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Government

Report: DHS Failing On Cybersecurity 68

Posted by Soulskill from the to-be-fair-cyberthreats-can't-hide-in-a-tube-of-toothpaste dept.
chicksdaddy writes: It's always interesting to listen to what politicians say on their way out of office — after the pressure to get re-elected and say "on message" has been lifted. Eisenhower's historic farewell address in 1961 warned Americans about the influence of the Military-Industrial Complex. Twenty years later, Jimmy Carter warned of the distorting influence of "single-issue groups and special interest organizations" on the political process. And, this week, outgoing Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) used his final days in office to issue a blistering report on the Department of Homeland Security. Coburn argued that DHS was failing on each of its five, critical missions, among them: cyber security.

The report, "A Review of the Department of Homeland Security's Missions and Performance (PDF)," was released on Saturday. In it, the outgoing Senator said that DHS's strategy and programs "are unlikely to protect us from the adversaries that pose the greatest cybersecurity threat."

Despite spending $700 million annually on a range of cybersecurity programs, Coburn said it is hard to know whether the Department's efforts to assist the private sector in identifying, mitigating or remediating cyber incidents provide "significant value" or are worth the expense. DHS programs are still heavily weighted towards software vulnerability mitigation, Coburn says, an activity that "will not protect the nation from the most sophisticated attacks and cybersecurity threats."
Data Storage

6 Terabyte Hard Drive Round-Up: WD Red, WD Green and Seagate Enterprise 6TB 190

Posted by samzenpus from the best-of-the-best dept.
MojoKid writes The hard drive market has become a lot less sexy in the past few years thanks to SSDs. What we used to consider "fast" for a hard drive is relatively slow compared to even the cheapest of today's solid state drives. But there are two areas where hard drives still rule the roost, and that's overall capacity and cost per gigabyte. Since most of us still need a hard drive for bulk storage, the question naturally becomes, "how big of a drive do you need?" For a while, 4TB drives were the top end of what was available in the market but recently Seagate, HGST, and Western Digital announced breakthroughs in areal density and other technologies, that enabled the advent of the 6 Terabyte hard drive. This round-up looks at three offerings in the market currently, with a WD Red 6TB drive, WD Green and a Seagate 6TB Enterprise class model. Though the WD drives only sport a 5400RPM spindle speed, due to their increased areal density of 1TB platters, they're still able to put up respectable performance. Though the Seagate Enterprise Capacity 6TB (also known as the Constellation ES series) drive offers the best performance at 7200 RPM, it comes at nearly a $200 price premium. Still, at anywhere from .04 to .07 per GiB, you can't beat the bulk storage value of these new high capacity 6TB HDDs.
Earth

Belize's "Blue Hole" Reveals Clues To Maya's Demise 80

Posted by samzenpus from the drop-of-water dept.
An anonymous reader writes The collapse of the Mayan civilization has been a mystery for decades, but now new research suggests that the blue hole of Belize could provide an answer. Studying minerals from Belize's famous underwater cave, researchers have discovered that an extreme drought occurred between AD 800 and AD 900, which is when the Mayan civilization collapsed. From the article: "Although the findings aren't the first to tie a drought to the Mayan culture's demise, the new results strengthen the case that dry periods were indeed the culprit. That's because the data come from several spots in a region central to the Mayan heartland, said study co-author André Droxler, an Earth scientist at Rice University."
Shark

Trains May Soon Come Equipped With Debris-Zapping Lasers 194

Posted by Soulskill from the working-their-way-up-to-cow-zapping-lasers dept.
Molly McHugh writes: Holland's chief transportation service is testing a unique new way to clear the rails of fallen leaves and other small debris: by mounting lasers on the fronts of locomotives. The lasers will cause the leaves, which produce a condition commonly referred to as "slippery rail" in the fall and winter months, to vanish in a puff of smoke.
Government

FTC: Online Billing Service Deceptively Collected Medical Records 25

Posted by samzenpus from the tell-us-everything dept.
itwbennett writes The FTC has reached a proposed settlement with PaymentsMD, an Atlanta health billing company that used the sign-up process for its billing service to surreptitiously seek customers' consent to obtain detailed medical information. The medical information PaymentsMD requested included customers' prescriptions, procedures, medical diagnoses, lab tests performed and their results, and other information, the FTC said. The bright spot in all this: In all but one case, the health care providers contacted for data refused to comply with PaymentsMD's requests.
Communications

How the NSA Is Spying On Everyone: More Revelations 148

Posted by timothy from the your-own-good dept.
The Intercept has published today a story detailing documents that "reveal how the NSA plans to secretly introduce new flaws into communication systems so that they can be tapped into—a controversial tactic that security experts say could be exposing the general population to criminal hackers." The documents also describe a years-long effort, aimed at hostile and friendly regimes, from the point of view of the U.S. government, to break the security of various countries' communications networks. "Codenamed AURORAGOLD, the covert operation has monitored the content of messages sent and received by more than 1,200 email accounts associated with major cellphone network operators, intercepting confidential company planning papers that help the NSA hack into phone networks."
Transportation

Video Collin Graver and his Wooden Bicycle (Video) 71

Posted by Roblimo from the we'll-stick-to-our-metal-bikes-for-the-moment-thank-you dept.
This is not a practical bike. "Even on smooth pavement, your vision goes blurry because you're vibrating so hard," Collin said to an Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter back in 2012 when he was only 15 -- and already building wooden bicycles. Collin's wooden bikes are far from the first ones. Wikipedia says, "The first bicycles recorded, known variously as velocipedes, dandy horses, or hobby horses, were constructed from wood, starting in 1817." And not all wooden bicycles made today are as crude as Collin's. A Portland (OR) company called Renovo makes competition-quality hardwood bicycle frames -- for as little as $2200, and a bunch more for a complete bike with all its hardware fitted and ready to roll.

Of course, while it might be sensible to buy a Renovo product if you want a wood-framed bike to Race Across America, you won't improve your woodworking skills the way Collin's projects have improved his to the point where he's made a nice-looking pair of wood-framed sunglasses described in his WOOD YOU? SHOULD YOU? blog. (Alternate Video Link)
Build

Video Maker Joe is a 'Maker' Sculptor (Video) 16

Posted by Roblimo from the I-sculpt,-therefore-I-am dept.
Joe Gilmore was showing some of his work at Maker Faire Atlanta when Timothy Lord pointed his camera at him. Joe may never create a Mars colony or build the tallest skyscraper in North America, but what he does is fun to the point of whimsy, and seems to bring smiles to a lot of faces. (Alternate Video Link)
Graphics

An Applied Investigation Into Graphics Card Coil Whine 111

Posted by timothy from the like-y'do dept.
jones_supa writes We all are aware of various chirping and whining sounds that electronics can produce. Modern graphics cards often suffer from these kind of problems in form of coil whine. But how widespread is it really? Hardware Canucks put 50 new graphics cards side-by-side to compare them solely from the perspective of subjective acoustic disturbance. NVIDIA's reference platforms tended to be quite well behaved, just like their board partners' custom designs. The same can't be said about AMD since their reference R9 290X and R9 290 should be avoided if you're at all concerned about squealing or any other odd noise a GPU can make. However the custom Radeon-branded SKUs should usually be a safe choice. While the amount and intensity of coil whine largely seems to boil down to luck of the draw, at least most board partners are quite friendly regarding their return policies concerning it.
Power

Facebook Testing Lithium-Ion Batteries For Backup Power 41

Posted by timothy from the economies-of-web-scale dept.
itwbennett writes Facebook has just started testing lithium-ion batteries as the backup power source for its server racks and plans to roll them out widely next year. Lithium-ion has been too expensive until now, says Matt Corddry, Facebook's director of hardware engineering, but its use in electric cars has changed the economics. It's now more cost effective than the bulky, lead-acid batteries widely used in data centers today.
United States

Senate May Vote On NSA Reform As Soon As Next Week 127

Posted by samzenpus from the stop-looking-at-me dept.
apexcp writes Senate Majority Leader (for now) Harry Reid announced he will be taking the USA FREEDOM Act to a floor vote in the Senate as early as next week. While the bill, if passed, would be the first significant legislative reform of the NSA since 9/11, many of the act's initial supporters have since disavowed it, claiming that changes to its language mean it won't do enough to curb the abuses of the American surveillance state
Space

Life Insurance Restrictions For Space Tourists 68

Posted by Soulskill from the lifestyles-of-the-rich-and-uninsured dept.
RockDoctor writes: Reuters reports that there are changes afoot for life insurance contracts, which will require additional premiums for "space tourists." While not likely to be a disabling issue for the industry — the statistics for astronauts dying in flight are not that bad — it is an issue that people considering such a jaunt will need to address. Obviously this has been brought to the fore by the unfortunate crash of the Virgin Galactic craft under test. Relatedly, an article at IEEE Spectrum explains why SpaceShipTwo's rocket fuel wasn't the cause of the accident.
Patents

Disney Patents a Piracy Free Search Engine 164

Posted by timothy from the that-cuts-out-a-bunch-of-disney-movies dept.
wabrandsma writes with this excerpt from Torrentfreak: Disney has just obtained a patent for a search engine that ranks sites based on various "authenticity" factors. One of the goals of the technology is to filter pirated material from search results while boosting the profile of copyright and trademark holders' websites. A new patent awarded to Disney Enterprises this week describes a search engine through which pirated content is hard to find. Titled "Online content ranking system based on authenticity metric values for web elements," one of the patent's main goals is to prevent pirated movies and other illicit content from ranking well in the search results. According to Disney their patent makes it possible to "enable the filtering of undesirable search results, such as results referencing piracy websites." Disney believes that current search engines are using the wrong approach as they rely on a website's "popularity." This allows site owners to game the system in order to rank higher. "For example, a manipulated page for unauthorized sales of drugs, movies, etc. might be able to obtain a high popularity rating, but what the typical user will want to see is a more authentic page," they explain. Probably not a good place to look for a grey-market copy of Song of the South.

Comment misses size & location, distribution of compan (Score 3, Informative) 105

by zrelativity (#45170999) Attached to: Tech's Highest-Paid Engineers Are At Juniper
Many of those companies are based in the Silicon Valley (particularly Santa Clara, North San Jose, Sunnyvale and Mountain View) where your cost of living is very high.

If you were in Washington State or Texas (Dallas), your cost of living maybe only half of what it is Silicon Valley. When I was living in Dallas, I was paying less than half of what I now pay for an apartment in San Jose. There is state tax too. Juniper is relatively small.

What was surprising to me was to see Walmart, but I don't know their Software Engineering group size or location.

Comment Re:Come again? (Score 1) 278

by zrelativity (#44765499) Attached to: Jury Finds Google Guilty of Standards-Essential Patents Abuse Against MS
This is my simple version:

Motorola/Google demands $4B for use of use of some H.264 & Wifi patents by MSFT in XBOX and other devices

MSFT disagrees, will pay the license but at RAND rate since Motorola participated in the standards

The case goes to court in Seattle to determine what the rate should be

Motorola sues MSFT in Germany, trying to get an injunction to prevent XBOX sale in Germany.

Seattle court says the case is already in review and German court cannot make a judgement

Seatle court determines that the license should be just over $1M

MSFT sues Motorola/Google for breach of contract

Jury agrees with MSFT and gives them $14M

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