sega_sai - Slashdot User

Submission + - four strangest bugs in the history of Android

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 23, 2011 @04:01PM

An anonymous reader writes: Every mobile operating system has its foibles, but Android also has to contend with the whims a dozen device manufacturers and fragmented software. Taken together, this situation has resulted in some peculiar Android bugs. Whether it’s a camera that tells time, a screen that just isn’t right, or SMS flying though the ether, Android has a colorful history with software and hardware bugs.

Submission + - Google+: Worse Than a Ghost Town (pbs.org)

Submitted by Pigskin-Referee on Friday September 23, 2011 @02:42PM

Pigskin-Referee writes: When Google rolled out the beta of their "magical and revolutionary" social network (oops, sorry — that's Apple's line), I dutifully signed up like everybody else in the tech industry. I played around with it and found some features I really liked — and some that made me scratch my head and think "Why in the world can't I do that? I can do it on Facebook." I circlified my friends and acquaintances, followed a few people I knew only by reputation, thoroughly enjoyed the "instant upload" feature for smart phones despite its scary aspects, got thoroughly annoyed while trying to navigate the interface a few times, and then ... headed back to Facebook. It seems as if most others are doing the same thing; I've noticed a drop-off in posts on G+ lately (when I bother to go there). I haven't given up on it, but it's an afterthought, whereas Facebook is a part of my life. It's not that Facebook is technically better — in many ways, it's not (although Facebook as been hard at work, making improvements to give people the functionality they've found and like on G+). Ultimately, social networking is about the people, and in general, the people I care about and enjoy "hanging out" with (to borrow a G+ term) are on Facebook. I'll log onto G+ if I want to get into a technical discussion or a political argument. Many of my colleagues are there. But my friends are on Facebook.

Submission + - PostgreSQL 9.1 released (postgresql.org)

Submitted by sega_sai on Monday September 12, 2011 @01:56PM

sega_sai writes: Today the new version of open source database PostgreSQL was released. This version provides many important and interesting features such as synchronous replication, serializable snapshot isolation, support of per-column collations, K-nearest neighbor indexing, foreign data wrappers, support of SELinux permission controls and many others. The complete list of changes is available here

Submission + - Internet Connection Poll 1

Submitted by

jones_supa

on Sunday September 11, 2011 @04:46AM

jones_supa writes: "Approximately how speedy is your Internet connection?

Pony express
256kb/s
512kb/s
1Mb/s
2Mb/s
4Mb/s
10Mb/s
100Mb/s
1Gb/s
Even more
Dunno, ask CowboyNeal"

Submission + - GlobalSign Acknowledges It was Breached (securityweek.com)

Submitted by wiredmikey on Friday September 09, 2011 @10:16PM

wiredmikey writes: GlobalSign, one of the longest established Certification Authorities (CA), acknowledged late Friday that it found evidence of a breach to the server hosting its Web site.

“The breached web server has always been isolated from all other infrastructure and is used only to serve the www.globalsign.com website,” the statement read. “At present there is no further evidence of breach other than the isolated www web server. As an additional precaution, we continue to monitor all activity to all services closely. The investigation and high threat approach to returning services to normal continues.”

The announcement follows claims from an individual identifying himself as “Comodohacker”, a 21-year old hacker acting as an individual, saying he had compromised systems at GlobalSign. “I have access to their entire server, got DB backups, their linux / tar gzipped and downloaded, I even have private key of their OWN globalsign.com domain, hahahaa,” he wrote.

The company said it would bring its certificate services back online on Monday, but it’s unclear if this is still the case.

Submission + - Apple v Google on Android: New Shoe to Drop? (infoworld.com)

Submitted by

GMGruman

on Friday September 09, 2011 @11:13AM

GMGruman writes: "Last week, Apple suggested in a legal finding that a key Android technology was "inspired" by Apple's work when the man who later became Android's chief was working at Apple. This week, Google sold some patents to HTC to use against Apple in the HTC-Apple patent fight relating to Android phones. Bill Snyder shows how Apple may be preparing for a direct assault on Google over Android."

Submission + - Heat your home with a server or two (i-programmer.info) 1

Submitted by mikejuk on Saturday July 23, 2011 @09:05AM

mikejuk writes: A new paper from Microsoft Research suggests a radical but slightly mad scheme for dealing with some of the more basic problems of the data centre.
Rather than build server farms that produce a lot of waster heat, why not have distributed Data Furnaces, that heat home and offices at the same time as providing cloud computing? This is a serious suggestion and they provide facts and figures to make it all seem viable. So when it gets cold all you have to do is turn up the number crunching...

Submission + - Android passwords are stored on disk in plain text (google.com) 1

Submitted by derGoldstein on Friday July 22, 2011 @08:25PM

derGoldstein writes: A new issue page was added to the Android project site: "Issue 10809: Password is stored on disk in plain text". The issue details: "The password for email accounts is stored into the SQLite DB which in turn stores it on the phone's file system in plain text". Andy Stadler replied in a comment: "rest assured, I am not closing this bug. We recognize that this is causing concern for some users, and we're going to look at identifying steps that can make your data more secure."

Submission + - Oracle Removes Former Sun CEO's Blog Posts (digitizor.com) 1

Submitted by

kai_hiwatari

on Friday July 22, 2011 @08:01PM

kai_hiwatari writes: "When Google announced Android back in 2007, Jonathan Schwartz, the CEO of Sun Microsystems at the time, wrote a blog post congratulating Google.
Until recently, Schwartz’s blog post published on November 5th, 2007 titled “Congratulations Google. Red Hat and the Java Community” could be found at http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/congratulations_google. After the acquisition of Sun Microsystems, the URL was redirected to http://blogs.oracle.com/jonathan/entry/congratulations_google. However, if you check either of the links now, you will get a 404 page.
It is worth noting that Google included this blog post in its defense against Oracle's Android lawsuit."

Submission + - Text messages indexed by a search engine (en.rian.ru)

Submitted by sega_sai on Monday July 18, 2011 @12:50PM

sega_sai writes: Today it was discovered that thousands of text messages which were sent using the website of Russian mobile operator Megafon have been indexed together with the phone numbers by Russian search engine Yandex and were available for search. After the discovery the text messages were quickly removed from search results. One of the many reasons for the screw-up was absence of robots.txt on the website of the mobile operator.

Submission + - Women Remain The Ignored Audience In Gaming (industrygamers.com)

Submitted by donniebaseball23 on Thursday June 16, 2011 @05:59PM

donniebaseball23 writes: Research firm Interpret has released its new report, “Games and Girls: Video Gaming’s Ignored Audience”, which finds that while the female audience in gaming has grown, games tailored to their needs and preferences continue to go missing. Women represent 50% of the market and their usage of HD consoles like Xbox 360 and PS3 is rising. "It remains to be seen whether developers and marketers will effectively invest in understanding and exploiting the undertapped female gaming market," said Courtney Johnson, analyst for Intrepret.

Submission + - Recovering from bank fraud? 4

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 05, 2011 @12:59PM

An anonymous reader writes: Last week, I logged into my online banking account to find that thousands of dollars had been fraudulently withdrawn from my account. My bank claims to have a policy of restoring fraudulent transactions, but they are refusing to do so, arguing that the transaction was not really fraudulent. Of course, I'm lock out of my other savings so now I'm having issues paying my day-to-day bills. Has anyone on Slashdot had experience with resolving this sort of issue?

Submission + - Is SHA-512 the way to go?

Submitted by crutchy on Saturday June 04, 2011 @07:36PM

crutchy writes: When I was setting up my secure website I got really paranoid about SSL encryption, so I created a certificate using OpenSLL for SHA-512 encryption. I don't know much about SHA (except bits that I can remember from Wikipedia), but I figure that if you're going to go to the trouble (or expense) of setting up SSL, you may as well go for the best you can get, right? Also, what would be the minimum level of encryption required for say online banking? I've read about how SHA-1 was "broken", but from what I can tell it still takes many hours. What is the practical risk to the real internet from this capability? Would a sort of rolling key be a possible next step, where each SSL-encrypted stream has its own private/public key pair generated on the fly, and things like passwords and bank account numbers were broken up and sent in multiple streams with different private/public key pairs? This would of course require more server grunt to generate these keys (or we could take a leaf from Google's book and just have separate server clusters designed solely for that job), but then if computing performance was a limiting factor, the threat to security of these hashes wouldn't be a problem in the first place. I guess with all security infrastructure, trust becomes a more important factor than technical abilities. Can I trust that my SSL provider hasn't been hacked (or at least snooped)? How do I know some disgruntled IT admin hasn't sold the private key of his company's root CA to the same organisation that developed the conficker virus? It would certainly make for a more profitable payload. I've read some of Bruce Schneier's work (I'm subscribed to Cryptogram) and he tends to highlight the FUD that surrounds internet security, and I agree that there is a lot of FUD, but complete ignorance and blase attitude toward security can also be taken advantage of. Where is the middle ground?

Submission + - SlashDot Slashdotted (slashdot.org) 1

Submitted by wulfmans on Saturday June 04, 2011 @01:27PM

wulfmans writes: Since yesterday on and off SlashDot stories have been unavailable to users and their website VERY slow and unresponsive.
http://news.slashdot.org/story/11/06/04/158209/Skype-Is-Working-To-Defeat-the-Reverse-Engineering
Error 503 Service Unavailable
Service Unavailable
Guru Meditation:
XID: 258617160
Varnish cache server
I doubt this will be published but i had to submit it as a story

Submission + - Strip searches of the mind: Laptop border searches (lextechnologiae.com)

Submitted by

pacergh

on Saturday June 04, 2011 @07:50AM

pacergh writes: "The government can search your laptop with no warrant, probable cause, or reasonable suspicion at the border. Law journal articles have argued that reasonable suspicion should be required. This article examines the origins of this fourth amendment exception and why folks should think about it before traveling abroad."

Slashdot Top Deals