By Soulskill from
Slashdot's #getoffmylawn department:
An anonymous reader writes
"The NY Times reports that Twitter will soon launch a new music recommendation system for users of its service. The company teased the new feature and directed queries to announcement that We Are Hunted, a company focused on music recommendation through social media, would be shutting down and joining the Twitter team. 'Recommendations based on social media interactions have become common throughout digital media for things like restaurants and shopping. Many online music services offer these features as well. Spotify, for example, can broadcast its users' playlists through Facebook. Twitter's advantage, in addition to its size, may lie in the devotion of its customers. "Music is one of the most tweeted topics," said Ted Cohen, a former label executive who is now a consultant to digital music companies. "Discovery is critical to the growth of music, and the new gatekeeper is recommendations from trusted sources."' Oddly, those 'trusted sources' seem to be celebrities with Twitter accounts at the moment, as the system is currently invite-only and restricted to 'influencers.'"Read Replies (0)
By timothy from
Slashdot's crispy-on-the-outside department:
A story at Slashgear says that the remains of a Soviet mission to Mars may have been spotted — on Mars — by
enthusiasts poring over old photos taken by a NASA orbiter. The article points out that the find must be confirmed by further imaging, but matches the seekers' expectations.
From the article:
"The community at VK.com/Curiosity_Live crowdsourced a mission to find the Soviet Union’s long-lost Mars 3 spacecraft, with the site’s leader, Vitali Egorov of St. Petersburg, Russia, creating models of what hardware from the spacecraft should look like. With this reference, the community combed through a large image taken five years ago by NASA’s MRO, identifying what is believed to be the craft’s parachute, lander, terminal retrorocket, and heat shield."Read Replies (0)
By timothy from
Slashdot's you-put-me-right-off-my-fresh-fried-lobster department:
An anonymous reader writes
"Two hundred hackers from around the world gathered at a Miami Beach hotel Thursday and Friday for the Infiltrate Security conference, which focuses on systems hacking from the 'offensive' perspective (with slides) . In a keynote address, Stephen Watt, who served two years in prison for writing the software used by his friend Alberto Gonzalez to steal millions of credit card numbers from TJX, Hannaford and other retailers, acknowledges he was a 'black hat' but denies that he was directly involved in TJX or any other specific job. Watt says his TCP sniffer logged critical data from a specified range of ports, which was then encrypted and uploaded to a remote server. Brad 'RenderMan' Haines gave a presentation on vulnerabilities of the Air Traffic Control system, including the FAA's 'NextGen' system which apparently carries forward the same weakness of unencrypted, unauthenticated location data passed between airplanes and control towers. Regarding the recent potential exploits publicized by Spanish researcher Hugo Teso, Haines says he pointed out similar to the FAA and its Canadian counterpart a year ago, but received only perfunctory response."Read Replies (0)
By Soulskill from
Slashdot's what-have-we-learned department:
Last summer we followed the odd case of lawyer Charles Carreon, as he
went after Matthew Inman, creator of
The Oatmeal webcomic, with legal threats. Carreon had been hired by FunnyJunk, a website Inman accused of stealing his comics. Carreon demanded $20,000 in compensation for Inman's "false accusations." Inman declined, and then used the publicity to solicit over $200,000 in donations, which he gave to charity after
sending Carreon photographs. Carreon dropped the suit against Inman, but the saga continued. A satirical website was set up about Carreon, which caused him to invoke the legal system again. The article documents the absurdities, which included further legal action and a song. Now, however, Carreon is reaping what he has sown;
a judge has ordered him to pay over $46,000 for his role in the legal circus.
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By Soulskill from
Slashdot's go-big-or-go-home department:
An anonymous reader sends news that Russian President Vladimir Putin unveiled today
a new $50 billion effort to maintain and extend the country's space capabilities. Part of this initiative is a new spaceport located in Russia, which will lead to
the first manned launches from Russian soil in 2018. Manned launches currently originate from the
Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
"The Russian space programme has been hurt in recent years by a string of launch failures of unmanned probes and satellites, but Putin vowed Moscow would continue to ramp up spending. He said that from 2013-2020, Russia would be spending 1.6 trillion rubles ($51.8 billion, 38 million euros) on its space sector, a growth far greater than any other space power. 'Developing our potential in space will be one of the priorities of state policy,' Putin said at a meeting in the regional capital Blagoveshchensk. ... speaking to Canadian spaceman Chris Hadfield, currently commander of the ISS, Putin hailed cooperation in space which meant world powers could forget about the problems of international relations and think 'about the future of mankind.'"Read Replies (0)
By Soulskill from
Slashdot's pressing-all-the-words department:
New submitter NitzJaaron writes
"Some of us have been experiencing attacks on Wordpress sites for the last few days, but it's now beginning to be widely reported that there's a fairly large brute force attack happening on Wordpress users on multiple hosts, including HostGator and LiquidWeb. 'This attack is well organized and again very, very distributed; we have seen over 90,000 IP addresses involved in this attack.' CloudFlare has announced that they're giving all users (free and paid) protection from said attacks with their services. 'The attacker is brute force attacking the WordPress administrative portals, using the username "admin" and trying thousands of passwords.'"Further reports available from
Immotion hosting and
Melbourne server hosting.
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By Soulskill from
Slashdot's wonder-if-they-know-that department:
redletterdave writes
"TechNet, the trade association representing and led by dozens of prominent technology companies including Google, Apple and Facebook, has formally come out in support of CISPA, sending a letter to the U.S. House of Representatives. The letter said: 'We commend the committee for providing liability protections to companies participating in voluntary information-sharing and applaud the committee's efforts to work with a wide range of stakeholders to address issues such as strengthening privacy protections. As the legislative process unfolds, we look forward to continuing the dialogue with you and your colleagues on further privacy protections, including discussions on the role of a civilian interface for information sharing.'"The White House
won't support the bill in its current form, but they plan to work with legislators on a compromise. The current text of the bill is
available online.
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