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Hugh Pickens writes "The NY Times covers a report released by the National Research Council, which says the ability of the US to identify the source of a nuclear weapon used in a terrorist attack is fragile and eroding. The goals of the highly specialized detective work, known as nuclear attribution, is to clarify options for retaliation and to deter terrorists by letting them know that nuclear devices have fingerprints that atomic specialists can find and trace. 'Although US nuclear forensics capabilities are substantial and can be improved, right now they are fragile, under-resourced and, in some respects, deteriorating,' the report warns. 'Without strong leadership, careful planning and additional funds, these capabilities will decline.' The report calls on the federal government to take steps to strengthen its forensic capabilities and argues for the necessity of better planning, more robust budgets, clearer lines of authority and more realistic exercises."

eagledck tips news that the FCC has "finally approved the first 4G Long Term Evolution (LTE) phone for sale in the US." The Samsung device will use MetroPCS as a carrier, but tech specs, software details and a launch timetable are still uncertain. Meanwhile, Verizon is ramping up testing of their own LTE infrastructure, hoping to launch in 25 to 30 markets by the end of the year. An anonymous reader notes that LTE rollouts could be hampered by a confused and conflicted patent situation. "It is impossible to know where all the patents are but we have identified more than 60 companies holding essential patents. It is a very large landscape and fragmented. If there was one major patent pool and a handful of individual companies to deal with, that would be possible. But signing license deals with 40 plus [entities] is not. A unified patent pool is best," said a representative for one of three patent pool organizations trying to accomplish that.

snydeq writes "A DefCon contest that invites contestants to trick employees at 30 US corporations into revealing not-so-sensitive data has rattled nerves at the FBI. Chris Hadnagy, who is organizing the contest, also noted concerns from the financial industry, which fears hackers will target personal information. The contest will run for three days, with participants attempting to unearth data from an undisclosed list of about 30 US companies. The contest will take place in a room in the Riviera hotel in Las Vegas furnished with a soundproof booth and a speaker, so an audience can hear the contestants call companies and try to weasel out what data they can get from unwitting employees." The group organizing the contest has established a strict set of rules to ensure participants don't violate any laws.

CurtMonash writes "Nontechnical people — for example marketers or small business owners — increasingly get the feeling they should know more about technology. And they're right. If you can throw up a small website or do some real number-crunching, chances are those skills will help you feed your family. But how should they get started? I started a thread with the question on DBMS2, and some consistent themes emerged, including: Learn HTML + CSS early on; Learn a bit of SQL, but you needn't make that your focus; Have your first real programming language be one of the modern ones, such as PHP or Python; MySQL is a good vehicle to learn SQL; It's a great idea to start with a project you actually want to accomplish, and that can be done by modifying a starter set of sample code (e.g., a WordPress blog); Microsoft's technology stack is an interesting alternative to some of the other technology ideas. A variety of books and websites were suggested, most notably MIT's Scratch. But, frankly, it would really help to get more suggestions for sites and books that help one get started with HTML/CSS, or with MySQL, or with PHP. And so, techie studs and studdettes, I ask you — how should a non-techie go about learning some basic technological skills?"

suraj.sun writes with news that the US Department of Justice has joined a lawsuit alleging Oracle of overcharging the federal government for its software products. Quoting: "In a nutshell, the lawsuit argues that Oracle's government customers — a wide array of agencies, including the State Department, the Energy Department, and the Justice Department itself — got deals 'far inferior' to those the enterprise software giant gave to its commercial clients. The allegations stem from a software deal between Oracle and the federal General Services Administration that the Justice Department says involved 'hundreds of millions of dollars in sales' and that ran from 1998 to 2006. Under the contract, Oracle was required to inform the GSA when commercial discounts improved and to offer those same discounts to government buyers. Oracle misrepresented its true commercial sales practices and thus defrauded the US, the lawsuit contends.

penciling_in writes "ISC has made the announcement that they have developed a technology that will allow 'cooperating good guys' to provide and consume reputation information about domains names. The release of the technology, called Response Policy Zones (DNS RPZ), was announced at DEFCON. Paul Vixie explains: 'Every day lots of new names are added to the global DNS, and most of them belong to scammers, spammers, e-criminals, and speculators. The DNS industry has a lot of highly capable and competitive registrars and registries who have made it possible to reserve or create a new name in just seconds, and to create millions of them per day. ... If your recursive DNS server has a policy rule which forbids certain domain names from being resolvable, then they will not resolve. And, it's possible to either create and maintain these rules locally, or, import them from a reputation provider. ISC is not in the business of identifying good domains or bad domains. We will not be publishing any reputation data. But, we do publish technical information about protocols and formats, and we do publish source code. So our role in DNS RPZ will be to define 'the spec' whereby cooperating producers and consumers can exchange reputation data, and to publish a version of BIND that can subscribe to such reputation data feeds. This means we will create a market for DNS reputation but we will not participate directly in that market.'"

eldavojohn writes "According to AfterDawn, Google has given app makers the option to use a license server as DRM to ensure the user has paid for an app before they can download it. Reportedly, the Market app will communicate with a Google license server using RSA encryption. It is important to note this is only available for non-free apps (built with SDK 1.5 and later), and it was instituted to provide a better solution to the old and widely criticized copy protection scheme that was susceptible to Android app piracy (like sideloading). For better or for worse, Android's Marketplace appears to now have an optional, phone-home form of DRM." Following news of the new licensing service, Hexage Ltd, makers of a popular Android game called Radiant, released the data they had collected on piracy of Radiant over a 10-month period beginning last October. A series of charts shows total users, paid users and the piracy rate, by region.

climenole points out a post from Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth about internal strife in the free software community. He wrote, "Tribalism is when one group of people start to think people from another group are 'wrong by default.' It's the great-granddaddy of racism and sexism. And the most dangerous kind of tribalism is completely invisible: it has nothing to do with someone's 'birth tribe' and everything to do with their affiliations: where they work, which sports team they support, which Linux distribution they love. ... Right now, for a number of reasons, there is a fever pitch of tribalism in plain sight in the free software world. It's sad. It's not constructive. It's ultimately going to be embarrassing for the people involved, because the Internet doesn't forget. It's certainly not helping us lift free software to the forefront of public expectations of what software can be."

ideonexus writes "The Atlantic has an excellent interview with Andrew Hacker — co-author with Claudia Dreifus of a book titled Higher Education? — covering everything that's wrong with the American university system. The discussion ranges from entrenched tenured professors more concerned with publishing and parking spaces than quality teaching; to 22-year-old students with unrealistic expectations that some company will put them in a management position after graduating with six-figures of debt; to football teams siphoning money away from academic programs so that student tuitions must increase to compensate. It really lays out the farce of university culture and reminds me of everything I absolutely despised about my college life. Dreifus is active in the comments section of the article as well, lending to a fantastic discussion on the subject."