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Cellphones

Cell Phone Interception At Def Con 95

Posted by Soulskill from the can-i-hear-you-now dept.
ChrisPaget writes "I'm planning a pretty significant demonstration of GSM insecurity at Defcon next week, where I'll intercept and record cellular calls made by my attendees, live on-stage, no user-input required. As you can imagine, intercepting cellphones is a Very Big Deal in the eyes of the law; this blog post is an attempt to reassure everyone that their privacy is being taken seriously despite the nature of the demo. I'm not just making it up either — the EFF have helped significantly with the details."
Google

Submission + - Google adds new privacy controls to Chrome (daniweb.com)

Submitted by billandad
billandad writes: Anyone would think the timing was deliberate. Just as Microsoft is forced into giving users the option to switch from IE via the browser ballot screen this week, so Google introduces a new Chrome beta with enhanced privacy features to chisel away even more at that Microsoft market share.
Idle

Submission + - Blog about Facebook gets mistaken for Facebook

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Scansafe has an article at http://blog.scansafe.com/journal/2010/2/24/cant-login-to-facebook.html about a personal blog about Facebook that got indexed by Google and received the top search result for 'Facebook Login'. This led to thousands of clueless users clicking the link thinking this blog was Facebook. The almost 2000 comments on the blog make for really disturbing reading — yes, there really are that many idiots out there.
Botnet

Chuck Norris Attacks Linux-Based Routers, Modems 193

Posted by timothy from the witnesses-awarded-him-both-ears-and-the-tail dept.
angry tapir writes "Discovered by Czech researchers, the Chuck Norris botnet has been spreading by taking advantage of poorly configured routers and DSL modems. The malware got the Chuck Norris moniker from a programmer's Italian comment in its source code: 'in nome di Chuck Norris,' which means 'in the name of Chuck Norris.' Chuck Norris is unusual in that it infects DSL modems and routers rather than PCs. It installs itself on routers and modems by guessing default administrative passwords and taking advantage of the fact that many devices are configured to allow remote access."
Math

Man Uses Drake Equation To Explain Girlfriend Woes 538

Posted by samzenpus from the less-math-more-social-science dept.
artemis67 writes "A man studying in London has taken a mathematical equation that predicts the possibility of alien life in the universe to explain why he can't find a girlfriend. Peter Backus, a native of Seattle and PhD candidate and Teaching Fellow in the Department of Economics at the University of Warwick, near London, in his paper, 'Why I don't have a girlfriend: An application of the Drake Equation to love in the UK,' used math to estimate the number of potential girlfriends in the UK. In describing the paper on the university Web site he wrote 'the results are not encouraging. The probability of finding love in the UK is only about 100 times better than the probability of finding intelligent life in our galaxy.'"

Comment Re:Spectrum auction (Score 1) 300

by mblumber (#29687513) Attached to: FCC Chairman Warns of Wireless Spectrum Gap

Minus the sarcasm, you're absolutely right.

The AWS and 700MHz auctions have opened up a vast amount of real estate to be used for high speed data. When that's exhaused, the FCC will start dolling out other valuble spectrums vacated by analog TV. I feel like today's RF environment is still fairly green, dispite Genachowski's comments to the contrary.
Communications

Desktop As a Cellphone Extension? 199

Posted by timothy from the ring-it-on dept.
spaceman375 writes "Like many slashdotters, I've given up on landlines and have only a cell account. The problem: when I am home I don't want to carry my phone on my person, AND I don't want to have to run (possibly up or down stairs) to answer a call. Landlines solved this with extensions. I could go buy an xlink or other Bluetooth-to-POTS solution, but that takes money for equipment. My desktop has Bluetooth, as do my laptop and cell. All I want is a program that can use my cell's Bluetooth to make and receive calls from my Linux PC. I can do this with asterisk or related programs, but that is like buying UPS when I just need a taxi ride. Yet all I can find are programs that either use 'presence' to shift other-sourced calls to my cell, or ways to use a Bluetooth headset when receiving a call on a PC. Has anyone found a way to use their desktop to make and receive calls through their cell via Bluetooth?"
Image

Teen Diagnoses Her Own Disease In Science Class 582

Posted by samzenpus from the be-you-own-best-diagnostician dept.
18-year-old Jessica Terry suffered from stomach pain, diarrhea, vomiting and fever for eight years. She often missed school and her doctors were unable to figure out the cause of her sickness. Then one day in January someone was finally figured out what was wrong with Jessica. That person was her. While looking under a microscope at slides of her own intestinal tissue in her AP science class, Jessica noticed an area of inflamed tissue called a granuloma, which is an indication of Crohn's disease. "It's weird I had to solve my own medical problem," Terry told CNN affiliate KOMO in Seattle, Washington. "There were just no answers anywhere. ... I was always sick."

Comment Rita? (Score 1) 364

by mblumber (#23898887) Attached to: Water Ice On Mars

Am I the only one who thought that they opened a Rita's Water Ice on Mars? They seem to be opening them all over the place of late.
Security

'Friendly' Worms Could Spread Software Fixes 306

Posted by Zonk from the perfect-way-to-make-a-rogue-ai dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft researchers are working out the perfect strategies for worms to spread through networks. Their goal is to distribute software patches and other friendly information via virus, reducing load on servers. This raises the prospect of worm races — deploying a whitehat worm to spread a fix faster than a new attacking worm can reach vulnerable machines."

Feed Science Daily: Frozen Sperm Worked For White Rhino (sciencedaily.com)

From feed by sdfeed
Scientists have successfully inseminated a rhino with formerly frozen sperm. This world-first artificial insemination of a white rhino with frozen rhino sperm took place in Budapest Zoo. The test-tube father called Simba is 38 years old and lives in the Zoo of Colchester, UK. The pregnant female is called Lulu. Her baby is due in November 2008.
Portables (Apple)

Submission + - Apple Cuts Linux iPod Users Off (blogspot.com)

Submitted by
Will Fisher
Will Fisher writes: "New iPods will no longer be able to work with Linux. iTunes now writes some kind of hash (SHA1, md5?) to the iPod database which new iPods check against. If this check fails then the iPod reports that it contains 0 songs. This appears to be protection against 3rd party applications writing out their own databases. We haven't found out how to generate our own valid hashes (but we do know the hash includes the database itself, and possibly the iPod serial number), and are looking for help."

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