By EditorDavid from
Slashdot's discredit-reports department:
An anonymous reader quotes security researcher Brian Krebs:
The web site that Equifax advertised as the place where concerned Americans could go to find out whether they were impacted by this breach -- equifaxsecurity2017.com -- is completely broken at best, and little more than a stalling tactic or sham at worst. In the early hours after the breach announcement, the site was being flagged by various browsers as a phishing threat. In some cases, people visiting the site were told they were not affected, only to find they received a different answer when they checked the site with the same information on their mobile phones.
TechCrunch has concluded that "the checker site, hosted by Equifax product TrustID, seems to be telling people at random they may have been affected by the data breach." One user reports that entering the same information twice produced two different answers. And ZDNet's security editor reports that even if you just enter Test or 123456, "it says your data has been breached." TechCrunch writes:
The assignment seems random. But, nevertheless, they were still asked to continue enrolling in TrustID. What this means is not only are none of the last names tied to your Social Security number, but there's no way to tell if you were really impacted. It's clear Equifax's goal isn't to protect the consumer or bring them vital information. It's to get you to sign up for its revenue-generating product TrustID. Meanwhile, one web engineer claims the secret 10-digit "security freeze" PIN being issued by Equifax "is just a timestamp of when you made the freeze."
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By EditorDavid from
Slashdot's is-simple-better-than-complex? department:
An anonymous reader quotes Stack Overflow Blog:
In this post, we'll explore the extraordinary growth of the Python programming language in the last five years, as seen by Stack Overflow traffic within high-income countries. The term "fastest-growing" can be hard to define precisely, but we make the case that Python has a solid claim to being the fastest-growing major programming language... June 2017 was the first month that Python was the most visited [programming language] tag on Stack Overflow within high-income nations. This included being the most visited tag within the US and the UK, and in the top 2 in almost all other high income nations (next to either Java or JavaScript). This is especially impressive because in 2012, it was less visited than any of the other 5 languages, and has grown by 2.5-fold in that time. Part of this is because of the seasonal nature of traffic to Java. Since it's heavily taught in undergraduate courses, Java traffic tends to rise during the fall and spring and drop during the summer.
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By EditorDavid from
Slashdot's internet-never-forgets department:
Slashdot reader troublemaker_23 writes, "A number of security researchers have dismissed an article by reporter Brian Krebs about Marcus Hutchins, the Briton who is awaiting trial in the US on charges of writing and distributing the Kronos banking malware, by pointing out that it has nothing to do with the case." An anonymous reader writes:
Krebs investigated dozens of hacker forum pseudonyms, concluding "The clues suggest that Hutchins began developing and selling malware in his mid-teens -- only to later develop a change of heart and earnestly endeavor to leave that part of his life squarely in the rearview mirror." Krebs believes 15-year-old Hutchins registered a domain he'd later advertise as "mainly for blackhats wanting to phish," and in 2010 may have filmed YouTube videos about password-stealing malware. Krebs says the early activities are "fairly small-time -- and hardly rise to the level of coding from scratch a complex banking trojan and selling it to cybercriminals," though he believes Hutchins moved on to advertising exploit kits, password-stealers, and bot rentals.
Krebs also talked to 27-year-old Brendan Johnston, a friend of Hutchins who did time in prison in 2014 for selling Trojans, who "said his old friend sincerely tried to turn things around in late 2012... 'I feel like I know Marcus better than most people do online, and when I heard about the accusations I was completely shocked,. He tried for such a long time to steer me down a straight and narrow path that seeing this tied to him didn't make sense to me at all." Krebs stresses that Hutchins didn't try to hide the fact that he'd written malware, "which in the United States at least is a form of protected speech." And his essay concludes, "Let me be clear: I have no information to support the claim that Hutchins authored or sold the Kronos banking trojan."
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By EditorDavid from
Slashdot's gnitupmoc-elbisrever department:
"It's not about an undo button," writes Slashdot reader marcle, sharing an article by a senior member of the technical staff at Sandia National Laboratories who's studying advanced technologies for computation. "Just reading this story bends my mind." From IEEE Spectrum:
[F]or several decades now, we have known that it's possible in principle to carry out any desired computation without losing information -- that is, in such a way that the computation could always be reversed to recover its earlier state. This idea of reversible computing goes to the very heart of thermodynamics and information theory, and indeed it is the only possible way within the laws of physics that we might be able to keep improving the cost and energy efficiency of general-purpose computing far into the future...
Today's computers rely on erasing information all the time -- so much so that every single active logic gate in conventional designs destructively overwrites its previous output on every clock cycle, wasting the associated energy. A conventional computer is, essentially, an expensive electric heater that happens to perform a small amount of computation as a side effect... [I]t's really hard to engineer a system that does something computationally interesting without inadvertently incurring a significant amount of entropy increase with each operation. But technology has improved, and the need to minimize energy use is now acute... In 2004 Krishna Natarajan (a student I was advising at the University of Florida) and I showed in detailed simulations that a new and simplified family of circuits for reversible computing called two-level adiabatic logic, or 2LAL, could dissipate as little as 1 eV of energy per transistor per cycle -- about 0.001 percent of the energy normally used by logic signals in that generation of CMOS. Still, a practical reversible computer has yet to be built using this or other approaches.
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By EditorDavid from
Slashdot's free-and-open-source-media-player-applications department:
Friday the makers of an open source media player Kodi called out trademark trolls who they say have "attempted to register the Kodi name in various countries outside the United States with the goal of earning money off the Kodi name without doing any work beyond sending threatening letters." BrianFagioli shares an article in which BetaNews quotes Kodi community and project manager Nathan Betzen:
"At least one trademark troll has so far not agreed to voluntarily release their grasp on their registration of our trademark and is actively blackmailing hardware vendors in an entire country, trying to become as rich as possible off of our backs and the backs of Kodi volunteers everywhere. His name is Geoff Gavora. He had written several letters to the Foundation over the years, expressing how important XBMC and Kodi were to him and his sales. And then, one day, for whatever reason, he decided to register the Kodi trademark in his home country of Canada. We had hoped, given the positive nature of his past emails, that perhaps he was doing this for the benefit of the Foundation. We learned, unfortunately, that this was not the case," says Nathan Betzen, Kodi Project Manager.
"Instead, companies like Mygica and our sponsor Minix have been delisted by Gavora on Amazon, so that only Gavora's hardware can be sold, unless those companies pay him a fee to stay on the store. Now, if you do a search for Kodi on Amazon.ca, there's a very real chance that every box you see is giving Gavora money to advertise that they can run what should be the entirely free and open Kodi. Gavora and his company are behaving in true trademark troll fashion."
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By EditorDavid from
Slashdot's silver-anniversaries department:
troublemaker_23 shares an article from ITWire: The Germany-based SUSE Linux marked a milestone last week: on Friday, September 2, the company turned 25, a remarkable achievement in an industry where the remains of software companies litter the landscape around the world... SUSE was formed in 1992 by three university students -- Hubert Mantel, Roland Dyroff, and Burchard Steinbild. The fourth man in the equation was software engineer Thomas Fehr. They had a simple objective: to build software and deliver UNIX support. Linux had been around for a little more than a year at that point and they decided to use it... The name S.u.S.E is a German acronym and means "Software und System-Entwicklung", or "Software and systems development". The name was later changed to SuSE and some years on became SUSE...
Like other open source outfits, SUSE has widened its services and now not only provides an enterprise Linux distribution but has a well developed software-defined storage product and one for a container-as-a-service option. It also caters to those seeking cloud options and does more than its fair share in contributing to upstream FOSS projects. Along the way, it has spawned a top-notch community distribution, openSUSE, which is run by an autonomous board led by the ebullient British developer Richard Brown.
S.u.S.E Linux was one of the first distros, arriving in 1994 after Soft Landing Systems Linux (in mid-1992) and Slackware.
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By EditorDavid from
Slashdot's fighting-on-Facebook department:
"I fought foreign propaganda for the FBI," writes a former special agent from its Counterintelligence Division. Now an associate dean at Yale Law School, he's warning that "the tools we had won't work anymore." An anonymous reader quotes Politico:
The bureau is now faced with huge private companies, like Facebook and Twitter, which are ostensibly neutral and have no professional or ethical obligation to vet the material they distribute. Further, foreign intelligence service propaganda agents are no longer human operatives on American soil -- they are invisible "trolls," often operating from a foreign country and behind social media accounts that make them impossible for the FBI to approach directly. Or, in the case of so-called bots -- software programs designed to simulate humans -- they might not even be people at all... [S]ocial media platforms can reach an almost limitless audience, often within days or hours, more or less for free: Russia's Facebook ads alone reached between 23 million and 70 million viewers.
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By EditorDavid from
Slashdot's gaga-for-GUIs department:
An anonymous reader quotes Linux.com:
What happens when you take Ubuntu 17.10, a new desktop interface (one that overlays on top of KDE), snap packages, and roll them all up into a pseudo rolling release? You get Nitrux. At first blush, this particular Linux distribution seems more of an experiment than anything else -- to show how much the KDE desktop can be tweaked to resemble the likes of the Elementary OS or MacOS desktops. At its heart, however, it's much more than that... This particular take on the Linux desktop is focused on the portable, universal nature of snap packages and makes use of a unique desktop, called Nomad, which sits atop KDE Plasma 5... The desktop includes a dock, a system/notification tray, a quick search tool (Plasma Search), and an app menu. Of all the elements on the desktop, it's the Plasma Search tool that will appeal to anyone looking for an efficient means to interact with their desktops. With this tool, you can just start typing on a blank desktop to see a list of results. Say, for example, you want to open LibreOffice writer; on the blank desktop, just start typing "libre" and related entries will appear...
Skilled Linux users should have no problem using Nitrux and might find themselves intrigued with the snap-centric Nomad desktop. The one advantage of having a distribution centered around snap packages would be the ease with which you could quickly install and uninstall a package, without causing issues with other applications... In the end, Nitrux is a beautiful desktop that is incredibly efficient to use -- only slightly hampered by an awkward installer and a lack of available snap packages. Give this distribution a bit of time to work out the kinks and it could become a serious contender.
The GUI-focused distro even includes Android apps in the menu -- although Linux.com's reviewer notes that "on two different installations, I have yet to get this feature to work. Even the pre-installed Android apps never start."
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By EditorDavid from
Slashdot's goodbye-Chaos-Manor department:
Long-time Slashdot reader BinBoy writes: Science fiction author and Byte magazine columnist Jerry Pournelle has died according to a statement by his son Alex posted to Jerry's web site. A well-wishing page has been set up for visitor's to post their thoughts and memories of Mr. Pournelle.
Pournelle's literary career included the 1985 science fiction novel Footfall with Larry Niven, which became a #1 New York Times best-seller -- one of several successful collaborations between the two authors. In a Slashdot interview in 2003, Larry Niven credited Jerry for the prominent role of religion in their 1974 book The Mote in God's Eye.
Wikipedia also remembers how Byte magazine announced Pournelle's legendary debut as a columnist in their June 1980 issue.
"The other day we were sitting around the BYTE offices listening to software and hardware explosions going off around us in the microcomputer world. We wondered, "Who could cover some of the latest developments for us in a funny, frank (and sometimes irascible) style?" The phone rang. It was Jerry Pournelle with an idea for a funny, frank (and sometimes irascible) series of articles to be presented in BYTE on a semi-regular (i.e.: every 2 to 3 months) basis, which would cover the wild microcomputer goings-on at the Pournelle House ("Chaos Manor") in Southern California. We said yes."
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By BeauHD from
Slashdot's I'll-be-damned department:
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The manufacturer of EpiPen devices failed to address known malfunctions in its epinephrine auto-injectors even as hundreds of customer complaints rolled in and failures were linked to deaths, according to the Food and Drug Administration. The damning allegations came to light today when the FDA posted a warning letter it sent September 5 to the manufacturer, Meridian Medical Technologies, Inc. The company (which is owned by Pfizer) produces EpiPens for Mylan, which owns the devices and is notorious for dramatically raising prices by more than 400 percent in recent years. The auto-injectors are designed to be used during life-threatening allergic reactions to provide a quick shot of epinephrine. If they fail to fire, people experiencing a reaction can die or suffer serious illnesses. According to the FDA, that's exactly what happened for hundreds of customers. In the letter, the agency wrote: "In fact, your own data show that you received hundreds of complaints that your EpiPen products failed to operate during life-threatening emergencies, including some situations in which patients subsequently died."
The agency goes on to lambast Meridian Medical for failing to investigate problems with the devices, recall bad batches, and follow-up on problems found. For instance, a customer made a complaint in April 2016 that an EpiPen failed. When Meridian disassembled the device, it found a deformed component that led to the problem -- the exact same defect it had found in February when another unit failed.
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By BeauHD from
Slashdot's ambitious-goals department:
gubol123 shares a report from The Economic Times: Six leading car makers are eyeing the government's plan to buy 10,000 electric vehicles while policy makers are considering generous fiscal incentives to make their capital and running cost cheaper than petrol cars within five years. Broadly, the aim is to put on roads one million electric three-wheelers and 10,000 electric city buses by mid-2019 and make India the world leader in at least some segments of the market as the country strives to shift entirely to battery-powered transportation by 2030. In six to eight months, 10,000 e-vehicles are expected to be running in the national capital region. The tender to buy 10,000 e-vehicles has already attracted Tata Motors, Hyundai, Nissan, Renault, Maruti Suzuki and Mahindra & Mahindra, and would be quickly followed by a dramatic scaling up of the e-vehicles program. The tender would be awarded by the end of this month and cars would start rolling in by mid-November.
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