61525825
submission
itwbennett writes:
A group of researchers from Google, the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and the University of Nebraska undertook a study of over 26 million builds by 18,000 Google engineers from November 2012 through July 2013 to better understand what causes software builds to fail and, by extension, to improve developer productivity. And, while Google isn't representative of every developer everywhere, there are a few findings that stand out: Build frequency and developer (in)experience don't affect failure rates, most build errors are dependency-related, and C++ generates more build errors than Java (but they’re easier to fix).
61525807
submission
jfruh writes:
Intel is developing a series of robot kits for hobbyists, ranging from 'Jimmy', a $1,500 'social robot,' to a more robust $16,000 model. The robots are powered by Intel x86 chips, are programmable, and can have exoskeletons parts produced at home by 3-D printers.
61476119
submission
itwbennett writes:
A browser add-on, dubbed 'Privacy Icons', from Disconnect and TRUSTe analyzes websites' privacy policies, and breaks them down into nine categories, including location tracking, do-not-track browser request compliance and data retention policies. The pay-what-you-want software is available now for recent versions of Chrome, Firefox and Opera.
61445777
submission
itwbennett writes:
Police in Dallas are scrambling after difficulties using a new records management system caused more than 20 jail inmates, including a number of people charged with violent crimes, to be set free. The prisoners were able to get out of jail because police officers struggling to learn the new system didn't file cases on them within three days, as required by law.
61369855
submission
itwbennett writes:
ICANN CEO Fadi Chehadé hopes to make progress on preparations to take over running the world's central DNS servers from the U.S. government's National Telecommunications and Information Agency when the organization meets in London next week. 'I think this is a meeting where the ICANN community has to deal with the fact, the good fact, that its relationship with the U.S. government, which characterized its birth, its existence and growth, has now run its course,' Chehadé said.
61364315
submission
jfruh writes:
Creators of compilers are in an arms race to improve performance. But according to a presentantation at this week's annual USENIX conference, those performance boosts can undermine your code's security. For instance, a compiler might find a subroutine that checks a huge bound of memory beyond what's allocated to the program, decide it's an error, and eliminate it from the compiled machine code — even though it's a necessary defense against buffer overflow attacks.
61364003
submission
jfruh writes:
When the U.S. government shut down the Silk Road marketplace, they seized its assets, including roughly $18 million in bitcoin, and despite the government's ambivalence about the cryptocurrency, they plan to auction the bitcoin off to the highest bidder, as they do with most criminal assets. Ironically, considering many bitcoin users' intense desire for privacy, the U.S. Marshall service accidentally revealed the complete list of potential bidders by sending a message to everyone on the list and putting their addresses in the CC field instead of the BCC field.
61362815
submission
itwbennett writes:
A proposed $324.5 million settlement of claims that Silicon Valley companies including Google and Apple suppressed worker wages by agreeing not to hire each others' employees may not be high enough, a judge signaled on Thursday. Judge Lucy Koh didn't say whether she would approve the settlement, but she did say in court that she was worried about whether that amount was fair to the roughly 64,000 technology workers represented in the case. Throughout Thursday's hearing, she questioned not just the amount but the logic behind the settlement as presented by lawyers for both the plaintiffs and the defendants.
61336701
submission
itwbennett writes:
The computerized trading platform for currencies owned by Australian company Alice is too abstract to be patented, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously, in Alice v. CLS Bank, released Thursday. The Alice patent at the heart of the case was to safeguard financial transactions against the risk that a party in the deal would renege. It was essentially a computerized version of what is known as 'intermediated settlement,' Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the majority. 'Merely requiring generic computer implementation fails to transform that abstract idea into a patent-eligible invention,' he added. The ruling isn't a direct assault on software patents, as some critics had hoped. But it should make it more difficult to get weak patents approved, said Julie Samuels, executive director of tech entrepreneur trade group Engine Advocacy and a long-time critic of software patents.
61335603
submission
Trailrunner7 writes:
Code Spaces, a code-hosting and software collaboration platform, has been put out of business by an attacker who deleted the company’s data and backups.
Officials wrote a lengthy explanation and apology on the company’s website, promising to spend its current resources helping customers recover whatever data may be left.
“Code Spaces will not be able to operate beyond this point, the cost of resolving this issue to date and the expected cost of refunding customers who have been left without the service they paid for will put Code Spaces in an irreversible position both financially and in terms of ongoing credibility,” read the note. “As such at this point in time we have no alternative but to cease trading and concentrate on supporting our affected customers in exporting any remaining data they have left with us.”
The beginning of the end was a DDoS attack initiated yesterday that was accompanied by an intrusion into Code Spaces’ Amazon EC2 control panel. Extortion demands were left for Code Spaces officials, along with a Hotmail address they were supposed to use to contact the attackers.
61331001
submission
jfruh writes:
Google famously custom-builds its own servers and data centers to accommodate its massive compute needs. But Urs Hölzle, Google's senior VP in charge of technical infrastructure, says that this is an entirely utilitarian strategy — that nobody else was offering the capabilities to provide compute power at the price that Google needed — and that once the cloud computing industry ramps up and uses the techniques Google pioneered, the company will be happy to rent time on other people's servers.
61330855
submission
jfruh writes:
As part of its censorship blitz around this month's 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, China has cut off access to Dropbox for its citizens. While most Chinese use home-grown file-sharing cloud services like Baidu, Dropbox represented an opportunity to share information with those outside Chinese government control — an opportunity that has now been quashed.
61330059
submission
itwbennett writes:
Responding to more than a year of pressure, Google and Microsoft will follow Apple in adding an anti-theft "kill switch" to their smartphone operating systems. In New York, iPhone theft was down 19 percent in the first five months of this year. Over the same period, thefts of Samsung devices — which did not include a kill switch until one was introduced on Verizon-only models in April — rose by over 40 percent. In San Francisco, robberies of iPhones were 38 percent lower in the six months after the iOS 7 introduction versus the six months before, while in London thefts over the same period were down by 24 percent. In both cities, robberies of Samsung devices increased. 'These statistics validate what we always knew to be true, that a technological solution has the potential to end the victimization of wireless consumers everywhere,' said San Francisco District Attorney George Gascon.
61313913
submission
itwbennett writes:
The ongoing congestion study, by MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis at the University of California's San Diego (UCSD) Supercomputer Center, is preliminary and doesn't assign fault for congestion, but it does point to a poor experience for ISP customers and Netflix, said David Clark, a senior research scientist at MIT. Traffic congestion at interconnection points between broadband providers and backbone providers doesn't appear to be widespread, with congestion often just two or three hours a day, said Clark. But in some cases, U.S. ISPs have experienced periods of congestion on interconnection points with backbone providers that last for months at a time. For their parts, representatives of both Netflix and the cable broadband industry said the study supports their positions on who's to blame for the congestion.
61265381
submission
jfruh writes:
MIT researchers have developed a protocol they call HTTPA, or Accountable HTTP, that aims to give users more control over their private data. The protocol marks any data the user deems private with restrictions on use before its sent over the Internet to requesting systems. And users will be able to see who else on the Internet is requesting that specific data — although that aspect of the system requires a trusted third-party monitor, which opens further privacy questions.
