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Security

Submission + - 17% Smaller DES S-box Circuits Found (openwall.com) 2

Submitted by
solardiz
solardiz writes: "DES is still in use, brute-force key search remains the most effective attack on it, and it is an attractive building block for certain applications (the key size may be increased e.g. with 3DES). Openwall researchers, with funding from Rapid7, came up with 17% shorter Boolean expressions representing the DES S-boxes. Openwall's John the Ripper 1.7.8 tests over 20 million of combinations against DES-based crypt(3) per second on Core i7-2600K 3.4 GHz, which roughly corresponds to DES encryption speed of 33 Gbps."
Biotech

Submission + - 16 year old discovers cure for Cystic Fibrosis (yahoo.com) 1

Submitted by Bob the Super Hamste
Bob the Super Hamste writes: According to yahoo new a 16 year old Canadian 11th grade student has discovered a possible cure for Cystic Fibrosis. The treatment is a drug combination that in a computer simulation on the Canadian SCINET supercomputing network appeared to cure the symptoms. He has also tested the drug combination on living cell with "results exceeded his expectations".
Open Source

Submission + - Yahoo Beats Patent Troll That Beat Google (itworld.com)

Submitted by
jfruhlinger
jfruhlinger writes: "You may recall the saga of patent troll Bedrock, which claims that it has patents over Linux and successfully sued Google over Google's Linux use. Well, the verdict from Bedrock's suit against Yahoo on similar grounds has come in — and Yahoo is victorious, not least because Yahoo went second and got to see how the arguments in the Google case went."
Idle

Submission + - IT pro pulls off rarest Putt-Putt feat (networkworld.com)

Submitted by netbuzz
netbuzz writes: Rick Baird, a 53-year-old IT manager from North Carolina, recently accomplished a feat seen only twice in half a century and not once since 1979: a perfect round of Putt-Putt golf — 18 holes, 18 shots. He tells Network World: “When I got ready to play 18 everybody was still gathering around to watch. I had to back off once since people were moving and I did not want there to be any distractions, and I needed a deep breath to calm down.”
Security

Submission + - Openwall Linux 3.0: no SUIDs, anti log spoofing (openwall.com) 2

Submitted by solardiz
solardiz writes: Openwall GNU/*/Linux (or Owl for short) version 3.0 is out, marking 10 years of the project. Owl is a small security-enhanced Linux distro for servers, appliances, and virtual appliances. Two curious properties of Owl 3.0: no SUID programs in default install (yet the system is usable, including password changing) and logging of who sends messages to syslog (thus, a user can't have a log message appear to come, say, from the kernel or sshd). No other distro has these. Other highlights of Owl 3.0: single live+install+source CD, i686 or x86_64, integrated OpenVZ (host and/or guest), "make iso" & "make vztemplate" in included build environment, ext4 by default, xz in tar/rpm/less, "anti-Debian" key blacklisting in OpenSSH. A full install is under 400 MB, and it can rebuild itself from source.
Businesses

Submission + - The Good and Ugly Side Of GPL 1

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: Matt Mullenweg (the creator of wordpress open source blog software), after review by various legal experts, is sticking to his guns that themes and plugins that "extend" Wordpress violates the GPL if they are not themselves distributed under the GPL. Matt has gone so far as to post this on Twitter. Accoding to Matt, premium template called thesis should be under GPL and the owner is not happy about it. WordPress is willing to sue the maker of thesis theme for not following GPL licensing. The webmasters and thesis owners are also confused with new development. Mark Jaquith wrote an excellent technical analysis of why WordPress themes inherit the GPL. This is why even if Thesis hadn't copy and pasted large swathes of code from WordPress (and GPL plugins) its PHP would still need to be under the GPL. The Open Source / GPL vs Thesis debate continues further and some claims that Matt Mullenweg is anti-capitalist, the GPL is a communist ideology, and why users should moving away from WordPress.

Submission + - Dell ships infected motherboards (newscientist.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: "Computer maker Dell is warning that some of its server motherboards have been delivered to customers carrying an unwanted extra: computer malware. It could be confirmation that the "hardware trojans" long posited by some security experts are indeed a real threat."
Censorship

Submission + - UK Police Threaten Teenage Photojournalist (wordpress.com)

Submitted by IonOtter
IonOtter writes: In what seems to be a common occurrence, and now a costly one, Metropolitan Police in the UK still don't seem to be getting the message that assaulting photographers is a bad idea. UK press photographer Jules Matteson details the event in his blog, titled The Romford Incident. The incident has already been picked up by The Register, The Independent and the British Journal of Photography, which contains an official statement from the Metropolitan Police.

Submission + - Hack AT&T Voicemail With Android

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: It is shockingly easy to gain access to any AT&T customers voicemail using caller ID spoofing techniques. What's worse is that AT&T knows about it: http://www.wireless.att.com/learn/popups/voicemail-security.jsp

On your Android phone, download one of the two caller ID spoofing programs.
Input the number of your target as the destination number and then enter your targets phone number again as the spoofed caller ID.
Then connect your call.

If at any point your target allows your inbound call to touch their voicemail, you will be dropped into a random menu of their voicemail and eventually can drill up or down to get what you want. You can change greetings, erase messages, send voicemails out of the target account and much more.

How many politicians worried about Google WiFi Sniffing will want to know more about this?
Government

Submission + - Sen. Bond disses Internet "kill switch" bill (thehill.com)

Submitted by GovTechGuy
GovTechGuy writes: Sen. Kit Bond has introduced his own cybersecurity legislation with Sen. Orrin Hatch and he had some harsh words for a competing bill sponsored by the Senate Committee on Homeland Security. Bond said that bill, which has been criticized for allegedly giving the president a "kill switch" over the Internet, burdens the private sector with mandates and puts too much on the plate of the already overburdened Department of Homeland Security. His bill would create a new position in the Pentagon that reports directly to the President in charge of coordinating all civilian cybersecurity. Any private sector involvement would be voluntary and free from legal challenge, rather than mandated.

Submission + - FBI failed to break the encryption of hard drives (globo.com)

Submitted by benoliver
benoliver writes: Not even FBI was able to decrypt files of Daniel Dantas (Brazilian banker accused of "financial crimes" by the Brazilian justice). Hard drives were seized by the feds during Operation Satyagraha, in 2008. Information is protected by sophisticated encryption system. The hard drives seized by federal police at the apartment of banker Daniel Dantas, in Rio de Janeiro, during Operation Satyagraha. The operation began in July 2008. According to a report published on Friday (25) by the newspaper Folha de S. Paulo, after a year of unsuccessful attempts, the U.S. federal police returned the equipment to Brazil in April. According to the report, the fed only requested help from USA in early 2009, after experts from the National Institute of Criminology (INC) failed to decode the passwords on the hard drives. The government has no legal instrument to compel the manufacturer of the American encryption system or Dantas to give the access codes.

Submission + - MEP wants to eliminate anonymity on the internet (google.com)

Submitted by m94mni
m94mni writes: The European Parliament wants to monitor your internet searches for child porn offenders, as previously reported (http://tech.slashdot.org/story/10/06/02/2317241/EU-To-Monitor-All-Internet-Searches). The declaration was adopted yesterday, and in an interview with the Swedish news outlet Europaportalen.se the Italian MEP Tiziano Motti behind declaration shares his views on internet and anonymity. In essence, Motti wants to completely eliminate anonymity on the internet. "Each upload of text, images or video clips must be tracable by the authorities", says Motti. This is in line with the secretive UN intitiative Q6/17, revealed two years ago (http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10040152-38.html). Is the decisive fight for anonymity on the internet coming closer?
Movies

Submission + - Movie studio finally sees the light on rentals (techcrunch.com)

Submitted by Griller_GT
Griller_GT writes: After months of conducting studies about the effects of delays on sales of DVDs, "Paramount Pictures has agreed to provide its movies to Redbox on the same day they go on sale." noting that "Those people who want to rent are going to figure out ways to rent," he said, "and us restricting them from renting isn't going to turn it into a purchase." Gee, who would have though of that? :)

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