“In a brutal reminder of the secrecy tech companies enforce on employees, Apple recently fired an employee after his daughter posted a video of the iPhone X,” writes long-time Slashdot reader HockeyPuck. Engadget reports:
His daughter took down the video as soon as Apple requested it, but the takedown came too late to prevent the clip from going viral, leading to seemingly endless reposts and commentary… [I]t’s important to stress that this wasn’t a garden variety iPhone X. As an employee device, it had sensitive information like codenames for unreleased products and staff-specific QR codes. Combine that with Apple’s general prohibition of recording video on campus (even at relatively open spaces like Caffe Macs) and this wasn’t so much about maintaining the surprise as making sure that corporate secrets didn’t get out. Apple certainly didn’t want to send the message that recording pre-release devices was acceptable. All the same, it’s hard not to sympathize — the [radiofrequecy] engineer had poured his heart into the iPhone X, only to be let go the week before the handset reaches customers.
In a new follow-up video, the former Apple engineer’s daughter says “I had no idea this was a violation,” adding that her father “takes full reponsibility for letting me film his iPhone X.” Here’s some more quotes from her video.

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Source: Slashdot – Apple Fires Engineer After His Daughter’s iPhone X Video Goes Viral

An anonymous reader quotes HPE Insights:
Software developers and testers must be sick of hearing security nuts rant, “Beware SQL injection! Monitor for cross-site scripting! Watch for hijacked session credentials!” I suspect the developers tune us out… The industry has generated newer tools, better testing suites, Agile methodologies, and other advances in writing and testing software. Despite all that, coders keep making the same dumb mistakes, peer reviews keep missing those mistakes, test tools fail to catch those mistakes, and hackers keep finding ways to exploit those mistakes. One way to see the repeat offenders is to look at the Open Web Application Security Project Top 10, a sometimes controversial ranking of the 10 primary vulnerabilities, published every three or four years by the Open Web Application Security Project… It boggles the mind that a majority of top 10 issues appear across the 2007, 2010, 2013, and draft 2017 OWASP lists…
It’s sad that eight out of 10 of the issues from 2013 are still top security issues in 2017. In fact, if you consider that the draft 2017 list combined two of the 2013 items, it’s actually nine out of 10. Ouch…
What can you do? Train everyone better, for starters. Look at coding and test tools that can help detect or prevent security vulnerabilities, but don’t consider them silver bullets. Do dynamic application security testing, including penetration testing and fuzz testing. Ensure admins do their part to protect applications. And finally, make sure you establish a culture of security-aware programming and deployment.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Why Do Web Developers Keep Making The Same Mistakes?

Slashdot reader blottsie shares a new article about the legendary Captain Crunch — which includes Steve Wozniak’s memory that Steve Jobs “started avoiding Crunch…afraid that it would put us too close to getting arrested.” The Daily Dot reports:
Wozniak and Jobs, of course, would go on to found the most successful tech company in the world. But Draper is far from being just an important footnote in Apple’s history. He’s the original hacking prankster, a purist driven by curiosity and craftsmanship, with a lifetime of exploits that have pushed technological and legal boundaries. And according to Jobs, in a rare 1994 interview, without him there wouldn’t have been Apple. Now, for the first time, Draper is looking to publish his story with Beyond the Little Blue Box, an autobiography for which he’s about to launch a Kickstarter campaign…
[H]e anonymously called in a national emergency directly to a furious President Richard Nixon on the Oval Office phone line, reporting that the West Coast had run out of toilet paper. He also claims he once bypassed the Iron Curtain to call Moscow in the Soviet Union. There’s a playful mischief about him, but he’s serious when it comes to his craft, relaying technical, intricate details about the systems he worked to hack… For many tinkering young coders and internet activists, Draper is still considered a folk hero, one whose apolitical infatuation with complex systems and compulsion to expose their limits made him a target — especially where that curiosity crossed with corporate interests.

“Experiences like that taught us the power of ideas,” Steve Jobs said in a 1994 interview. “The power of understanding that if you could build this box, you could control hundreds of billions of dollars around the world, that’s a powerful thing.” Steve Wozniak — who writes the book’s foreword — remembers how Jobs ended that interview. “Steve Jobs said — and I agree — that without the blue box there might never have been an Apple.”

Draper’s Kickstarter campaign includes a “2600 Club” Bronze level, while people who pledge over $199 will receive an actual blue anonabox. And there’s also a $10,000 “Super Phreak” level which includes a “VIP one-to-one meeting” with 74-year-old John Draper himself.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Captain Crunch (and Steve Wozniak) Write New Book: ‘Beyond the Little Blue Box’

While Whole Foods “strategically marked down select items like avocados and almond milk, overall prices have dropped very slightly — about 1 percent — since Amazon ownership, according to an analysis by research firm Gordon Haskett.” An anonymous reader quotes Bustle:
This hardly seems like big savings, and Gordon Haskett noted that since the initial price cuts in August, the cost of some items have been slowly ticking back up. “The price of frozen foods, for example, was 7 percent higher on Sept. 26 than on Aug. 28, when Amazon officially took over,” Abha Bhattarai reported for the Post, which is owned by Amazon. “Snack items had risen 5.3 percent in that period, while dairy and yogurt were up 2 percent. (Among categories where prices are lower: Beverages, down about 2.8 percent; bread and bakery, down 6.8 percent; and produce, down 0.5 percent…)”
For shoppers like me who buy mostly fresh fruits and vegetables, it did feel like I was saving money. However, one industry insider said there is a strategy behind how prices are cut. “The whole game is that you want the 100 most recognizable things — milk, apples, bananas — to be cheaper,” Jan Rogers Kniffen, an industry consultant and former department store executive, told the Post. “If you can do that, you can build a perception that the whole store is competitively priced.”
From July through September, Whole Foods brought in $1.3 billion in sales for Amazon.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Did Amazon Really Lower Whole Foods’ Prices?

Long-time Slashdot reader Zorro was the first to spot this story. Scientific American reports:
Could there be a “liver-friendly” vodka? One company claims its proprietary blend of additives reduces stress on the body… The researchers concluded that consuming the alcohol with the additives — glycyrrhizin, derived from licorice; D-mannitol, a sugar alcohol; and potassium sorbate, a preservative — may support improved liver health compared with drinking alcohol alone. Marsha Bates, a distinguished research professor and director of the Center of Alcohol Studies at Rutgers University, said the study design “seemed appropriate.” But, she added, study itself was small, with only 12 healthy men and women, and “doesn’t really provide any information of what the long-term effects of consuming alcohol with this additive would be. It’s a positive preliminary study but certainly does not provide a firm basis for speculating about long-term impact.”
Functional or not, Harsha Chigurupati needs approval from federal regulators before he can tout curative powers on a label… Specifically, Chigurupati is seeking approval to make the claim that his blend, known as NTX for “No Tox,” provides “antioxidant and inflammatory support” and “reduces the risk of alcohol-induced liver diseases,” among other claims… Chigurupati said his goal is not to enable people to drink more, but to drink with less physical harm.
The claim “leaves some experts deeply skeptical,” adds the article, while 33-year-old Chigurupati admits that an earlier formula “tasted terrible and it actually burned my mouth.” But his company later developed a formula which he says tasted good and is easier on the liver. “I don’t believe in abstinence,” Chigurupati told the Wall Street Journal. “What I do believe in is using technology to make life better. I’m not going to stop drinking, so why not make it safer?”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Can Science Make Alcohol Safer?

schwit1 shares an article from UPI:
India will make its second mission to the moon in 2018, the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) announced this week. The Chandrayaan 2 spacecraft consists of an orbiter, lander and rover configuration “to perform mineralogical and elemental studies of the lunar surface,” the ISRO said… Several other countries, including China and Japan, are planning lunar expeditions in the coming years — partly to better understand the moon’s environmental conditions for the potential of human settlements…
According to Popular Mechanics, the ISRO is attempting to make the lunar landing on a budget of $93 million, which is about the same cost of SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket that’s scheduled for launch by the end of this year. The Falcon rocket, though, is only going into orbit — and a $93 million price tag for a lunar landing could have impact on other countries’ space plans.

India landed a spacecraft on the moon in 2008, and plans to complete this second lunar landing by March.

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Source: Slashdot – India, China, and Japan Are All Planning Moon Missions