Comment Re:Meanwhile... (Score 2, Interesting) 460

by mdekato on Friday August 08, 2008 @10:52AM (#24525211) Attached to: Nearly 50,000 IT Jobs Lost In Past Year

Here's how companies are "trimming the shrubbery" now that the IT gardeners are gone. My wife works at a large national DIY store as a receiving clerk. They pulled ALL IT support out of the stores and Distribution Centers and put the IT duties on the people like my wife. If they can't figure out the problem, they can call a national helpdesk who will walk them through the fix (this will not work with my wife). If there is a hardware problem I think they have to wait for a shipment from the corporate hq.

China's All-Seeing Eye 213

Posted by Soulskill on Sunday May 18, 2008 @01:22PM from the who-watches-the-watchers dept.

Greg Walton brings us a lengthy story from Rolling Stone which describes China's comprehensive surveillance project, dubbed Golden Shield. The 'Great Firewall of China,' which we've discussed in the past, is but one aspect of Golden Shield. It also includes national ID cards, CCTV networks, and face-recognition software. This investigation showcases just how massive an undertaking it truly is. When finished, it will dwarf London's surveillance system. Quoting: "Over the past two years, some 200,000 surveillance cameras have been installed throughout the city. Many are in public spaces, disguised as lampposts. The closed-circuit TV cameras will soon be connected to a single, nationwide network, an all-seeing system that will be capable of tracking and identifying anyone who comes within its range -- a project driven in part by U.S. technology and investment. Over the next three years, Chinese security executives predict they will install as many as 2 million CCTVs in Shenzhen, which would make it the most watched city in the world. (Security-crazy London boasts only half a million surveillance cameras.) ... This is the most important element of all: linking all these tools together in a massive, searchable database of names, photos, residency information, work history and biometric data. When Golden Shield is finished, there will be a photo in those databases for every person in China: 1.3 billion faces."

IE 7.0/8.0b Code Execution 0-Day Released 131

Posted by kdawson on Friday May 16, 2008 @09:45AM from the cross-zone-scripting dept.

SecureThroughObscure writes "Security blogger and researcher Nate McFeters blogged about a 0-day exploit affecting IE7 and IE8 beta on XP that was released by noted security researcher Aviv Raff. The flaw is a 'cross-zone scripting' flaw that takes advantage of the fact that printing HTML web pages occurs in the Local Machine Zone in IE rather than in the Internet Zone. Quoting McFeters's post: 'This is currently unpatched and in all of its 0-day glory, so for the time being, beware printing using the "print table of links" option when printing web pages.' McFeters and others will be presenting at Black Hat on the link between cross-site scripting and cross-zone. Rob Carter has been hitting this hard over at his blog, pointing out cross-zone weaknesses in Azureus, uTorrent, and the Eclipse platform."

Submission + - Avalanche on Mars

Submitted by mdekato on Tuesday March 04, 2008 @10:06AM

mdekato writes: MSNBC reports that NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has captured an avalanche on Mars' surface as it happened. Very good still images show what must have been an awesome sight. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23452561/

Submission + - Negroponte slams Intel (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by Yogi_Stewart_4 on Wednesday January 09, 2008 @09:06AM

Yogi_Stewart_4 writes: More OLPC/Intel love — apparently Intel used 'underhand' tactics to try to block sales contracts of the OLPC, trying to reach the customer directly after an agreement had been reached. "They would go in even after we had signed contracts and try to persuade government officials to scrap their contract and sign a contract with them instead. That's not a partnership." Mr Negroponte cited an example in Peru where Intel sales staff tried to persuade the country's vice-minister of education, Oscar Becerra Tresierra, to buy the Intel Classmate PC.

Submission + - Soldier of the Future Goes to War

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 26, 2007 @09:34AM

An anonymous reader writes: Land Warrior, the Army's wearable electronics package, was panned earlier this year by the troops who were testing it out. They were forced to take the collection of digital maps and next-gen radios to war, anyway. And now, Wired's Noah Shachtman reports from Iraq, those same soldiers are starting to warm up to their soldier suits of the future.