Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror

Comment Home automation (Score 1) 129

by robpow (#45073421) Attached to: Milestone: The Millionth UK-Made Raspberry Pi
The RPi makes an excellent home automation controller, mine's running Domoticz (www.domoticz.com) and controls some lighting and reads wireless temperature sensors around the house. It's small and cheap and fast enough for this but I wouldn't run anything more advanced like a full LAMP stack or as a full time user desktop.

Comment Re: TimeMachine (Score 1) 227

by robpow (#44385027) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Asynchronous RAID-1 Free Software Backup For Laptops?
This +100 ... I honestly has never spared a second thought at having to manage a backup regime since I switched to Macs. A Time Capsule (you can get 3rd party ones as well as Apple ones) backs up the Macs in the house. If you have two TCs on the network Time Machine will even alternate between them so you can have two backups in different parts of the house.

Submission + - Doctor Who (Actor) Warns Against Facebook (techweekeurope.co.uk)

Submitted by judgecorp
judgecorp writes: Matt Smith, the current actor playing Doctor Who, doesn't use Facebook or Twitter, despite his geek icon status. He worries that social media encourages us to create "surrogate versions" or "celebrity versions" of ourselves. He also, arguably, doesn't need their help, being a celebrity already. Smith made the comments in St Petersburg, where he hosted the final of Microsoft's Imagine Cup for student inventors, won this year by a British team with a mesh music-playing application.

Submission + - Why Javascript on Mobile is Slow (sealedabstract.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Drew Crawford has a good write up of Javascript's current state regarding mobile development, and why the lack of explicit memory handling (and a design philosophy that ignores memory issues) leads to massive garbage collection overhead, which prevents HTML5/JS from being deployed for anything besides light duty mobile web development.

Submission + - Critical Security Updates Coming to Windows XP, 8, RT & Server

Submitted by SmartAboutThings
SmartAboutThings writes: On the upcoming Patch Tuesday on July 9, Microsoft is going to bring some notable security updates, that will mostly deal with fixing issues in remote code execution vulnerabilities, which allow attackers to breach in. The security updates will be applied to all Windows versions Microsoft is still supporting (from XP to Windows 8.1)

Submission + - BBC gives up on 3-D programming. (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by RockDoctor
RockDoctor writes: After spending several years on supporting the uptake of 3-D TV, the BBC has accepted that people don't want it, and are turning off their 3-D channels following an uptake of under 5% of households with 3-D equipment.

I can just feel the joy at not having wasted my money on this technology.

Submission + - NSA recruitment drive goes horribly wrong

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Guardian is running a story about a recent recruitment session held by the NSA and attended by students from the University of Wisconsin which had an unexpected outcome for the recruiters.

Attending the session was Madiha R Tahir, a journalist studying a language course at the university. She asked the squirming recruiters a few uncomfortable questions about the activities of NSA: which countries the agency considers to be 'adversaries', and if being a good liar is a qualification for getting a job at the NSA.

Following her, others students started to put NSA employees under fire too. A recording of the session is available on Tahir's blog.

Submission + - Hacking and attacking automated homes (networkworld.com)

Submitted by colinneagle
colinneagle writes: If you use the Z-Wave wireless protocol for home automation then you might prepare to have your warm, fuzzy, happiness bubble burst; there will be several presentations about attacking the automated house at the upcoming Las Vegas hackers' conferences Black Hat USA 2013 and Def Con 21. For example, CEDIA IT Task force member Bjorn Jensen said, "Today, I could scan for open ports on the Web used by a known control system, find them, get in and wreak havoc on somebody's home. I could turn off lights, mess with HVAC systems, blow speakers, unlock doors, disarm alarm systems and worse."

Among other things, the hacking Z-Wave synopsis adds, "Zigbee and Z-wave wireless communication protocols are the most common used RF technology in home automation systems...An open source implementation of the Z-wave protocol stack, openzwave, is available but it does not support the encryption part as of yet. Our talk will show how the Z-Wave protocol can be subjected to attacks."

Submission + - FTC demands search engines separate paid advertisements from search results (ftc.gov)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: According to both the FTC staff’s original search engine guidance and the updated guidance, failing to clearly and prominently distinguish advertising from natural search results could be a deceptive practice. The updated guidance emphasizes the need for visual cues, labels, or other techniques to effectively distinguish advertisements, in order to avoid misleading consumers, and it makes recommendations for ensuring that disclosures commonly used to identify advertising are noticeable and understandable to consumers.

The letters note that the principles of the original guidance still apply, even as search and the business of search continue to evolve. The letters observe that social media, mobile apps, voice assistants on mobile devices, and specialized search results that are integrated into general search results offer consumers new ways of getting information. The guidance advises that regardless of the precise form that search takes now or in the future, paid search results and other forms of advertising should be clearly distinguishable from natural search results.

Submission + - Robotic Kiosk Stores Digital Copies Of Physical Keys

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The New York Daily News reports that a startup company in Manhattan is putting robotic key copying machines in 7-Eleven stores. The machines can automatically create physical copies of common apartment and office keys. What is more interesting is that they allow users to save digital copies of their keys, which can later be created when the original is lost or the user is locked out of their home.

Submission + - 3 Habitable Super-Earths Found Orbiting Nearby Star (discovery.com) 1

Submitted by astroengine
astroengine writes: Gliese 667C is a well-studied star lying only 22 light-years from Earth in the constellation of Scorpius, but it appears to have been hiding a pretty significant secret. The star has at least six exoplanets in orbit, three of which orbit within the star’s “habitable zone” — the region surrounding a star that’s not too hot and not too cold for liquid water to exist on their surfaces. Astronomers already knew that Gliese 667C had three worlds in orbit, one in the star’s habitable zone, but the finding of three more exoplanets, two of which are also in the habitable zone is a huge discovery. Finding one small planet in a star’s habitable zone is exciting, but finding three is historic. “The number of potentially habitable planets in our galaxy is much greater if we can expect to find several of them around each low-mass star — instead of looking at ten stars to look for a single potentially habitable planet, we now know we can look at just one star and find several of them,” said Rory Barnes, of the University of Washington, co-author of the study, in an ESO press release Tuesday (June 25).

Submission + - MS to Indie Devs: Ya' gotta have a publisher! (forbes.com)

Submitted by Loadmaster
Loadmaster writes: The new Oddworld game New 'n' Tasty is coming to every platform in the current generation and even the next generation but not the Xbox One. It's not that developer Oddworld Inhabitants isn't porting the game. It's not that they hate Microsoft or the Xbox One. No, it's that Microsoft has taken an anti-indie dev stance with the Xbox One. While the game industry is moving to Kickstarter and self-funded shops, Microsoft has decided all developers must have a publisher to grace their console.

It just gets worse for Microsoft's new console. They spy on you, control who you let borrow, restrict how you can sell the game, and now they are forcing indie developers to split profit with a partner in the form of an unnecessary publisher. The adage for Microsoft products is that they get it right on rev. 3, but here it seems they've bombed it. Big time.
User Journal

Journal Journal: Idealist Geeks ?

Journal by Taco Cowboy

Just heard the term "Idealist Geeks" over the BBC worldservice

The guy was talking about folks like Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden - digital age kids (geeks really) who are really good at the technology that spy agencies (like NSA) just can't do without

Of all the people in the world, why we Geeks have to take all the responsibilities all by ourselves ?

Slashdot Top Deals

Uncertain fortune is thoroughly mastered by the equity of the calculation. - Blaise Pascal

Close