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Cellphones

Submission + - WP8 SDK Leak Confirms WP7 Dead (i-programmer.info)

Submitted by mikejuk
mikejuk writes: Despite trying to convince everyone that WP7 phones are still a good thing to have a leak of the WP8 SDK reveals that WP7 apps are more or less dead. After spending so much time getting developers to commit to creating over 100,000 they some how have to break that news that its time to start over with an app count of 0.
The new SDK doesn't allow WP7 Silverlight or XNA projects to be created for WP8. There is a conversion utility that will attempt to turn a WP7 Silverlight app into a WP8 app but essentially it is time to start over with the new WinPRT API. There is no automatic conversion for XNA apps.
From the developers point of view Microsoft might as well have thrown away WP7 and started something completely new ... oh wait, that's what they have done.
Transportation

Submission + - GM working on Wi-Fi Direct-equipped cars to detect pedestrians and cyclists (gizmag.com)

Submitted by cylonlover
cylonlover writes: General Motors is working to expand upon its vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) and vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication systems that are being developed to allow information to be shared between vehicles and infrastructure to provide advance warning of potential road hazards, such as stalled vehicles, slippery roads, road works, intersections, stop signs and the like. The automaker is now looking to add pedestrians and cyclists to the mix using Wi-Fi Direct technology so a car can detect them in low visibility conditions before the driver does.
Medicine

Submission + - Two more men with HIV now virus-free (msn.com)

Submitted by Diggester
Diggester writes: Two men unlucky enough to get both HIV and cancer have been seemingly cleared of the virus, raising hope that science may yet find a way to cure for the infection that causes AIDS, 30 years into the epidemic.

The researchers are cautious in declaring the two men cured, but more than two years after receiving bone marrow transplants, HIV can't be detected anywhere in their bodies. These two new cases are reminiscent of the so-called "Berlin patient," the only person known to have been cured of infection from the human immunodeficiency virus.
GNOME

Submission + - Gnome Project is Understaffed (gnome.org)

Submitted by lister king of smeg
lister king of smeg writes:

I suppose I can’t just leave my last post standing there as-is. I’ll start by listing a bunch of things I consider facts about the GNOME project. I don’t want to talk about solutions here, I just want to list them, because I don’t think they are common knowledge. People certainly don’t seem to talk about them a lot. core developers are leaving GNOME development. The most recent examples are Emmanuele and Vincent. Both cite the need to look for something different, there is no hard feelings. GNOME is understaffed. This is hard to explain in a short and concise way. For anecdotal numbers: GTK has 1 person working full-time on it (me). Glib doesn’t even have that. I think evolution is in a similar situation (a complete email client). We can also try Ohloh’s statistics for GNOME (they include 131 packages, including GStreamer and NetworkManager). You’ll see a sharp drop off of committers on the first page already which suggests around 20 full-time developers at most. GNOME is a Red Hat project. If you look at the Ohloh statistics again and ignore the 3 people working almost exclusively on GStreamer and the 2 working on translations, you get 10 Red Hat employees and 5 others. (The 2nd page looks like 6 Red Hat employees versus 8 others with 6 translators/documenters.) This gives the GNOME project essentially a bus factor of 1. GNOME has no goals. I first noticed this in 2005 when Jeff Waugh gave his 10×10 talk. Back then, the GNOME project had essentially achieved what it set out to do: a working Free desktop environment. Since then, nobody has managed to set new goals for the project. In fact, these days GNOME describes itself as a “community that makes great software”, which is as nondescript as you can get for software development. The biggest problem with having no goals is that you can’t measure yourself. Nobody can say if GNOME 3 is better or worse than GNOME 2. There is no recognized metric anywhere. This also leads to frustration in lots of places. GNOME is losing market- and mindshare. I don’t want to point out Linus’ bashing, but a bunch of very pragmatic facts that all together lead to fewer GNOME users and developers: Distros are dropping GNOME for other environments instead of working with GNOME. Previous supporters of GNOME are scaling back their involvement or have already dropped GNOME completely. Most important desktop applications have not made the switch to GNOME 3. From talking to them, it’s not a priority for most of them. The claimed target users for GNOME are leaving desktop computers behind for types of devices GNOME doesn’t work on.

Maybe if the higher ups in gnome would listen to the users and quit chasing the elusive Joe-Sixpack by trying trying to be a tablet gui they would be doing better.
Android

Submission + - Groklaw analyzes the Apple vs Samsung case. (groklaw.net)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: As Samsung and Apple have been fighting over patents from one end of the earth to the other, most of the coverage, with few exceptions, seems to present Apple's point of view. We know how much money Apple is asking for, we know it's claiming treble damages for willfulness, we know it thinks FRAND patents are not deserving of injunction enforcement, and that Samsung is asking too much money for them.

But now that we have the redacted trial briefs from the parties, I thought you'd like to see Samsung's side. Litigation has two sides, two stories, not just one.

Did you know that Apple wants a royalty rate of $24 per unit from Samsung for its alleged use of Apple's design patent, the notorious tablet shape with rounded corners? $24! But when Samsung asked Apple for a much lower amount per unit that everybody else in the market pays for Samsung's standards patents, Apple refused, offered no counter-offer, and sued instead. To date, it's paid nothing at all for those patents or for the other regular patents Samsung is accusing Apple of infringing."

The claims made against Samsung are discussed inside.
Privacy

Submission + - Defcon Researchers Build Tool To Track The Planes Of The Rich And Famous (forbes.com) 1

Submitted by Sparrowvsrevolution
Sparrowvsrevolution writes: At the Defcon security conference later this week, two security researchers will release a tool that aims to expose a little-seen list of hidden private aircraft flight plans–the so-called Block Aircraft Registration Request or BARR list, a collection of aircraft whose owners have tried to keep their whereabouts secret.

Any private jet owner can request to be taken out of the FAA's public database of flight plans. But Dustin Hoffman and Semon Rezchikov found that private flyers' whereabouts are still broadcast in air-traffic control communications. So they developed a speech-to-text system that pulls out planes' tail numbers from those communications almost in real time, often fast enough to post a plane's destination before it lands. In its proof-of-concept version, the site is focusing on Las Vegas airports, but plans to expand to other cities soon.
IOS

Submission + - Google Warned Samsung Galaxy Tab was "too similar" (allthingsd.com)

Submitted by
tlhIngan
tlhIngan writes: "Some interesting news has come out of Apple's filings against Samsung. First, Google warned Samsung that their "P1" (Galaxy Tab) and "P3" (Galaxy Tab 10.1) tablets were "too similar" to the iPad. In addition, Samsung's own Product Design Group note it was "regrettable" that the Galaxy S "looks similar" to the iPhone. Finally, how designers at a Samsung-sponsored evaluation noted the Galaxy S "copied the iPhone too much" and "innovation is needed". Of course, Samsung has some ammunition of its own, including how Apple copied Sony's designs.

In unrelated news, Judge Grewal has sanctioned Samsung for not preserving emails from automatic deletion, even after litigation has begun."
Google

Submission + - Scientists Uncover the Seasonal Variations of Internet Porn

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "For everything, there is a season, and a time for every purpose, under heaven as Megan Garber reports that according to a paper just published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior, internet pornography — like planting, reaping and harvesting — is seasonal. Porn's peak seasons? Winter and late summer. Researchers at Villanova examined the Google trends for such commonly-searched-for terms as "porn," "xxx," "xxvideos" ... and other, more descriptive phrases and uncovered a defined cycle featuring clear peaks and valleys — recurring at discernible six-month intervals. The researchers also ran a control group consisting of Google searches for non-sexual terms and those terms demonstrated no such cyclical pattern. The researchers then looked at search terms associated with a relatively purpose-driven category of sexytime — prostitution and dating websites — and found that, for those terms ... the six-month cycle showed up again. "The findings are striking. And they suggest, above all, the power of the Internet to reveal the patterns of human emotion in a new scope, from a new angle," writes Garber. The authors note that a six-month sexual cycle has been reported before. It crops up in everything from abortion rates, to condom sales, and diagnosis of sexually transmitted infections. But why? One possibility is that it's purely a social construction driven by the fact that in Western cultures, Christmas and summer are the main holiday seasons; but it could reflect a more primitive biological cycle. "The Internet knows what we want," concludes Garber. "It knows what we do when we are alone, or think we are. And it knows all of us with the same totality of intimacy.""
Facebook

Submission + - Zynga CEO cashed out for $200M before stock IMPLOSION (blogspot.com)

Submitted by
quantr
quantr writes: ""Though Zynga's stock prices have plummeted since the company's earnings report on Wednesday, CEO Mark Pincus and other insiders managed to reduce their damages from the crash by dumping shares months ago.

Pincus along with other Zynga executives and investors sold a portion of their shares in April, bringing in around $516 million at $12 a share, a couple of dollars above the stock's initial IPO price,according to a report from Daily Ticker.

The company's stock has floated around the $5 mark for a few weeks now, but after Zynga reported disappointing revenues and a third-straight quarter of losses for the April-to-June period yesterday, share prices plunged to a new low of $3.

Of those insiders who sold their stocks early, Pincus made the most and brought in $200 million from the sale, but several others also took home eight-figures. They would have made a lot less if they waited until today to dump their shares like many other investors.

The fortunate timing of their cashouts — conducted in the same quarter when Zynga's's business appeared to deteriorate to the point that its share prices collapsed once investors were updated on its status — has raised a few eyebrows.

One law firm, Newman Ferrara, is already conducting an investigation into whether Zynga misrepresented or failed to provide investors information about problems with its social games, such as delayed launches or the company's dependence on Facebook's platform.

Earlier today, analysts expressed doubt that Zynga will be able to continue to dominate the social game space as it has for two years now, commenting "The bottom line is that Zynga over promised and significantly under delivered.""
Hardware

Submission + - Cray XK6 supercomputer used to simulate ice cream (geek.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The processing power available inside modern supercomputers isn’t just able to help us better understand the universe we live in, develop better medicines, and model complex systems. Apparently it is also helping to make better ice cream.

Research has been carried out at the University of Edinburgh to simulate the soft matter that makes up ice cream. More specifically, scientists are trying to understand the complex interactions occurring between the many different ingredients that make up your favorite flavor of the delicious cold stuff.
Government

Submission + - FAA's New Flight Control System Has Security Holes: Researcher (informationweek.com)

Submitted by gManZboy
gManZboy writes: A key component of the FAA's emerging "Next Gen" air traffic control system is fundamentally insecure and ripe for manipulation and attack, security researcher Andrei Costin said in a presentation Wednesday at Black Hat 2012. Costin outlined a series of issues related to the Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) system, a replacement to the decades-old ground radar system used to guide airplanes through the sky and on the ground at airports. Among the threats to ADS-B: The system lacks a capability for message authentication. "Any attacker can pretend to be an aircraft" by injecting a message into the system, Costin said. There's also no mechanism in ADS-B for encrypting messages. One example problem related to the lack of encryption: Costin showed a screen capture showing the location of Air Force One--or that someone had spoofed the system.
Google

Submission + - Google Outs 3D maps for iOS ahead of Apple (paritynews.com)

Submitted by hypnosec
hypnosec writes: Apple announced during WWDC 2012 that it is going to ditch Google maps and bring out its own under iOS 6. Did Google sulk? Well no! It started working and in fact raced ahead of Apple in providing 3D maps for iOS. Through a blog post, Google announced that it has now made 3D imagery available on its Google Earth for iOS app. Users of iPhone 4S, iPad 2 or new iPad, while using Google Earth for iOS app, will feel that they are virtually flying over cities.The feature, as of now, works only for 12 regions. Cities for which the 3D imagery is provided are from US with an expectation of a city in Rome. The U.S. cities include: Boulder, Colo., Boston, Charlotte, N.C., Lawrence, Kan., Long Beach, Calif., Los Angeles, Portland, Ore., San Diego, Santa Cruz, Calif., Tampa, Fla., Tucson, Ariz., and San Francisco, plus its East Bay and Peninsula neighbors notes the blog post.
Idle

Submission + - Termites explode to defend their colonies (nature.com)

Submitted by ananyo
ananyo writes: A species of termite found in the rainforests of French Guiana takes altruism seriously: aged workers grow sacks of toxic blue liquid that they explode onto their enemies in an act of suicidal self-sacrifice to help their colonies.
The “explosive backpacks” of Neocapritermes taracua grow throughout the lifetimes of the worker termites, filling with blue crystals secreted by a pair of glands on the insects' abdomens. Older workers carry the largest and most toxic backpacks. Those individuals also, not coincidentally, are the least able to forage and tend for the colony: their mandibles become dull and worn as the termites age, because they cannot be sharpened by moulting (abstract).
HP

Submission + - HP Cloud offers up free access to OpenStack (hpcloud.com)

Submitted by
krow
krow writes: "HP Cloud is offering free access to Open Stack via its public cloud. Today adoption is growing around the Open Stack APIs, and we are offering up access to push tool integration and adoption around the API's. Most recently we have been able to add support for on-demand Jenkin's orchestration via the JCloud's plugin.

API, as well as console, access is being made to the computer, object storage, and CDN interfaces. There are images being provided for different Linux distributions, and additionally images for Bitnami, ActiveState's Stackato, and Enterprise DB's Postgres images. Hopefully the access can be used to drive adoption of the Open Source alternative to Amazon's APIs."
Businesses

Submission + - Flight 4590 Didn't Kill the Concorde, Costs Did (vice.com)

Submitted by
pigrabbitbear
pigrabbitbear writes: "If the plane were around today — which some still fantasize about — it’d be like powering a stretch Hummer with dolphin blood. The airlines couldn’t sell enough tickets on the small plane to even make up for the amount of fuel it needed to guzzle on its journeys, let alone cover maintenance for the technological marvel. (A Concorde’s taxi to the end of a runway used as much fuel as a 737’s flight from London to Amsterdam.) Customers were fine with ordinary travel times for a fraction of the airfare and the plane only took transatlantic journeys, because going over land was too disturbing. Too much noise."
IT

Submission + - Europe's Most Powerful Supercomputer Inaugurated (slashdot.org)

Submitted by
Nerval's Lobster
Nerval's Lobster writes: "Europe’s most powerful supercomputer—and the fourth most powerful in the world—has been officially inaugurated.

The SuperMUC, ranked fourth in the June TOP500 supercomputing listing, contains 147,456 cores using Intel Xeon 2.7-GHz, 8-core E5-2680 chips. IBM, which built the supercomputer, stated in a recent press release that the supercomputer actually includes more than 155,000 processor cores. It is located at the Leibniz-Rechenzentrum (Leibniz Supercomputing Centre) in Garching, Germany, near Munich.

According to the TOP500 list, the SuperMUC is the world’s most powerful X86-based supercomputer. The Department of Energy’s “Sequoia” supercomputer at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif., the world’s most powerful, relies on 16-core, 1.6-GHz POWER BQC chips."
AI

Submission + - Champions Declared in AI Poker Tournament (ieee.org)

Submitted by the_newsbeagle
the_newsbeagle writes: The annual computer poker competition has just wrapped up, in which artificial intelligences battled each other over the (virtual) Texas Hold 'Em table. A researcher who worked on one of the top programs, the University of Alberta's "Hyperborean" program, has blogged about this year's competition and entrants for IEEE Spectrum. His first post explains the rules of the game and why it's tougher for a computer to win at poker than at chess; his second post describes Hyperborean's strategies, and the third gives the results and takes stock of Hyperborean's performance.
Government

Submission + - Skype is Killing Chat Privacy to Help Law Enforcement

Submitted by derekmead
derekmead writes: Skype has gone under a number of updates and upgrades since it was bought by Microsoft last year, mostly in a bid to improve reliability. But according to a killer report by the Washington Post, Skype has also changed its system to make chat transcripts, as well as users’ addresses and credit card numbers, more easily shared with authorities.

As we’ve already seen with Facebook and Twitter, big Internet firms aren’t digging their heels in against government requests, which shouldn’t come as a shock; pissing off the authorities is bad business. The lesson then is that, while the Internet will always retain a vestige of its Wild West days, as companies get bigger and bigger, they’re either going to play ball with governments or go the way of Kim Dotcom.

Submission + - Interview With O'Reilly Open Source Award Winner Elizabeth Krumbach (muktware.com)

Submitted by sfcrazy
sfcrazy writes: During LinuxCon this year one of the lead Linux kernel developers, Alan Cox, pointed at the challenge the community is facing in terms of gender gap. Unlike other areas where women are in leadership positions open source is an exception. So, we are starting an interview series on Muktware 'Woman Force In Open Source' where we will feature one female developer/executive every week. We are starting this series with Elizabeth Krumbach the winner of the O'Reilly Open Source Award.

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