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Bug

Relicensing of MySQL Man Pages Just a Bug 41

Posted by Unknown Lamer
from the oracle-still-evil dept.
An anonymous reader writes "As reported earlier on Slashdot it appeared the license covering the MySQL man pages was changed from the GPL to something less good. However, as speculated, this appears to be a bug." The build system was grabbing the wrong files, oops. The fix should be coming shortly: "Once the fixes have been made to the build system, we will rebuild the latest 5.1, 5.5, 5.6 releases plus the latest 5.7 milestone and make those available publicly asap."
Digital

PDP-11 Still Working In Nuclear Plants - For 37 More Years 216

Posted by Unknown Lamer
from the great-architectures-live-forever dept.
Taco Cowboy writes "Most of the younger /. readers never heard of the PDP-11, while we geezers have to retrieve bits and pieces of our affairs with PDP-11 from the vast warehouse inside our memory lanes." From the article: "HP might have nuked OpenVMS, but its parent, PDP-11, is still spry and powering GE nuclear power-plant robots and will do for another 37 years. That's right: PDP-11 assembler programmers are hard to find, but the nuclear industry is planning on keeping them until 2050 — long enough for a couple of generations of programmers to come and go." Not sure about the OpenVMS vs PDP comparison, but it's still amusing that a PDP might outlast all of the VAX machines.
United Kingdom

UK Town of Ipswich Remodelled As Zelda Level 51

Posted by timothy
from the every-legend-needs-a-map dept.
cyclomedia writes "Switch Fringe is a relatively new not-for-profit annual music and arts festival in the UK town of Ipswich, and this year's program features a full page map of the town with details about each venue. Unlike most other maps this one is in the form of a Zelda level. This is in part due to this year's theme 'Re-imagining Ipswich,' that PixelH8 is coming out of semi-retirement to play a gig during the proceedings and possibly due to the fact that the map's designer — The Decibel Kid — spent too much time playing Zelda on a Gameboy Color during the first Web bubble."
IBM

SCO v. IBM Is Officially Reopened 99

Posted by timothy
from the living-dead-sequel dept.
stoilis writes "Groklaw reports that the SCO vs IBM case is officially reopened: 'The thing that makes predictions a bit murky is that there are some other motions, aside from the summary judgment motions, that were also not officially decided before SCO filed for bankruptcy that could, in SCO's perfect world, reopen certain matters. I believe they would have been denied, if the prior judge had had time to rule on them. Now? I don't know.'"
Security

To Hack Back Or Not To Hack Back? 183

Posted by Soulskill
from the wild-wild-cyberwest dept.
dinscott writes "If you think of cyberspace as a resource for you and your organization, it makes sense to protect your part of it as best you can. You build your defenses and train employees to recognize attacks, and you accept the fact that your government is the one that will pursue and prosecute those who try to hack you. But the challenge arises when you (possibly rightfully so) perceive that your government is not able do so, and you demand to be allowed to 'hack back.'"
KDE

KDE Plasma Can Now Run On Wayland 29

Posted by Unknown Lamer
from the windows-five-percent-spiffier dept.
An anonymous reader writes "With the upcoming KDE 4.11, there's an initial Wayland backend through the KWin manager. The author notes on his blog: 'Once the system is fully started you can just use it. If everything works fine, you should not even notice any difference, though there are still limitations, like only the three mouse buttons of my touchpad are supported ;-)'"
Graphics

Clearing Up Wayland FUD, Misconceptions 240

Posted by Soulskill
from the where-there's-a-will,-there's-a-wayland dept.
An anonymous reader writes "In clearing up common misconceptions about Wayland (e.g. it breaking compatibility with the Linux desktop and it not supporting remote desktops like X), Eric Griffith (a Linux developer) and Daniel Stone (a veteran X.Org developer) have written The Wayland Situation in which they clearly explain the facts about the shortcomings of X, the corrections made by Wayland, and the advantages to this alternative to Canonical's in-development Mir."
Movies

Google Loves The Internship; Critics Not So Much 103

Posted by Soulskill
from the i-blame-jj-abrams dept.
theodp writes "It was the best of movies; it was the worst of movies. GeekWire reports that The Internship — the new comedy starring Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson as two 40-something guys who get internships at Google — is getting high praise from Googlers but low marks from movie critics. Google CEO Larry Page called the movie 'a lot of fun' in his Google+ post, while fellow Google exec Vic Gundotra gushed, 'I laughed a lot while watching this movie!' After screening a sneak preview with Google companions, Wired's Steven Levy wrote, 'From Google's point of view, the movie could not possibly be better.' USA Today's take, on the other hand, is that 'Google has never looked lamer thanks to The Internship.' And the NY Daily News calls the movie 'an unfunny valentine to Google.' But perhaps the unkindest cut of all comes from the NY Post, who suggests that 'maybe The Internship was secretly funded by Bing.' Ouch." Update: 06/07 20:02 GMT by T : Peter Wayner saw the movie (a "harmless bit of summer fluff"), and his full-length take below takes on some of the tech-company misconceptions that the film-makers gleefully adopted as script material.
Books

Book Review: Exploding the Phone 64

Posted by samzenpus
from the read-all-about-it dept.
benrothke writes "Phil Lapsley calls his book 'the untold story of the teenagers and outlaws who hacked Ma Bell.' The story is an old one, going back to the early 1960's. Lapsley was able to track down many of the original phone phreaks and get their story. Many of them, even though the years have passed, asked Lapsley not to use their real names." Read below for the rest of Ben's review.
Government

Intelligence Director Claims NSA Surveillance Reports Inaccurate 262

Posted by Soulskill
from the nothing-to-see-here-move-along dept.
Nerval's Lobster writes "James R. Clapper, the nation's Director of National Intelligence, claimed that recent reports about the NSA monitoring Americans' Internet and phone communications are inaccurate. 'The Guardian and The Washington Post articles refer to collection of communications pursuant to Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act,' he wrote in a June 6 statement. 'They contain numerous inaccuracies.' While the statement didn't detail the supposed inaccuracies, it explained why the monitoring described in those articles would, at least in theory, violate the law. 'Section 702 is a provision of FISA that is designed to facilitate the acquisition of foreign intelligence information concerning non-U.S. persons located outside the United States,' it read. 'It cannot be used to intentionally target any U.S. citizen, any other U.S. person, or anyone located within the United States.' Those newspaper articles describe an NSA project codenamed Prism, which allegedly taps into the internal databases of nine major technology companies: Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Facebook, PalTalk, YouTube, Skype, AOL, and Apple. Both publications drew their information from an internal PowerPoint presentation used to train intelligence operatives. Speaking to Slashdot, Google, Microsoft and Facebook all again denied knowledge of Prism; the Google spokesperson suggested he didn't 'have any insight' into why Google would have appeared in the NSA's alleged PowerPoint presentation. But many, many questions remain."
Security

Hacker Publishes Alleged Zero-Day Exploit For Plesk 42

Posted by timothy
from the head-plesk dept.
hypnosec writes "KingCope, known for many concrete zero-day exploits, has published yet another zero-day through full disclosure – this time for Plesk, a hosting software package made by Parallels and used on thousands of servers across the web. According to KingCope, Plesk versions 9.5.4, 9.3, 9.2, 9.0 and 9.6 on three different Linux variants Red Hat, CentOS and Fedora are vulnerable to the hack. The exploit, as noted by the hacker, makes use of specially crafted HTTP queries that inject PHP commands. The exploit uses POST request to launch a PHP interpreter and the attacker can set any configuration parameters through the POST request. Once invoked, the interpreter can be used to execute arbitrary commands."
Bitcoin

Fake Mt. Gox Pages Aim To Infect Bitcoin Users 74

Posted by timothy
from the gathering-their-magic dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Mt. Gox is the the largest Bitcoin exchange in the world, and as such it and its users are being repeatedly targeted by attackers. Some two months ago, it battled a massive DDoS attack that was likely aimed at destabilizing the virtual currency and allow the criminals to profit from the swings. Now, according to Symantec researchers, the criminals have turned to spoofing Mt. Gox' site and tricking its customers into downloading malware — the Ponik downloader Trojan, which is also able to steal passwords."
Education

Ask Slashdot: With Grants Drying Up, How Is a Tech Non-Profit To Survive? 178

Posted by Unknown Lamer
from the unicorns-probably dept.
helios17 writes "Non-Profits like this have traditionally gotten started from the money grants provide. Most grants award vehicles, computers, and even pay for organization rental and utility costs. The problem fledgling and even established non-profits are encountering is the dwindling number of grants allowing for Operating or General Support costs. What good is a vehicle received via grant if you can't afford to put fuel in it? With the number of Operating or General Support grants shrinking and those available funds competed for heavily, should we be looking on line for help? Can efforts like this be a better way to approach it?"
Books

Book Review: Creating Mobile Apps With JQuery Mobile 91

Posted by samzenpus
from the read-all-about-it dept.
sagecreek writes "You can judge this book, at least in part, by the lengthy tagline on its cover: 'Learn to make practical, unique, real-world sites that span a variety of industries and technologies with the world's most popular mobile development library.' jQuery might not be your favorite framework on the long, long list of JavaScript possibilities. But Shane Gliser unabashedly describes himself as a jQuery 'fanboy...if it's officially jQuery, I love it.' Gliser is an experienced mobile developer and blogger who operates Roughly Brilliant Digital Studios. He also has some background in mobile UX (user experience), and both qualities show in this smoothly written, well-illustrated, 234-page how-to book that focuses on jQuery Mobile, a 'touch-optimized' web framework for smartphones and tablets." Read below for the rest of sagecreek's review.
Google

Questioning Google's Disclosure Timeline Motivations 73

Posted by timothy
from the comparative-advantage dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The presence of 0-day vulnerability exploitation is often a real and considerable threat to the Internet — particularly when very popular consumer-level software is the target. Google's stance on a 60day turnaround of vulnerability fixes from discovery, and a 7-day turnaround of fixes for actively exploited unpatched vulnerabilities, is rather naive and devoid of commercial reality. As a web services company it is much easier for Google to develop and roll out fixes promptly — but for 95+% of the rest of the world's software development companies making thick-client, server and device-specific software this is unrealistic. Statements like these from Google clearly serve their business objectives. As predominantly a web services company with many of the world's best software engineers and researchers working for them. One could argue that Google's applications and software should already be impervious to vulnerabilities (i.e. they should have discovered them themselves through internal QA processes) — rather than relying upon external researchers and bug hunters stumbling over them."
Encryption

Judge Orders Child Porn Suspect To Decrypt His Hard Drives 802

Posted by Soulskill
from the ruining-it-for-everyone dept.
An anonymous reader writes "After having first decided against forcing a suspect to decrypt a number of hard drives that were believed to be his and to contain child pornography, a U.S. judge has changed his mind and has now ordered the suspect to provide law enforcement agents heading the investigation with a decrypted version of the contents of his encrypted data storage system, or the passwords needed to decrypt forensic copies of those storage devices. Jeffrey Feldman, a software developer at Rockwell Automation, has still not been charged with any crime, and the prosecution initially couldn't prove conclusively that the encrypted hard drives contained child pornography or were actually Feldman's, which led U.S. Magistrate Judge William Callahan to decide that forcing him to decrypt them would violate his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. But new evidence has made the judge reverse his first decision (PDF): the FBI has continued to try to crack the encryption on the discs, and has recently managed to decrypt and access one of the suspect's hard drives... The storage device was found to contain 'an intricate electronic folder structure comprised of approximately 6,712 folders and subfolders,' approximately 707,307 files (among them numerous files which constitute child pornography), detailed personal financial records and documents belonging to the suspect, as well as dozens of his personal photographs."
Open Source

Linux Mint 15 'Olivia' Is Out 185

Posted by Soulskill
from the linux-mint-16-unlikely-to-be-called-'newton-john' dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The Linux Mint blog today announced the full release of Linux Mint 15 'Olivia.' Here are the release notes and a list of new features. As before, it's available with either MATE or Cinnamon as a desktop environment. The included version of MATE has been upgrade to 1.6, which saw many old and deprecated packages replaced with newer technologies. Cinnamon has gone to 1.8, which improved the file manager, added support for 'desklets' (essentially desktop widgets), and completed the transition away from Gnome Control Center to Cinnamon's own settings panel. Other new features of Linux Mint 15 include improved login screen applications (one of which is an HTML greeter that supports HTML5, CSS, JavaScript, and WebGL), a tool developed from the ground up to manage software sources in Mint, and a vastly improved driver manager. The project's website sums it up simply: 'Linux Mint 15 is the most ambitious release since the start of the project.'"
Hardware Hacking

Canon DSLR Hack Allows It To Shoot RAW Video 171

Posted by Soulskill
from the features-added-by-users dept.
When the Canon 50D DSLR camera was released back in 2008, it could take nice pictures, but it had no support for video recording. Now, through an enterprising hack by members of the Magic Lantern forums, the 50D can capture RAW video. From the article: "The tech inside the 50D looks like it borrows a lot more from its higher-end siblings, like the 5D Mark II, and it’s possible we may actually get better RAW video quality out of the 50D than we do out of any of the non-CF Canon cameras. ... The camera doesn’t have playback or audio recording as it was never designed to shoot video, but this isn’t too different from the RAW recording on the other Canon DSLRs at the moment."
Security

Scanner Identifies Malware Strains, Could Be Future of AV 70

Posted by timothy
from the like-with-like dept.
An anonymous reader writes "When it comes to spotting malware, signature-based detection, heuristics and cloud-based recognition and information sharing used by many antivirus solutions today work well up a certain point, but the polymorphic malware still gives them a run for their money. At the annual AusCert conference held this week in Australia a doctorate candidate from Deakin University in Melbourne has presented the result of his research and work that just might be the solution to this problem. Security researcher Silvio Cesare had noticed that malware code consists of small "structures" that remain the same even after moderate changes to its code. He created Simseer, a free online service that performs automated analysis on submitted malware samples and tells and shows you just how similar they are to other submitted specimens. It scores the similarity between malware (any kind of software, really), and it charts the results and visualizes program relationships as an evolutionary tree."

What the world *really* needs is a good Automatic Bicycle Sharpener.

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