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Submission + - Ask Slashdot: What Would Happen If ALL Software Ran On ALL Platforms?

Submitted by dryriver
dryriver writes: We live in a computing world where the OS you use — Windows, OS X, Linux, Android, iOS, others — often determines what software can and cannot be run on a given electronic device. (Let us pretend for a moment that emulators and other options don't exist). What if — magically — such a thing as as Universally Compatible Software Application were possible. Software, in other words, that is magically capable of running on ANY electronic device equipped with enough CPU, GPU and Memory capacity to run the software in a usable way. Example: 3D CAD software that runs on Windows 14, Playstation 7, an Android Smartphone, Nintendo's latest handheld gaming device and an Ubuntu PC in exactly the same way with no compatibility problems whatsoever occurring. What would and would not change in such a computing world? And does anyone think such a thing as Universally Compatible Software Application will EVER be possible or feasible from a technical standpoint?

Comment Probably NAT or proxy related (Score 1) 131

by thingie (#52208231) Attached to: Google Scholar Users Report Badly Malfunctioning Captcha

This is most likely proxy-related.

Google human-detection / anti-SPAM efforts are IP based and unless you're authenticated against google there's a very high chance you entire institution is being seen as a single entity. This is usually related to campus level NATing.

There is a variant which is the result of a well-intentioned librarian putting google scholar behind EZproxy ( https://www.oclc.org/support/s... ).

Submission + - Security Firm Discovers Secret Plan to Hack Numerous Websites and Forums (softpedia.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Security researchers have shut down a secret plan to hack and infect hundreds or possibly thousands of forums and websites hosted on the infrastructure of Invision Power Services, makers of the IP.Board forum platform.

The man behind this plan was a hacker known as AlphaLeon, maker of the Thanatos malware-as-a-service platform. AlphaLeon hacked IP.Board's customer hosting platform, and was planning to place an exploit kit that would infect the visitors to these websites with his Thanatos trojan, in order to grow his botnet. Some of the companies using IP.Board-hosted forums include Evernote, the NHL, the Warner Music Group, and Bethesda Softworks (Elder Scrolls, Fallout, Wolfenstein, Doom games).

Submission + - So whatever happened to that spaceport SpaceX was building in South Texas? (blastingnews.com)

Submitted by MarkWhittington
MarkWhittington writes: About a year and a half ago, with then Texas Governor Rick Perry and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk in attendance, ground was broken on the first private spaceport designed to launch rockets vertically near Brownsville, Texas. At the time, SpaceX announced that it expected to launch a rocket a month, either a Falcon 9 or a Falcon Heavy in the skies over South Texas starting in 2016. But then, the Texas spaceport story fell off the face of the Earth, as it were. Fortunately, the Valley Morning Star has an explanation as to why things are taking so long.

Submission + - Newspaper publishes comment abuse stats, invites debate on moderation

Submitted by AmiMoJo
AmiMoJo writes: British newspaper The Guardian has published some stats on its popular comment sections attached to each story. So far the Guardian's site has received 70 million comments, of which around 2% were removed for violation of community standards. Articles written by women tended to get the most blocked comments, especially if they were in male writer dominated sections like sports and technology, while fashion was one of the few areas where men got more abuse. Further down the article the reader is invited to moderate some sample comments and see how their actions compared to those of the paper's staff. You can leave suggestions for improvement here.

Submission + - Seattle Police raid privacy activists because they run a Tor Node

Submitted by Frosty Piss
Frosty Piss writes: Seattle police raided the home of two outspoken privacy activists early on May 30th. Jan Bultmann and David Robinson, a married couple and co-founders of the Seattle Privacy Coalition, were awakened at 6:15 a.m. by a team of six detectives from the Seattle Police Department who had a search warrant to examined their equipment. They claimed to be looking for child pornography, however Bultmann and Robinson believe the raid is because they run a Tor exit node out of their home. They said they operated the node as a service to dissidents in repressive countries, knowing full well that criminals might use it as well, much like any other communication tool. The SPD acknowledged this morning that no child porn was found, no assets were seized, and no arrests were made.

Submission + - Gov't Researchers Develop Wireless Car Charges That Are Faster Than Plug-ins (computerworld.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The U.S. Department of Energy has demonstrated a 20,000 watt (20KW) wireless car-charging system that offers three times the efficiency of today's plug-in systems for electric vehicles (EVs). The research is the first step in creating a 50KW wireless charging system that may someday allow roadways to charge vehicles while they are being driven. The DOE's Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee demonstrated the new system in partnership with Toyota, Cisco Systems, Evatran and the Clemson University International Center for Automotive Research. ORNL said the 20KW charging system for passenger cars is the world's highest power wireless system. It was developed in less than three years using a "unique architecture that included an ORNL-built inverter, isolation transformer, vehicle-side electronics and coupling technologies."

Submission + - HP's New Logo Is The Awesome One It Never Used (theverge.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Earlier today, HP announced the Spectre 13, the world's thinnest laptop. One of the subtle changes HP is making with its recent global brand offensive is to its logo. HP has decided to go with a minimalist design consisting of four slashes making up the "HP" brand name. Previously, "Hewlett-Packard" was written out in full on last year's Spectre x360. HP says it will be using the minimalist logo solely on its premium laptops.

Submission + - This May Be The Most Unsecure Router Ever Made (20+ Major Security Bugs) (softpedia.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: LTE routers made by Quanta Computer Incorporated, a Taiwanese hardware manufacturer, are plagued by over twenty major security flaws ranging from backdoor accounts to remote code execution bugs, from hardcoded SSH keys to undocumented diagnostics pages, and from weak WPS PINs to network eavesdropping functions.

As the researcher explains: "A personal point of view: at best, the vulnerabilites are due to incompetence; at worst, it is a deliberate act of security sabotage from the vendor." The vendor has not fixed any of these issues even after almost four months.

Submission + - 'Chilling Effect' of Mass Surveillance Is Silencing Dissent Online, Study Says (vice.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Research suggests that widespread awareness of mass surveillance could undermine democracy by making citizens fearful of voicing dissenting opinions in public. A paper published in Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, the flagship peer-reviewed journal of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC), found that "the government’s online surveillance programs may threaten the disclosure of minority views and contribute to the reinforcement of majority opinion.” The NSA’s “ability to surreptitiously monitor the online activities of US citizens may make online opinion climates especially chilly” and “can contribute to the silencing of minority views that provide the bedrock of democratic discourse," the researcher found.

Submission + - Why Buses Need to Be More Dangerous

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Is there such a thing as being too safe? Jeff Kaufman writes that buses are much safer than cars, by about a factor of 67 but buses are not very popular and one of the main reasons is that if you look at situations where people who can afford private transit take mass transit instead, speed is the main factor. According to Kauffman, we should look at ways to make buses faster so more people will ride them, even if this means making them somewhat more dangerous. Kauffman presents some ideas, roughly in order from “we should definitely do this” to “this is crazy, but it would probably still reduce deaths overall when you take into account that more people would ride the bus”: Suggestions include not to require buses to stop and open their doors at railroad crossings, allow the driver to start while someone is still at the front paying, allow buses to drive 25mph on the shoulder of the highway in traffic jams where the main lanes are averaging below 10mph, and leave (city) bus doors open, allowing people to get on and off any time at their own risk. "If we made buses more dangerous by the same percentage that motorcycles are more dangerous than cars," concludes Kauffman, "they would still be more than twice as safe as cars."

Submission + - EU Court Says Public Wi-Fi Hotspot Owners Aren't Liable For Third Party Piracy

Submitted by Mickeycaskill
Mickeycaskill writes: A preliminary ruling from a European Court of Justice Advocate General has said it is not reasonable for owners of public Wi-Fi hotspots to be held liable for copyright infringement committed by users on these networks.
Sony took legal action against a German business owner after a third party allegedly illegally downloaded music to which the record label owned the rights to on the basis the network should have been secured.
However this view has been rejected by the Advocate General who says it is impossible for all public Wi-Fi to be secured. His recommendation will now be debated by European judges.

Submission + - How far have we come with HTTPS? Google turns on the spotlight

Submitted by alphadogg
alphadogg writes: HTTPS is widely considered one of the keys to a safer Internet, but only if it's broadly implemented. Aiming to shed some light on how much progress has been made so far, Google on Tuesday launched a new section of its transparency report dedicated to encryption. Included in the new section is data highlighting the progress of encryption efforts both at Google and on popular third-party sites. "Our aim with this project is to hold ourselves accountable and encourage others to encrypt so we can make the Web even safer for everyone," wrote HTTPS evangelists Rutledge Chin Feman and Tim Willis on the Google Security Blog. https://security.googleblog.co...

Comment Re:Already happened to a good portion of the early (Score 1) 166

by SgtChaireBourne (#49061321) Attached to: Vint Cerf Warns Against 'Digital Dark Age'
I don't think they kept the old site archived though hothothot.com is still around and they were offline for a long time during some kind of remodel and no longer carry Clancy's Fancy after the remodel. Strange since I figure they would try to have the largest selection possible. But anyway, the site is still online and might be the oldest web shop by now. As far as I know, it was the second web shop ever but I cannot recall which might have been the first.

Submission + - Removing libsystemd0 from a live-running Debian system (lkcl.net) 1

Submitted by lkcl
lkcl writes: The introduction of systemd has unilaterally created a polarisation of the GNU/Linux community that is remarkably similar to the monopolistic power position wielded by Microsoft in the late 1990s. Choices were stark: use Windows (with SMB/CIFS Services), or use UNIX (with NFS and NIS). Only the introduction of fully-compatible reverse-engineered NT Domains services corrected the situation. Instructions on how to remove systemd include dire warnings that "all dependent packages will be removed", rendering a normal Debian Desktop system flat-out impossible to achieve. It was therefore necessary to demonstrate that it is actually possible to run a Debian Desktop GUI system (albeit an unusual one: fvwm) with libsystemd0 removed. The reason for doing so: it doesn't matter how good systemd is believed to be or in fact actually is: the reason for removing it is, apart from the alarm at how extensive systemd is becoming (including interfering with firewall rules), it's the way that it's been introduced in a blatantly cavalier fashion as a polarised all-or-nothing option, forcing people to consider abandoning the GNU/Linux of their choice and to seriously consider using FreeBSD or any other distro that properly respects the Software Freedom principle of the right to choose what software to run. We aren't all "good at coding", or paid to work on Software Libre: that means that those people who are need to be much more responsible, and to start — finally — to listen to what people are saying. Developing a thick skin is a good way to abdicate responsibility and, as a result, place people into untenable positions.

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