He who is slient, is strongest.

Gives attacker almost as much control as user

Facebook engineers are finishing a patch for a critical vulnerability that exposed user birthdays and other sensitive data even when they were designated as private, a security researcher said Wednesday.…

Second ISS spacewalk wraps

Atlantis mission specialists Steve Bowen and Michael Good wrapped the second STS-132 mission spacewalk at 17:47 GMT today, having spent seven hours and nine minutes outside the International Space Station.…

tonyfugere writes "After a year of testing by invitation only, Google Wave has been opened to the public. From what I have seen, it looks like it could be beneficial for documenting brainstorming sessions beyond simple instant messaging protocols." (Google Wave is "also great for entertaining the masses," says tonyfugere, who links to the slightly NSFW demonstration below.)

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asgard4 writes "Coming up with sound, elegant, and easy to implement designs is not a trivial matter, as Fred Brooks, author of the classic book The Mythical Man-Month, acknowledges in his latest book The Design of Design. In many disciplines — especially in software development — the design process and how to produce good designs is relatively poorly understood. Teaching the design process to students is even more difficult. In the form of opinionated essays, Brooks attempts to summarize what we know about the design process, how it has changed over time, and how we can produce better and more elegant designs. Brooks has decades of experience designing large systems and is well known for his involvement in the design of IBM's OS/360. Even though Brooks is a computer scientist, the book applies equally well to many other disciplines outside of software development that have a formal design process, such as architecture. A lot of his examples come from other engineering disciplines and architecture. But of course he presents the obligatory OS/360 case study as well." Read on for the rest of Martin's review.

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VP8 set free as WebM

Google I/O Google has taken a swashbuckling step towards open and license-free web video by open sourcing the leading codec from On2 Technologies, the video-compression outfit it acquired earlier this year for $124.6 million.…

Hugh Pickens writes "David Carr writes that headlines in newspapers and magazines were once written with readers in mind, to be clever or catchy or evocative, but now headlines are just there to get the search engines to notice. Hence the headline for this story that includes a prized key word for one of the 'Gossip Girls' — just the thing to push this Slashdot summary to the top of Google rankings. 'All of the things that make headlines meaningful in print — photographs, placement, and context — are nowhere in sight on the Web,' writes Carr. Headlines have become, as Gabriel Snyder, the recently appointed executive editor of Newsweek.com, says, 'naked little creatures that have to go out into the world to stand and fight on their own.' In this context, 'Jon Stewart Slams Glenn Beck' is the ideal headline, guaranteed to pull in thousands of pageviews. And while nobody is suggesting that the Web should somehow accommodate the glories of The New York Post's headlines in that paper's prime, some of its classics would still work. 'Remember "Headless Body in Topless Bar," perhaps the most memorable New York Post headline ever? It's direct, it's descriptive, and it's oh-so-search-engine-friendly. And not a Taylor Momsen in sight.'"

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peterofoz writes "The students will be asked to voluntarily submit a DNA sample. The cotton swabs will come with two bar code labels. One label will be put on the DNA sample and the other is kept for the students' own records. The confidential process is being overseen by Jasper Rine, a campus professor of Genetics and Development Biology, who says the test results will help students make decisions about their diet and lifestyle." No word in the story on just what "confidential" means — who will have access to the results, how long they'll be kept, or what else they might someday be used for. Will the notoriously liberal Berkeley campus see this as a service or an invasion of privacy?

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NAND then there was disruption

Comment "Flash is a better disk ... and disk is a better tape." So said distinguished Microsoft engineer Jim Gray in 2006.…

Put your pencils down

Pakistani authorities have ordered ISPs to block access to Facebook ahead of an "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day" planned by users for tomorrow.…

Free White Paper - IBM Sets Pace in Unix Virtualization

KVM virt side-by-side with Xen

Commercial Linux distributor Novell is hoping that the delivery of the first service pack update for its SUSE Linux 11 operating system for servers and desktops will give the software a bump. And not just because SP1 has support for lots of new hardware.…

SuperSpeed USB and military-grade toughness?

Review Although it has been said that it won't become mainstream until it is officially adopted by Intel in 2011, USB 3.0 - aka SuperSpeed USB - is steadily emerging from the shadows with more and more manufacturers bringing support for the protocol to the eager masses.…

pinkstuff writes "The Navy unveiled its terror-fighting marine mammals at a two-day homeland security and disaster preparedness exercise in California this week. From the article: 'A Navy seal — actually a sea lion — took less than a minute to find a fake mine under a pier near San Francisco's AT&T Park. A dolphin quickly located a terrorist lurking in the black water before another sea lion, using a device carried in its mouth, cuffed the pretend saboteur's ankle so authorities could reel him in.' Queue the 'frickin lasers' jokes."

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An anonymous reader writes "Web browser history detection with the CSS:visited trick has been known for the last ten years, but recently published research suggests that the problem is bigger than previously thought. A study of 243,068 users found that 76% of them were vulnerable to history detection by malicious websites. Newer browsers such as Safari and Chrome were even more affected, with 82% and 94% of users vulnerable. An average of 63 visited locations were detected per user, and for the top 10% of users the tests found over 150 visited sites. The website has a summary of the findings; the full paper (PDF) is available as well."

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It's like ten thousand spoons when all you need is data protection

An underground cybercrime forum has been hacked, with once walled-off information uploaded onto file-sharing networks.…

They all agreed they did it...

The European Commission has fined ten memory chip makers a total of €331m - as part of the first settlement made for cartel charges.…

'I’m not stopping. This man is going to kill me'

A Northern Ireland garage mechanic who drove for three miles with a disgruntled customer clamped to the bonnet of his car has been cleared of a raft of charges including assault and dangerous driving, the Belfast Telegraph reports.…

An anonymous reader noted an article in Cosmos questions the conventional wisdom of the "follow the water" strategy of seeking extraterrestrial life, saying "There's an awful lot of places where water could exist — either on the surface of the Earth, or deep within it — yet life is largely concentrated in a small sliver of this."

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Lessons from the front line

Blog In order to have a meaningful discussion about the specifics of remote access software, we need to get a few concepts out of the way, and some terminology nailed down. The first concept that needs to be dealt with is that of “sessions”. A session is the interface you see on the screen when you log in: your background, your applications available to you, your bookmarks and shortcuts and all other things that make your desktop yours. When you sit down in front of your computer and log into it, you are accessing the “console session”.…

Free White Paper - Finding an upside in the downturn with data quality

May might act

Supporters of Gary McKinnon are anxiously awaiting a Cabinet Office decision on whether the coalition government will halt his extradition proceedings.…

Barence writes "A flaw with the graphics driver in Windows 7 could compromise the stability and security of PCs, Microsoft has warned. The vulnerability lies in the Windows Canonical Display Driver (cdd.dll) for the 64-bit versions of Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2. Microsoft claims that the flaw could lead to machines rebooting or even allow a hacker to remotely execute code, although it claims either eventuality is improbable. Concerned users are being advised to disable Windows Aero until Microsoft can issue a fix."

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