lone Gunmen, the X-Files' trio of conspiracy theorists, are set to appear in Fox’s six-episode event. The three characters were played by Tom Braidwood, Dean Haglund, and Bruce Harwood. Haglund, who played the gunman “Ringo,” confirmed his and his compatriots’ return on Twitter today." We'll see how see how series creator Chris Carter handles their apparently greatly-exaggerated demise, and whether the explanation used in the print comics comes into play.

Submission + - Skype Translate has a filthy mouth

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Skype Translate was supposed to be Microsoft's attempt at the "Star Trek" universal translator, offering real-time voice and text translation. It launched with one of the most challenging of languages, Chinese. And apparently, thanks to the Great Firewall, it has its problems. An American expat using it in China said 'It's nice to talk to you' was translated as 'It's f*cking nice to f*ck you,' and other synthesized profanity.

Submission + - Belgian government phishing test goes off-track

Submitted by alphadogg
alphadogg writes: An IT security drill went off the tracks in Belgium, prompting a regional government office to apologize to European high-speed train operator Thalys for involving it without warning. Belgium’s Flemish regional government sent a mock phishing email to about 20,000 of its employees to see how they would react. Hilarity and awkwardness ensued, with some employees contacting Thalys directly to complain, and others contacting the cops...

Submission + - Giving Doctors Grades Has Backfired

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Beginning in the early 1990s a quality-improvement program began in New York State and has since spread to many other states where report cards were issued to improve cardiac surgery by tracking surgical outcomes, sharing the results with hospitals and the public, and when necessary, placing surgeons or surgical programs on probation. But Sandeep Jauhar writes in the NYT that the report cards have backfired. "They often penalized surgeons, like the senior surgeon at my hospital, who were aggressive about treating very sick patients and thus incurred higher mortality rates," says Jauhar. "When the statistics were publicized, some talented surgeons with higher-than-expected mortality statistics lost their operating privileges, while others, whose risk aversion had earned them lower-than-predicted rates, used the report cards to promote their services in advertisements."

Surveys of cardiac surgeons in The New England Journal of Medicine have confirmed that reports like the Consumer Guide to Coronary Artery Bypass Graft Surgery have limited credibility among cardiovascular specialists, little influence on referral recommendations and may introduce a barrier to care for severely ill patients. According to Jauhar, there is little evidence that the public — as opposed to state agencies and hospitals — pays much attention to surgical report cards anyway. A recent survey found that only 6 percent of patients used such information in making medical decisions. "Surgical report cards are a classic example of how a well-meaning program in medicine can have unintended consequences," concludes Jauhar. "It would appear that doctors, not patients, are the ones focused on doctors’ grades — and their focus is distorted and blurry at best."

Submission + - 'Unparticles' May Hold The Key To Superconductivity, Say Physicists

Submitted by KentuckyFC
KentuckyFC writes: One curious property of massless particles like photons is that their energy or momentum can take any value across many orders of magnitude, a property that physicists call scale invariance. By contrast, massive particles like electrons always have the same mass regardless of their energy or momentum. So massive particles are not scale invariant. The concept of unparticles is the idea that some “stuff” may have mass, energy and momentum and yet also be scale invariant. This stuff must be profoundly different from ordinary particles, hence the name: unparticles. Nobody has ever seen an unparticle but now physicists are suggesting that unparticles may hold the key to understanding unconventional superconductivity. Their thinking is that at very low temperatures, ordinary particles can sometimes behave like unparticles. In other words, their properties become independent of the scale at which they're observed. So if an unparticle moves without resistance on a tiny scale, then it must also move without resistance at every scale, hence the phenomenon of superconductivity. That could provide some important insights into unconventional superconductivity which has puzzled physicists since it was discovered in the 1980s.

Submission + - Red Hat CEO: Open Source Goes Mainstream In 2014

Submitted by ashshy
ashshy writes: Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst likes to post "state of the union" addresses at the end of every year. Last December, he said that open source innovation is going mainstream in 2014. In an interview with The Motley Fool, Whitehurst matches up his expectations against mid-year progress. Spoiler alert: It's mostly good news.

Feed Google News Sci Tech: China Cracks Down on Messaging Apps - Wall Street Journal (google.com)

From feed by feedfeeder

Wall Street Journal
China Cracks Down on Messaging Apps
Wall Street Journal
China issued new restrictions on public accounts on messaging apps such as WeChat and Laiwang. Reuters. China issued new restrictions on messaging apps Thursday in a move it said was to "help build a clean cyberspace" and safeguard national...
China intensifies crackdown on social media with curbs on instant messagingThe Guardian
China tightens control over instant messaging servicesBusiness Standard
China aims to rein in mobile messaging apps with new regulationsPCWorld
seattlepi.com-Fox Business
all 132 news articles

Feed Google News Sci Tech: Google Says Website Encryption – Or Lack Thereof – Will Now Influenc (google.com)

From feed by feedfeeder

TechCrunch
Google Says Website Encryption – Or Lack Thereof – Will Now Influence Search ...
TechCrunch
Google will begin using website encryption, or HTTPS, as a ranking signal – a move which should prompt website developers who have dragged their heels on increased security measures, or who debated whether their website was “important” enough to...
Google to reward websites that protect users' data with better search rankingBangor Daily News
Google lowers search ranking of websites that don't use encryptionComputerworld
Google Starts Giving A Ranking Boost To Secure HTTPS/SSL SitesSearch Engine Land

all 61 news articles

Submission + - Hardkernel Releases Raspberry Pi Compatible ODROID-W (makezine.com)

Submitted by kodiaktau
kodiaktau writes: Hardkernel released a new Raspberry Pi compatible board based on the Samsung Exynos SoC. The board is smaller than a typical Pi, keeping basic HDMI, USB and CSI interfaces. It also has 26 pin expansion board with more GPIO available, however it lacks an Ethernet jack. Initial prices as estimated around $30.

Interesting to note that the author calls out that the Pi Foundation is likely to run into similar name retention problems as Arduino has had as competitors call their boards "Pi Compatible".

Video overview on YouTube can be found here. http://youtu.be/rIZvsgXNWSc

Submission + - Black Hat Researchers Actively Trying to Deanonymize Tor Users (torproject.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Last week, we discussed news that a presentation had been canceled for the upcoming Black Hat security conference that involved the Tor Project. The researchers involved hadn't made much of an effort to disclose the vulnerability, and the Tor Project was scrambling to implement a fix. Now, the project says it's likely these researchers were actively attacking Tor users and trying to deanonymize them. "On July 4 2014 we found a group of relays that we assume were trying to deanonymize users. They appear to have been targeting people who operate or access Tor hidden services. The attack involved modifying Tor protocol headers to do traffic confirmation attacks. ...We know the attack looked for users who fetched hidden service descriptors, but the attackers likely were not able to see any application-level traffic (e.g. what pages were loaded or even whether users visited the hidden service they looked up). The attack probably also tried to learn who published hidden service descriptors, which would allow the attackers to learn the location of that hidden service." They also provide a technical description of the attack, and the steps they're taking to block such attacks in the future.

Submission + - UK to allow driverless cars by 2015

Submitted by rtoz
rtoz writes: The UK government has announced that driverless cars will be allowed on public roads from January next year.

It also invited cities to compete to host one of three trials of the tech, which would start at the same time.

In addition, ministers ordered a review of the UK's road regulations to provide appropriate guidelines.

The debate now is whether to allow cars, like the prototype unveiled by Google in May, to abandon controls including a steering wheel and pedals and rely on the vehicle's computer.

Or whether, instead, to allow the machine to drive, but insist a passenger be ready to wrest back control at a moment's notice.

Submission + - Observation of a quantum Cheshire Cat in a matter-wave interferometer experiment (nature.com)

Submitted by Dupple
Dupple writes: From its very beginning, quantum theory has been revealing extraordinary and counter-intuitive phenomena, such as wave-particle duality, Schrödinger cats and quantum non-locality. Another paradoxical phenomenon found within the framework of quantum mechanics is the ‘quantum Cheshire Cat’: if a quantum system is subject to a certain pre- and postselection, it can behave as if a particle and its property are spatially separated. It has been suggested to employ weak measurements in order to explore the Cheshire Cat’s nature. Here we report an experiment in which we send neutrons through a perfect silicon crystal interferometer and perform weak measurements to probe the location of the particle and its magnetic moment.

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