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Networking

Can the US Actually Cultivate Local Competition in Broadband? 135

Posted by timothy from the but-what-we-really-want-is-more-rules dept.
New submitter riskkeyesq writes with a link to a blog post from Dane Jasper, CEO of Sonic.net, about what Jasper sees as the deepest problem in the U.S. broadband market and the Internet in general: "There are a number of threats to the Internet as a system for innovation, commerce and education today. They include net neutrality, the price of Internet access in America, performance, rural availability and privacy. But none of these are the root issue, they're just symptoms. The root cause of all of these symptoms is a disease: a lack of competition for consumer Internet access." Soft landings for former legislators, lobbyists disguised as regulators, hundreds of thousands of miles of fiber sitting unused, the sham that is the internet provider free market is keeping the US in a telecommunications third-world. What, exactly, can American citizens do about it? One upshot, in Jasper's opinion (hardly disinterested, is his role at CEO at an ISP that draws praise from the EFF for its privacy policies) is this: "Today’s FCC should return to the roots of the Telecom Act, and reinforce the unbundling requirements, assuring that they are again technology neutral. This will create an investment ladder to facilities for competitive carriers, opening access to build out and serve areas that are beyond our reach today."
Android

Visual Studio 2015 Supports CLANG and Android (Emulator Included) 192

Posted by timothy from the exigent-realities dept.
Billly Gates (198444) writes "What would be unthinkable a decade ago is Visual Studio supporting W3C HTML and CSS and now apps on other platforms. Visual Studio 2015 preview is available for download which includes support for LLVM/Clang, Android development, and even Linux development with Mono using Xamarin. A little more detail is here. A tester also found support for Java, ANT, SQL LITE, and WebSocket4web. We see IE improving in terms of more standards and Visual Studio Online even supports IOS and MacOSX development. Is this a new Microsoft emerging? In any case it is nice to have an alternative to Google tools for Android development."
Programming

Microsoft To Open Source .NET and Take It Cross-Platform 525

Posted by Soulskill from the april-fools-headlines-from-10-years-ago dept.
An anonymous reader writes: Microsoft today announced plans to open source .NET, the company's software framework that primarily runs on Windows, and release it on GitHub. Furthermore, Microsoft also unveiled plans to take .NET cross-platform by targeting both Mac OS X and Linux. In the next release, Microsoft plans to open source the entire .NET server stack, from ASP.NET 5 down to the Common Language Runtime and Base Class Libraries. The company will let developers build .NET cloud applications on multiple platforms; it is promising future support of the .NET Core server runtime and framework for Mac and Linux. Microsoft is also making Visual Studio free for small teams.
Security

First Victims of the Stuxnet Worm Revealed 39

Posted by Soulskill from the patient-zero dept.
An anonymous reader writes: Analyzing more than 2,000 Stuxnet files collected over a two-year period, Kaspersky Lab can identify the first victims of the Stuxnet worm. Initially security researchers had no doubt that the whole attack had a targeted nature. The code of the Stuxnet worm looked professional and exclusive; there was evidence that extremely expensive zero-day vulnerabilities were used. However, it wasn't yet known what kind of organizations were attacked first and how the malware ultimately made it right through to the uranium enrichment centrifuges in the particular top secret facilities. Kaspersky Lab analysis sheds light on these questions.
Electronic Frontier Foundation

Computer Scientists Ask Supreme Court To Rule APIs Can't Be Copyrighted 260

Posted by Soulskill from the pleading-for-sanity dept.
An anonymous reader writes: The EFF, representing a coalition of computer scientists, filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court yesterday hoping for a ruling that APIs can't be copyrighted. The names backing the brief include Bjarne Stroustrup, Ken Thompson, Guido van Rossum, and many other luminaries. "The brief explains that the freedom to re-implement and extend existing APIs has been the key to competition and progress in both hardware and software development. It made possible the emergence and success of many robust industries we now take for granted—for example, mainframes, PCs, and workstations/servers—by ensuring that competitors could challenge established players and advance the state of the art. The litigation began several years ago when Oracle sued Google over its use of Java APIs in the Android OS. Google wrote its own implementation of the Java APIs, but, in order to allow developers to write their own programs for Android, Google's implementation used the same names, organization, and functionality as the Java APIs."
Security

Home Depot Says Hackers Grabbed 53 Million Email Addresses 99

Posted by samzenpus from the reply-all dept.
wiredmikey writes Home Depot said on Thursday that hackers managed to access 53 million customer email addresses during the massive breach that was disclosed in September when the retail giant announced that 56 million customer payment cards were compromised in a cyber attack. The files containing the stolen email addresses did not contain passwords, payment card information or other sensitive personal information, the company said. The company also said that the hackers acquired elevated rights that allowed them to navigate portions of Home Depot's network and to deploy unique, custom-built malware on its self-checkout systems in the U.S. and Canada.

Comment Re:It's Fun (Score 1) 485

by theskipper (#48308521) Attached to: Silicon Valley Swings To Republicans

Don't know, not much of a history buff. So was just curious if you had a citation about the etymology of the term.

Regarding changing the term in common language, as an old fart I tend to not pay attention to political correctness efforts like that. If the change shows up in the USPTO trademark database then I'll consider changing the usage. Until then, it sounds to me like a bunch of old women arguing about Sally's new boyfriend over Sunday tea.

Comment Re:It's Fun (Score 1) 485

by theskipper (#48306845) Attached to: Silicon Valley Swings To Republicans

I must be missing something. According to Wikipedia, the term "Democratic Party" goes back to 1828. Are you saying it was Andrew Jackson who used it as a political strategy?

And to be honest, I didn't even know there was an effort to change the term to "Democrat Party". Is that a cable news/talk radio thing?

Comment Re:We can do that thing you like (Score 2) 230

by theskipper (#48262543) Attached to: Windows 10 Gets a Package Manager For the Command Line

Hang on a second. Microsoft is a proprietary software vendor and will attack anything that jeopardizes their revenue stream. They're putting the "free candy" sign on the outside of their van based on a business decision, not because they want to create some warm and fuzzy community effort (i.e. actually give out free candy!).

It's in their DNA to only promote things that will further generating revenue because their shareholders require it (and rightfully so, they are the owners).

Point being, they must have opened up that other stuff because some competitive threat existed, or there was a sound basis that it would create further lock-in and recurring revenue down the road. It doesn't follow that future software releases like this must be opened just because they opened other pieces of their software portfolio.
Government

Hackers Breach White House Network 98

Posted by Soulskill from the dozens-of-solitaire-games-compromised dept.
wiredmikey writes: The White House's unclassified computer network was recently breached by intruders, a U.S. official said Tuesday. While the White House has not said so, The Washington Post reported that the Russian government was thought to be behind the act. Several recent reports have linked Russia to cyber attacks, including a report from FireEye on Tuesday that linked Russia back to an espionage campaign dating back to 2007. Earlier this month, iSight Partners revealed that a threat group allegedly linked with the Russian government had been leveraging a Microsoft Windows zero-day vulnerability to target NATO, the European Union, and various private energy and telecommunications organizations in Europe. The group has been dubbed the "Sandworm Team" and it has been using weaponized PowerPoint files in its recent attacks. Trend Micro believes the Sandworm team also has their eyes set on compromising SCADA-based systems.
Security

JP Morgan Chase Breach Compromised Data of 76 Million Households 76

Posted by Soulskill from the go-big-or-go-home dept.
JakartaDean writes with news that the cyberattack on J.P. Morgan Chase this summer resulted in stolen information on 76 million households and 7 million businesses. The compromised data included names, email addresses, phone numbers, and addresses. The bank said the attackers were unable to gather account numbers, social security numbers, or passwords. The hackers appeared to have obtained a list of the applications and programs that run on JPMorgan's computers — a road map of sorts — which they could crosscheck with known vulnerabilities in each program and web application, in search of an entry point back into the bank's systems, according to several people with knowledge of the results of the bank's forensics investigation, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity. ... Even if no customer financial information was taken, the apparent breadth and depth of the JPMorgan attack shows how vulnerable Wall Street institutions are to cybercrime.

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