Comment Yes, please. (Score 1) 293
Pretty please?
Comment What about NoScript? AdBlockers? (Score 4, Insightful) 375
Can I not telnet to facebook.com on port 80 and make a request by hand? Sorry, but their copyright ends after they distribute a URI over HTTP. What I do with the response is my prerogative. My browser does anything it wants to with your data... even if I'm not using a browser to connect to tcp/80 at the time.
Comment Re:They're not seeing a primary source. (Score 1) 112
We have had a request out for a Security Researcher with a clearance for over a year now. Not a single candidate with a military background has come through yet with the right skillset for exploitation development. The Military is only cranking out operations people, which aren't really that hard to come by.
Comment Re:Training? (Score 1) 112
I've seen the NSA recruiting at Defcon and making it a point to say that you would still be accepted even if you had drug convictions. Playing to the crowd for sure :P
Comment Looking in the wrong places (Score 1) 112
About 20% of the best people I know employed as Security Researchers did not even graduate high school, including myself. I see this trending downward as more and more schools now have something of a security curriculum, but its still very much an industry of self-motivated voodoo programming. Universities have always been decent at training operational security people (configuring/monitoring security appliances and policy issues), but I've yet to hear of a school with a good program on vulnerability discovery, exploitation, and reverse engineering code. For me, at least, its much more of a mindset thing more than a skillset thing, which is a lot harder to teach.
Comment Neat! I'd really like to try that out. However... (Score 1) 198
I'm not so keen on my IDE being reliant on all those static code analysis tools to determine your code's structure. For the most part they find all your methods just fine, but so many times they fall short, especially when you are not using Java.
Comment link (Score 2, Informative) 185
This is a great site with a good bit of introductory information. I implemented their LED flasher tutorials when I was playing with my Xylinx Spartan board. fpga4fun.com
Comment What this really says. (Score 1) 117
"New startup makes it easier and standard practice to legitimize the practice of patent trolling."
Just fix the damn system already!
Just fix the damn system already!
Maryland To Tax Custom Programming and Computer Services 395
mcwop writes "Early this morning Maryland passed legislation to apply a new 6% sales tax to 'custom computer programming' and other computer- and hardware-related services. Computer industry groups lobbied hard against the measure to no avail. Purchasers of IT services may find that in-house IT and buying out-of-state become attractive options, as well as cutting money out of other projects."
Submission + - Vote Swapping Ruled Legal!
cayenne8 writes: Way back when (2000), during that election, there were some sites set up (voteswap.com and votexchange.com) for people across the nation to agree to swap votes. This was set up mostly for Nader and Gore voters to work against Bush.
California representatives threatened to proscute these sites as criminal offenses, and many of them shut down. On Monday, the 9th US court of appeals upheld that "the websites' vote-swapping mechanisms as well as the communication and vote swaps they enabled were constitutionally protected" and California's spurious threats violated the First Amendment. The 9th Circuit also said the threats violated the U.S. Constitution's Commerce Clause."
See the story HERE .
California representatives threatened to proscute these sites as criminal offenses, and many of them shut down. On Monday, the 9th US court of appeals upheld that "the websites' vote-swapping mechanisms as well as the communication and vote swaps they enabled were constitutionally protected" and California's spurious threats violated the First Amendment. The 9th Circuit also said the threats violated the U.S. Constitution's Commerce Clause."
See the story HERE .
Surviving in Space Without a Spacesuit 481
Geoffrey writes "The recent movie Sunshine features a scene (echoing the famous scene in 2001: a Space Odyssey) in which two astronauts have to cross from one ship to another without spacesuits. But, can you survive in space without a spacesuit?
Morgan Smith, writing in Slate, asks whether this is realistic, and concludes: "Yes, for a very short time.""
Google Pushes Open Source OCR 212
SocialWorm writes "Google has just announced work on OCRopus, which it says it hopes will 'advance the state of the art in optical character recognition and related technologies.' OCRopus will be available under the Apache 2.0 License. Obviously, there may be search and image search implications from OCRopus. 'The goal of the project is to advance the state of the art in optical character recognition and related technologies, and to deliver a high quality OCR system suitable for document conversions, electronic libraries, vision impaired users, historical document analysis, and general desktop use. In addition, we are structuring the system in such a way that it will be easy to reuse by other researchers in the field.'"
Journal Journal: unorganized rantings on software patents
Software Patents
I'll start off with a notice to those who would say that I am out to
undermine all the work of programmers everywhere, in hopes that I may
receive a free lunch: I am a programmer, I understand what it is to
see a project through to its completion and hope for it's continued
success. A free ride has never been my goal. Furthermore, it is
another misstatement to say that abolishing software patents would
somehow make software available at zero cost.
Journal Journal: Speaking of software.
Most contemopary people are unaware remain unaware of the nature of software
when related to communications in general. Software is not some ghostly image
conjoured by a computer wizard; It encompasses a much broader realm. Software
is in essence language. It can be translated into innumerable sequences of
differing interpetations.
Journal Journal: tabla rosa
rm -rf /var/log/
int main(int argc, char **argc)
{
printf("Hello World!\n");
}
int main(int argc, char **argc)
{
printf("Hello World!\n");
}
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Work expands to fill the time available. -- Cyril Northcote Parkinson, "The Economist", 1955
