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Submission + - Rest In Peace Robin "Roblimo" Miller (1952-2018) (wikipedia.org)

Submitted by rootmon
rootmon writes: Our thoughts/prayers are with the family and friends of long time open source writer/journalist Robin "Roblimo" Miller who passed away this morning.

Robin "Roblimo" Miller (born October 30, 1952) was the Editor in Chief of Open Source Technology Group, the company that owned Slashdot, SourceForge.net, freshmeat, Linux.com, NewsForge, and ThinkGeek from 2000 to 2008.

Miller formerly owned Robin's Limousine, a small limo company based in Elkridge, Maryland, the origin of his online nickname. Miller is best known for his involvement with Slashdot,[1] where he was not only the corporate editorial overseer but also Interview Editor.

As a freelancer, Miller wrote for a number of print and online publications including Time.com, Baltimore City Paper, American Medical News, Innkeeping World, Machine Design, The Baltimore Sun, and Rewired.com. Miller is the author of three books: The Online Rules of Successful Companies, Point & Click Linux!, and Point & Click OpenOffice.org, all published by Prentice Hall.[citation needed] His latest[when?] ventures revolve around Internet-delivered video, including video software "tours" and tutorials on Linux.com and his recent "side" venture, Internet Video Promotion, Inc.

Miller has been a judge for the Lulu Blooker Prize and is on the online advisory board of the Online Journalism Review of the Annenberg Center for Communication at the University of Southern California.

  He is married with three grown children and three stepchildren. Robin lived in Bradenton, Florida for over a decade before recently moving to Forest Park, Georgia.

It was my privilege to have known Robin personally and have met him on several occasions including a trip to Liberty City in Miami where our LUG setup a K12LTSP (Linux Terminal Server network) computer lab for neighborhood children.

(Biographical Info Quoted in Part from Wikipedia)

Comment Python Library For Alexa Skills Kit (Score 2) 138

by rootmon (#54356171) Attached to: 'This Isn't AI'
John Wheeler created a Flask extension for those who prefer to code their Alexa Skills in Python.

https://github.com/johnwheeler...

The project contains helpful links to get you started.

Also, please be aware that Alexa is not an AI, it is basically a voice recognition remote control robot - you program the phrases and the actions, Alexa does not learn new skills, they are explicitly programmed to appear like a natural language conversation. The intelligence is in the speech recognition and the cleverness of the skill developers.

Submission + - Newspaper chain CEO is 'pleased' to announce IT plan, then fires tech staff (computerworld.com)

Submitted by dcblogs
dcblogs writes: The McClatchy Company, which operates a major chain of newspapers in the U.S., is moving IT work overseas. The number of affected jobs, based on employee estimates, range from 120 to 150. The chain owns about 30 newspapers, including The Sacramento Bee, where McClatchy is based; The Fresno Bee, The News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C., The State in Columbia, S.C. and the Miami Herald. In a letter sent to the chain’s IT employees in late March, McClatchy CEO Patrick Talamantes detailed all the improvements a contract with the outsourcing firm, India-based Wipro, will bring, but buries, well down in the letter what should have been in its lead paragraph: There will be cutbacks of U.S. staff. The letter received by McClatchy’s IT employees from Talamantes begins by telling them it is “pleased to unveil our new IT Transformational Program, a program designed to provide improved service to all technology users, accelerated development and delivery of technology solutions and products, variable demand-based technology resources and access to modern and cutting-edge skills and platforms.” Seven paragraphs down in the letter, he lowers the boom: "As we embark on the implementation phase, there will be a realignment of resources requiring a reduction in McClatchy technology staff." IT employees thought they were part of the solution to McClatchy's tech direction, not the problem. Said one IT employee: "This has taken us all by surprise. I'm not saying that we felt untouchable as they have been doing layoffs for the past 10 years, but being part of IT we felt that we had a big part in what happens" in the company. Employees are now training their replacements.

Submission + - Security Expert Jailed for Reporting Vulnerabilities in Lee County, FL Elections (theregister.co.uk)

Submitted by rootmon
rootmon writes: Information Security Professional David Levin was arrested 3 months after reporting un-patched SQL injection vulnerabilities in the Lee County, Florida Elections Office run by Sharon Harrington, the Lee County Supervisor of Elections. Harrington's office has been in the news before for voting systems problems (for example in during the 2012 election, 35 districts in Lee County had to remain open 3 hours past the closing of polls due to long lines and equipment issues , wasting $800,000 to $1.6 million of taxpayer money incompatible iPads for which her office is facing an audit. Rather than fix the issues with their systems, they chose to charge the whistle blower with three third-degree felonies. The News Press also has several related interviews.

Comment You can't teach some of these skills! (Score 1) 553

by rootmon (#48224895) Attached to: Employers Worried About Critical Thinking Skills

Common sense is not so common these days. People are sheep.

Teachers can't teach skills they don't have. Very few teachers or professors have what it takes to be successful business people or problem solvers. There are some, and those are the ones who stick out among a mediocre flock of public servants who can barely keep the kids in their seats and keep them from talking during class.

Schools should be teaching children how to educate themselves but the system was designed around the turn of the previous century to turn out compliant factory workers and is not up to the modern challenges.

Comment What outage? (Score 1) 105

by rootmon (#43657127) Attached to: CenturyLink's Nationwide Outage Affects Millions

I have been working since 8 AM Eastern Time as a telecommuter and my CenturyLink DSL has been up without so much as an SSH session disconnecting all day. I live in SW Florida and my colleagues tell me they're having problems but perhaps the outage is not as widespread as publicized or it's affecting DNS and I use OpenDNS instead of my ISP's DNS for filtering sites I don't want my kids to browse such as adult content.

In my experience, Cable modems were far less stable than DSL. I had Comcast for a while and it was much worse. So please don't listen to the cable modem trolls. Overall DSL is a more reliable technology and I've been using Spring/Embarq/CenturyLink for 12 years now with very few hiccups which they did address quickly, except for a move where I used DirectWay/Hughes and then Comcast for a while. DirectWay/Hughes was good if you have no other options but satellite just has too much latency for some apps like voip or skype, and Comcast was terrible especially during peak hours.
Space

Submission + - Astronomers catch a star in the act of devouring a planet (io9.com)

Submitted by jamstar7
jamstar7 writes: Astronomers have witnessed the first evidence of a planet's destruction by its aging star as it expands into a red giant.

"A similar fate may await the inner planets in our solar system, when the Sun becomes a red giant and expands all the way out to Earth's orbit some five-billion years from now," said Alex Wolszczan, from Penn State, University, who led a team which found evidence of a missing planet having been devoured by its parent star. Wolszczan also is the discoverer of the first planet ever found outside our solar system.

The planet-eating culprit, a red-giant star named BD+48 740 is older than the Sun and now has a radius about eleven times bigger than our Sun.

The evidence the astronomers found was a massive planet in a surprising highly elliptical orbit around the star — indicating a missing planet — plus the star's wacky chemical composition.

5 billion years or so is a long way off, so it's likely none of us has to worry about it, but still, watching a star eating its own planets is not only cool in its own right, but gives you food for thought as to how to keep the human species going long after the Sun starts going off the main sequence into red gianthood. And of course, some more cash into astronomers' and physicists' hands now can give us a closer ballpark number of when this event is going to happen. It's all in the math...
Security

Submission + - After Hacker Exposes Hotel Lock Insecurity, Lock Firm Asks Hotels To Pay For Fix (forbes.com)

Submitted by Sparrowvsrevolution
Sparrowvsrevolution writes: In an update to an earlier story on Slashdot, hotel lock company Onity is now offering a hardware fix for the millions of hotel keycard locks that hacker Cody Brocious demonstrated at Black Hat were vulnerable to being opened by a sub-$50 Arduino device. Unfortunately, Onity wants the hotels who already bought the company's insecure product to pay for the fix.

Onity is actually offering two different mitigations: The first is a plug that blocks the port that Brocious used to gain access to the locks' data, as well as more-obscure Torx screws to prevent intruders from opening the lock's case and removing the plug. That band-aid style fix is free. A second, more rigorous fix requires changing the locks' circuit boards manually. In that case, Onity is offering "special pricing programs" for the new circuit boards customers need to secure their doors, and requiring them to also pay the shipping and labor costs.

Submission + - Single handed keyboard options for coding?

Submitted by dubbreak
dubbreak writes: I was recently injured in a car accident which will limit the use of hand for 6 weeks or so. I'll be taking a little time off but deadlines march on and I'll need to be (semi) productive after my initial recuperation. What is you experience with single handed keyboards or other input option that require one hand at most?

The current project is mainly C#, so I've need to be able to type brackets, semicolons and parentheses quick and painlessly.
Medicine

Submission + - Should Medical Apps Be Regulated? (itworld.com) 2

Submitted by maximus1
maximus1 writes: There's a tidal wave of medical-related apps coming to smartphones and tablets that will be used by doctors and patients alike. But how should the medical establishment deal with them? Neurologist Steven Levine, currently working on an app for stroke victims, thinks they should be treated like new medicines: developed using scientific peer review and subject to regulation by the government or professional associations. Obstetrician Kurian Thott, developer of an app called iRounds that helps communication between doctors, thinks they should be released quickly and the market should decide which take off. What do you think?

Submission + - Inside the Grum Botnet (krebsonsecurity.com)

Submitted by tsu doh nimh
tsu doh nimh writes: An examination of a control server seized in the recent takedown of the Grum spam botnet shows that the crime machine was far bigger than most experts had assumed. A PHP panel used to control the botnet shows that it had just shy of 200,000 systems sending spam when it was dismantled in mid-July. Researchers also found dozens of huge email lists, totaling more than 2.3 billion addresses, as well evidence it was used for phishing and malware attacks in addition to mailing pharmacy spam. Just prior to its takedown, Grum was responsible for sending about one in six spams worldwide.
Security

Submission + - US to drive 3,000 Wi-Fi linked vehicles in massive crash avoidance trial (networkworld.com)

Submitted by
coondoggie
coondoggie writes: "The US Department of Transportation said it will run a massive road test of cars, trucks and buses linked together via WiFi equipment in what the agency says will be the largest test of automated crash avoidance technology to date. The test will be conducted by the University of Michigan's Transportation Research Institute (UMTRI), and feature mostly volunteer participants whose vehicles have been outfitted with vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication devices ."

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