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Windows

Submission + - PC Sales are Flat-lining (ibtimes.co.uk)

Submitted by
DavidGilbert99
DavidGilbert99 writes: "Gartner has released figures showing that PC shipments globally declined 0.1 percent in the last three months, making it the seventh consecutive month of little-to-no growth in the PC market. This was despite the launch a number of new Ultrabooks, the much-vaunted slim-and-light platform promoted by Intel. The decline has been put down to the poor economic situation around the globe, increased spending on tablets and smartphones instead of PCs as well as the imminent launch of Windows 8, making people hold out on updating their PCs."
Music

Submission + - Supreme Court strikes down copyright fees on music, video (ctvnews.ca)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Quick submission for all us Canadian's, looks like the Supreme court finally decided to rule on various copyright issues. No more fees to "preview" a song. Another of these rule changes could save our schools a lot of money. No more fee's required to photocopy material for students.
Cloud

Submission + - Feds: We need priority access to cloud resources (networkworld.com)

Submitted by BButlerNWW
BButlerNWW writes: Federal agencies must be assured priority and uninterrupted access to public cloud resources before fully embracing the technology for national security and emergency response IT functions, a recent report finds. It recomends creating a program to develop a system to ensure federal organization receive "first-in-line" access to cloud-based resources during emergency situations.
Google

Submission + - Google Doodle Turing Machine Now Open Source (i-programmer.info)

Submitted by mikejuk
mikejuk writes: Following on from the release of the Moog Synthesizer Doodle code, Google has now released the JavaScript of its Turing Machine puzzle.
The JavaScript code that powered the recent Google Doodle of a Turing Machine to celebrate Alan Turing's 100th birthday is now up on Google Code, and you can still play the interactive game at the doodle archives. The code itself is available under an Apache 2 license, which means you can use it for commercial purposes, but the graphics are under a Creative Commons license, which means you can't. The reason for the difference is that Google wants to protect its logo.
Android

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Encrypted Android Devices in State and Local Government 3

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: I am a systems administrator for a mid size state agency. We currently offer Blackberry's to our staff, but we are migrating to Android devices in the near future. Being that phones have sensative data (email, documents, etc.) What is a good choice for encrypting that data? Options abound like OS level encryption from Motorola and Samsung , 3rd party apps from GoTrusted and even a LUKS port for Android. Does anyone have experience managing encrypted Android devices? What are the important features I should be looking at? Many thanks in advance.

Submission + - Digsby IM/Social Networking Client to go Open Source (digsby.com)

Submitted by kae77
kae77 writes: A year and a half after being acquired by social network Tagged, popular IM/Social Networking client Digsby is going open source! An announcement on the Digsby blog presented the news. In the coming weeks, all source code will be made available on Github, including the long-promised by never delivered work towards the Mac and Linux clients.

Submission + - Wikileaks will get credit card money (www.dv.is)

Submitted by mordur
mordur writes: An Icelandic District Court has ordered the payment processing company Valitor to immediately re open the merchant account of DataCell and start processing credit card payments for the Wikileaks organization. Noncompliance on behalf of Valitor will result in daily fines of ISK 800.000 (approx. USD 60.000).

Under pressure from the USA based international credit card companies, Valitor stopped all service to DataCell and, thus to Wikileaks, just hours after having started processing payment in July 2011. The court found that Valitor had failed to prove that the processing of payments for Wikileaks was contrary to the business policies of the international credit card companies, nor had the company proved that DataCell was in breach of the service agreement between the companies by serving Wikileaks.
Cloud

Submission + - Building a Personal FOSS Cloud

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Cloud-based personal data management is pretty cool... if you don't mind entrusting the entirety of your personal data to a gigantic corporation. Apart from the risks of their doing unseemly things with your data, also the security of your data is entirely in their unreliable hands. So, is it possible to build my own personal data repository, where for example, I can store my contacts and calendars to sync to multiple devices? This could be hosted on any third party hosting service assuming also that all of my data was encrypted at the data level. So even if the host wanted to look at my data, all they'd see is 1s and 0s. What are the options for the tinfoil hat wearing FOSS folks that want to participate in the cloud age?
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft Kills Windows Gadgets via Security Update (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by
benfrog
benfrog writes: "Microsoft has taken the unusual step of killing the Windows Gadgets feature completely via a security update. According to an advisory issued Tuesday, an attacker could take over a user's system if they are logged in as admin and they install a vulnerable gadget. Microsoft has pulled the plug on its official Gadgets Gallery and is offering a Fix-it that completely disables the Windows Sidebar and Gadgets. Researchers Mickey Shkatov and Toby Kohlenberg are scheduled to give a presentation on the vulnerability at the upcoming Black Hat conference called We Have You By the Gadgets."
Bug

Submission + - Instagram Bug Exposes Private Photos to Strangers (theregister.co.uk)

Submitted by
benfrog
benfrog writes: "A just-patched bug in Instragram potentially exposed user's private photographs to strangers. According to a Spanish-languge blog post by security researcher Sebastián Guerrero (English-lanuage security advisory related to his post here), photos and private information were exposed by the bug stemming from the ability to guess and forge approved requests to follow a user. Guerrero illustrated the vulnerability by adding himself to a group of people followed by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg."
Government

Submission + - UK Government To Offer Free TV Filters For 4G Interference (techweekeurope.co.uk)

Submitted by
judgecorp
judgecorp writes: "4G services could interfere with terrestrial TV in the UK, so the government plans to offer one free filter for every household affected by the issue. The analysis suggests that 2.3 million households could be affected, but many of those have cable or satellite TV, so the plan might only need a million filters (each household only gets one, even if they have many TVs). ."

Submission + - Megaupload Founder Offers Deal to the US (pcworld.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: "Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom has offered to do a deal with U.S. prosecutors, who are seeking his extradition from New Zealand to the U.S."

"..in an interview to The New Zealand Herald, Dotcom said the delays in the case were placing pressure on his ability to defend himself from the charges."

Source: PCWorld
Wireless Networking

Submission + - IT groups eschew BYOD, issue company-owned tablets (networkworld.com)

Submitted by alphadogg
alphadogg writes: After several years of struggling to accommodate personally-owned smartphones, many corporate IT groups are taking the opposite tack with tablets: they're issuing corporate-owned iPads and Android tablets. And partly as a result, at least some are seeing a jump in costs for mobile end user support, redesigned custom applications, and device administration. "We're ripping PCs out of the environment faster than we're installing them. This may be the death of the PC," says Dale Potter, CIO at The Ottawa Hospital.

Tablets are more likely to be corporate-owned than are smartphones, even when a company is willing to support employee-owned tablets. Data from a recent survey of 556 companies in 45 countries by Aberdeen Group found that overall, 43% of the sample were willing to support any personally owned tablet; 29% allowed selected tablets, but over one quarter — 28% — banned all personal tablets. By contrast, 51% allowed any personally owned smartphone to be used for business; 32% allowed selected phones (from a corporate-approved list); and only 17% banned all personal smartphones for business use.
Android

Submission + - Ouya Android Game Console Hits $4 Million Home Run on Kickstarter (hothardware.com)

Submitted by
MojoKid
MojoKid writes: "Wouldn't it be great if game consoles didn't cost several hundred dollars, and if the games were free to play, at least to try them out? Well, that's the central idea behind Ouya, a new game console for the TV and powered by Android. In less than three days, Ouya has raised roughly $4 million on Kickstarter from more than 30,000 excited backers. Ouya's open-source foundation is the key cog in what the developers hope will be a game changing machine. Ouya proposes to be an affordable $99 console at retail. It will come ARMed with an Nvidia Tegra 3 quad-core processor flanked by 1GB of system memory, 8GB of internal flash storage, Wireless-N and Bluetooth LE 4.0 connectivity, HDMI output for connecting to your swank living room HDTV (supports up to 1080p HD), a single USB 2.0 port, and a wireless controller with standard controls (two analog sticks, D-pad, eight action buttons, a system button, and a touchpad). All this will come wrapped in Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0)."
Bug

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: How do you track bugs for personal software projects?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: One of my personal software projects grows bigger than I thought and the bugs becomes too many to just remember. I looked around for an open source bugs tracking system but found no ideal solutions. Ideally I wanted a simple system that does not need server setup and extra database setup, and can run under Mac OS X. Another option is a cloud service if it's affordable enough. Any suggestions from Slashdot?
Android

Submission + - Boeing 787 Dreamliner: Powered by Android, and 69TB of solid-state storage (extremetech.com)

Submitted by
MrSeb
MrSeb writes: "The Boeing 787 Dreamliner is the most-anticipated wide-bodied jet of all time: Boeing has taken a total of 859 orders since 2004, and so far it has only delivered 14 planes. By end of 2013 it intends to ramp up production to 10 units per month, but even then, most customers still have a wait time of between 5 and 10 years. This submission isn’t about the Dreamliner’s composite body, or the fact that it uses 20% less fuel than a 767, though: Inside all 859 of those planes, each and every seat will be outfitted with an Android-powered entertainment system. Boeing is offering two flavors of in-flight entertainment and connectivity (IFEC) solutions: The Thales TopSeries Avant, and the Panasonic eX3. Two days ago, Qatar Airways showed off its recently-delivered 787 Dreamliner at the Farnborough International Airshow in the UK — and inside there are 254 seats, all equipped with the Thales IEFC. There are two classes in the Qatar Airways 787, economy and business, and they’re outfitted with 17-inch and 10-inch touchscreen IEFCs respectively. The IEFCs are completely integrated — all of the hardware is stored in the seat-back unit (there’s no under-seat box). And the hardware spec well, this is the bit that blew my mind. Each IEFC has an STMicro dual-core ARM processor, 1GB of RAM, and a 256GB (!) SSD. There’s also a main server, which features 32 x86 cores (so, quad-CPU Xeon or Opteron), 128GB of RAM, and a further 4TB of SSD storage. All told, a Qatar Airways Dreamliner has 508 ARM cores, 32 x86 cores, 382GB of RAM, and 69 terabytes of solid-state storage."
Businesses

Submission + - Entrepreneur Offers Crowdfunding for Health Startups, Including His (xconomy.com)

Submitted by
awjourn
awjourn writes: "As the SEC hashes out the final rules for crowdfunding equity investments in startups, one NYC entrepreneur is jumping into an industry that popular crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter won't go anywhere near: health. His company, MedStartr, launched July 11 with six companies seeking to raise money from the crowd for their health products and services. Among them, EndoGoddess, an app diabetics can use to track their blood sugar. Even MedStartr wants to raise funding on MedStartr. But will crowdfunding fly in healthcare, and more importantly, will regulators at the FDA and SEC be on board with it?"
Security

Submission + - Apple Hacker To Demo Dangers Of Near-Field Communications (darkreading.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Apple's hacker nemesis Charlie Miller, who the company banned from its app store developer program, apparently hasn't been waiting around for his suspension to be lifted. His latest pet project is hacking near-field communications (NFC), and at Black Hat USA in Vegas this month, he will demonstrate the dangers of using your smartphone to pay your cabfare. (But when his Apple "sentence" is up, look out).

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