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Security

Hackers Get Their Own Scoreboard and Rankings 106

Posted by samzenpus from the and-the-winner-is dept.
wiredmikey writes "Sometimes hacking is about money; other times, it's about competition, and when that happens, it is also about getting a little credit. Enter RankMyHack.com. The site is described as the world's 'first elite hacker ranking system,' and invites people to submit proof of their Website hacks in exchange for points — the higher the points, the higher the place on the leader board. In order to get ranked, hackers need to prove they have indeed hacked a site – by inserting a predetermined text into the hacked site page. Rankmyhack then scans for the text in the page and gives score based on how popular the website is, with lower points awarded for XSS attacks. Assuming the site is real – and early reports indicate that it is – hackers can now see where their hacks stack up against those of their peers. Will this morph into a playground for hacktivists to hone their skills?"
Japan

Nuclear Risk Expert: Fukushima Fuel May Be Leaking 500

Posted by timothy from the so-step-lively dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Three weeks after the nuclear crisis began at Japan's Fukushima Dai-1 power plant, there's still a real danger of melted nuclear fuel escaping the reactor buildings and releasing a large dose of radiation. So says Theo Theofanous, an engineer who spent 15 years studying the risks of nuclear reactors. Theofanous believes that melted nuclear fuel has already leaked through the reactor vessels and accumulated at the bottoms of the primary containment structures. All attempts to keep the reactor buildings cool may not be enough to prevent the overheated fuel from eating through the concrete floors, he says."
Medicine

Doctors Reverse With Drugs Autism-Linked Fragile X Syndrome In Mice 63

Posted by timothy from the kmart-definitely-sucks dept.
An anonymous reader writes "New research by a team of Bangalore-based scientists has given hope to those with emotional problems caused by the inheritance of a fragile X chromosome. The researchers, for the first time in the world, mapped defective connections between nerve cells in the emotional hub of the brain of mice who had Fragile X Syndrome. The research has just been published in the online edition of the US-based Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences." Besides the mapping of these nerves, though, "The NCBS team has shown that even the long-term ravages of the condition could be reversed with medication in mice." Fragile X syndrome is associated with autism, though the conditions do not map directly to each other.
Books

Why Beatrix Potter Would Love a Digital Reader (wordpress.com) 98

Posted by timothy from the bunny-centerfold dept.
destinyland writes "In 1906, children's book author Beatrix Potter tried creating her own new, non-book format for delivering her famous fairy tales. 'Intended for babies and tots, the story was originally published on a strip of paper that was folded into a wallet, closed with a flap, and tied with a ribbon.' While today there's hundreds of children's picture books, it's fun to look back over a century to actual images from one of Potter's original strange wallet-sized stories — 'The Story of A Fierce, Bad Rabbit' — plus an image showing you exactly what Beatrix Potter thought 'a fierce, bad rabbit' would look like!"

Comment Cut cut the cable this month (Score 1) 502

by ssyladin (#32057694) Attached to: One In Eight To Cut Cable and Satellite TV In 2010

My wife and I just moved and decided that paying $150 for Comcast Silver + HBO + HD "Bonus" was just too much. We moved out to Portland and subscribed to Verizon ViOS and cut our "media" bill to $85/month (we got a higher tier). I got "permission" to build a sweet HTPC and hooked it up to our 46" TV.

With Hulu, Netflix, a vast library of personal DVDs on a jukebox system, and a fat pipe to the Internet, we've been doing quite well. Unfortunately we like our sports and ESPN360 isn't really there yet. When we want some background noise, Aussies rule Footie has been great, but we're really noticing the lack of NASCAR, March Madness, and are worried about actual coverage of June the World Cup. We're actually looking at satellite to at least get the World Cup without worries.

Comment Re:hmm (Score 1) 117

by tzot (#32051952) Attached to: Japanese Researchers Make Plastic Out of Water

Yep, ice-9. That's what I thought at first, too. Then, while reading the article (something about eventually decreasing the density), I thought "new replacement for silicone used in breast implants". Then I combined the two and resulted with something marginally better than a plastic doll.
Networking

Chinese Man Gets 30 Months For Fake Cisco Sales 161

Posted by kdawson from the hey-pancho dept.
alphadogg writes "A Chinese man was sentenced to two-and-a-half years in a US prison this week for trafficking in counterfeit Cisco Systems gear. Yongcai Li, 33, will also have to pay the networking company nearly $800,000 in restitution after being the conduit for hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of counterfeit computer hardware, the FBI said Friday. Prosecutors said he procured the fake gear in China and then sent it to co-conspirators in the US. His alleged co-conspirators have not been charged. Li was arrested by FBI agents on Jan. 9, 2009, in Las Vegas — while the annual Consumer Electronics Show was taking place there. Two years ago, the FBI claimed to have seized more than $78 million worth of counterfeit equipment in more than 400 seizures."
Medicine

Gates Foundation Plans To Invest $10B Into Vaccines 477

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the finally-gates-gets-good-anti-virus dept.
Endloser writes "Bill Gates is going to invest $10 billion to provide vaccines to people worldwide. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation believes that vaccines are the way to a better future for the world. So they have decided to make 'the largest pledge ever made by a charitable foundation to a single cause.' This 10-year, 10 billion dollar project is expected to save 8.7 million lives."
Security

Ethics of Releasing Non-Malicious Linux Malware? 600

Posted by kdawson from the what-would-schneier-do dept.
buchner.johannes writes "I was fed up with the general consensus that Linux is oh-so-secure and has no malware. After a week of work, I finished a package of malware for Unix/Linux. Its whole purpose is to help white-hat hackers point out that a Linux system can be turned into a botnet client by simply downloading BOINC and attaching it to a user account to help scientific projects. The malware does not exploit any security holes, only loose security configurations and mindless execution of unverified downloads. I tested it to be injected by a PHP script (even circumventing safe mode), so that the Web server runs it; I even got a proxy server that injects it into shell scripts and makefiles in tarballs on the fly, and adds onto Windows executables for execution in Wine. If executed by the user, the malware can persist itself in cron, bashrc and other files. The aim of the exercise was to provide a payload so security people can 'pwn' systems to show security holes, without doing harm (such as deleting files or disrupting normal operation). But now I am unsure of whether it is ethically OK to release this toolkit, which, by ripping out the BOINC payload and putting in something really evil, could be turned into proper Linux malware. On the one hand, the way it persists itself in autostart is really nasty, and that is not really a security hole that can be fixed. On the other hand, such a script can be written by anyone else too, and it would be useful to show people why you need SELinux on a server, and why verifying the source of downloads (checksums through trusted channels) is necessary. Technically, it is a nice piece, but should I release it? I don't want to turn the Linux desktop into Windows, hence I'm slightly leaning towards not releasing it. What does your ethics say about releasing such grayware?"
The Internet

Are Ad Servers Bogging Down the Web? 387

Posted by CmdrTaco from the yes-of-course-they-are dept.
blackbearnh writes "The work of making high-volume web sites perform well is an ongoing challenge, and one that continues to evolve as the nature of web content changes. According to Google Performance Guru Steve Souders, fat JavaScript libraries and rich content are creating new problems for web site tuning, but one of the biggest problems lies outside the control of web site administrators — ad servers. In an interview previewing the upcoming Velocity Online conference run by O'Reilly, Souders talks at length about the real causes of poor web performance today, and in particular, the effect that poorly performing ad servers are creating. 'We adopted a framework of inserting ads, of creating ads, that's pretty simple. And because it's pretty simple, it's not highly tuned. That's one reason why we shouldn't be too surprised that we see performance issues in third party ads. The other reason is that ad services are not focused on technology. Certainly companies like Yahoo and Google and Microsoft, we're technology companies. We focus on technology. So it's not surprising that our web developers are on the leading edge of adopting these performance best practices. And it's also not surprising that ad services might lag two, three or four years behind where these web technology companies are.'"

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