ICANN made its decision last week on a number of high-profile top-level domain names. And of 17 names, only 4 were attributed to a community-run group who will oversee them.

o pass the test, each dot-word applicant had to prove they represented a specific community related to the word. If successful, they would be given priority over anyone else that had applied for the same top-level domain name.

Considering the commercial possibilities of domains ending with "music", "tennis", "art" and others - with recent auctions for gTLDs reaching into the millions of dollars - the stakes are high. And with a high bar of 14 out of 16 points required to pass the test, most failed.

The dot-words that did not pass the community test will move forward to an auction some time next year, and those with the deepest pockets will be able to snap them up.

Two interesting conclusions: of those names rejected, the field is now open for them to be managed by commercial, not community interests. And secondly, the playing field is now open for just about any domain name on earth. Let the dollars flow, eh gentlemen?

Hewlett-Packard has alerted some customers that it will be revoking a digital certificate used to sign a huge swath of software-including hardware drivers and other software essential to running on older HP computers. The certificate is being revoked because the company learned it had been used to digitally sign malware that had infected a developer's PC.

Wahlin said that it appears the malware, which had infected an HP employee's computer, accidentally got digitally signed as part of a separate software package-and then sent a signed copy of itself back to its point of origin. Though the malware has since been distributed over the Internet while bearing HP's certificate, Wahlin noted that the Trojan was never shipped to HP customers as part of the software package.

"When people hear this, many will automatically assume we had some sort of compromise within our code signing infrastructure, and that is not the case," Wahlin told Krebs. "We can show that we've never had a breach on our [certificate authority] and that our code-signing infrastructure is 100 percent intact."

Windows SysAdmins: before you laugh yourself to sleep over all those Linux systems struggling to patch Shellshock vulnerabilities, a recently discovered flaw in Windows Powershell allows similar privilege escalation with very little work. The recently discovered vulnerability relies upon:

a simple coding error-allowing untrusted input to be run as a command. In the current incarnation of the exploit, an attacker appends a valid command onto the end of the name of a directory using the ampersand character. A script with the coding error then reads the input and executes the command with administrator rights.

Seems if mankind can make it, mankind can also break it. Keep those systems patched, folks!

The next major patch of World of Warcraft goes live this Tuesday. Included in this update are all the new skill changes, talent trees, attribute modifications, and profession reworks of the upcoming Warlords of Draenor expansion pack. Although the Iron Horde have invaded Netherguard around the Dark Portal, the revamped Outland area and level cap extension do not unlock until the full release on November 13.

If you are like me and have avoided playing for the last year during the extended lapse of new content, you may want to log back in and check out the changes. Another bonus is a revamped 5-man Upper Blackrock Spire instance that will be available to level 90s for a limited time.

Marriott (since 2012) has been using wireless technology to prevent guests at the Gaylord Opryland hotel and convention center from using their own Wi-Fi mobile hotspots, forcing exhibitors or customers to use Marriott's expensive Internet services, available at the whopping cost of $250 to $1,000 per wireless access point. Despite popular press reports, this did not involve "jamming" which is strictly illegal in the US, but instead something more like a WiFi DoS attack.

Marriott had deployed a Wi-Fi monitoring system with a "containment capability". When activated, the system could identify Wi-Fi access points that were not part of Marriott's own Wi-Fi system (or otherwise authorized by Marriott). Such non-Marriott access points were dubbed "rogues". When rogues were detected, the system sent "de-authorization" packets to the unauthorized access points, booting those users off their free connections and, presumably, forcing them to pony up for Marriott's paid Internet access.

http://www.commlawblog.com/2014/10/articles/enforcement-activities-fines-f/marriott-whacked-for-600000-for-war-on-rogue-wifi-hotspots/

Feels Like Earthquake Weather...

Hurricane Irene, a powerful storm that ran north along the US East Coast four days after a magnitude-5.8 earthquake rattled Virginia in 2011, may have triggered some of that earthquake's aftershocks. The rate of aftershocks following the 23 August 2011, earthquake near Mineral, Virginia, increased sharply as Irene passed by.

The researchers are not the first to examine a potential link between hurricanes and seismic activity. Shimon Wdowinski, a seismologist at the University of Miami, Florida, says that he has found a strong correlation between extremely wet tropical cyclones striking Taiwan and big earthquakes that occur up to three years later. He thinks that the erosion of landslide debris in such a storm's aftermath triggers a change in fault loading, eventually producing an earthquake.

That work is not yet published. But another study by researchers in the United States and Taiwan found a similar association between slow earthquakes - which take places over hours or even days - and tropical cyclones in Taiwan.

http://www.nature.com/news/hurricane-may-have-triggered-earthquake-aftershocks-1.12839

The physical traits of previous sexual partners could be passed on to future children. Telegony was first hypothesized by Aristotle and was a widely held belief in the Middle Ages and up until the 19th century. The theory was discredited by the advent of genetics, but may have some truth to it after all. Scientists at the University of New South Wales discovered that, for fruit flies at least, the size of the young was determined by the size of the first male the mother mated with, rather than the second male that sired the offspring.

"We know that features that run in families are not just influenced by the genes that are passed down from parents to their children. Various non-genetic inheritance mechanisms make it possible for environmental factors to influence characteristics of a child. Our new findings take this to a whole new level - showing a male can also transmit some of his acquired features to offspring sired by other males," says lead author Dr Angela Crean.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/11133203/Could-previous-lovers-influence-appearance-of-future-children.html

Little background information,

Last night (October 3) Github developer Jake Boxer disabled the GamerGate github repository containing documents for "Operation Disrespectful Nod". Which contained documents for a letter writing campaign to advertisers for the publishers of the game media articles declaring gamers dead just over a month ago. Here's a link to an image of the removal request for if/when the original tweet is eventually removed.

Jake previously voiced his disapproval for intel pulling ads from Gamasutra claiming: "While we wait for @Intel to correct this, here's @leighalexander's fantastic piece that they pulled ads because of ..." original tweet along with "@leighalexander so fucking angry that this happened. thank you so much for the writing and work that you do." original tweet, Backup Image for both.

Note @leighalexander is Leigh Alexander Editor At Large for Gamasutra, author of 'Gamers' don't have to be your audience. 'Gamers' are over.

Reddit is also up in arms over a "rogue" employee being allowed to delete repositories that, to my knowledge, don't violate Githubs terms of service.

So what's the Pipedot's take on this? Is it ok seeing as Github is a private entity, maybe they don't have to host anything they don't want. Maybe it's time to start migrating my personal repos to other services in case electrical diagramming or web development offends someone.

I could be wrong, but isn't Pipdot's code hosted in Github?

Cross posting to SoylentNews

My current fetish, if you can call it that, is lightweight distros. Once you decide you don't need a heavyweight desktop like Gnome or KDE, down the slope you go, asking, "How light a system can I really get?" Depending on how much you're willing to compromise, the answer is, "pretty far!" And well at the far end of lightweight is SliTaz Linux. It's a marvel of engineering. What you get is a full graphical desktop, web server, Firefox, and database tools, all configured to run in less than 256MB of memory with no need to even hit the hard drive when running! The whole distro fits easily on 30MB on a (small!) USB stick.

The compromises aren't that drastic, but you need to know them. But one is that the distro is built on busybox, which is a reduced set of basic *nix utilities. You get the JWM window manager, the lighttpd webserver, SQLite, Firefox and Midori. You don't get stuff like LibreOffice or much selection of graphical software. There's a packaging system, but it uses a custom format (TazPKG) with repositories that are a bit lean. But the idea isn't to be your new desktop. Put SliTaz on a USB stick and you can quickly get to a command prompt to shell into your servers, FTP some files around, set up quick HTTP access to some files somewhere, listen to some music (it's got ALSAplayer), or browse the web. And you can do so without much script fu: when the system boots you're sitting at a JWM desktop (or openbox, if you want). And not only does it boot quickly, but your machine is super-fast when running since the entire system can run in memory &emdash; and not much memory, at that!

Increasingly, this kind of system has huge appeal to me. All my stuff is on network storage, and my mail and calendar are on hosted internet services. I don't need much in a desktop box a lot of the time. Naturally, it runs on a Raspberry Pi. Want to check it out? Read another review at Dark Duck or check out the DistroWatch page. There are some screenshots at LinuxScreenshots.org.

Over the past ten years, there has been a stunning surge in the volume of used lead acid batteries exported from the U.S. Between 2002 and 2013 U.S. exports increased a staggering 19,902%. Last year alone, U.S. companies exported 639,670 metric tonnes of batteries, with as much as 92% going to Mexico.

The impact of this exodus is two-fold. From industry's standpoint, domestic recyclers are seeing a constant erosion of their feedstock, resulting in excess capacity that endangers jobs and the survival of domestic recycling. From a broader viewpoint, it imperils Mexico's environment and the health of workers due to the country's poor track record of secondary lead smelting oversight and regulation.

While EPA's June release of a final rule restricting the export of lead-containing CRT displays offers some encouragement, it is hard to ignore the double standard. Why focus the effort on obsolete CRTs when America has more cars than people?

http://www.waste-management-world.com/articles/print/volume-15/issue-4/features/trash-talking.html