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Businesses

Submission + - Sir Patrick Stewart defeated by the cable company (telegraph.co.uk) 1

Submitted by whoever57
whoever57 writes: While in his role portraying Jean-Luc Picard in the Star Trek series he was able to defeat opponents across the galaxy, but in real life he was defeated by a much more mundane foe — a foe that many here at /. are familiar with — the cable company. Venting his frustration via twitter, he tweeted that he had lost the will to live after attempting to get a new account with Time Warner Cable in New York City New York City.
Programming

Submission + - What Causes Spaghetti Code? (Not the GOTO)

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Michael O'Church writes that spaghetti code is an especially virulent but specific kind of bad code related to the dreaded and mostly archaic goto statement, a simple and powerful control flow mechanism that makes it difficult to reason about code, because if control can bounce about a program, one cannot make guarantees about what state a program is in when it executes a specific piece of code. Goto statements were once the leading cause of spaghetti code, but goto has fallen so far out of favor that it’s a non-concern. "Now the culprit is something else entirely: the modern bastardization of object-oriented programming," writes O'Church adding that inheritance is an especially bad culprit, and so is premature abstraction: using a parameterized generic with only one use case in mind, or adding unnecessary parameters. Object-oriented programming, originally designed to prevent spaghetti code, has become one of the worst sources of it (through a “design pattern” ridden misunderstanding of it). An “object” can mix code and data freely and conform to any number of interfaces, while a class can be subclassed freely about the program. "There’s a lot of power in object-oriented programming, and when used with discipline, it can be very effective. But most programmers don’t handle it well, and it seems to turn to spaghetti over time," concludes O'Church. "I recognize that this claim – that OOP as practiced is spaghetti code – is not a viewpoint without controversy. Nor was it without controversy, at one time, that goto was considered harmful.""
Space

Submission + - Spectacular fireball lights up UK sky 1

Submitted by
The Bad Astronomer
The Bad Astronomer writes: "An extremely bright meteor burned up over Ireland and the northern UK around 22:00 UTC on Friday night, and was apparently witnessed by thousands of people. It traveled east to west, and was moving relatively slowly. It may have been an actual rock, or it may have been some human-made space debris — a satellite or rocket booster — burning up. Space junk tends to move more slowly, so that's a potential suspect, though orbiting debris usually moves in the opposite direction. I'm collecting pictures and images on my Bad Astronomy blog."
Apple

Submission + - Verizon iPhone 5 ships unlocked, works on any GSM network (geek.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: you’re planning to get a new Verizon iPhone 5, there might be a little bonus feature included that neither Apple nor Verizon are keen to admit. As units have started making it out of the stores, it appears that the Verizon version of the device is fully unlocked out of the box and able to connect to any GSM network.

Verizon support is apparently confirming to customers that the device is unlocked. At the very least, this doesn’t appear to be a mistake. It likely has to do with the way the iPhone’s radios are designed along with the implementation of LTE on Verizon. This might make the device a little more palatable to those on the fence about upgrading, especially for anyone that travels.
Science

Submission + - Has Plant Life Reached Its Limits? (nytimes.com)

Submitted by
hessian
hessian writes: "Since 2000, Dr. Running and his colleagues have monitored how much plant growth covers terra firma, using two NASA satellites in the agency’s Earth Observing System. After they crunched the numbers, combining the current monitoring system’s data with satellite observations dating back to 1982, they noticed that terrestrial plant growth, also known as net primary production, remained relatively constant. Over the course of three decades, the observed plant growth on dry land has been about 53.6 petagrams of carbon each year, Dr. Running writes in the article.

This suggests that plants’ overall productivity — including the corn that humans grow and the trees people log for paper products — is changing little now, no matter how mankind tries to boost it, he said."
Privacy

Submission + - Evidence for another Sony Rootkit (thepiratebay.se)

Submitted by vux984
vux984 writes: There's some preliminary evidence that SOE is heading face first into what may be another rootkit scandal. A poster named Bug started this thread here: (I expect it to disappear if the story gains traction.)

http://forums.station.sony.com/eq2/posts/list.m?&topic_id=520848
and posted his findings to a torrent:
http://thepiratebay.se/torrent/7522392/NEW_2012_Sony_Rootkit_Exploit

My read is frankly that "Bug" is overreacting to a lot of the details, and assigning a lot of malicious intent where I'm highly skeptical any exists.

Nonetheless: They do in fact install a browser add-on without any sort of proper disclosure in all major browsers. They do in fact silently add zones to your Internet 'trusted zones' lists. And they are in fact uploading scads of crash data (multiple GB) without user permission or review and its evident that the crash data can contain information the user would not wish to transmit to Sony.

Additionally, the combined effect of the add-on and white listed zones potentially exposes users to remote execution attacks; similiar to the way Sony's XCP could be exploited by 3rd parties. Again there is some circumstantial evidence at least that it is already being exploited in the wild.

There was an uproar here when Microsoft quietly added its .NET Framework Assistant add-on to Firefox , this seems to go way beyond that, and its the first time I think I've seen zones silently added to the trusted zone. I think Sony's crossed a line... again.

In any case, anyone here who plays any SOE titles should at least be aware what Sony is doing and decide for themselves what they think of it.
Twitter

Submission + - New Twitter Policies Put the Kibosh on Mashup Services (techcrunch.com)

Submitted by
dburr
dburr writes: "If This Then That (IFTTT) is a web mashup service that lets you connect together multiple services in unique and powerful ways. For example, you can automatically bookmark Favorited tweets using a social bookmarking service such as Delicious. Or even notify you by SMS when your server goes down. Unfortunately, Twitter has just announced policy changes that will in effect neuter it. Starting next Thursday, August 27, IFTTT will be disabling all Twitter "triggers" (the real power of IFTTT and its defining feature). (You will still be able to post Tweets through IFTTT) This has upset many long time Twitter users and members of the technorati. I have created a petition in a valiant (and perhaps vain) attempt to express our displeasure at their decision."
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft No Longer Accepts Long Passwords, Shortens Them For You

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Microsoft doesn’t like long passwords. In fact, the software giant not only won’t let you use a really long one in Hotmail, but the company recently started prompting users to only enter the first 16 characters of their password. Let me rephrase that: if you have a password that has more than 16 characters, it will no longer work. Microsoft is making your life easier! You no longer have to input your whole password! Just put in the first 16 characters!
Hardware

Submission + - Open Hardware Spectrometer Kit (publiclaboratory.org)

Submitted by mybluevan
mybluevan writes: The Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science is putting together an open hardware spectrometer kit on Kickstarter. The kits are built using an HD webcam, discarded DVD, and a couple other odd bits. They've also put together a kit for your smart phone and open-source software for desktop, Android, and iOS. Need to analyze the contents of your coffee, the output of your new grow lights, or a distant star on a budget? Just build your own spectrometer, or pick up the limited edition steampunk version.

Submission + - GPL Kerfuffle Kills Xbian for RaspberryPi (raspbmc.com) 1

Submitted by tetrahedrassface
tetrahedrassface writes: Rasbmc developer Sam Nazarko is reporting that Xbian had violated the GPL and stolen his installer code without providing attribution and not releasing their source. His breakdown of events is interesting, and currently the Xbian project has been taken offline with several tweets saying Xbian development is terminated.
Security

Submission + - New proof-of-concept bootkit targets UEFI and Windows 8 (neowin.net)

Submitted by
KingofGnG
KingofGnG writes: "The UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) platform is the “next-gen” technology designed to replace the ancient BIOS contained within the most basic layer of hardware logic in PCs, bringing not only a more flexible environment but strong security features as well. The fact is that the UEFI platform has been already “cracked” open by a new bootkit created by Italian security researchers."
Security

Submission + - Iran behind cyber attacks on U.S. banks (nbcnews.com)

Submitted by who_stole_my_kidneys
who_stole_my_kidneys writes: Evidence suggest the Iranian government is behind cyber attacks this week that have targeted the websites of JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America. The attack is described by one source, a former U.S. official familiar with the attacks, as being "significant and ongoing" and looking to cause "functional and significant damage." Also, one source suggested the attacks were in response to U.S. sanctions on Iranian banks.

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