Slashdot Mirror

disconj writes "With the 40th anniversary of the release of Dungeons & Dragons coming up this weekend, the Internet is ablaze with reflections on its legacy. Dave Ewalt gives an intro for the uninitiated. Ethan Gilsdorf explains how 'all I need to know about life I learned from Dungeons & Dragons'. Finally, Jon Peterson presents a video show-and-tell of rare artifacts from D&D's development." The real question is how many characters have you lost in Tomb of Horrors?

theodp writes "At first glance, the headline in The Salt Lake Tribune — Very Few Utah Girls, Minorities Take Computer Science AP Tests — appears to be pretty alarming. As does the headline No Girls, Blacks, or Hispanics Take AP Computer Science Exam in Some States over at Education Week. Not One Girl Took The AP Computer Science Test In Some States warns a Business Insider headline. And so on and so on and so on. So how could one quibble with tech-giant backed Code.org's decision to pay teachers a $250 "Female Student Bonus", or Google's declaration that 'the ultimate goal of CS First is to provide proven teaching materials, screencasts, and curricula for after-school programs that will ignite the interest and confidence of underrepresented minorities and girls in CS,' right? But the thing is, CollegeBoard AP CS exam records indicate that no Wyoming students at all took an AP CS exam (xls) in 2013, and only a total of 103 Utah students (xls) had reported scores. Let's not forget about the girls and underrepresented minorities, but since AP CS Exam Stats are being spun as a measure of CS education participation (pdf) and equity, let's not forget that pretty much everyone has been underrepresented if we look at the big AP CS picture. If only 29,555 AP CS scores were reported (xls) in 2013 for a HS population of about 16 million students, shouldn't the goal at this stage of the game really be CS education for all?"

An anonymous reader writes "Google has announced on its official blog that it's working on a new way for diabetics to monitor their blood sugar: a 'smart' contact lens. Diabetes is a difficult condition to treat because blood sugar levels vary widely by a person's activity level and food intake. It's also hard to monitor without painful and intrusive measurements — people can feel normal at dangerously high blood sugar levels, while extremely low levels can impair their ability to seek treatment. Google says, 'Over the years, many scientists have investigated various body fluids—such as tears—in the hopes of finding an easier way for people to track their glucose levels. But as you can imagine, tears are hard to collect and study. At Google[x], we wondered if miniaturized electronics—think: chips and sensors so small they look like bits of glitter, and an antenna thinner than a human hair—might be a way to crack the mystery of tear glucose and measure it with greater accuracy. We're now testing a smart contact lens that's built to measure glucose levels in tears using a tiny wireless chip and miniaturized glucose sensor that are embedded between two layers of soft contact lens material. We're testing prototypes that can generate a reading once per second.' They're talking with the FDA and bringing in experts to help them figure out the best way to do it."

As noted by Sky & Telescope, SpaceWatchtower, and many other sources, astronomer and telescope innovator John Dobson died yesterday in Burbank, California, at the age of 98. He's famous as an inspiration for others to explore astronomy, in part through the San Francisco Sidewalk Astronomers, which he co-founded in 1967, and as designer of the telescope variety which bears his name.

An anonymous reader writes "The Volatility memory forensics project has developed plugins that can automatically find instances of Truecrypt within RAM dumps and extract the associated keys and parameters. Previous research in this area has focused specifically on AES keys and led to the development of tools such as aeskeyfind. The Volatility plugin takes a different approach by finding and analyzing the same data structures in memory that Truecrypt uses to manage encryption and decryption of data that is being read from and written to disk. With the creation of these plugins a wide range of investigators can now decrypt Truecrypt volumes regardless of the algorithm used (AES, Seperent, combinations of algos, etc.). Users of Truecrypt should be extra careful of physical security of their systems to prevent investigators from gaining access to the contents of physical memory."

An anonymous reader writes "Google today released Chrome version 32 for Windows, Mac, and Linux. The new version includes tab noise indicators, a new look for Windows 8 Metro mode, and automatic blocking of malware downloads. You can update to the latest release now using the browser's built-in silent updater, or download it directly from google.com/chrome."

New submitter mni12 writes "I have been working on a Bayesian Morse decoder for a while. My goal is to have a CW decoder that adapts well to different ham radio operators' rhythm, sudden speed changes, signal fluctuations, interference, and noise — and has the ability to decode Morse code accurately. While this problem is not as complex as speaker-independent speech recognition, there is still a lot of human variation where machine learning algorithms such as Bayesian probabilistic methods can help. I posted a first alpha release yesterday, and despite all the bugs one first brave ham reported success. I would like to collect thousands of audio samples (WAV files) of real world CW traffic captured by hams via some sort of online system that would allow hams not only to upload captured files but also provide relevant details such as their callsign, date & time, frequency, radio / antenna used, software version, comments etc. I would then use these audio files to build a test library for automated tests to improve the Bayesian decoder performance. Since my focus is on improving the decoder and not starting to build a digital audio archive service I would like to get suggestions of any open source (free) software packages, online services, or any other ideas on how to effectively collect large number of audio files and without putting much burden on alpha / beta testers to submit their audio captures. Many available services require registration and don't support metadata or aggregation of submissions. Thanks in advance for your suggestions."

retroworks writes "The MIT Materials Systems Laboratory, EU's StEP, and the U.S. National Center for Electronics Recycling (NCER) have released a study, Quantitative Characterization of Domestic and Transboundary Flows of Used Electronics, that analyses collection and export of obsolete electronics generated in the United States. It is the fifth study to debunk a widely reported statistic that '80 percent' of used electronics are dumped abroad. Last year, the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) released studies of 279 sea containers, seized as 'e-waste' in African ports of Lagos and Accra, and found 91% of the goods were reused. According to the UN, most of the junk at Chinese and African dumps was generated in African cities (Lagos had 6.9M households with TV in 2007, World Bank). The UNEP study also bolsters African traders claims that used product purchased from nations with strong warranty laws outperform 'affordable' new product imported from Asia. Where did the 'original' widely reported statistic of 80% dumping (see /. slashdot dumping story) originate? Last May, in response to an editorial by Junkyard Planet author Adam Minter in Bloomberg, the source of dumping accusations (Basel Action Network) claimed 'never, ever' to have cited the statistic. The new studies have not slowed USA legislation aimed at banning trade of used electronics for repair, reuse and recycling overseas. This month, the Coalition for American Electronics Recycling (CAER.org) announced 13 republicans and 5 democrats had signed on to support the bill 2791 to criminalize exports of non-shredded displays, cell phones, and computers. Interpol announced a new 'Project Eden' targeting African geek importers in November 2013." In related news, First time accepted submitter Accordion Noir writes: "Virginia tech researchers and a team from the US, Canada, and Russia have released a study indicating that the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 may have had positive environmental results in fish. Reduced mercury releases from mining in areas effected by the economic disarray in Russia led fish to have lower levels of methyl mercury than those in rivers on the Norwegian border or in Canada, where mining continued."

Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Alan Schwarz writes in the NYT that the rise of ADHD diagnoses and prescriptions for stimulants over the years have coincided with a remarkably successful two-decade campaign by pharmaceutical companies to publicize the syndrome and promote the pills to doctors, educators and parents. 'The numbers make it look like an epidemic. Well, it's not. It's preposterous,' says Dr. Keith Conners, a psychologist who has led the fight to legitimize attention deficit hyperactivity disorder for more than fifty years. Few dispute that classic ADHD, historically estimated to affect 5 percent of children, is a legitimate disability that impedes success at school, work and personal life. But recent data from the CDC show that the diagnosis had been made in 15 percent of high school-age children, and that the number of children on medication for the disorder had soared to 3.5 million from 600,000 in 1990." (Read on for more.) "Behind that growth has been drug company marketing that has stretched the image of classic ADHD to include relatively normal behavior like carelessness and impatience, and has often overstated the pills' benefits. Advertising on television and in popular magazines like People and Good Housekeeping has cast common childhood forgetfulness and poor grades as grounds for medication that, among other benefits, can result in 'schoolwork that matches his intelligence' and ease family tension. The FDA has cited every major ADHD drug — stimulants like Adderall, Concerta, Focalin and Vyvanse, and nonstimulants like Intuniv and Strattera — for false and misleading advertising since 2000, some multiple times. And although many doctors have portrayed the medications as benign — 'safer than aspirin,' some say — they can have significant side effects and are regulated in the same class as morphine and oxycodone because of their potential for abuse and addiction. Meanwhile profits for the ADHD drug industry have soared. Sales of stimulant medication in 2012 were nearly $9 billion, more than five times the $1.7 billion a decade before, according to the data company IMS Health. 'This is a concoction to justify the giving out of medication at unprecedented and unjustifiable levels,' concludes Conners."

cagraham writes "In a seemingly minor update, Google announced that all Gmail images will now be cached on their own servers, before being displayed to users. This means that users won't have to click to download images in every email now — they'll just automatically be shown. For marketers, however, the change has serious implications. Because each user won't download the images from a third-party server, marketers won't be able to see open-rates, log IP addresses, or gather information on user location and browser type. Google says the changes are intended to enhance user privacy and security."

AcidPenguin9873 writes "Earlier this year, Google announced that it would build its next fiber network in Austin, TX. Construction is slated to start in 2014, but there's a hitch: AT&T owns 20% of the utility poles in Austin. The City of Austin is considering a rules change that would allow Google to pay AT&T to use its utility poles, but AT&T isn't happy about it. The debate appears to hinge on a technicality that specifies what types of companies can attach to the utility poles that AT&T owns. From the news story: 'Google 'would be happy to pay for access (to utility poles) at reasonable rates, just as we did in our initial buildout in Kansas City,' she said, referring to Google Fiber's pilot project in Kansas City...Tracy King, AT&T's vice president for public affairs, said in a written statement that Google "appears to be demanding concessions never provided any other entity before. ... Google has the right to attach to our poles, under federal law, as long as it qualifies as a telecom or cable provider, as they themselves acknowledge. We will work with Google when they become qualified, as we do with all such qualified providers," she said.'"

Pseudonymous Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto (whether that name represents one person or several) is believed to hold many millions of dollars in Bitcoin. Various attempts have been made to pin down Nakamoto's identity; the IB Times reports today that a (sadly anonymous) analysis points to George Washington University economics professor Nick Szabo, based on textual analysis and some other clues, such as Szabo's expertise in digital currency and his role as founder of GoldCoin. Szabo's blog Unenumerated is fascinating reading, whether or not this analysis is right.

lpress writes "Udacity CEO and MOOC super star Sebastian Thrun has decided to scale back his original ambition of providing a free college education for everyone and focus on (lifelong) vocational education. A pilot test of Udacity material in for-credit courses at San Jose State University was discouraging, so Udacity is developing an AT&T-sponsored masters degree at Georgia Tech and training material for developers. If employers like this emphasis, it might be a bigger threat to the academic status quo than offering traditional college courses."

A year after the first schematics were completed and a few months after the first prototype board shipped, Make Play Live has released Improv, the first engineering card for EOMA-68 (EOMA-68 is a specification for modular systems that splits the cpu board from the rest of the system, allowing the end user to use the same core with several devices or upgrade e.g. a tablet without having to pay for a new screen shell). From Aaron Seigo's weblog post: "The hardware of Improv is extremely capable: a dual-core ARM® Cortex-A7 System on Chip (SoC) running at 1Ghz, 1 GB of RAM, 4 GB of on-board NAND flash and a powerful OpenGL ES GPU. To access all of this hardware goodness there are a variety of ports: 2 USB2 ports (one fullsize host, one micro OTG), SD card reader, HDMI, ethernet (10/100, though the feature card has a Gigabit connector; more on that below), SATA, i2c, VGA/TTL and 8 GPIO pins. The entire device weighs less than 100 grams, is passively cooled and fits in your hand. Improv comes pre-installed with Mer OS, sporting a recent Linux kernel, systemd, and a wide variety of software tools. By default it boots into console, so if you are making a headless device you needn't worry about extra overhead running that you don't need. If you are going to hook it up to a screen (or two), then you have an amazing starting point with choices such as X.org, Wayland, Qt4, Qt5 and a full complement of KDE libraries and Plasma Workspaces. Improv takes advantage of the open EOMA68 standard to deliver a unique design: the SoC, RAM and storage live on one card (the 'CPU card'), the feature ports are on a PCB it docks with (the 'feature board'). The two dock securely together with the CPU card sitting under the feature board nestled in a pair of rails; they are undocked from each other by pushing a mechanical ejector button." Check out the specs and pictures. The card is available now for $75. Improv is open hardware, with the schematics licensed under the GPL and available soon.

lpress writes "Department of Education officials, led by Under Secretary of Education Martha Kanter, were on our campus last week, soliciting input on The President's College Value and Affordability plan. The discussion focused primarily on the design of a system for rating colleges and to a lesser extent on innovation and improvement. While the feedback was constructive, many attendees pointed out difficulties and limitations of any college rating system. One solution is to open the process by having the Department of Education gather and post data and provide a platform and tools for all interested parties to analyze, visualize and discuss it. Similarly, open innovation should be encouraged, for example, by providing a hosted version of the open source education platform MOOC.ORG."

theodp writes "In June, Google unveiled Project Loon to acclaim from the press for its "moonshot" project that aims to use high-altitude balloons to cheaply provide internet connectivity to rural, remote, and underserved areas of the developing world. So it's interesting to see that a just-published Google patent application for Balloon Clumping to Provide Bandwidth Requested in Advance, which pre-dated the Loon launch by a year, paints a not entirely altruistic picture of balloon-powered Internet access technology. Google describes the invention — which had been kept secret with a non-publication request — as just the ticket for those well-to-do enough to pay a tiered-pricing premium to get faster internet access while attending concerts, conferences, air shows, music festivals, and sporting events where a facility's overtaxed Wi-Fi simply won't do. Hope this revelation doesn't make Bill Gates think any less of the project!"

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "In a case of major importance, the long simmering battle between the Authors Guild and Google has reached its climax, with the court granting Google's motion for summary judgment, dismissing the case, on fair use grounds. In his 30-page decision (PDF), Judge Denny Chin — who has been a District Court Judge throughout most of the life of the case but is now a Circuit Court Judge — reasoned that, although Google's own motive for its "Library Project" (which scans books from libraries without the copyright owners' permission and makes the material publicly available for search), is commercial profit, the project itself serves significant educational purposes, and actually enhances, rather than detracts from, the value of the works, since it helps promote sales of the works. Judge Chin also felt that it was impossible to use Google's scanned material, either for making full copies, or for reading the books, so that it did not compete with the books themselves."

An anonymous reader writes "Google today released Chrome version 31 for Windows, Mac, and Linux. The new version includes support for Web payments, Portable Native Client, and 25 security fixes. 'Under the hood, PNaCl works by compiling native C and C++ code to an intermediate representation, rather than architecture-specific representations as in Native Client. The LLVM-style bytecode is wrapped into a portable executable, which can be hosted on a web server like any other website asset. When the site is accessed, Chrome fetches and translates the portable executable into an architecture-specific machine code optimized directly for the underlying device. This translation approach means developers don’t need to recompile their applications multiple times to run across x86, ARM or MIPS devices.' You can update to the latest release now using the browser's built-in silent updater, or download it directly from google.com/chrome."

An anonymous reader writes "A blog run by faculty members at Chicago State University (CSU) has been threatened by university lawyers with a cease and desist notice. Since 2009 the blog has posted information critical of CSU's policies and hiring practices. The notice threatened legal action if the site is not disabled by Friday due to violations of 'trade names and marks' without permission and violations of University policies. The blog admin changed the name of the blog in the meanwhile to Crony State University and replaced an image on the page pending legal counsel. Also the blog is currently still active."

First time accepted submitter VZ writes "The first new stable wxWidgets release in years and the first new major release since 1998 has just been announced. wxWidgets 3.0 now includes official support for Cocoa-based 32 and 64 bit applications under OS X, GTK+ 3 under Unix and has thousands of other improvements." Update: 11/12 01:00 GMT by U L : Clarification: it's been several years since the 2.8 release series, and fifteen years since wxWidgets 2.0.

An anonymous reader writes "Google has announced it is discontinuing support for Internet Explorer 9 in Google Apps, including its Business, Education, and Government editions. Google says it has stopped all testing and engineering work related to IE9, given that IE11 was released on October 17 along with Windows 8.1. This means that IE9 users who access Gmail and other Google Apps services will be notified 'within the next few weeks' that they need to upgrade to a more modern browser. Google says this will either happen through an in-product notification message or an interstitial page."

quantr points out an interview with Bill Gates in which he talks about setting priorities for making a difference in the world. Quoting: "The internet is not going to save the world, says the Microsoft co-founder, whatever Mark Zuckerberg and Silicon Valley's tech billionaires believe. But eradicating disease just might. Bill Gates describes himself as a technocrat. But he does not believe that technology will save the world. Or, to be more precise, he does not believe it can solve a tangle of entrenched and interrelated problems that afflict humanity's most vulnerable: the spread of diseases in the developing world and the poverty, lack of opportunity and despair they engender. 'I certainly love the IT thing,' he says. 'But when we want to improve lives, you've got to deal with more basic things like child survival, child nutrition.' These days, it seems that every West Coast billionaire has a vision for how technology can make the world a better place. A central part of this new consensus is that the internet is an inevitable force for social and economic improvement; that connectivity is a social good in itself. It was a view that recently led Mark Zuckerberg to outline a plan for getting the world's unconnected 5 billion people online, an effort the Facebook boss called 'one of the greatest challenges of our generation.' But asked whether giving the planet an internet connection is more important than finding a vaccination for malaria, the co-founder of Microsoft and world's second-richest man does not hide his irritation: 'As a priority? It's a joke.'"

First time accepted submitter taxtropel was one of many readers to note that Google has officially released its newest version of Android. taxtropel extracts from the announcement: "Today we are announcing Android 4.4 KitKat, a new version of Android that brings great new features for users and developers. The very first device to run Android 4.4 is the new Nexus 5, available today on Google Play, and coming soon to other retail outlets. We'll also be rolling out the Android 4.4 update worldwide in the next few weeks to all Nexus 4, Nexus 7, and Nexus 10 devices, as well as the Samsung Galaxy S4 and HTC One Google Play Edition devices." Reader SmartAboutThings adds: "Almost all of the features that the Nexus 5 comes with are not a surprise, since they were heavily leaked before. Still, for those that have obediently waited this day, here are some of its most important specs: 2.2Ghz quad-core Snapdragon 800 and 2GB of RAM, 4.95-inch 1080p display, Wireless charging, 2,300 mAh battery, LTE, Bluetooth 4.0, 802.11ac WiFi and NFC; Gorilla Glass 3, Front 1.3-megapixel camera and 8-megapixel sensor on the back with optical image stabilization (OIS)."

Billly Gates writes "Microsoft is ending support for Windows XP in 2014. Fortunately for its users who want to keep browsing the web, Google is continuing to support Chrome until at least 2015. Firefox has no current plans to end support for XP. Hopefully this will delay the dreaded XPopacalypse — the idea that a major virus/worm/trojan will take down millions of systems that haven't been issued security patches. When these browsers finally do end XP support, does it mean webmasters will need to write seperate versions of CSS and JavaScript for older versions if the user base refuses to leave Windows XP (as happened with IE6)?" Update: 10/29 17:31 GMT by S : Changed headline and summary to reflect that Mozilla doesn't have plans to drop XP support any time soon.

rtoz writes "Motorola has announced 'Project Ara,' afree and open hardware platform for smartphones. The purpose of Project Ara is to create a modular smartphone that would allow users to swap hardware components according their own wish. The design for Project Ara consists of an endoskeleton (endo) and modules. The endo is the structural frame that holds all the modules in place. A module can be anything, from a new application processor to a new display or keyboard, an extra battery, a pulse oximeter — or something not yet thought of." Motorola's not the first one to think of such a thing; this project is in cooperation with Phonebloks, which had already been pushing for reusable, reconfigurable phone components.

quantr tips this news from Bloomberg: "A Chinese journalist who posted allegations of corrupt dealings during the privatization of state-owned assets has been formally arrested on a defamation charge, his lawyer said. The Beijing People's Procuratorate approved Liu Hu's arrest on Sept. 30, lawyer Zhou Ze said by phone yesterday. Liu, who worked for the Guangzhou-based New Express, had been in detention since Aug. 24, according to Zhou. Liu's arrest adds to evidence that the government is stepping up a crackdown against people who go online with revelations of official malfeasance. At the same time that the Communist Party has vowed to get tough on corruption, authorities have targeted outspoken bloggers and announced that people who post comments deemed defamatory could face as much as three years behind bars."

An anonymous reader writes in with a story about an actress who claims to be the voice behind Siri. "Own an iPhone or iPad? Since Siri was released on the iPhone 4S in 2011, I bet you, like me, have been wondering who the real voice behind Apple Virtual voice assistant Siri is. She has provided weather forecast, restaurants tips and has power announcements at airport around the world. Well, the real voice behind Siri has been revealed, and she is Atlanta-based Actress Susan Bennett. While her name might not ring a bell to you, her friends , those who have worked with her, her family and even forensics expert recognized her voice, and says she is the real Siri."

rjmarvin writes "Google search is turning 15, and on a media field trip to the Menlo Park garage where Sergey Brin and Larry Page began the company, they rolled out a slew of product updates. Chief among them was the announcement of a new search algorithm called Hummingbird along with an updated Knowledge Graph and other search improvements, on top of updated Google Now cards for Android, push notifications for Google's iOS app and more."

Daniel_Stuckey writes "From an article announcing the sites' decision to do away with comments: 'It wasn't a decision we made lightly. As the news arm of a 141-year-old science and technology magazine, we are as committed to fostering lively, intellectual debate as we are to spreading the word of science far and wide. The problem is when trolls and spambots overwhelm the former, diminishing our ability to do the latter. ... even a fractious minority wields enough power to skew a reader's perception of a story, recent research suggests. ... A politically motivated, decades-long war on expertise has eroded the popular consensus on a wide variety of scientifically validated topics. Everything, from evolution to the origins of climate change, is mistakenly up for grabs again. Scientific certainty is just another thing for two people to "debate" on television. And because comments sections tend to be a grotesque reflection of the media culture surrounding them, the cynical work of undermining bedrock scientific doctrine is now being done beneath our own stories, within a website devoted to championing science.'" This comes alongside news that Google is trying to clean up YouTube comments by adding integration with Google+. "You’ll see posts at the top of the list from the video’s creator, popular personalities, engaged discussions about the video, and people in your Google+ Circles."

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "In a recent 56-page decision (PDF) in Capitol Records v. Vimeo, LLC, a federal court in Manhattan found Vimeo to be covered by the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, rejecting Capitol Records' arguments that it was not entitled to the statute's "safe harbor". However, Vimeo is not yet out of the woods in this particular case, as the Court found factual issues — requiring a trial — as to 10 of the videos on the question of whether they were uploaded at the direction of Vimeo users, and as to 55 of the videos whether Vimeo had actual knowledge, or red flag knowledge, as the existence of an infringement."

toygeek writes "If you've been in IT long enough, you're bound to have heard the phrase 'Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon filled with backup tapes.' These days moving data has become so much easier; We've surpassed baud rates and are into Gbps fiber on the backbones, and even in some homes. So, what's the modern equivalent to this, and what does it take to make the OC fiber connections cringe? Follow along as we theoretically stuff MicroSD cards into a Chevy Suburban and see what happens, and take sneakernet to a whole new level."

Google has announced the formation of a new company called Calico, which aims to promote health and fight aging. Larry Page said, "That’s a lot different from what Google does today. And you’re right. But as we explained in our first letter to shareholders, there’s tremendous potential for technology more generally to improve people’s lives. So don’t be surprised if we invest in projects that seem strange or speculative compared with our existing Internet businesses." He expanded upon this in an interview with Time: "I'm not proposing that we spend all of our money on those kinds of speculative things. But we should be spending a commensurate amount with what normal types of companies spend on research and development, and spend it on things that are a little more long-term and a little more ambitious than people normally would. More like moon shots." The new company's CEO will be Arthur Levinson, who is currently the chairman of Apple and biotech company Genentech. Apple CEO Tim Cook said, "For too many of our friends and family, life has been cut short or the quality of their life is too often lacking. Art is one of the crazy ones who thinks it doesn't have to be this way."

Lucas123 writes "On the news that Linus Torvalds's SSD went belly up while he was coding the 3.12 kernel, Computerworld took a closer look at SSDs and their failure rates. While Torvalds didn't specify the SSD manufacturer in his blog, he did write in a 2008 blog that he'd purchased an 80GB Intel SSD — likely the X25, which has become something of an industry standard for SSD reliability. While they may have no mechanical parts, making them preferable for mobile use, there are many factors that go into an SSD being reliable. For example, a NAND die, the SSD controller, capacitors, or other passive components can — and do — slowly wear out or fail entirely. As an investigation into SSD reliability performed by Tom's Hardware noted: 'We know that SSDs still fail.... All it takes is 10 minutes of flipping through customer reviews on Newegg's listings.' Yet, according to IHS, client SSD annual failure rates under warranty tend to be around 1.5%, while HDDs are near 5%. So SSDs not only outperform, but on average outlast spinning disks."

lpress writes "Google and MIT have both built open source MOOC platforms and offered innovative MOOCs. They have just announced the establishment of mooc.org, a non-profit organization that will provide a platform to develop, host, and research online courses. The devil is, no doubt, in the details, but this combination of MIT's educational expertise and reputation, Google's vast infrastructure, and the lofty goals of both organizations might turn out to be revolutionary." From Google's research weblog: "Google and edX have a shared mission to broaden access to education, and by working together, we can advance towards our goals much faster. In addition, Google, with its breadth of applicable infrastructure and research capabilities, will continue to make contributions to the online education space, the findings of which will be shared directly to the online education community and the Open edX platform." Course Builder will continue to be maintained for the time being, but eventually Google will "provide an upgrade path to Open edX and MOOC.org from Course Builder."

lpress writes "Google and MIT have both built open source MOOC platforms and offered innovative MOOCs. They have just announced the establishment of mooc.org, a non-profit organization that will provide a platform to develop, host, and research online courses. The devil is, no doubt, in the details, but this combination of MIT's educational expertise and reputation, Google's vast infrastructure, and the lofty goals of both organizations might turn out to be revolutionary." From Google's research weblog: "Google and edX have a shared mission to broaden access to education, and by working together, we can advance towards our goals much faster. In addition, Google, with its breadth of applicable infrastructure and research capabilities, will continue to make contributions to the online education space, the findings of which will be shared directly to the online education community and the Open edX platform." Course Builder will continue to be maintained for the time being, but eventually Google will "provide an upgrade path to Open edX and MOOC.org from Course Builder."

lpress writes "Google and MIT have both built open source MOOC platforms and offered innovative MOOCs. They have just announced the establishment of mooc.org, a non-profit organization that will provide a platform to develop, host, and research online courses. The devil is, no doubt, in the details, but this combination of MIT's educational expertise and reputation, Google's vast infrastructure, and the lofty goals of both organizations might turn out to be revolutionary." From Google's research weblog: "Google and edX have a shared mission to broaden access to education, and by working together, we can advance towards our goals much faster. In addition, Google, with its breadth of applicable infrastructure and research capabilities, will continue to make contributions to the online education space, the findings of which will be shared directly to the online education community and the Open edX platform." Course Builder will continue to be maintained for the time being, but eventually Google will "provide an upgrade path to Open edX and MOOC.org from Course Builder."

benrothke writes "It has been about 8 years since my friend Richard Bejtlich's (note, that was a full disclosure 'my friend') last book Extrusion Detection: Security Monitoring for Internal Intrusions came out. That and his other 2 books were heavy on technical analysis and real-word solutions. Some titles only start to cover ground after about 80 pages of introduction. With this highly informative and actionable book, you are already reviewing tcpdump output at page 16. In The Practice of Network Security Monitoring: Understanding Incident Detection and Response, Bejtlich takes the approach that your network will be attacked and breached. He observes that a critical part of your security posture must be that of network security monitoring (NSM), which is the collection and analysis of data to help you detect and respond to intrusions." Read below for the rest of Ben's review. The Practice of Network Security Monitoring: Understanding Incident Detection and Response author Richard Bejtlich pages 376 publisher No Starch Press rating 9/10 reviewer Ben Rothke ISBN 978-1593275099 summary Definitive guide to the new world of Network Security Monitoring (NSM) In this book, Bejtlich details how to design a NSM program from the initiation state. Being a big open source proponent, the book lists no proprietary tools and myriad open source solutions. The book is designed for system and security administrators, CIRT managers and analysts with a strong background in understanding threats, vulnerabilities and security log interpretation.

The book is about the inevitable, that attackers will get inside your network. While it's foreseeable they will get in, it's not inevitable that you have to be caught off-guard. For those who are serious about securing their network, this is an invaluable book that provides a unique and very workable model to create a fully-functioning NSM infrastructure.

The book is a hands-on guide to installing and configuring NSM tools. The reader who is comfortable using tools such as Wireshark, Nmap and the like will be quite at home here.

This is a book about how not to be surprised and its 13 chapters detail how to create and manage a NSM program, what to look for, and details myriad tools to use in the process.

The focus of the book is not on the planning and defense phases of the security cycle, hopefully, that is already in place in your organization, rather on the actions to take when handling systems that are already compromised or that are on the verge of being compromised, as detailed in the preface.

In chapter 1, the book details the difference between continuous monitoring(CM) and NSM; since their terms are similar and many people confuse the two. CM is big in the federal computing space and NIST provides an overview and definition of it here. The book notes that CM has almost nothing to do with NSM or even with trying to detect and respond to intrusions. NSM is threat-centric, meaning adversaries are the discussion of the NSM operation; while CM is vulnerability-centric; focusing on configuration and software weaknesses.

Also in chapter 1, Bejtlich asks the important question: is NSM legal? He writes that there is no easy answer to that questions and anyone using or deploying an NSM solution should first consult with their legal counsel; in order not to potentially violate the US Wiretap Act and other laws and regulations. This is especially true for those who are in European Union (EU) countries, as the EU places a high threshold on information security teams who want to monitor network traffic. Something as simple as running Wireshark on a corporate network in the US, would require court approval if done on an EU-based network.

One of the main NSM tools the book references and details is Security Onion (SO). SO is a Linux distro for IDS and NSM. Its based on Ubuntu and the distro contains Snort, Suricata, Bro, Sguil, Squert, Snorby, ELSA, Xplico, NetworkMiner and many other useful security tools.

The book details and explains how use these tools in an NSM environment. An important point Bejtlich makes in chapter 9 regarding the tools, is that analysts need tools to find intruders. But methodology is more important than just software tools. Tools collect and interpret data, but methodology provides the conceptual model. He explains that CIRT analysts must understand how to use tools to achieve a particular goal, but it is imperative and important to start with a good operational model first, and then select tools to provide data supporting that model.

The book has a short discussion of how cloud computing effects NSM. In a nutshell, the cloud throws a monkey wrench into an NSM effort. For example, it is generally not an option for SaaS offerings since customers are limited to the back-end logs.

The book closes with the observation that NSM is not just about all the tools that the author spent over 300 pages discussing, rather it is more about the workflows, metrics and collaboration. Unfortunately, this title does not detail the necessary workflows for a NSM and it is hoped that the follow-up to this book will.

The only negative in the book is that as CSO of Mandiant, Bejtlich references his firm's products, mainly their MIR appliance for a CIRT. In the spirit of objectivity and not trying to have the book come across as marketing PR, if an author is going to mention a product their firm sells, they should also mention alternative solutions.

For those looking for a comprehensive guide on the topic of NSM, written by one of the experts in the field, The Practice of Network Security Monitoring: Understanding Incident Detection and Responseis an excellent reference that is certain to make the reader a better information security practitioner, and their network more secure.

Reviewed by Ben Rothke.

You can purchase The Practice of Network Security Monitoring: Understanding Incident Detection & Response from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews (sci-fi included) -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Lemeowski writes "Game studios go to great lengths to protect their IP. But board game designer Daniel Solis doesn't subscribe to that philosophy. He has spent the past ten years blogging his game design process, posting all of his concepts and prototypes on his blog. Daniel shares four things he's learned after designing games in public, saying paranoia about your ideas being stolen "is just an excuse not to do the work." His article provides a solid gut check for game designers and other creatives who may let pride give them weird expectations."

jamie writes "In a story on Thursday, Slashdot and its readers had a little fun at the expense of Al Gore, who was quoted as saying that the hurricane severity scale was going to go to 6. A correction was made the next day. The author of the piece that Slashdot linked now writes 'I retract the balance of my criticism.' Turns out Gore was misquoted. Luckily for Gore, this is the first time he's been ridiculed for something he didn't actually say. Well, except for Love Story, Love Canal, farm chores, and everyone's favorite, inventing the internet. (The original Slashdot story is here and its central link now includes the Washington Post's correction.)" From Ezra Klein's update on his earlier piece: "I'm out-of-town and so away from my tape recorder. So I asked Gore's staff about the line and they have Gore saying: 'The scientists are now adding category six to the hurricane ... some are proposing we add category 6 to the hurricane scale that used to be 1-5.' That doesn't offend my memory of the discussion and it's entirely possible I missed Gore's qualifying sentence while trying to keep up. If so, that's my fault, and I apologize."

Nerval's Lobster writes "Any number of executives could take Ballmer's place, including a few he unceremoniously kicked to the curb over the years. Whoever steps into that CEO role, however, faces a much greater challenge than if Ballmer had quietly resigned several years ago. Ballmer famously missed the boat on tablets and smartphones; Windows 8 isn't selling as well as Microsoft expected; and on Websites and blogs such as Mini-Microsoft (which had a brilliant posting about Ballmer's departure), employees complain bitterly about the company's much-maligned stack-ranking system, its layers of bureaucracy, and its inability to innovate. Had Ballmer left years ago, replaced by someone with the ability to more keenly anticipate markets, the company would probably be in much better shape to face its coming challenges. In its current form, Microsoft often feels like it's struggling in the wake of Amazon, Google, Apple, and Facebook." In an interview with ZDNet, Ballmer said his biggest regret as CEO was in how Windows Vista was developed. Opinions are divided on both the nature of his resignation and what it will mean for Microsoft. While the stock price is up, BusinessWeek and others suggest the purpose of the transition is to find somebody better able to anticipate future trends. That would certainly lead to more organizational changes within Microsoft, something employees suffered through just last month. Ben Kuchera at the Penny Arcade Report points out that this could mean Microsoft will try to re-enter markets it has abandoned. He asks the company to "stay the hell away from PC gaming."

An anonymous reader writes "Google today released Chrome version 29 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. The new version features improved Omnibox suggestions, profile resetting, as well as new apps and extensions APIs. The biggest change is undoubtedly around how Omnibox suggestions work on the desktop. When the feature arrived in the beta channel, Google said that the improvements were 'based on the recency of websites visited, so you’ll get more contextually relevant suggestions at the right time. ... Chrome 29 for Android meanwhile has received WebRTC support, which enables real-time communication (such as videoconferencing) in the browser without installing any plugins."

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "Can it be true? The US government claims it really wants to hear from us on the subject of how copyright law needs to be modified to accommodate the developing technology of the digital age? I don't know, but the US Patent & Trademark Office (which btw has nothing to do with administering copyright) says 'we really want to hear from you' and the Department of Commerce Internet Policy Task Force wrote a 122-page paper (PDF) on the subject, so they must really mean it, right? But I couldn't find the address to which to send my comments, so maybe that was an oversight on their part."

toygeek writes "Some companies have small corporate offices with a few desks and some basic staff, and the balance of their staff works from home. I have worked for two companies that have home-sourced their staffing. I wish to take you through my journey in working from home in the IT world and share some facts that I've accumulated along the way."

One of the things Google is known for is giving their employees so-called '20% time' — that is, the freedom to use a fifth of their working hours to pursue their own projects. Many of these projects have directly improved Google's existing products, and some have spawned new products entirely. An article at Quartz on Friday made that claim that 20% time was all but dead at Google, largely due to interference from upper management. Some Google engineers responded, and said that it has essentially turned into 120% time — they're still free to undertake their own projects, but they typically need their whole normal work week to meet productivity goals. "What 20% time really means is that you- as a Google eng- have access to, and can use, Google’s compute infrastructure to experiment and build new systems. The infrastructure, and the associated software tools, can be leveraged in 20% time to make an eng far more productive than they normally would be." An article at Ars makes the case that this is not necessarily a bad thing, because Google has enough good products that simply need iteration now, making the more innovative 20% time less useful. "Google wasn’t hurting for successful products when it started to tout its 20 percent time: off the backs of its pre-IPO services, it earned a market cap of over $23 billion. But if it was a company that wanted to grow and diversify beyond products that were either related to search or derivative of what already existed, it needed more ideas, better ideas, as quickly as possible. Hence, liberal use of 20 percent time made a lot of sense. Now, Google is not only an enormous company of nearly 45,000 employees with a market cap twelve times that of its first IPO ($286 billion), it has a lot of big products that it wants to make work. More than it needs more ideas, it needs to make the ideas it has great."

jrepin writes "The KDE community has released version 4.11 of Software Compilation, which is dedicated to the memory of Atul 'toolz' Chitnis, a great Free and Open Source Software champion from India. This version of Plasma Workspaces will be supported for at least two years, and delivers further improvements to basic functionality with a smoother taskbar, smarter battery widget and improved sound mixer. The introduction of KScreen brings intelligent multi-monitor handling. KWin window manager incorporates first experimental support for Wayland. This release marks massive improvements in the Kontact PIM suite, giving much better performance and many new features, like scam detection and scheduling e-mail sending. Kate text editor improves the productivity of Python and Javascript developers with new plugins, Dolphin file manager became faster, and the educational applications bring various new features. The Nepomuk semantic storage and search engine received substantial performance improvements." The performance enhancements to nepomuk (KDE's semantic desktop engine) are particularly welcome. This release of the Plasma desktop also marks the end of Plasma version one; primary development focus will now switch to updating KDE for Qt 5. There should still be more updates to KDE 4, however. Also released recently by the KDE team was the first RC of Plasma Media Center 1.1.

Trailrunner7 writes "Google's bug bounty program has been one of the more successful reward systems of its kind, and the company has regularly modified and expanded the program over the years to keep pace with what's going on in the industry. Google also has increased the rewards it offers for certain kinds of vulnerabilities several times, and the company is doing it again, raising the lower reward level from $1,000 to $5,000. This is the second major reward increase in the last couple of months. In June the company jacked up the amount of money it pays for cross-site scripting vulnerabilities in Google web properties to $7,500, and also raised the reward for authentication bypasses to that same level. Now, Google is giving researchers more incentive to find significant vulnerabilities in its Chrome browser."

An anonymous reader writes "Google today announced Android Device Manager, a new app coming later this month that helps you find your lost phone or tablet. The service will be available for devices running Android 2.2 (Froyo) or above. Details are scarce right now, but Google does say Android Device Manager will let you ring your phone at maximum volume so you can find it, even if it's been silenced. We also know you'll need to be signed into your Google Account to use the service."

An anonymous reader writes "Google today announced it has already started upgrading all of its SSL certificates to 2048-bit keys. The goal is to beef up the encryption on the connections made to its services. Google says the upgrade, which includes the root certificate that the company uses to sign all of its SSL certificates, will be completed 'in the next few months.' Previously, however, Google was more specific and said it was aiming to finish the process by the end of 2013."

An anonymous reader writes "Long time /. member maynard has written one of the most obsessively detailed and extensive analyses of Stanley Kubrick's classic 2001: A Space Odyssey seen in some time. At more than 22,000 words, it contains still images, film clips, musical score selections and copious references, including by Piers Bizony, author of Filming the Future, Nietzsche, Foucault, Freud, and film theorists like Bazin, Kracauer and Zizek. It's already gained some notoriety, having been retweeted by Nicholas Jackson, former editor of the Atlantic Monthly and Slate. Anyone who loves the film or SF in general should find this an amazing read!" I don't know whether it can topple my all-time favorite analysis of 2001, Leonard F. Wheat's Kubrick's 2001: A Triple Allegory .

Travis Goodspeed has authored a blog post detailing his method of tracking low-earth-orbit satellites. Starting with an old Felcom 82B dish made for use on maritime vessels, he added motors to move it around and a webcam-based homemade calibration system. "For handling the radio input and controlling the motors, I have a BeagleBone wired into a USB hub. These are all mounted on the trunk of the assembly inside of the radome, sending data back to a server indoors. ... In order to operate the dish, I wanted both a flashy GUI and concise scripting, but scripting was the higher priority. Toward that end, I constructed the software as a series of daemons that communicate through a PostgreSQL database on a server inside the house. For example, I can run SELECT * FROM sats WHERE el>0 to select the names and positions of all currently tracked satellites that are above the horizon. To begin tracking the International Space Station if it is in view, I run UPDATE target SET name='ISS';. For predicting satellite locations, I wrote a quick daemon using PyEphem that fetches satellite catalog data from CelesTrak. These positions are held in a database, with duplicates filtered out and positions constantly updated. PyEphem is sophisticated enough to predict in any number of formats, so it's easy to track many of the brighter stars as well as planets and deep-space probes, such as Voyagers 1 and 2."