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Networking

Submission + - Cisco rumored to be selling Linksys (bloomberg.com)

Submitted by drdread66
drdread66 writes: Cisco seems to be giving up on another technology acquisition. Hot on the heels of a full writedown for shuttering Flip Video, Cisco is now looking at another potentially huge loss from unloading Linksys. How many more times can Cisco make a disastrous acquisition before the company re-evaluates their strategy?

Feed + - Google News Sci Tech: Google Said to End FTC Probe With Letter Promising Change - Bloomberg (google.com)

From feed by feedfeeder

Politico
Google Said to End FTC Probe With Letter Promising Change
Bloomberg
Google Inc. is poised to offer voluntary concessions that will end a 20-month antitrust probe of the company's business practices by U.S. regulators without any enforcement action being taken, two people familiar with the matter said. Google, which has been ...
Google Antitrust Case Is Said to Be Nearing EndNew York Times (blog)
Google-FTC Antitrust Suit Reportedly Coming To A CloseTechCrunch
Google to tweak practices to end search probe - Elizabeth Wasserman ... - PoliticoPolitico
The Verge-All Things Digital-CNET
all 15 news articles

Science

Submission + - Virus rebuilds heart's own pacemaker in animal tests (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by
hugheseyau
hugheseyau writes: "A new pacemaker has been built inside a heart by converting beating muscle into cells which can organise the organ's rhythm, US researchers report. Scientists injected a genetically-modified virus into guinea pigs to turn part of their heart into a new, working pacemaker."
Censorship

Submission + - Watching porn causes memory loss says new study (dailymail.co.uk)

Submitted by SonicSpike
SonicSpike writes: People addicted to watching pornography on the internet are in danger of suffering short-term memory loss which can have a major impact on their lives, according to new research.

German scientists studied the part of the brain responsible for keeping information in the mind while using it to complete a task, critical for understanding, reasoning, problem solving and decision making.

According to researchers at the University of Duisburg-Essen, the findings could help psychologists understand why some people with internet porn addictions forget to sleep, miss appointments, shirk job responsibilities and neglect relationships.
Politics

Submission + - Anonymous hacks Westboro Baptist Church (inquisitr.com)

Submitted by
elashish14
elashish14 writes: "The Westboro Baptist Church stated earlier this week that they would be picketing the funerals of the victims of Newtown Connecticut's tragic shooting in an effort to bring awareness to their hate messages. In response, the Anonymous hacker collective has hacked their website and posted the personal information of all of its members."
Android

Submission + - Dell Gives up on Android, Doubles Down on Windows 8 (maximumpc.com)

Submitted by
hugheseyau
hugheseyau writes: ""Dell vice chairman Jeff Clarke made a less than shocking announcement at this year’s Dell World Conference in Austin. The company is officially giving up on Android phones and tablets. ... So if Dell is giving up on Android, what comes next? The company claims its doubling down on Windows 8, and the enterprise market.""
Privacy

Submission + - When writing, how anonymous can you be, really? (webis.de)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Do you still think your online writing is, basically, anonymous? Think again! Research has it people put much of their personal traits into their writing, and computers may just be able to pick them up. That's at least what a recently announced competition on author identification (Given a document, who wrote it?) and author profiling (Given a document, what're its author's age and gender?) wants to find out. Alas, re-using other people's writing is no solution either; there's also a competition on plagiarism detection (Given a document, is it an original?). Wanna revisit your recent rants?
Education

Submission + - Does Computer Science Education Week Matter?

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Nothing gets the kids jazzed about Computer Science like a black-and-white photo of Admiral Grace Murray Hopper sitting at the console of a UNIVAC I, like the one that "graced" the home page of the website for the just-concluded Computer Science Education Week, right? And kids will no doubt be inspired by a visit to CSEdWeek's YouTube site, where the two videos posted this year have thus far generated a combined 161 views (take that, Psy!), right? With CSEdWeek partners like Google, Oracle, and Microsoft lamenting the 'tragic' state of CS education, would their efforts and dollars be better spent on other ways of bringing coding skills to the masses than on year-after-year of CSEdWeek handwaving? How about funding an online Udacity CS course for the younger set that implements some of Bret Victor's game-changing concepts?
Encryption

Submission + - WW2 pigeon code decrypted by Canadian? (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by Albanach
Albanach writes: At the start of November Slashdot reported the discovery of a code, thought to be from the second world war, found attached to the leg of a pigeon skeleton located in an English chimney. Now a Canadian by the name of Gord Young claims to have deciphered the message in less than 20 minutes. He believes that the message is comprised mostly of acronyms.

Submission + - Small dev company missing payments from multinational corp

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: I run a small dev shop focused on web development, based in Europe. For the past 6 years we've had lots of successful projects with clients from CEE, Western Europe and the US. One of our main clients was based in the US. We started working for them in 2008, while they were a "promising start-up" and everything went smoothly until they were bought by a multinational corp. We couldn't be happier to work for such a big player in the market, we even managed to get by with huge payment delays (3-4 months on a monthly based contract), but now, after more than 2 years working for them I have the feeling we're getting left out, we got 6 months old unpaid invoices and we're getting bounced between the EU and US departments every time we try to talk to them. What can a small company do to fight a big corp that's NASDAQ listed and has an army of lawyers? They've been getting a lot of bad press lately so I don't think that will scare them either...

Submission + - Australia Plans to Drill 2,000-Year-Old Ice Core in Antarctica

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Australia announced Saturday a new project to drill a deep ice core in Antarctica, which may shed light on past climatic conditions in the continent. The project, Aurora Basin North project, will involve researchers drilling a 2,000-year-old ice core, in order to search for the scientific "holy grail" of the ice core.
Microsoft

Submission + - Missing e-mail

Submitted by Antony-Kyre
Antony-Kyre writes: Since Microsoft hasn’t been of any help, I’m asking Slashdot. Ever since they switched from the previous look to that “Outlook” look in Hotmail, I haven’t received any spam. This isn’t spam I block. This is spam I’m collecting that I’d like to eventually report and/or investigate (long story). It’s been days now (not opening any messages to check the last time I received e-mail), and I don’t know what to do. I usually expect perhaps dozens a week, but unless a spam network was recently taken down, I figure Hotmail is blocking e-mail at its source. Has anyone else been having similar problems?

Submission + - Huge security hole in recent Samsung devices (xda-developers.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A huge security hole has been discovered in recent Samsung devices including phones like the Galaxy S2 and S3. It is possible for every user to obtain root due to a custom faulty memory device created by Samsung.
Your Rights Online

Submission + - Using social media about military operations make you a target? (theage.com.au)

Submitted by AHuxley
AHuxley writes: Could using social media or blog comments about any military operation make you a legal military target? Australian army Land Warfare Studies Centre analyst Chloe Diggins looks at what could make a web 2.0 user a combatant.
The Geneva Convention protecting civilians could be removed if a power feels uploading, downloading or sharing is part of the fight. How long before "knowingly providing material support or resources to an entity that has been designated as Foreign Terrorist Organizations under section 219 of the Immigration and Nationality Act." becomes just "providing material support or resources to an entity that has been designated"
Privacy

Submission + - Swede gets photo driving license - with a photo of a painting of himself (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by RockDoctor
RockDoctor writes: The BBC are reporting that a Swedish artist has read the terms of his driving license application carefully, and complied with them. The application calls, specifically, for a "recent likeness" of the subject, not for a photograph of the subject. So, he got out his paintbrushes and painted a self-portrait — a "likeness", and "recent" too — against the regulation plain background. Attaching a photograph of the portrait to the application, he then mailed off the application, and a while later got his new driving license in the post.

The artist cites arty-farty inspirations such as Magritte's painting of a pipe entitled "Ceci n'est pas une pipe", as well as "[questions of] technology and [...] of identity". Or maybe he's just a trouble-maker who deserves a day in a dark room with a police thug and a $5 wrench.

Of course any nerd would have spent months finding and writing drivers for managing a 1990s 480x320 pixel webcam and using that to produce the photo. It does rather beg questions of just how low a resolution a picture you can get away with though. And how would the police (etc) manage an HDR photograph (of one's reflection, out of focus, in a poor-quality mirror).
Patents

Submission + - China's ZTE And Huawei Join The German Patent Fray (fosspatents.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Germany has pretty much become the new Eastern District of Texas, the world's most popular patent battleground. After Apple, Samsung and Motorola, the Chinese are now going to Germany as well to sort out their domestic patent squabbles. Huawei and ZTE, arguably the People's Republic's leading wireless tech companies, started suing each other in April last year. On Friday the Mannheim Regional Court held a Huawei vs. ZTE hearing, reports a local patent watcher. Huawei says ZTE infringes a 4G/LTE handover patent and wants its rival's base stations and USB modem sticks banned in Germany. More clashes between the two are coming up in the same court and in other places in Europe, including France.
Security

Submission + - Researchers Convert Phones into Secret Listening Devices (darkreading.com)

Submitted by
CowboyRobot
CowboyRobot writes: "Columbia University grad student Ang Cui demonstrated how networked printers and phones can be abused by attackers. "The attack I demonstrated is caused by the multiple vulnerabilities within the syscall interface of the CNU [Cisco Native Unix] kernel," Cui tells Dark Reading. "It is caused by the lack of input validation at the syscall interface, which allows arbitrary modification of kernel memory from userland, as well as arbitrary code execution within the kernel. This, in turn, allows the attacker to become root, gain control over the DSP [Digital Signal Processor], buttons, and LEDs on the phone. The attack I demonstrated patches the existing kernel and DSP in order to carry out stealthy mic exfiltration.""

Submission + - White House Petition to Confer National Landmark Status to Flickr API

Submitted by somekind
somekind writes: Over the past few months Twitter imposed restrictions on the use of its client API, and Facebook shut down the facial recognition API supported the face.com after acquiring the company. Mathew Ingram noted these and other examples (Google starting to charge for high-volume use of Google Maps) as evidence that "open APIs" published by a single vendor can't be trusted by outside developers. Worried about the possibility that Yahoo! might do the same with Flickr, Dave Winer has just launched a petition to Obama asking the President to declare the Flickr API a National Historic Landmark, thus (by Dave's reckoning) legally protected from arbitrary withdrawal or wholesale changes by its corporate masters. As of this post, Dave's petition has gained 24 signees.

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