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Submission + - China's All-Seeing Eye

Submitted by krou
krou writes: Naomi Klein writes in Rolling Stone Magazine about China's All-Seeing Eye, a Panopticon-like experiment called "Golden Shield" taking place in Shenzhen using technology supplied by companies such as IBM, Honeywell and General Electric. Ultimately, says the owner of one factory manufacturing surveillance equipment, the plan is "to have city-by-city surveillance, so they could just sit and monitor one city and its surveillance system as a whole ... Once the tests are done and it's proven, they will be spreading from the big province to the cities, even to the rural farmland." Klein writes:

This is how this Golden Shield will work: Chinese citizens will be watched around the clock through networked CCTV cameras and remote monitoring of computers. They will be listened to on their phone calls, monitored by digital voice-recognition technologies. Their Internet access will be aggressively limited through the country's notorious system of online controls known as the "Great Firewall." Their movements will be tracked through national ID cards with scannable computer chips and photos that are instantly uploaded to police databases and linked to their holder's personal data. 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.
According to Klein, she sees this as more than just a Chinese experiment, but also one that holds ramifications for America and elsewhere, claiming that "the most efficient delivery system for capitalism is actually a communist-style police state", and that "the global corporations currently earning superprofits from this social experiment are unlikely to be content if the lucrative new market remains confined to cities such as Shenzhen. Like everything else assembled in China with American parts, Police State 2.0 is ready for export to a neighborhood near you."
Security

500 Thousand MS Web Servers Hacked 332

Posted by kdawson from the scream-and-shout dept.
andrewd18 writes "According to F-Secure, over 500,000 webservers across the world, including some from the United Nations and UK government, have been victims of a SQL injection. The attack uses an SQL injection to reroute clients to a malicious javascript at nmidahena.com, aspder.com or nihaorr1.com, which use another set of exploits to install a Trojan on the client's computer. As per usual, Firefox users with NoScript should be safe from the client exploit, but server admins should be alert for the server-side injection. Brian Krebs has a decent writeup on his Washington Post Security Blog, Dynamoo has a list of some of the high-profile sites that have been hacked, and for fun you can watch some of the IIS admins run around in circles at one of the many IIS forums on the 'net."
Security

Submission + - Friendly botnets suggested to beat the bad ones

Submitted by
holy_calamity
holy_calamity writes: "New Scientist reports on a University of Washington project aiming to marshal swarms of "good" computers to take on botnets. Their approach — called Phalanx — uses its distributed network to shield a server from DDoS attacks. Instead of that server being accessed directly, all information must pass through the swarm of "mailbox" computers, which are swapped around randomly and only pass on information to the shielded server when it requests it."
Slashback

Journal Journal: Bitching about /. Moderation System

Journal by themusicgod1
The quality of discussion is around the same as it was a year ago. One thing that has changed is that the moderation system no longer functions as I expect;
  • Highlight thresholds do not work. I set to 5, and I was seeing '4' rated comments. This isn't a big deal, but when there are 5x as many 4 rated comments as 5 rated comments, this is a dealbreaker--reading discussion threads is suddenly not worth the effort, and that's the only reason I'm here.
  • If a comment is both rated t
Books

Submission + - GUI Design Book Recommendations? 8

Submitted by jetpack
jetpack writes: I've always hated writing user interfaces, and graphical user interfaces in particular. However, I suspect that is largely because I have no clue how to write a *good* one. By this, I don't mean the technical aspects, like using the APIs and so on. I mean what are the issues in designing an interface that is clean, easy to understand and easy to use? What are things to be considered? What are things to be avoided? What are good over-all philosophies of UI design?

To this end, I'd like to pick up a book or two (or three) and get my learn on. I'd appreciate some book suggestions from the UI experts in the Slashdot crowd.
Security

Submission + - Domains May Disappear After Search 1

Submitted by
Ponca City, We Love You
Ponca City, We Love You writes: "A perfect domain name pops into your mind, a quick check at your registrar reveals that the domain is available, you put off the registration a few minutes and when you come back to register the domain, it's taken by someone else. How much time has elapsed between the search and the attempted registration — in one case, less than 90 seconds. Daily Domainer has an interesting story alleging that there may be a leak that allows domain tasters to intercept, analyze and register your domain ideas in minutes. "Every time you do a whois search with any service, you run a risk of losing your domain," says one industry insider. ICANN's Security and Stability Advisory Committee (SSAC ) has not been able to find hard evidence of Domain Name Front Running but they have issued an advisory (pdf) for people to come forward with hard evidence it is happening. Here is how domain name research theft crimes can occur and some tips to avoiding being a victim."
The Courts

Submission + - FBI zaps couple for shining laser at helicopter (networkworld.com) 3

Submitted by
coondoggie
coondoggie writes: "The US attorney's office and the FBI this week charged a California couple with shining a laser into the cockpit of a sheriff's department helicopter, a federal criminal complaint that could land them in jail for up to 20 years and earn them a $250,000 fine. The federal criminal complaint was filed on December 13, against Jared Dooley and Kendra Snow. The complaint states that on November 8, 2007, at about 10:55 p.m., a green laser beam illuminated the cockpit of a Kern County Sheriff's Department helicopter, which was flying at 500 feet during routine patrol in Bakersfield, California. When the light hit the cockpit, it disoriented the Kern County Sheriff's pilot, causing pain and discomfort in his eyes for a couple of hours, the FBI said in a statement. http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/23237"
Biotech

Submission + - Synthetic DNA on the Brink of Yielding New Life Fo (washingtonpost.com) 1

Submitted by mlimber
mlimber writes: The Washington Post has a story about the future of biotech: "The cobbling together of life from synthetic DNA, scientists and philosophers agree, will be a watershed event, blurring the line between biological and artificial — and forcing a rethinking of what it means for a thing to be alive.... Some experts are worried that a few maverick companies are already gaining monopoly control over the core 'operating system' for artificial life and are poised to become the Microsofts of synthetic biology. That could stifle competition, they say, and place enormous power in a few people's hands."
Security

Submission + - A Legal Analysis of the Sony BMG Rootkit Debacle

Submitted by
YIAAL
YIAAL writes: "Two lawyers from the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology look at the Sony BMG Rootkit debacle: "The Article first addresses the market-based rationales that likely influenced Sony BMG's deployment of these DRM systems and reveals that even the most charitable interpretation of Sony BMG's internal strategizing demonstrates a failure to adequately value security and privacy. After taking stock of the then-existing technological environment that both encouraged and enabled the distribution of these protection measures, the Article examines law, the third vector of influence on Sony BMG's decision to release flawed protection measures into the wild, and argues that existing doctrine in the fields of contract, intellectual property, and consumer protection law fails to adequately counter the technological and market forces that allowed a self-interested actor to inflict these harms on the public." Yes, under "even the most charitable interpretation" it was a lousy idea. The article also suggests some changes to the DMCA to protect consumers from this sort of intrusive, and security-undermining, technique in the future."
The Internet

Submission + - BBC iPlayer Welcomes Linux (and Macs) (bbc.co.uk) 2

Submitted by
h4rm0ny
h4rm0ny writes: "The story is brief but wonderful. After previously limiting their iPlayer only to the Windows platform (as covered on Slashdot here and here, the BBC's content is now available to users of Linux and Macs. From their site:

From today we are pleased to announce that streaming is now available on BBC iPlayer. This means that Windows, Mac and Linux users can stream programmes on iPlayer as long as their computer has the latest version of Flash. Another change is that you do not have to register or sign in any more to download programmes, and Windows XP and Vista users will have an improved version of Download Manager (formerly the Library) available to them.

It seems that the BBC have listened to people who petitioned them for broader support and an open format. Well Flash isn't exactly open but its a lot more ubiquitous than Windows Media and Real Player formats. Sadly for the rest of the World, you're going to have to go through the usual proxy Hell to get at this, as it's for us in the UK only. Now this sort of response to demand is why we pay our licence fee!"

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In seeking the unattainable, simplicity only gets in the way. -- Epigrams in Programming, ACM SIGPLAN Sept. 1982

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