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Comment Fix bugs. Make something you'd use yourself. (Score 2, Insightful) 283

by redcloud (#33867304) Attached to: Grad Student Looking To Contribute To Open Source
Is there a bug tracker on this project? Tracking down and fixing bugs will force you to become familiar with the codebase, and hopefully, expose you to code from which you can learn. Also, find projects that you will use personally on a regular basis--i.e. "scratch your own itch". You'll do better work if the end result is not just some code somewhere, but something that you need and make use of frequently.
NASA

JPL Scientists Take NASA To the Supreme Court 238

Posted by timothy from the ask-kozinksi dept.
CheshireCatCO writes "Scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab, concerned about background checks now required of federal employees, sued NASA to suspend the checks back in 2007. The case has now worked its way up to the Supreme Court. At stake: whether all federal employees can be forced to undergo open-ended background checks whether or not the employee has exposure to classified or sensitive information. The background checks, which can include interviewing people from employees' pasts such as landlords and teachers, may seek, among other things, sexual histories."
Encryption

Intel Threatens DMCA Using HDCP Crack 373

Posted by CmdrTaco from the no-surprise-here dept.
mikesd81 writes "Intel is apparently threatening to use the DMCA against anyone using the HDCP crack under the DMCA's anti-circumvention clause. 'There are laws to protect both the intellectual property involved as well as the content that is created and owned by the content providers,' said Tom Waldrop, a spokesman for the company, which developed HDCP. 'Should a circumvention device be created using this information, we and others would avail ourselves, as appropriate, of those remedies.'"
Data Storage

Distinguishing Encrypted Data From Random Data? 467

Posted by timothy from the is-this-a-solved-problem? dept.
gust5av writes "I'm working on a little script to provide very simple and easy to use steganography. I'm using bash together with cryptsetup (without LUKS), and the plausible deniability lies in writing to different parts of a container file. On decryption you specify the offset of the hidden data. Together with a dynamically expanding filesystem, this makes it possible to have an arbitrary number of hidden volumes in a file. It is implausible to reveal the encrypted data without the password, but is it possible to prove there is encrypted data where you claim there's not? If I give someone one file containing random data and another containing data encrypted with AES, will he be able to tell which is which?"
Emulation (Games)

Emulation Arrives On the PS3 169

Posted by timothy from the machine-that-goes-pong dept.
YokimaSun writes "Following the recent exploit that allows you to jailbreak your PS3, the homebrew community have now breached the console with the first homebrew game, which is the classic Pong. Also released is the first emulator for the system in the shape of a SNES Emulator great for those 16-bit games. Finally drk||Raziel, the coder of the Dreamcast Emulator NullDC, has posted screenshots of his Dreamcast emulator working on the PS3 (albeit at a very early stage). The PS3 is building up to be the Dream Console for emulation."
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.'"
Software

Apple Bans RSS Reader Due To Bad Word In Feed Link 254

Posted by kdawson from the rabbit-holes-have-rabbit-holes dept.
btempleton writes "It all started when I prepared yet another Downfall subtitle parody. In this one, Hitler is the studio head, upset at all the Downfall parodies, and he wants to do DMCA takedowns on them all. (If you're a DMCA/DRM fighting Slashdotter, you'll like it.) The EFF, which I chair, blogged it on Deeplinks, and hilarity ensued. That weekend, Exact Magic, an iPhone developer, had submitted a special RSS reader app to display EFF news on the iPhone. Apple's iPhone app store evaluators looked at the RSS reader, read the feed it pointed to, and then played the linked-to video. They saw the F-word flash in the subtitles of the video, and then rejected the RSS-reading tool from the App Store. We're up to several levels of meta here — Apple has banned an app over a parody about banning, and is now parodying itself. Bonus: TFA also has the story of just how hard it is to be fully legal in obtaining the famous clip for parody."
The Almighty Buck

Submission + - Coders: Your Days Are Numbered (infoworld.com) 2

Submitted by
snydeq
snydeq writes: "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister argues that communication skills, not coding skills, are a developer's greatest asset in a bear economy. 'Too many software development teams are still staffed like secretarial pools. Ideas are generated at the top and then passed downward through general managers, product managers, technical leads, and team leads. Objectives are carved up into deliverables, which are parceled off to coders, often overseas,' McAllister writes. 'The idea that this structure can be sustainable, when the U.S. private sector shed three-quarters of a million jobs in March 2009 alone, is simple foolishness.' Instead, companies should emulate the open source model of development, shifting decision-making power to the few developers with the deepest architectural understanding of, and closest interaction with, the code. And this shift will require managers to look beyond résumés 'choked with acronyms and lists of technologies' to find those who 'can understand, influence, and guide development efforts, rather than simply taking dictation.'"
Censorship

Submission + - New CyberSecurity Bill Raises Questions of Privacy

Submitted by Nicolas Dawson
Nicolas Dawson writes: Steve Aquino of MotherJones asks: "Should President Obama have the power to shut down domestic Internet traffic during a state of emergency?"

A controversial new bill called The Cybersecurity Act of 2009 would give the president, "...the ability to 'declare a cybersecurity emergency' and shut down or limit Internet traffic in any 'critical' information network 'in the interest of national security.' The bill does not define a critical information network or a cybersecurity emergency. That definition would be left to the president."

Responses from several professional groups, including the EFF are included in the article.
Image

Daemon 395

Posted by samzenpus from the read-all-about-it dept.
stoolpigeon writes "Have you ever been reading a book or watching a film and as the plot moves to involve some use of technology you begin to brace yourself, and the cringe as you are ripped out of the story by what is an obviously ignorant treatment of matters you know well? Do you find the idea of creating a "gui interface using visual basic" to see about tracking an ip address as more fit for a sitcom rather than crime drama? And if so, have you ever wondered what it would be like if one of us, a geek, wrote a techno-thriller? What if someone who grokked our culture and understood our tech wrote something? Would it be great, or would it just get bogged down in the techno babble?" Keep reading for the rest of JR's review.
User Journal

Journal Journal: This is required

Journal by LoneWlf

This will go down on your permanent record.

What to say about the last year and a half.

I've been busy. Obviously far to busy to note that I have not written.

I no longer have the truck. Such is life. Gas prices got too high and I had to offload it.

I've moved. I now have my own place in north central phoenix.

I've changed jobs. I now work as a contractor for IBM for their AmEx account.

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