Whip-hero - Slashdot User

Comment PPE and Robotics (Score 4, Interesting) 251

by Whip-hero on Monday April 20, 2020 @03:38AM (#59967636) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: What Are You Doing To Help?

I've been WFH for about five years. During the quarantine, I've been working on PPE production. A lot of people have been 3D printing masks and face shields, but it's difficult to make an impact as an individual because an FDM printer takes ~10 hours to make a respirator mask. One of my hobbies is urethane resin molding, so I've been working with a local makerspace to make silicone molds to cast PPE at a rate of about 2/hour. It's slow going because I've had to order supplies and wait for deliveries, but I think I can do 30-60 respirators as a proof of concept this week. After that, I'll hand off the work to the makerspace, which will bankroll some larger-scale production.

I also coached a FIRST FTC up until the quarantine began, and I meet with my students once per week to discuss school, working from home, and anything they want to talk about.

Comment Was Easy Way Too Boring? (Score 1) 123

by Whip-hero on Saturday June 01, 2019 @02:33AM (#58689602) Attached to: Teen Makes His Own AirPods For $4

I must be missing something here. The kid took a *working BT bone conduction headset*, then destroyed it so that he could glue on an Apple ear bud? Why didn't he just use the headset after having actually paid for it?

Sloppy Linux Admins Enable Slow Brute-Force Attacks 391

Posted by kdawson on Sunday October 04, 2009 @10:27PM from the time-lapse-intrusion-monitering dept.

badger.foo passes on the report of Peter N. M. Hansteen that a third round of low-intensity, distributed brute-force attacks is now in progress — we earlier discussed the first and second rounds — and that sloppy admin practice on Linux systems is the main enabler. As before, the article links to log data (this time 770 apparently already compromised Linux hosts are involved), and further references. "The fact that your rig runs Linux does not mean you're home free. You need to keep paying attention. When your spam washer has been hijacked and tries to break into other people's systems, you urgently need to get your act together, right now."

Microsoft Tax Dodge At Issue In Washington State 681

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday September 22, 2009 @09:03PM from the office-at-area-fifty-one dept.

newscloud writes "With Washington State facing a billion-dollar biennial budget deficit, the spotlight again shifts to Microsoft's software licensing office in Reno, Nevada. 'Although the majority of its software development is performed in Washington State, Microsoft records its estimated $18 billion in licensing revenue per year through a corporate office in Reno, Nevada where there is no licensing tax. Just by enforcing the state's existing tax law from 2008 onwards, we could reduce Washington's revenue shortfall by more than 70 percent. Alternately, we could pursue the entire $707 million from Microsoft's thirteen years of tax dodging and cover most of the expected deficit going forward.' We have discussed Microsoft's creative capitalism in the past."

Games Fail To Portray Gender and Ethnic Diversity 590

Posted by Soulskill on Friday July 31, 2009 @10:06PM from the overrepresented-demon-alien-demographic dept.

eldavojohn writes "A new study has found that game characters tend not to reflect cultural diversity. According to the paper from researchers across four universities (PDF): 'A large-scale content analysis of characters in video games was employed to answer questions about their representations of gender, race and age in comparison to the US population. The sample included 150 games from a year across nine platforms, with the results weighted according to game sales. ... The results show a systematic over-representation of males, white and adults and a systematic under-representation of females, Hispanics, Native Americans, children and the elderly.' The researchers also note that games 'function as crucial gatekeepers for interest in science, technology, engineering and math,' and that without these groups represented properly, 'it may place underrepresented groups behind the curve.'"

Linux, Twitter, and Red Hat "Win" Big At Pwnie Awards 63

Posted by Soulskill on Friday July 31, 2009 @08:03PM from the i'd-like-to-thank-the-academy dept.

hugmeplz writes "The third annual Pwnie Awards took place last night at Black Hat in Las Vegas, and a full list of the winners has been posted. 'Most Epic Fail' honors went to the notorious Twitter/Google Apps hack from earlier this month that raised all sorts of questions about cloud computing security. Red Hat got skewered with the 'Mass 0wnage' award, also known as the 'Pwnie for Breaking the Internet,' for issuing a version of OpenSSH that left a backdoor open to hackers. The Linux development team earned 'Lamest Vendor Response' recognition for 'continually assuming that all kernel memory corruption bugs are only Denial-of-Service.' Naturally, Microsoft didn't slip past judges' eyes. Its vulnerability that enabled the Conficker worm to do its thing earned honors as the 'Most Overhyped Bug.' On the more positive side, the Pwnie Awards recognized security pros Wei Yongjun, sgrakkyu, Sebastian Kramer and Bernhard Mueller for accomplishments such as discovering bugs and demonstrating exploits. The Pwnie for Best Song went to Doctor Braid for his song Nice Report. Solar Designer snagged the Lifetime Achievement Award, for among other things, being the first to demonstrate heap buffer overflow exploitation, according to the Pwnie Awards Web site."

Comment None of the above (Score 1) 921

by Whip-hero on Wednesday March 18, 2009 @02:30PM (#27245001) Attached to: Study Finds the Pious Fight Death Hardest

It's not because of self-doubt or fear of damnation. It's because as religious people, they believe they have more to live for. They believe that a supreme being has taken a personal interest in their individual lives, and that whatever is happening to them serves an important purpose in the greater scheme of things. If there is any chance of recovery at all, they'll hang on to it.

The definition of faith is the belief in that for which there is no evidence, so perhaps religious people are less likely to give up hope.

Submission + - Google Bans Anti-MoveOn.org Ads

Submitted by

Whip-hero

on Friday October 12, 2007 @12:11PM

Whip-hero writes: "Citing copyright infringement, Google has removed a Republican candidate's ads attacking MoveOn.org. "Internet giant Google has banned advertisements critical of MoveOn.org, the far-left advocacy group that caused a national uproar last month when it received preferential treatment from The New York Times for its 'General Betray Us' message." The article goes on to state that "Google routinely permits the unauthorized use of company names such as Exxon, Wal-Mart, Cargill and Microsoft in advocacy ads. An anti-war ad currently running on Google asks 'Keep Blackwater in Iraq?' and links to an article titled 'Bastards at Blackwater — Should Blackwater Security be held accountable for the deaths of its employees?'""

Canada Rejects Anti-Terror Laws 507

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Wednesday February 28, 2007 @03:39PM from the shot-down dept.

Coryoth writes "The Canadian parliament has voted against renewing anti-terror laws that had been introduced after September 11, 2001. The rejected laws included provisions to hold terror suspects indefinitely, and to compel witnesses to testify, and were in some sense Canada's version fo the Patriot Act. The laws were voted down in the face of claims from the minority Conservative government that the Liberal Party was soft on terror, and despite the fact that Canada has faced active terrorist cells in their own country. The anti-terror laws have never been used, and it was viewed that they are neither relevant, nor needed, in dealing with terrorist plots. Hopefully more countries will come to the same conclusion."

Submission + - MPAA Fires Back at AACS Decryption Utility

Submitted by RulerOf on Wednesday February 28, 2007 @03:23PM

RulerOf writes: The AACS Decryption utility released this past December known as BackupHDDVD originally authored by Muslix64 of the Doom9 forums has received its first official DMCA Takedown Notice. It has been widely speculated that the utility itself was not an infringing piece of software due to the fact that it is merely "a textbook implementation of AACS," written with the help of documents publicly available at the AACS LA's website, and that the AACS Volume Unique Keys that the end user isn't supposed to have access to are in fact the infringing content, but it appears that such is not the case. From the thread:

"...you must input keys and then it will decrypt the encrypted content. If this is the case, than according to the language of the DMCA it does sound like it is infringing. Section 1201(a) says that it is an infringement to "circumvent a technological measure." The phrase, "circumvent a technological measure" is defined as "descramb(ling) a scrambled work or decrypt(ing) an encrypted work, ... without the authority of the copyright owner." If BackupHDDVD does in fact decrypt encrypted content than per the DMCA it needs a license to do that.

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