Slashdot Rolls Out a New Look; Pentagon Spent $5 Billion for Weapons Day Before Shutdown

Editor's Note: Do you know where most denied traffic/attacks come from? Do you have too much data about your network security? Too little? We have questions and if you have answers, take our IT security survey. To view a web version of this message, click here Send this message to a friend Slashdot Rolls Out a New Look Pentagon Spent $5 Billion for Weapons Day Before Shutdown Ex-Microsoft Privacy Chief No Longer Trusts Company Silk Road Founder Arrested, $3.6M of Bitcoin Seized in FBI Raid Latest 100 Gigabit DDoS Attack Strikes Unreflected Hot Comment: "Yes, 'preventing terrorism' is not essential. It kills very few people ..." From the Vault: Inside Gadget-Aided, Totally Illegal, Cross-Country Sprint for Glory Watch It: The Internet Society Blasts U.S. Online Spying Poll Booth: My favorite brand of snake oil is ... Slashdot Rolls Out a New Look We've unveiled our biggest redesign effort ever and the comments and emails have been tremendously valuable as we continue to implement our current features into the beta. Please keep them coming. The new design is meant to be richer but also simpler to use, while maintaining the spirit of what Slashdot is all about. Sound Off>> Pentagon Spent $5 Billion for Weapons Day Before Shutdown John Reed at Foreign Policy reports that the Pentagon awarded 94 contracts on its annual end-of-the-fiscal-year buying spree, spending more than $5 billion on everything from robot submarines to Finnish hand grenades and a radar base mounted on an offshore oil platform. The dollar-dump happened on the eve of the U.S. government's shutdown that saw 400,000 Defense Department employees furloughed. Sound Off>> Ex-Microsoft Privacy Chief No Longer Trusts Company Microsoft's onetime Chief Privacy Advisor says he doesn't trust the company's long-term privacy measures and ability or interest to secure user data in the wake of the NSA's PRISM program. Also, in the two years since leaving Microsoft, he has stopped carrying a cell phone and has become a staunch open source user. Sound Off>> Silk Road Founder Arrested, $3.6M of Bitcoin Seized in FBI Raid Ross William Ulbricht, known as "Dread Pirate Roberts," was arrested and charged with one count each of narcotics trafficking conspiracy, computer hacking conspiracy, and money laundering conspiracy, according to a court filing. Silk Road has been shut down and some $3.6 million in Bitcoin (26,000 Btc) seized.  Sound Off>> Latest 100 Gigabit DDoS Attack Strikes Unreflected In March, we saw the first ever 100 Gigabit DDoS attack, which was possibly due to a DNS Reflection Amplification attack. Now word is out that a new 100 Gigabit attack has struck using raw bandwidth, without any DNS Reflection. Sound Off>>   Re: Priorities "Yes, 'preventing terrorism' is not essential. It kills very few people compared to, oh, I dunno, being poor, for one. Any anyway, you cannot actually prevent terrorism. If someone is really determined to do something we label terrorism, they'll find a way, and no amount of state apparatus can stop it." --by GrahamCox Read More>>   Inside Gadget-Aided, Totally Illegal, Cross-Country Sprint for Glory Six years ago, Wired magazine wrote about Alex Roy and his quest to break the record time for a cross-U.S. road trip. To deal with about 31,000 highway patrol officers along the way, Roy decked out his E39 BMW M5 with a thermal camera, radar/laser detectors, GPS devices, police scanners, and other high-tech gadgets. Read More>> The Internet Society Blasts U.S. Online Spying SlashTV: In a position paper responding to reports of the U.S. government's circumvention of encryption technology, The Internet Society expressed alarm at the alleged programs that "are a fundamental threat to the Internet's economic, innovative, and social potential." The Society's Paul Brigner talks about the group and its reaction to government online surveillance. Watch the Video>> My favorite brand of snake oil is ... Homeopathy Reiki Goat testicle implants Magnet therapy Actual snake oil Something else you just don't understand. Cast Your Vote>>   Follow Slashdot on Twitter and Facebook. To unsubscribe, click here or send an email to: unsubscribe-213087@elabs10.com To ensure delivery of this newsletter to your inbox and to enable images, please add slashdot@newsletters.slashdot.org to your e-mail address book or safe senders list. Slashdot | 594 Howard Street, Suite 300 | San Francisco, CA 94105 To view our Privacy Policy click here.