lamarguy91 - Slashdot User

Submission + - Phase 1 of TrueCrypt Audit Turns up No Backdoors (threatpost.com)

Submitted by msm1267 on Monday April 14, 2014 @01:46PM

msm1267 writes: A initial audit of the popular open source encryption software TrueCrypt turned up fewer than a dozen vulnerabilities, none of which so far point toward a backdoor surreptitiously inserted into the codebase.

A report on the first phase of the audit was released today by iSEC Partners, which was contracted by the Open Crypto Audit Project (OCAP), a grassroots effort that not only conducted a successful fundraising effort to initiate the audit, but raised important questions about the integrity of the software.

The first phase of the audit focused on the TrueCrypt bootloader and Windows kernel driver; architecture and code reviews were performed, as well as penetration tests including fuzzing interfaces, said Kenneth White, senior security engineer at Social & Scientific Systems. The second phase of the audit will look at whether the various encryption cipher suites, random number generators and critical key algorithms have been implemented correctly.

Submission + - IRS Can Now Seize Your Tax Refund To Pay A Relative's Debt

Submitted by Hugh Pickens DOT Com on Monday April 14, 2014 @09:58AM

Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: Just in time for the April 15 IRS filing deadline comes news from the Washington Post that hundreds of thousands of taxpayers who are expecting refunds are instead getting letters informing them that because of a debt they never knew about — often a debt incurred by their parents — the government has confiscated their check — sometimes on debts 20 or 30 years old. For example, when Mary Grice was 4, back in 1960, her father died, leaving her mother with five children to raise. Until the kids turned 18, Sadie Grice got survivor benefits from Social Security to help feed and clothe them. Now, Social Security claims it overpaid someone in the Grice family — it’s not sure who — in 1977. After 37 years of silence, four years after Sadie Grice died, the government is coming after her daughter. “It was a shock,” says Grice, 58. “What incenses me is the way they went about this. They gave me no notice, they can’t prove that I received any overpayment, and they use intimidation tactics, threatening to report this to the credit bureaus.”

The Treasury Department has intercepted $1.9 billion in tax refunds already this year — $75 million of that on debts delinquent for more than 10 years, says Jeffrey Schramek, assistant commissioner of the department’s debt management service. The aggressive effort to collect old debts started three years ago — the result of a single sentence tucked into the farm bill lifting the 10-year statute of limitations on old debts to Uncle Sam. The Federal Trade Commission, on its Web site, advises Americans that “family members typically are not obligated to pay the debts of a deceased relative from their own assets.” But Social Security officials say that if children indirectly received assistance from public dollars paid to a parent, the children’s money can be taken, no matter how long ago any overpayment occurred. Many of the taxpayers whose refunds have been taken say they’ve been unable to contest the confiscations because of the cost, because Social Security cannot provide records detailing the original overpayment, and because the citizens, following advice from the IRS to keep financial documents for just three years, had long since trashed their own records. More than 1,200 appeals have been filed on the old cases but only about 10 percent of taxpayers have won those appeals. "The government took the money first and then they sent us the letter," says Brenda Samonds.." We could never get one sentence from them explaining why the money was taken.”

Submission + - The Comcast merger isn't about lines on a map,it's about controlling information (consumerist.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 12, 2014 @04:15PM

An anonymous reader writes: Comcast and proposed merger partner Time Warner Cable claim they donâ(TM)t compete because their service areas donâ(TM)t overlap, and that a combined company would happily divest itself of a few million customers to keeps its pay-TV market share below 30%, allowing other companies that donâ(TM)t currently compete with Comcast to keep not competing with Comcast. This narrow, shortsighted view fails to take into account the full breadth of whatâ(TM)s involved in this merger â" broadcast TV, cable TV, network technology, in-home technology, access to the Internet, and much more. In addition to asking whether or not regulators should permit Comcast to add 10-12 million customers, there is a more important question at the core of this deal: Should Comcast be allowed to control both what content you consume and how you get to consume it?

Submission + - PC Gaming Alive and Dominant (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 12, 2014 @08:10AM

An anonymous reader writes: Ars reports on a panel at PAX East which delved into the strength of the PC as a platform for games, and what its future looks like. The outlook is positive: 'Even as major computer OEMs produce numbers showing falling sales, the PC as a platform (and especially a gaming platform) actually shows strong aggregate growth.' The panelists said that while consoles get a lot of the headlines, the PC platform remains the only and/or best option for a lot of developers and gamers. They briefly addressed piracy, as well: 'Piracy, [Matt Higby] said, is an availability and distribution problem. The more games are crowdfunded and digitally delivered and the less a "store" figures into buying games, the less of a problem piracy becomes. [Chris Roberts] was quick to agree, and he noted that the shift to digital distribution also helps the developers make more money—they ostensibly don't have everyone along the way from retailers to publishers to distributors taking their cut from the sale.'

Comment But... (Score -1, Offtopic) 182

by lamarguy91 on Tuesday December 04, 2012 @12:49PM (#42180549) Attached to: But Can It Run <em>Crysis 3</em>?

... will it blend?

(Your PC or Crisis 3... take your pick.)

Submission + - A Peek into Netflix Queues (nytimes.com)

Submitted by margaret on Saturday January 09, 2010 @06:15PM

margaret writes: The New York Times has an interactive web app where you can map the popularity of various netflix titles by neighborhood, in a dozen different cities. Invasion of privacy or harmless voyeuristic fun? Either way, it's pretty interesting.

Submission + - Prion proteins capable of evolution despite no DNA 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 09, 2010 @05:42PM

An anonymous reader writes: Scientists from the Scripps Research Institute have shown for the first time that "lifeless" organic substances with no genetic material are capable of evolving just like any higher form of life. The discovery could reshape the definition of life and have revolutionary impacts on how certain diseases are treated.

http://www.mnn.com/lifestyle/health/stories/prion-proteins-capable-of-evolution-despite-containing-no-dna

Comment Demo Presentation (Score 5, Informative) 72

by lamarguy91 on Sunday October 12, 2008 @12:50AM (#25343525) Attached to: A 3D Curve Sketching System For Tablets

Looks like they are part of the presentation & demo sessions at the UIST (User Interface Software and Technology) being hosted by ACM next week.

More details here:

http://www.acm.org/uist/uist2008/

And a schedule of events:

http://www.acm.org/uist/uist2008/program/index.html

I hope to see additional project details and possibly some additional demonstration videos come from this event.

A 3D Curve Sketching System For Tablets 72

Posted by timothy on Saturday October 11, 2008 @10:53PM from the no-mention-of-license-terms dept.

dominique_cimafranca writes "The Dynamic Graphics Project of the University of Toronto has released a pretty nifty 3D curve sketching system. Apart from the large drawing area, the tablet software looks very intuitive to artists. From the site: 'The system coherently integrates existing techniques of sketch-based interaction with a number of novel and enhanced features. Novel contributions of the system include automatic view rotation to improve curve sketchability, an axis widget for sketch surface selection, and implicitly inferred changes between sketching techniques. We also improve on a number of existing ideas such as a virtual sketchbook, simplified 2D and 3D view navigation, multi-stroke NURBS curve creation, and a cohesive gesture vocabulary.'"

Open Office Plans To Party Like It's Version 3.0 396

Posted by timothy on Saturday October 11, 2008 @08:11PM from the undervalued dept.

penguin_dance writes "The Register reports that 'OpenOffice.org is throwing a launch party in Paris on 13 October' to celebrate eight years, and hopefully announce the release of version 3.0. Some notes: [OpenOffice.org 3.0] will support the OpenDocument Format 1.2 standard, and be able to open files created by MS Office 2007 and Office 2008 for Mac OS X." As maj_id10t notes, though the OO.o site does not yet carry an announcement, "Lifehacker has posted an entry stating the final release of OpenOffice 3.0 is available for download via their distribution mirrors."

Loebner Talks AI 107

Posted by timothy on Saturday October 11, 2008 @05:43PM from the well-tell-him-ai-back dept.

Mighty Squirrel writes "This is a fascinating interivew with Hugh Loebner, the academic who has arguably done more to promote the development of artifical intelligence than anyone else. He founded the Loebner prize in 1990 to promote the development of artificial intelligence by asking developers to create a machine which passes the Turing Test — meaning it responds in a way indistinguishable from a human. The latest running of the contest is this weekend and this article shows what an interesting and colourful character Loebner is."

Supercomputer Simulates Human Visual System 244

Posted by Soulskill on Friday June 13, 2008 @05:23PM from the i-can-see-clearly-now dept.

An anonymous reader writes "What cool things can be done with the 100,000+ cores of the first petaflop supercomputer, the Roadrunner, that were impossible to do before? Because our brain is massively parallel, with a relatively small amount of communication over long distances, and is made of unreliable, imprecise components, it's quite easy to simulate large chunks of it on supercomputers. The Roadrunner has been up only for about a week, and researchers from Los Alamos National Lab are already reporting inaugural simulations of the human visual system, aiming to produce a machine that can see and interpret as well as a human. After examining the results, the researchers 'believe they can study in real time the entire human visual cortex.' How long until we can simulate the entire brain?"

Submission + - Lawsuit Against RIAA Tries to Stop Them All (arstechnica.com) 1

Submitted by

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property

on Monday March 31, 2008 @07:58PM

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes: "Tanya Anderson has filed an amended complaint against the RIAA. One of the more interesting provisions in it is in the 18th claim, which seeks to stop the RIAA from 'continuing to engage in criminal investigation of private American citizens', no doubt referring to the unlicensed MediaSentry investigations. If granted, that could shut down the RIAA lawsuits entirely. Naturally, the RIAA doesn't like this at all. First, they got the judge to agree that the original complaint was too light on the details, so it was amended. Now the RIAA complains that it's too long, because it's 108 pages filled with the RIAA's dirty laundry. You may remember this as the countersuit to the lawsuit where RIAA lawyers tried to grill a 10-year-old girl, only later to drop their case for lack of evidence and have the mother sue them for malicious prosecution."

Did Amazon Induce Vista's Premature Birth? 296

Posted by kdawson on Thursday February 21, 2008 @04:58PM from the ready-or-not-here-i-come dept.

theodp writes "A recent Amazon SEC filing sheds light on the puzzling departure of Microsoft Sr. VP Brian Valentine in Sept. 2006. Valentine is the Gen. George Patton-like figure charged with pushing Vista developers, who dumped the still not-ready-for-prime-time OS into RC1 status as he bolted for a new gig at Amazon. Having repeatedly assured everyone that Valentine was staying with the company post-Vista, Microsoft backpedaled and explained that Valentine decided to leave since the company had shipped a near-final version of Vista. Not so. Although analysts fell for the PR line, it seems Valentine had actually signed an Employment Agreement way back in June calling for him to be on board at Amazon on Sept. 11 if he wanted to pick up a $1.7M signing bonus, $150K base salary, another $500K bonus, and 400K shares of Amazon stock (now worth almost $30M). Who says you have to shell out $999.95 for MS-Project to come up with accurate planned completion dates?"

Programmers At Work, 22 Years Later 136

Posted by kdawson on Thursday February 21, 2008 @04:15PM from the still-crazy-after-all-these-years dept.

Firebones writes "In 1986, the book Programmers at Work presented interviews with 19 programmers and software designers from the early days of personal computing including Charles Simonyi, Andy Hertzfeld, Ray Ozzie, Bill Gates, and Pac Man programmer Toru Iwatani. Leonard Richardson tracked down these pioneers and has compiled a nice summary of where they are now, 22 years later."

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