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Submission + - Anonymous Dumps Australian Telco Data Online (gizmodo.com.au)

Submitted by lukehopewell1
lukehopewell1 writes: After the threats, admissions and delays, hacktivists protesting a data retention scheme proposed by the Australian Government’s National Security Inquiry have begun dumping data gleaned from an Australian telco — presumably AAPT.

Anonymous is in the process of dumping government and business customer data onto Pastebin for the world to see under the guise of Operation Australia. This episode is far from over, however. We’re likely to see more data trickle out over the coming days, considering that the group has promised 40GB worth of leaks.

Submission + - OAuth 2.0 standard editor quits, takes name off spec (theregister.co.uk) 1

Submitted by tramp
tramp writes: Eran Hammer, who helped create the OAuth 1.0 spec, has been editing the evolving 2.0 spec for the last three years. He resigned from his role in June but only went public with his reasons in a blog post on Thursday."
"At the end, I reached the conclusion that OAuth 2.0 is a bad protocol," Hammer writes. "WS-* bad. It is bad enough that I no longer want to be associated with it."
And he ends with "I think the OAuth brand is in decline," he writes. "This framework will live for a while, and given the lack of alternatives, it will gain widespread adoption. But we are also likely to see major security failures in the next couple of years and the slow but steady devaluation of the brand. It will be another hated protocol you are stuck with."

Comment old time cellphones (Score 1) 307

by slohandave (#33281852) Attached to: Old (unused) mobile phones I've got hanging around ...

I got my first car based cell phone in november of 1984 before the network was even turned on for use, if you tried to call you got a canned Cellular One message telling you to sod off. When they turned on the network in boston Jan 1, 1985 at 12:01 am it was like woo hoo I'm on, ordering pizza on my way home, tormenting the 1st wife and generally acting like a spoiled kid with a new toy. Then It was the bag phones, they called them transportables and they had full handsets and a lead/acid battery, great for emergencies, just wack'em upside the head with the phone bag and they were out for the night, people were all over walking around with bags'o'phones. Then came the Grey Whale, the first actual handheld, looked like a military walkie talkie from the korean war, but hey it worked and the first time it rang when I was in a store and I hauled it out of my inside pocket (specially made to fit the beast) people stared and another time it got me laid, what could be better. Since then I've been through freaking hundreds of phones, lost them, toileted them, dropped, stepped, run over, stolen, hell I dropped 2 Razors in webster lake on the same day, left one on the roof of my car and saw it fly into the Charles taking a corner at 45mph on Strorrow Drive, but with all that, I still only have 4 or 5 old phones, they all work except the analog motorola, but all the batteries are shot, 10 to 30 minutes max but I keep them around for nostagia. And the point of all this is, "Old Phones Never Die, they just move on to a different paradigm of existence"
Image

Water Cooled

Posted by samzenpus from the cooled-boys-make-a-cool-boy dept.
Hose, the refreshedmaker!
Government

DC Fires Tech Contractors, Puts Employees On Leave 51

Posted by Soulskill from the stirring-the-pot dept.
theodp writes "After Gov. Tim Kaine intervened on his behalf, Vivek Kundra was quietly reinstated to his Federal CIO post on Tuesday after a brief leave following an FBI raid on Kundra's former DC office (Kundra was not implicated). Now, the Washington Post reports that the City of DC plans to fire 23 Technology Office contractors and place 4 employees on leave in the aftermath of the arrests of a Security manager and contractor on bribery charges last week. Another government employee has since been arrested for his role in the scam, and the mayor has promised that the tech office will undergo a 'full and formal review.'"
Image

Company Makes Paper Out Of Wombat Poo 71

Posted by samzenpus from the my-test-smells-funny dept.
Creative Paper attracted worldwide interest for its paper made of kangaroo droppings in 2005. Well it's been four years and the best and brightest at Creative Paper haven't been sitting on their laurels. What's their great new idea? They have now launched a kind of paper made from wombat poo. Scat-obsessed Darren Simpson from Creative Paper says the paper is green or gold depending on the time of year the droppings are harvested. The wombat paper will be unveiled at an international paper conference in Burnie, Australia later this month.
Earth

Earth May Harbor a Shadow Biosphere of Alien Life 267

Posted by kdawson from the but-not-as-we-know-it dept.
An anonymous reader sends us to Cosmos Magazine for a speculative article arguing that a 'shadow biosphere' may exist on Earth, unrelated to life as we know it. If such non-carbon-based life were found here at home, it would alter the odds for how common life is elsewhere in the universe, astrobiologists say. "The tools and experiments researchers use to look for new forms of life — such as those on missions to Mars — would not detect biochemistries different from our own, making it easy for scientists to miss alien life, even if [it] was under their noses. ... Scientists are looking in places where life isn't expected — for example, in areas of extreme heat, cold, salt, radiation, dryness, or contaminated streams and rivers. [One researcher] is particularly interested in places that are heavily contaminated with arsenic, which, he suggests, might support forms of life that use arsenic the way life as we know it uses phosphorus."
Books

An Ethical Question Regarding Ebooks 715

Posted by kdawson from the cui-bono dept.
tytso writes "Suppose there is a book that you want to read on your ebook reader, but it is out of print (so even if you purchase the dead-tree version of the book used, the author won't receive any royalties) and the publisher has refused to make it available as an ebook. You can buy it from Amazon as a used book, but that isn't your preferred medium. It is available on the internet as a pirated etext, however. This blog post outlines a few possibilities, and then asks, 'What is the right thing to do? And why?' I'm also curious if the answers change depending on whether you are a Baby Boomer, or a Gen X, Gen Y, etc. — I've noticed that attitudes around copyright seem to change depending on whether someone is a college student or a recent college graduate, versus someone who can remember a time when the Internet did not exist."
Censorship

Google's Gatekeepers 150

Posted by kdawson from the can't-read-that-here-try-a-proxy dept.
theodp writes "With control of 63% of the world's Internet searches, as well as ownership of YouTube, the NY Times reports that Google is the most powerful and protean of the Internet gatekeepers, exerting enormous influence over who can find an audience on the Web around the world. Deciding what controversial material does and doesn't appear on the local search engines Google maintains in many countries — as well as on Google.com, YouTube, Blogger, Picasa, and Orkut — falls on the shoulders of Nicole Wong and her colleagues, who have arguably been given more influence over online expression than anyone else on the planet. Some find Google's gatekeeper role worrisome: 'If your whole game is to increase market share,' says Lawrence Lessig, 'it's hard to do good, and to gather data in ways that don't raise privacy concerns or that might help repressive governments to block controversial content.'"
Encryption

A 1941 Paper-and-Pencil Cipher 75

Posted by kdawson from the sudoku-got-nothin' dept.
Schneier's blog links to a photo of a 68-year-old code being employed in wartime, with a plausible explanation of what is going on in it. (The photo is from the Life Magazine archive we discussed when it went live.) "What you see here is a photo that never should have been allowed to be taken, and one which provides an amazing, one-of-a-kind glimpse into the world of WWII espionage and counter-espionage. As far as I can tell, what is shown in this picture is an FBI agent in New York encrypting a message, passed from 'DUNN'... through Sebold, prior to transmitting that message to Germany via shortwave radio. ... [T]his appears to be real cryptology at work."
Editorial

The Player Is and Is Not the Character 152

Posted by Soulskill from the i-agree-and-disagree dept.
Jill Duffy writes "GameCareerGuide has posted an intellectual article about video games which argues there is no such thing as 'breaking the fourth wall' in games. Written by Matthew Weise, a lead game designer for the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab, the article considers the complex relationship between video game players and characters. Weise says that, unlike in theater and film, video games don't ever really break the fourth wall, as it were, because in games, there is no wall. Players are always tethered to the technology, and the player is always just as much the main character as not the main character. Weise looks at both modern experimental games, like Mirror's Edge, as well as old classics, like Sonic the Hedgehog, to defend his point. He writes, 'Both avatars and the technological devices we use to control them are never simply in one reality. They are inherently liminal entities, contributing to a mindset that we, as players, exist in two realities at once. It's just as natural for a player to say, "I defeated that boss," as it is to say, "Snake defeated that boss," since Snake is and is not the player at the same time. It is likewise natural for a player to say, "I punched an enemy soldier," when in reality, she punched no one. All she did was press a button.'"
Windows

Boot Windows Vista In Four Seconds 326

Posted by timothy from the says-them dept.
arcticstoat writes "Asus' budget motherboard wing, ASRock, claims that it's found a way to load a clean boot of Windows from a full shut down in just four seconds, using its new Instant Boot technology. The technology takes advantage of the S3 and S4 features of ACPI, which normally enable the Sleep/Standby and Hibernation modes in Windows respectively. However, by calling them at different times in the boot-up and shutdown process, Instant Boot enables you to boot up to your Windows desktop in three to four seconds, even after a proper shut down. Two modes are available; Fast mode, which uses S3 and boots up in around four seconds, and Regular Mode, which uses S4 and apparently takes between 20 and 22 seconds to boot. The advantage of Instant Boot when compared with normal Sleep and Hibernation modes is that you get the advantage of a clean boot of Windows, without what ASRock calls 'accumulated garbage data,' and you also get the security of knowing that you won't lose any data if there's a power cut and you lose AC power. There's also a video of it in action at the link above."
Image

Dogs To Sniff Out Smokers 136

Posted by samzenpus from the what-brand-is-it-lassie dept.
The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation has turned to "tobacco detection canine" teams to sniff out workers sneaking away for a smoke. Careless smoking by workers inside the former Deutsche Bank building is blamed for the Aug. 18, 2007, fire that killed two firefighters. "This is just one part of the project team's multifaceted approach to ensuring that all site regulations are strictly followed and enforced," said LMDC spokesman Mike Murphy.
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How To Cut In Line and Not Get Caught 256

Posted by samzenpus from the no-cuts dept.
ewenc writes "A psychology study of hundreds of people waiting for front-row access to U2 concerts points to the best ways to cut in line and not get caught. 'Super-fans' are most irked by queue-jumpers. People were equally peeved whether someone cut in front or behind, and cutters who jumped beside a friend were less likely to attract scorn."

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