How To Take Control of a Car's Electronics, Cheap 109
mspohr writes with this excerpt from The Register: "Spanish hackers have been showing off their latest car-hacking creation; a circuit board using untraceable, off-the-shelf parts worth $20 that can give wireless access to the car's controls while it's on the road. The device, which will be shown off at next month's Black Hat Asia hacking conference, uses the Controller Area Network (CAN) ports car manufacturers build into their engines for computer-system checks. Once assembled, the smartphone-sized device can be plugged in under some vehicles, or inside the bonnet of other models, and give the hackers remote access to control systems. 'A car is a mini network,' security researcher Alberto Garcia Illera told Forbes. 'And right now there's no security implemented.'"
Not a totally remote exploit. (Score:4, Insightful)
wait, the subject isn't autofilled in the beta? al (Score:1, Insightful)
Plenty of people have offered criticism. Hold on, let me check the current beta and see how much of it has been taken...
Oh, look, it's all been ignored. There's still a massive block of whitespace at the top of the page for no apparent reason. The comment box is still so narrow it looks like I've written several pages of text when in reality it's more like three sentences. They "fixed" the sidebar along the side of the screen, though, in that instead of being a giant empty space it's plastered with ads. So there's that, I guess. I'm not entirely sure why there's an ad for diamonds next to this comment I'm writing, but I guess they ran out of tech jobs that are nowhere near me to advertise. (Edit: Oh, and the captcha text field is too narrow to display any of the text you enter. Great.)
But, then again, they were very clear: Slashdot is now an IT B2B site, not a nerd news site. The new commenting system will help ensure that those of us still stuck in the past who for some reason thought Slashdot was about "news for nerds" will GTFO and go some place else, so the important IT exec types can chat amongst themselves in their new Web 3.0 version of Slashdot.
I'll miss the old Slashdot, but if we're honest, it's been dead for years.
Here you go spaz retard (Score:5, Insightful)
Taken from the wise wjwln
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4761849&cid=46192975
You're obviously not paying attention then. Plenty of people have posted *exactly* what's wrong with the comment system in beta. Maybe you haven't seen them because you're actually using beta?
Look, you have to understand something: Slashdot discussions generate interesting content by allowing tons of garbage to be posted, mixed around, and evolved. Part of the evolution comes from the interactive nature of community discussion, and part of it comes from the moderation process. For this evolution process to work properly, you have to be able to see a lot of posts at once, all in one shot. You need to be able to see some contextual information about the people posting comments. When you post your own comments, you need to be able to quote or link to other posts easily. When you want to moderate, you need to be able to do it in place, at the comment you intend to moderate.
Beta breaks all of these vital features; without them, the nature of Slashdot discussion changes completely. People will read fewer comments because the new layout hinders rapid seeking, scanning, and comprehension of potentially valuable posts... all while making it much more difficult to skim past the stuff that doesn't interest you. When people read fewer comments, they post fewer comments. When the total number of comments starts to drop, the exploration of the discussion space becomes much less thorough. Potentially valuable or interesting discussion paths will be missed. Those rare, but highly sought after gems of insight and wisdom borne from the cesspool of chaos will become much more scarce.
You want to know why people hate the beta so much? It's because it kills the evolutionary discussion dynamic that makes this community what it is. There's nothing else like it, and many of us do not want to lose it.
Not with a bang, but with a Beta. (Score:2, Insightful)
What company directs 25% of its users to a partially-working, not-ready-for-production website? Please realize that Beta will not have the features that we want, because it goes against Dice's plans for Slashdot. To their advertisers, Dice presents Slashdot as a "Social Media for B2B Technology" [slashdotmedia.com] platform. B2B - that's the reason Beta looks like a generic wordpress-based news site. A large precentage of the current userbase might be in IT, but /. is most certainly not a B2B site.
Nevertheless, Dice is desperate to make money off of Slashdot, since it has not lived up to their financial expectations, a fact that they have revealed in a press release [diceholdingsinc.com] detailing their performance in 2013:
Slashdot Media was acquired to provide content and services that are important to technology professionals in their everyday work lives and to leverage that reach into the global technology community benefiting user engagement on the Dice.com site. The expected benefits have started to be realized at Dice.com. However, advertising revenue has declined over the past year and there is no improvement expected in the future financial performance of Slashdot Media's underlying advertising business. Therefore, $7.2 million of intangible assets and $6.3 million of goodwill related to Slashdot Media were reduced to zero.
Beta is not a cosmetic change. It is a new design that deliberately ruins the one thing that makes /. what it is today -- the commenting system. There is nothing wrong with Slashdot, from the users' perspective, that demands breaking its foundations. As others have commented, this is an attempt to monetize /. at any any cost [slashdot.org], and its users be damned. Dice views its users, the ones who create the site [slashdot.org], as a passive audience. As such, it is interchangeable with its intended B2B crowd. We, the current users of Slashdot, are an obstacle in Dice's way.
That is why they ignore the detailed feedback they have received in the months since they first revealed Beta. That is also why they now disregard our grievances. Their claims of hearing us are a deliberate snow job. It is only pretense, since at the same time they openly admit that Classic will be cancelled soon [slashdot.org]:
"Most importantly, we want you to know that Classic Slashdot isn't going away until we're confident that the new site is ready.
Don't hold your breath waiting for Dice to fix Beta. Their vision of Slashdot is a crippled shadow of the site as it is today. Don't let them pull the wool over your eyes. Dice doesn't need us, and it wants us out.
Slashdice delenda est!