Slashdot Mirror

itwbennett writes "Antivirus firm Sophos acquired a passel of USB sticks lost by commuters on trains in the Greater Sydney metro area at an auction organized by the Rail Corporation New South Wales. The company analyzed 50 USB sticks and found that not a single one was encrypted and 33 of them were infected with at least one type of malware."

itwbennett writes "Antivirus firm Sophos acquired a passel of USB sticks lost by commuters on trains in the Greater Sydney metro area at an auction organized by the Rail Corporation New South Wales. The company analyzed 50 USB sticks and found that not a single one was encrypted and 33 of them were infected with at least one type of malware."

jfruhlinger writes "One of the great banes of election season is that any politician can shell out a few pennies per voter and phone-spam thousands of people who'd rather not hear a recorded pitch. But turnabout's fair play, and now a service called reverse robocall will deliver your recorded message to elected officials as often as you'd like for a nominal fee. If there's a representative you'd like to call repeatedly, check them out."

itwbennett writes "In a blog post titled 'Why I Will Never Feel Threatened by Cheap Overseas Programming', John Larson tells the story of a startup that shipped its initial programming to India, paying $14 per hour, with predictably disastrous results. Larson concludes: 'I have yet to see a project done overseas at that sort of hourly rate that has actually gone well.' But in this not-uncommon tale of outsourcing woe, is the problem really with the programming or with unrealistic expectations?" The comments on Larson's blog post (originally titled "Why I Will Never Feel Threatened by Programmers in India") seem to me more valuable than the post itself.

itwbennett writes "In a blog post titled 'Why I Will Never Feel Threatened by Cheap Overseas Programming', John Larson tells the story of a startup that shipped its initial programming to India, paying $14 per hour, with predictably disastrous results. Larson concludes: 'I have yet to see a project done overseas at that sort of hourly rate that has actually gone well.' But in this not-uncommon tale of outsourcing woe, is the problem really with the programming or with unrealistic expectations?" The comments on Larson's blog post (originally titled "Why I Will Never Feel Threatened by Programmers in India") seem to me more valuable than the post itself.

jfruhlinger writes "One of the reasons the iPad has stayed at the top of the tablet heap for so long is that — in contrast with the story of the Mac and PC 25 years ago — the iPad has remained competitive with its rivals on price. That may be starting to change, with cheaper tablets like the Amazon Fire coming to market. And now, the sub-$100 Novo7 is on sale in China, sporting Android 4.0. It promises to arrive in the U.S. for a similar price point soon." The official press release from MIPS has a bit more detail. Of interest is the use of a MIPS SoC designed by Ingenic.

bdking writes "In a public legal brief (PDF), Apple offers numerous design alternatives that Samsung could have used for its smartphones and tablets to avoid infringing on Apple's patents. Basically, as long as competitors' smartphones and tablets bear no resemblance to smartphones and tablets, everything's cool."

itwbennett writes "Sony's new handheld gaming system, the Playstation Vita, launches in Japan in two weeks, and the latest report from Andriasang has some interesting details, including Sony's decision to go with proprietary memory cards. Sony says this is both for security reasons and to ensure a consistent experience for all users, but that 'doesn't explain why they're charging such enormous sums for these cards,' says blogger Peter Smith. 'The caveat here is that we haven't seen official pricing for the cards, but game retailer Gamestop lists them at $120 (!!) for a 32 GB card, $70 for a 16GB, $45 for 8 GB and $30 for a 4 GB.'"

itwbennett writes "Sony's new handheld gaming system, the Playstation Vita, launches in Japan in two weeks, and the latest report from Andriasang has some interesting details, including Sony's decision to go with proprietary memory cards. Sony says this is both for security reasons and to ensure a consistent experience for all users, but that 'doesn't explain why they're charging such enormous sums for these cards,' says blogger Peter Smith. 'The caveat here is that we haven't seen official pricing for the cards, but game retailer Gamestop lists them at $120 (!!) for a 32 GB card, $70 for a 16GB, $45 for 8 GB and $30 for a 4 GB.'"

jfruhlinger writes "Most Slashdotters — even those living in democratic countries — would probably be unsurprised to know that their governments are spying on them. But most people are not aware of how complicit security vendors, who publicly work to protect the public from such electronic eavesdropping, are complicit in such monitoring. All this and more is revealed in the latest Wikieaks document dump, the Spy Files."

itwbennett writes "On Wednesday the FCC approved the use of medical micropower networks (MMNs) in four blocks of the 400MHz spectrum band despite opposition from broadcast engineers who say they are concerned about interference. MMNs can be used to bypass areas of the nervous system that have been impaired by strokes or spinal cord or brain injuries."

itwbennett writes "On Wednesday the FCC approved the use of medical micropower networks (MMNs) in four blocks of the 400MHz spectrum band despite opposition from broadcast engineers who say they are concerned about interference. MMNs can be used to bypass areas of the nervous system that have been impaired by strokes or spinal cord or brain injuries."

itwbennett writes "Last month two Red Hat developers proposed to replace the 30-year-old syslog system with a new Journal daemon. Initial reaction was mostly negative and 'focused on the Journal's use of a binary key-value form of data to log system events,' says blogger Brian Proffit. But now, says Proffitt, it seems that the proposal to replace syslog has less to do with the fixing syslog's problems than with Red Hat's desire to go its own way with Linux infrastructure."

itwbennett writes "Last month two Red Hat developers proposed to replace the 30-year-old syslog system with a new Journal daemon. Initial reaction was mostly negative and 'focused on the Journal's use of a binary key-value form of data to log system events,' says blogger Brian Proffit. But now, says Proffitt, it seems that the proposal to replace syslog has less to do with the fixing syslog's problems than with Red Hat's desire to go its own way with Linux infrastructure."

itwbennett writes "WikiLeaks has launched a new submissions platform, along with a study of the global trade in surveillance products. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange told press conference attendees in London that all the iPhone, BlackBerry, and Gmail users in the crowd were 'screwed.' 'The reality is intelligence contractors are selling right now to countries across the world mass surveillance systems for all of those products,' Assange said."

itwbennett writes "WikiLeaks has launched a new submissions platform, along with a study of the global trade in surveillance products. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange told press conference attendees in London that all the iPhone, BlackBerry, and Gmail users in the crowd were 'screwed.' 'The reality is intelligence contractors are selling right now to countries across the world mass surveillance systems for all of those products,' Assange said."

itwbennett writes "Internet freedom got a boost Wednesday when Italy's highest court ruled that the editors of online publications can't be held legally responsible for defamatory comments posted by their readers. The judges said online publications could not be treated in the same way as traditional print media and could not be expected to exercise preventative editorial control over readers' comments."

itwbennett writes "Internet freedom got a boost Wednesday when Italy's highest court ruled that the editors of online publications can't be held legally responsible for defamatory comments posted by their readers. The judges said online publications could not be treated in the same way as traditional print media and could not be expected to exercise preventative editorial control over readers' comments."

bdking writes "Shares of the daily-deals site were up Tuesday, but Groupon's ride on Wall Street since going public in early November has been almost all downhill. And there's no evident catalyst to reverse the slide." From the looks of it, Groupon is blowing all of its money attempting to expand in the face of ever-growing competition in a market with trivial start-up costs.

itwbennett writes "Eurogamer published a piece on a rumored Kinect 2 system that will most likely launch with the next iteration of the Xbox line, which might be sometime between late 2012 and 2014. Eurogamer says this new Kinect won't be hobbled by the limitations of the USB 2.0 port that the current Kinect uses; instead the hardware will be designed to give the new Kinect a faster pipeline to the system's internals. What this means, says blogger Peter Smith is that 'not only can Kinect 2 read finger movements (high on the wish-list for the current hardware) but it can read lips, too. I don't think they mean this in the sense that it can extrapolate what you're saying from your lip movements, but that it can tell who in a room is speaking by matching lip movement to audio input.'"

itwbennett writes "Eurogamer published a piece on a rumored Kinect 2 system that will most likely launch with the next iteration of the Xbox line, which might be sometime between late 2012 and 2014. Eurogamer says this new Kinect won't be hobbled by the limitations of the USB 2.0 port that the current Kinect uses; instead the hardware will be designed to give the new Kinect a faster pipeline to the system's internals. What this means, says blogger Peter Smith is that 'not only can Kinect 2 read finger movements (high on the wish-list for the current hardware) but it can read lips, too. I don't think they mean this in the sense that it can extrapolate what you're saying from your lip movements, but that it can tell who in a room is speaking by matching lip movement to audio input.'"

jfruhlinger writes "Telecommuting provides many joys, including the ability to stay in your pajamas all day and the chance to work with a cat on your lap. But it does have some major drawbacks, perhaps none so serious as the fact that, if your co-workers are for the most part in an office, they can forget you exist — which means you don't get credit for your work as you deserve."

itwbennett writes "In follow-up to yesterday's story about how Merck in Germany is threatening legal action to take its vanity Facebook URL back from Merck U.S., Facebook apologized for its 'administrative error' in reassigning the URL but said that if the two companies can't play nice, no one will get the URL."

itwbennett writes "In follow-up to yesterday's story about how Merck in Germany is threatening legal action to take its vanity Facebook URL back from Merck U.S., Facebook apologized for its 'administrative error' in reassigning the URL but said that if the two companies can't play nice, no one will get the URL."

itwbennett writes "A BBC article outlines a push to make software programming a basic course of study for British schoolchildren in hopes that Britain could become a major programming center for video games and special effects. Can earlier exposure to better technology courses reverse the declining enrollment in university computer science courses and make coding cool?"

itwbennett writes "A BBC article outlines a push to make software programming a basic course of study for British schoolchildren in hopes that Britain could become a major programming center for video games and special effects. Can earlier exposure to better technology courses reverse the declining enrollment in university computer science courses and make coding cool?"

jfruhlinger writes "John Spencer, a British blogger and tech educator, is convinced that free and open source software, which he's promoted for years, is costing IT jobs, as UK schools cut support staff no longer needed. But does the argument really hold up? It turns out that the services he's focused on are actually cloud services that are reducing the need for schools to provide their own tech infrastructure. Of couse, it's also true that many of those cloud services are themselves based on open source tech."

bdking writes "If a recent internal survey and reviews left on glassdoor.com are to be believed, working at social games company Zynga isn't much fun. Zynga's competitive, metrics-driven culture may be scaring away potential acquisitions and forcing out employees seeking better work-life balance and less stress."

itwbennett writes "Terrorist suspect Jose Pimentel had a blog on Google-owned Blogger. And so it follows that Senator Joe Lieberman sent a letter to Google CEO Larry Page taking him to task because 'Blogger's Content Policy does not expressly ban terrorist content.' Lieberman also pointed out that YouTube does ban terrorist content and added that 'Google's inconsistent standards are adversely affecting our ability to counter violent Islamist extremism online.'"

itwbennett writes "Terrorist suspect Jose Pimentel had a blog on Google-owned Blogger. And so it follows that Senator Joe Lieberman sent a letter to Google CEO Larry Page taking him to task because 'Blogger's Content Policy does not expressly ban terrorist content.' Lieberman also pointed out that YouTube does ban terrorist content and added that 'Google's inconsistent standards are adversely affecting our ability to counter violent Islamist extremism online.'"

itwbennett writes "Back in October, rumors surfaced (and then quickly subsided) that Microsoft was considering another bid to purchase Yahoo. Now the rumors are back, and this time Microsoft is said to be in talks with other prospective buyers about some kind of partnership to acquire the troubled Internet company."

itwbennett writes "Back in October, rumors surfaced (and then quickly subsided) that Microsoft was considering another bid to purchase Yahoo. Now the rumors are back, and this time Microsoft is said to be in talks with other prospective buyers about some kind of partnership to acquire the troubled Internet company."

itwbennett writes "How much does it cost to make a phone app to tell local temperature and suggest how not to get heatstroke, such as drink water and avoid alcohol? If you're the U.S. Government, it'll cost you a pretty penny. Using MuckRock to file a Freedom of Information Act, Rich Jones of GUN.IO discovered the Department of Labor, Occupational Safety and Health Administration paid $106,467 for the Android version; $96,000 for the iPhone version, and an additional $40,000 for a BlackBerry app that never got distributed."

itwbennett writes "How much does it cost to make a phone app to tell local temperature and suggest how not to get heatstroke, such as drink water and avoid alcohol? If you're the U.S. Government, it'll cost you a pretty penny. Using MuckRock to file a Freedom of Information Act, Rich Jones of GUN.IO discovered the Department of Labor, Occupational Safety and Health Administration paid $106,467 for the Android version; $96,000 for the iPhone version, and an additional $40,000 for a BlackBerry app that never got distributed."

LinuxScribe writes with this bit from IT World: "In an effort to foil crackers' attempts to cover their tracks by altering text-based syslogs, and improve the syslog process as a whole, developers Lennart Poettering and Kay Sievers are proposing a new tool called The Journal. Using key/value pairs in a binary format, The Journal is already stirring up a lot of objections." Log entries are "cryptographically hashed along with the hash of the previous entry in the file" resulting in a verifiable chain of entries. This is being done as an extension to systemd (git branch). The design doesn't just make logging more secure, but introduces a number of overdue improvements to the logging process. It's even compatible with the standard syslog interface allowing it to either coexist with or replace the usual syslog daemon with minimal disruption.

jfruhlinger writes "AT&T's plan to merge with T-Mobile just hit a pretty big snag. The FCC declared the merger would be anti-competitive and not in the public interest." According to the NY Times, the FCC seeks to hold a hearing before an administrative law judge in which the burden would be upon AT&T to prove the deal isn't anti-competitive.

itwbennett writes "In a court filing, Oracle accused HP of secretly contracting with Intel to keep making Itanium processors so that it can continue to make money from its locked-in Itanium customers and take business away from Oracle's Sun servers. Oracle says that Intel would have long ago killed off Itanium if not for these payments from HP. For its part, HP called the filing a 'desperate delay tactic' in the lawsuit HP filed against Oracle over its decision to stop developing for Itanium."

itwbennett writes "In a court filing, Oracle accused HP of secretly contracting with Intel to keep making Itanium processors so that it can continue to make money from its locked-in Itanium customers and take business away from Oracle's Sun servers. Oracle says that Intel would have long ago killed off Itanium if not for these payments from HP. For its part, HP called the filing a 'desperate delay tactic' in the lawsuit HP filed against Oracle over its decision to stop developing for Itanium."

jfruhlinger writes "Microsoft has quietly announced that it's planning on baking anti-virus protection right into the Windows 8 OS. Users have been criticizing Windows' insecurity for years — but of course this move is raising howls of protest from anti-virus vendors, who have built a nice business out of Windows' security holes. Is this a good move by Microsoft, or a leveraging of their monopoly as bad as bundling Internet Explorer?"

itwbennett writes "As Slashdot readers will recall, Barnes & Noble is being particularly noisy about the patents Microsoft is leveraging against the Nook. Now the bookseller has filed a supplemental notice of prior art that contains a 43-page list of examples it believes counters Microsoft's claim that Nook violates five of Microsoft's patents. 'The list of prior art for the five patents that Microsoft claims the Nook infringes is very much a walk down memory lane,' says Brian Proffitt. 'The first group of prior art evidence presented by Barnes & Noble for U.S. Patent No. 5,778,372 alone lists 172 pieces of prior art' and 'made reference to a lot of technology and people from the early days of the public Internet... like Mosaic, the NCSA, and (I kid you not) the Arena web browser. The list was like old home week for the early World Wide Web.'"

itwbennett writes "As Slashdot readers will recall, Barnes & Noble is being particularly noisy about the patents Microsoft is leveraging against the Nook. Now the bookseller has filed a supplemental notice of prior art that contains a 43-page list of examples it believes counters Microsoft's claim that Nook violates five of Microsoft's patents. 'The list of prior art for the five patents that Microsoft claims the Nook infringes is very much a walk down memory lane,' says Brian Proffitt. 'The first group of prior art evidence presented by Barnes & Noble for U.S. Patent No. 5,778,372 alone lists 172 pieces of prior art' and 'made reference to a lot of technology and people from the early days of the public Internet... like Mosaic, the NCSA, and (I kid you not) the Arena web browser. The list was like old home week for the early World Wide Web.'"

itwbennett writes "Slashdot readers will recall that the SOPA hearings earlier this week 'excluded any witnesses who advocate for civil rights. Google's Katherine Oyama was the only witness to object to the bill in a meaningful way.' So to get the attention of lawmakers, new media giants Google, Facebook, and Zynga turned to the only place they knew that politicians gather daily. They took out a full page ad in the New York Times. The irony of taking out a newspaper ad to protect the Web is certainly lost on no one."

itwbennett writes "Slashdot readers will recall that the SOPA hearings earlier this week 'excluded any witnesses who advocate for civil rights. Google's Katherine Oyama was the only witness to object to the bill in a meaningful way.' So to get the attention of lawmakers, new media giants Google, Facebook, and Zynga turned to the only place they knew that politicians gather daily. They took out a full page ad in the New York Times. The irony of taking out a newspaper ad to protect the Web is certainly lost on no one."

jfruhlinger writes "The infrastructure of a large data center poses two main problems: You need to find a way to reliably power all those servers, and you need to figure out a way to deal with the heat those servers put off. Syracuse University and the University of Toledo are experimenting with one gadget to solve both problems. Small power units that run on natural gas, called microturbines, provide reliable DC power separate from the utility grid, and their heat output can paradoxically be harnessed to cool the servers and transmit the heat to other buildings on campus."

jfruhlinger writes "The ubiquitous EULA — reams of baffling text imposing draconian terms on software users — infuriate most Slashdot users and are routinely ignored by everyone else (until they suddenly cause trouble, of course). But it doesn't have to be that way. Several European countries are considering laws mandating user-friendly EULAs, and some companies provide them voluntarily."

itwbennett writes "Facebook has reduced the amount of personal data it releases to users as required by European Union law. Due to the volume of requests since Europe v. Facebook began its campaign, Facebook is no longer sending CDs to people. Facebook said in a statement that the CD mailout 'contains a level of detail that is less useful for the average user — it is a much rawer collection of data.' Instead, users are now directed to a page where they can download their personal 'archive,' which according to Facebook is a copy of 'all of the personal information you've shared on Facebook.' But rather than the 57 categories of data early data requesters received, the new tool downloads just 22 categories."

itwbennett writes "Facebook has reduced the amount of personal data it releases to users as required by European Union law. Due to the volume of requests since Europe v. Facebook began its campaign, Facebook is no longer sending CDs to people. Facebook said in a statement that the CD mailout 'contains a level of detail that is less useful for the average user — it is a much rawer collection of data.' Instead, users are now directed to a page where they can download their personal 'archive,' which according to Facebook is a copy of 'all of the personal information you've shared on Facebook.' But rather than the 57 categories of data early data requesters received, the new tool downloads just 22 categories."

jfruhlinger writes "One of the more profound ways that the iPhone changed the mobile industry was the fact that it upended the relationship between the handset maker and the wireless carrier: Apple sells many of its phones directly to customers, and in general has much more of an upper hand with carriers than most phone manufacturers. But venture capitalist John Stanton, who was friends with Steve Jobs in the years when the iPhone was in development, said the Apple CEO's initial vision was even more radical: he wanted Apple to build its own wireless network using unlicensed Wi-Fi spectrum, thus bypassing the carriers altogether."

itwbennett writes "In a court case between Hotfile.com and Hollywood studios, Warner Brothers admitted they sent takedown orders for thousands of files they didn't own or control. Using an automated takedown tool provided by Hotfile, Warner Brothers used automated software crawlers based on keywords to generate legal takedown orders. This is akin to not holding the Post Office liable for what people mail, or the phone companies liable for what people say. But the flip side is that hosters must remove files when receiving a legal takedown notice from the copyright holder — even when the copyright holders themselves don't know what material they actually own."

jfruhlinger writes "Edward Naughton has been insisting for months that Android violates the GPL because Google created a new set of Linux kernel headers that it hasn't released the source code for, despite the fact that it incorporates open source code. While numerous commentators, including those who helped write the kernel headers, claimed this code isn't copyrightable, Naughton in persisting in his crusade, saying that the questions need to be resolved in court for the good of the open source movement."