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Submission + - Geeky volunteer work? 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: I plan to be in-between jobs for 1-2 months later this year and use part of this time to do some volunteer work in Africa. My naive question: what to do and where to go? Is it possible to make good use of the skill-set of a typical geek? Any interesting projects worth supporting on-site?
Security

Submission + - How dangerous is it to rely on MD5? (wordpress.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In the middle of the UK's "hackgate" scandal LulzSec banjaxed the web site for News International's "Sun" newspaper, the biggest seller in the UK market. They then claimed to have cracked passwords at the Sun encrypted using MD5 — an algorithm long known to be flawed. But are MD5's vulnerabilities really something to worry about? Some security experts put down fears about MD5 to hype — it can be cracked but the crack is of little practical use.
Linux

Submission + - Ubuntu 11.10 Down to 12-Second Boot (crn.com)

Submitted by deadeyefred
deadeyefred writes: Even though it's still only in alpha, it appears as though the forthcoming version of Ubuntu, version 11.10, will be much faster than earlier versions according to this story. It looks as if the switch from GDM to LightDM will have a significant impact as Ubuntu gets closer to "instant on" status.
Science

Submission + - Scientists: Time Travel Impossible (discovery.com)

Submitted by smitty777
smitty777 writes: Dr. Du Shengwang of the University of Hong Kong has performed a study he claims proves that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, thus making time travel impossible. FTA, the team has "proved that a single photon, or unit of light, "obeys the traffic law of the universe."Einstein claimed that the speed of light was the traffic law of the universe or in simple language, nothing can travel faster than light," the university said on its website."

Submission + - NASA's Hubble Discovers Another Moon Around Pluto (nasa.gov)

Submitted by thebchuckster
thebchuckster writes: Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope discovered a fourth moon orbiting the icy dwarf planet Pluto. The tiny, new satellite – temporarily designated P4 — was uncovered in a Hubble survey searching for rings around the dwarf planet.

The new moon is the smallest discovered around Pluto. It has an estimated diameter of 8 to 21 miles (13 to 34 km). By comparison, Charon, Pluto's largest moon, is 648 miles (1,043 km) across, and the other moons, Nix and Hydra, are in the range of 20 to 70 miles in diameter (32 to 113 km).

Submission + - FBI Arrests 12 in 'Anonymous' Hackers Probe (computerworld.com) 1

Submitted by JohnBert
JohnBert writes: The FBI has reportedly arrested more than 12 people in what appears to be a nationwide crackdown against alleged members of the Anonymous hacking group. News of the arrests in California, New Jersey and Florida was reported today by Fox News and CBS News. Both stories were based on information from unnamed sources.

Spokesmen from the FBI's national office in Washington and from its field offices in San Francisco and New York confirmed to Computerworld that the agency had carried out law enforcement actions related to an ongoing cybercrime investigation. However they would neither confirm nor deny the arrests or name the group that was being investigated.

A spokespersons from the FBI's Washington office and its San Francisco field office hinted that a statement related to today's action would be released shortly.
Google

Submission + - Google Now Alerts Users to Malware Infections (threatpost.com)

Submitted by Trailrunner7
Trailrunner7 writes: Google is taking the unusual step of displaying a message at the top of its search results pages for some users, alerting them to the fact that their computers may be infected with malware. The action is the result of an investigation in which the search giant discovered that some malware-infected PCs were sending their search requests through one of a number of proxies.

The move by Google is an unprecedented one, and may mark the beginning of a shift in the way that the company and others--such as Microsoft, Yahoo and Facebook--that have massive presences on the Web and see enormous amounts of traffic deal with the issue of their users' security. Many ISPs in Europe and some in the United States have taken to actively warning their customers when they have an infection and some go so far as to prevent the offending machine from accessing the Internet until it's cleaned.

Google's move is slightly different, though, as the company is not taking any active measures to stop users from moving around the Web, but is just showing them a warning that calls attention to the fact that their PCs may be infested with malware. The company said that it hit upon the idea after discovering some unusual traffic during a maintenance window on one of its data centers.

Submission + - Toys For the Potential Engineer (K'nex, And many o (jake.com)

Submitted by marywalls958
marywalls958 writes: When you might be youthful, you have a tendency to latch on to certain items, and it's essential that your mothers and fathers nurture that curiosity (even if it does outcome in boredom at school). For example, when a child who's often been actively playing around with Legos toys, K'nex and other mechanical toys starts discovering about easy and complicated machines in college, he or she is heading to wind up saying "Haven't I currently been about this?" The smart instructor will administer some somewhat innovative curriculum to the boy or girl.

Remaining way ahead of the class, again, although it can make college a minimal dull, winds up becoming very vital afterwards in existence. It really is always the child who observed grade school boring who winds up staying accepted to an elite academy for long run engineers.

If you want to facilitate your long run-engineering-genius's creativeness and grasp of the material, the excellent information is that you have fairly a lot of alternatives. The greater toymakers out there craft their merchandise with an comprehending of the way a child's mind functions. Kids never feel they're schooling for a occupation in creating new strategies to harvest and cultivate foods, or that they're heading to engineer an ingenious remedy to fossil fuels, they're just possessing fun, placing various important things together and viewing what they come up with.

Meccano is yet another wonderful line of developmental toys if you want to phase up from the simplicity of Technics. Meccano truly arrives with a few easy equipment and usually requires kids to put collectively automobiles, airplanes and other devices with tiny items of colour coded sheet metal, as well as nuts and bolts.

But dig this, if you want anything actually awesome, you can go for the Haynes inner combustion engine. It only fees about sixty 5 bucks, which isn't a lot when you take into account what it is: A simulation of a real, working inner combustion motor.

Now, it doesn't in fact necessitate gasoline or anything at all, it is really not a actual motor, but instead, an digital simulation of one particular. It really is a tiny product of a true 4 cylinder motor. It arrives with spark plugs, tools, nuts and bolts, and all the directions you'll will need to set it together. It teaches how a genuine engine will work, and it may make all the awesome seems you expect from a actual engine. It really is as near as you can get to true engineering devoid of filling your residing space with carbon monoxide!

Proper now, even though applying LEGO Mindstorms NXT 2. positioned, if you are working with a minor bit grownup electricity to set up that widespread perception and also the design and style — be it a car, a good puppy, any system, any humanoid any robotic, or it could be in any respect your individual ideas may perhaps make — it will sooner or later finish what you would like.

Totally no gear have a tendency to be critical, not really any screwdriver. All is really specially designed employing lego stops. Most are not always that lego stops may perhaps perhaps conclude up getting handy to. It is not that studded versions which breeze along. Most are Technic blocks ("studless legos"), which normally create a a great deal more personal, a minimized sum of boxy glimpse.

LEGO Mindstorms NXT 2.
Related Posts: Mindstorm Lego, Technics Lego
Security

Submission + - Google warns users about active malware infection (net-security.org)

Submitted by dinscott
dinscott writes: Google has begun notifying its users that a particular piece of malware is installed on their computers by showing a big yellow notification above their search results.

The warning begun popping up yesterday, and does so only for users whose computers have been infected by a particular strain of malware that hijacks search results in order to drive users towards websites that use pay-per-click schemes.
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft Tulalip Might Be A New Social Network (gizmocrazed.com)

Submitted by
Mightee
Mightee writes: "Microsoft might be working on the new project named as Tulalip that will come with the tagline of a hybrid search/social networking service. According to this info Tulalip service available on SOCL.com domain and this domain is in possession of Microsoft. If you want to confirm then you need to check the record of socl.com WHOIS on DomainTools.

You will be able to see the ready explanation of Tulalip from this "Welcome message":

With Tulalip you can Find what you need and Share what you know easier than ever."
Cloud

Submission + - Project Daytona - Microsoft's Hadoop (i-programmer.info)

Submitted by mikejuk
mikejuk writes: Microsoft has developed an iterative MapReduce runtime for Windows Azure, code-named Daytona. This brings the MapReduce algorithm to the cloud and to a whole new set of users who don't have to become experts in parallel programming to apply it. The best known and used MapReduce implementation is Hadoop, which is open source. Microsoft has made the suggestion that Daytona may also go open source "pending community feedback".

Submission + - Outgoing Federal CIO Warns of 'An IT Cartel' (computerworld.com)

Submitted by JohnBert
JohnBert writes: In a wide-ranging discussion with President Barack Obama's top science advisors, Federal CIO Vivek Kundra warned of the dangers of open data access and complained of "an IT cartel" of vendors.

He also believes the U.S. can operate with just a few data centers. Kundra, who is leaving his job in mid-August, offered a kaleidoscopic view of his concerns about federal IT in an appearance before President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.

In particular, Kundra is worried about the "mosaic effect," the unintended consequence of government data sharing, where data sets are combined and layered in ways that can strip away privacy and pose security threats. In the age of Facebook and Twitter, where a lot of personal data is already available, government data that may have been "innocuous in the past," can be used to "identify people that may not want to be identified," Kundra said.
Compaq

Submission + - Napkins & history of Ethernet, Compaq, Faceboo (networkworld.com)

Submitted by alphadogg
alphadogg writes: Napkins don't really stack up well against hard drives or even floppy disks for preserving data over time. But some of the technology and business world's most enduring ideas are said to have at least gotten their starts as sketches on dinner or cocktail napkins (which in fact were inspiration for the 5 ¼ floppy disk's size). Robert Metcalfe's early Ethernet diagrams from his days at Xerox PARC back in the early 1970s might be the most famous napkin sketches in the technology industry, but there are napkin stories involving Compaq, Facebook, @home and more

Submission + - How to build a VM honeypot?

Submitted by jongleur_kit
jongleur_kit writes: Today I received the latest in a series of scam phone calls. This time it was the "ammyy scam," in which the scammer tries to get you to install a remote access program. After playing dumb for a while to see how they operate I had to stop there and confront them on their nefarious methods (they get you to open your Windows event log and tell you that the errors and warnings are undelete-able "viruses" and hence you need their services). At that point they immediately hung up.

I was frustrated that I couldn't go further with this and collect more information on the scammers. I have an MSc in Computer Science, and I think it would be a fun project to create a honeypot for just such instances.

I assume a good honeypot would involve a VM and some active (nmap) scanning and also some passive (p0f) scanning, ideally with the ability to record sequences of actions on my box if I let them in.

Can anyone point me to a good forum or how-to guide on this, or give some advice in this thread? What would a good setup include?

Finally, I am a US citizen now living in the UK, and I have no idea what the legal context is here. What are the rules in the UK regarding entrapment, etc.? What if I were to run a few of these and post information (like IP addresses, phone numbers, etc.) in a blog post? Is that legal here?

Thanks

PS: I'm cross-posting this over at Reddit under user name abplayer.

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