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Blackberry

+ - 202 RIM's future hangs on developer support for "new BlackBerry" ->

Submitted by alphadogg
alphadogg writes "With its future up for grabs, Research in Motion at its annual BlackBerry World conference next week will focus on simplifying development for its soon-to-be-unveiled BlackBerry 10 operating system. HTML5 is one key technology in that strategy to create a viable ecosystem of applications for a new generation of mobile devices expected to ship by year-end. The simplicity is needed because BB10, based on a real time kernel acquired with RIM's buyout of QNX Software Systems in 2010, is a complete break with the software that runs on standard BlackBerry smartphones. "It's a bit of a challenge," says Tyler Lessard, formerly a RIM vice president in charge of the global developer program, and since October 2011 chief marketing officer at mobile security vendor Fixmo. "There's very little or no compatibility between the old and new operating systems. Existing apps can't be carried forward to QNX and BB 10. The question is, once the BlackBerry 10 smartphones launch, can RIM have an adequate catalog of apps?""
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China

+ - 183 China plans national, unified CPU architecture->

Submitted by
MrSeb
MrSeb writes "According to reports from various industry sources, the Chinese government has begun the process of picking a national computer chip instruction set architecture (ISA). This ISA would have to be used for any projects backed with government money — which, in a communist country such as China, is a fairly long list of public and private enterprises and institutions, including China Mobile, the largest wireless carrier in the world. The primary reason for this move is to lessen China’s reliance on western intellectual property. There are at least five existing ISAs on the table for consideration — MIPS, Alpha, ARM, Power, and the homegrown UPU — but the Chinese leadership has also mooted the idea of defining an entirely new architecture. What if China goes the DIY route and makes its own ISA or microarchitecture with silicon-level censorship and monitoring, or an always-open backdoor for the Chinese intelligence agencies?"
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Government

+ - 139 Conflict Of Interest Derails UK Government Open Source Consultation-> 1

Submitted by
judgecorp
judgecorp writes "The UK government's consultation about the use of open source in public sector IT has been sent back to square one with discussion results scrapped because the facilitiator, Andy Hopkirk, is involved with Microsoft. Hopkirk is well regarded, but the open source community feel the debate dismissed RF (royalty free) standards in favour of the (FRAND) devinition which is more favourable to proprietary vendors."
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Australia

+ - 210 Optus loses second battle in Aussie TV-timeshifting battle->

Submitted by beaverdownunder
beaverdownunder writes "After winning an initial legal battle to continue its mobile TV Now terrestrial-television re-broadcasting service, Optus has lost a second battle in Australian Federal court. The Optus system 'time-shifted' broadcast signals by two minutes, and then streamed them to customers' mobile phones.

In the previous ruling, the judge sided with Optus' argument that since the customer requested the service, they were the ones recording the signal, and thus was fair-use under Australian copyright law. However, the new ruling had declared Optus to be the true entity recording and re-distributing the broadcasts, and thus is in violation of the law.

There has been no word yet on whether Optus will appeal the decision, but as they could be retroactively liable for a great deal of damages, it is almost certain that they will."

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ISS

+ - 179 DARPA Aims to Reuse Space Junk->

Submitted by
CowboyRobot
CowboyRobot writes "Space junk has increased to the point where pieces of it are colliding and breaking into smaller pieces. The problem is now so bad that NASA has had to modify the design of satellites to protect them from flying debris. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) wants to turn disabled satellites and their components, including antennas and solar arrays, into functioning systems and is hosting a conference on June 26 to explore how to build "refurbished" satellites from already-orbiting material for less than what it would cost to build them from scratch and launch them from the surface of the Earth."
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Bug

+ - 143 Microsoft patches major Hotmail 0-day flaw after widespread exploitation->

Submitted by suraj.sun
suraj.sun writes "Microsoft quietly fixed a flaw in Hotmail's password reset system that allowed anyone to reset the password of any Hotmail account last Friday. The company was notified of the flaw, by researchers at Vulnerability Lab, on April 20th and responded with a fix within hours—but not until after widespread attacks, with the bug apparently spreading "like wild fire" in the hacking community.

Hotmail's password reset system uses a token system to ensure that only the account holder can reset their password — a link with the token is sent to an account linked to the Hotmail account — and clicking the link lets the account owner reset their password. However, the validation of these tokens isn't handled properly by Hotmail, allowing attackers to reset passwords of any account.

Initially hackers were offering to crack accounts for $20 a throw. However, the technique became publicly known and started to spread rapidly with Web and YouTube tutorials showing the technique popping up across the Arabic-speaking Internet."

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Medicine

+ - 160 Bionic eye patient tests planned for 2013->

Submitted by
angry tapir
angry tapir writes "Australian researchers are getting ready to test a bionic eye on patients in 2013. The eye consists of 98 electrodes that stimulate nerve cells in the retina, which is a tissue lining the back of the eye that converts light into electrical impulses necessary for sight, and allow users to better differentiate between light and dark. With the bionic eye, images taken by a camera are processed in an external unit, such as a smartphone, then relayed to the implant’s chip. This stimulates the retina by sending electric signals along the optic nerve into the brain where they are decoded as vision."
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Privacy

+ - 139 House Passes CISPA->

Submitted by wiedzmin
wiedzmin writes "The House approved Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act with a 248 to 168 vote today. CISPA allows internet service providers to share Internet "threat" information with government agencies, including DHS and NSA, without having to protect any personally identifying data of its customers, without a court order. It effectively immunizes ISPs from privacy lawsuits for disclosing customer information, grants them anti-trust protection on colluding on cybersecurity issues and allows them to bypass privacy laws when sharing data with each other."
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Mars

+ - 201 BOLD plan to find Mars life for cheap->

Submitted by
techfun89
techfun89 writes "There is a BOLD new plan for detecting signs of microbial life on Mars. The nickname is BOLD, which stands for Biological Oxidant and Life Detection Initiative, would be a follow-up to the 1976 Mars Viking life-detection experiments.

"We have much better technology that we could use," says BOLD lead scientist Dirk Schulze-Makuch, with Washington State University. He elaborates, "Our idea is to make a relatively cheap mission and go more directly to characterize and solve the big question about the soil properties on Mars and life detection."

To help figure out the life-detection mystery, Schulze-Makuch and his colleagues would fly a set of six pyramid-shaped probes that would crash land, pointy end down, so they embed themselves four to eight inches into the soil. One of the instruments includes a sensor that can detect a single molecule of DNA or other nucleotide."

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Intel

+ - 225 Ivy Bridge running hotter than Intel's last-gen CPU-> 1

Submitted by crookedvulture
crookedvulture writes "The launch of Intel's Ivy Bridge CPUs made headlines earlier this week, but the next-gen processor's story is still being told. When overclocked, Ivy Bridge runs as much as 20C hotter than its Sandy Bridge predecessor at the same speed, despite the fact that the two chips have comparable power consumption. There are several reasons for these toasty tendencies. The new 22-nm process used to fabricate the CPU produces a smaller die with less surface area to dissipate heat. Intel has changed the thermal interface material between the CPU die and its heat spreader. Ivy also requires a much bigger step up in voltage to hit the same speeds as Sandy Bridge. Looks like serious overclockers are better off sticking with Intel's last-generation chips."
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Databases

+ - 178 Critical Vuln Found In All Current Oracle DB Servers->

Submitted by
chicksdaddy
chicksdaddy writes "There's a critical remotely exploitable vulnerability in all of the current versions of the Oracle database server that can enable an attacker to intercept traffic and execute arbitrary commands on the server. The bug, which Oracle reported as fixed in the most recent Critical Patch Update, is only fixed in upcoming versions of the database, not in currently shipping releases, and there is publicly available proof-of-concept exploit code circulating.

The vulnerability lies in the TNS Listener service, which on Oracle databases functions as the service that routes connection requests from clients to the server itself. A researcher named Joxean Koret said that he discovered the vulnerability several years ago and then sold the details of the bug to a third party broker, who reported it to Oracle in 2008. Oracle credited Koret for reporting the bug in its April CPU, but Koret said in a post on the Full Disclosure mailing list this week that the flaw was not actually fixed in the current versions of the Oracle database server."

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NASA

+ - 181 Notion of extraterrestrial life more whimsical than factual?->

Submitted by
coondoggie
coondoggie writes "Princeton University researchers are throwing some cold water on the hot notion that astrobiologists and other scientists expect to one day find life on other planets. Recent discoveries of planets similar to Earth in size and proximity to the planets' respective suns have sparked scientific and public excitement about the possibility of also finding Earth-like life on those worlds, but the expectation that life — from bacteria to sentient beings — has or will develop on other planets as on Earth might be based more on optimism than scientific evidence..."
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