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Security

Submission + - ICO Warns Toshiba Over Data Breach (itproportal.com)

Submitted by hypnosec
hypnosec writes: Toshiba Information Systems has been given a slap on the wrist by the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), following a data spillage. This happened during an on-line competition that Toshiba organised last year. Back in September 2011, a concerned member of the public contacted the ICO and informed the body that some data pertaining to those registered for the competition was accessible. In fact, the personal details of 20 entrants were compromised in a security flaw on the site. Those details included names, addresses and dates of birth, along with other contact information. The ICO investigated and found that Toshiba's security measures weren't thorough enough, and hence, didn't detect the vulnerability — from a mistake, made by a third-party web designer. A fine hasn't been levied, but Toshiba has signed an undertaking to ensure this doesn't happen again.

Submission + - Ellison doesn't know if Java is free (cnet.com)

Submitted by Emacs.Cmode
Emacs.Cmode writes: Among the highlights emanating from U.S. District Court in San Francisco courtroom 8 today was Oracle CEO Larry Ellison's response to a question regarding the status of the Java programming language, which his company acquired when it bought Sun Microsystems in 2010.
Asked by Google's lead attorney, Robert Van Nest, if the Java language is free, Ellison was slow to respond. Judge William Alsup pushed Ellison to answer with a yes or no. As ZDNet reporter Rachel King observed in the courtroom, Ellison resisted and huffed, "I don't know."
Science

Submission + - 'Smart' labware made with bathroom sealant and a 3D printer (nature.com)

Submitted by ananyo
ananyo writes: Researchers have used a 3D printer and quick-setting bathroom sealant to make a variety of customized vessels for chemical reactions. The method (abstract) allows labware to become, for the first time, an integral part of the experiment itself.
The scientists printed one vessel with catalyst-laced 'ink', enabling the container walls to drive chemical reactions. Another container included built-in electrodes, made from skinny strips of polymer printed with a conductive carbon-based additive. The strips carried currents that stimulated an electrochemical reaction within the vessel. The system could allow scientists to test chemical processes in ways that were not economical before — producing just a few tablets of a particular drug, for example, for further tests or clinical trials.
Education

Submission + - Teachers Think White Females Lag in Math (utexas.edu) 2

Submitted by ancarett
ancarett writes: Researchers from the University of Texas at Austin found that American high school math teachers tend to rate white female students’ math abilities lower than those of their white male peers, even when their grades and test scores are comparable. Their research drew from the Education Longitudional Study (2002) with data on about 15,000 students and their teachers. According to the researchers "teachers hold the belief that math is just easier for white males than it is for white females." Their findings appear in the April 2012 issue of Gender & Society.
The Almighty Buck

Submission + - Banned From Kickstarter For Being Cyberstalked (rachelmarone.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Rachel Marone has been a victim of cyberstalking for 10 years. In 2011, she had a project on Kickstarter shut down because of the high volume of spam posted in the comment section of the project. Recently, Marone's manager spoke to Kickstarter again to see how she could avoid having a new project banned if the cyberstalker showed up again. They replied, 'If there is any chance that Rachel will receive spam from a stalker on her project, she should not create one. We simply cannot allow a project to become a forum for rampant spam, as her past project became. If this happens again, we will need to discard the project and permanently suspend Rachel’s account.' On her website, Marone sums up the situation thus: 'I am being told that I cannot crowdfund because I am a stalking victim. Daniella Jaeger is sending out the message that if you are being stalked you are unwelcome on Kickstarter. With so many women being stalking targets this does not seem reasonable to me.'

Submission + - Former TSA Administrator Speaks (wsj.com)

Submitted by phantomfive
phantomfive writes: Former TSA head Kip Hawley talks about the TSA: "it's simply no longer the case that killing a few people on board a plane could lead to a hijacking. Never again will a terrorist be able to breach the cockpit simply with a box cutter or a knife. The cockpit doors have been reinforced, and passengers, flight crews and air marshals would intervene.

I wanted to reduce the amount of time that officers spent searching for low-risk objects, but politics intervened at every turn. Lighters were untouchable, having been banned by an act of Congress. And despite the radically reduced risk that knives and box cutters presented in the post-9/11 world, allowing them back on board was considered too emotionally charged for the American public.
Programming

Submission + - Documentation as a Bug-Finding Tool (madebyknight.com)

Submitted by Sekrimo
Sekrimo writes: I recently came across this excellent article on an interesting advantage to writing documentation. While the author acknowledges that developers often write documentation so that others may better understand their code, he claims that documenting can also be a useful way to find bugs before they ever become an issue. Taking the time to write this documentation helps to ensure that you've thought through every aspect of your program fully, and cleared up any issues that may arise.
Programming

Submission + - The ugly underbelly of coder culture (infoworld.com) 4

Submitted by
snydeq
snydeq writes: "Today's developers are overwhelmingly young and male, and they're barring the door from a more diverse workforce, writes Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister. 'Software development isn't just failing to attract women. It's actively pushing them away. ... Put all the pieces together, and you're left with an impression of developers that's markedly different from the geeks and nerds they're made out to be in popular culture. On the contrary, developers harbor the same attitudes and engage in the same behaviors you see whenever a subculture is overwhelmingly dominated by young males. They've even coined a clever name for programmers who think and behave like fraternity pledges: brogrammers,' McAllister writes. 'Developers like to think of their culture as a meritocracy, where the very best developers naturally rise to the top. But as long as the industry tends to exclude more than half of the potential workforce, that's nothing but pure arrogance. '"
Crime

Submission + - iPhone users sue AT&T for letting thieves re-activate their stolen devices (forbes.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Following on the heels of the FCC and U.S. mobile carriers finally announcing plans to create a national database for stolen phones, a group of iPhone users filed a class action lawsuit against AT&T on Tuesday claiming that it has aided and abetted cell phone thieves by refusing to brick stolen cell phones.

AT&T has “[made] millions of dollars in improper profits, by forcing legitimate customers, such as these Plaintiffs, to buy new cell phones, and buy new cell phone plans, while the criminals who stole the phone are able to simply walk into AT&T stories and ‘re-activate’ the devices, using different, cheap, readily-available ‘SIM’ cards,” states their complaint.

AT&T, of course, says the suit is "meritless."

Submission + - Whistle Blower in limbo after reporting H-1B Visa fraud at Infosys (nytimes.com)

Submitted by McGruber
McGruber writes: The New York Times has the sad story (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/13/us/whistle-blower-claiming-visa-fraud-keeps-his-job-but-not-his-work.html?hpw) of Jack B. Palmer, an employee of Infosys, the giant Indian outsourcing firm.

17 months ago, Mr. Palmer made a quiet internal complaint that Infosys was committing visa fraud by bringing "in Indian workers on short-term visitor visas, known as B-1, instead of longer-term temporary visas, known as H-1B, which are more costly and time-consuming to obtain."

Since making his complaint, Mr. Palmer "has been harassed by superiors and co-workers, sidelined with no work assignment, shut out of the company’s computers, denied bonuses and hounded by death threats."
Canada

Submission + - Canada Post Files Copyright Lawsuit Over Crowdsourced Postal Code Database (michaelgeist.ca)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Canada Post has filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Geolytica, which operates GeoCoder.ca, a website that provides several geocoding services including free access to a crowdsourced compiled database of Canadian postal codes. Canada Post argues that it is the exclusive copyright holder of all Canadian postal codes and claims that GeoCoder appropriated the database and made unauthorized reproductions. GeoCoder compiled the postal code database by using crowdsource techniques without any reliance on Canada Post's database and argues that no copyright in postal codes and no infringement.
Math

How Windows FreeCell Gave Rise To Online Crowdsourcing 93

Posted by samzenpus from the mastering-the-game dept.
TPIRman writes "In 1994, a physics doctoral student named Dave Ring assembled more than 100 math and puzzle enthusiasts on Usenet for what became one of the earliest online 'crowdsourcing' projects. Their goal: to determine if every hand in Windows' FreeCell solitaire game was in fact winnable, as the program's help file implied. Their efforts soon focused in on one incredibly stubborn hand: #11,982. They couldn't beat it, but in the process of trying, they proved the viability of an idea that would later be refined with crowdsourcing models like Amazon's Mechanical Turk."
Network

The First Universal Quantum Network 156

Posted by samzenpus from the faster-than-fast dept.
MrSeb writes "German scientists at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics have created the first 'universal quantum network' that could be feasibly scaled up to become a quantum internet. So far their quantum network only spans two labs spaced 21 meters apart, but the scientists stress that longer distances and multiple nodes are possible. The network's construction is ingenious: Each node is represented by a single rubidium atom, trapped inside a reflective optical cavity. These atoms communicate with each other by emitting a single photon over an optical fiber. Each atom is a quantum bit — a qubit — and the polarization of the photon emitted carries the quantum state of the qubit. The receiving qubit absorbs the photon and takes on the quantum state of the transmitter. Voila: A network of qubits that can send, receive, and store quantum information. In another, probably more exciting test, the emitted photons were actually used to entangle the rubidium atoms."
Businesses

Why the Middle East Is a Good Place For Women Tech Entrepreneurs 229

Posted by samzenpus from the unexpected-sales-pitch dept.
pbahra writes "Conferences for start-ups and entrepreneurs often feature 'pitch contests,' slots in which aspiring entrepreneurs take to the stage to sell their ideas to the audience. Last month's ArabNet conference, held in the Lebanese capital, was no different. What was different, however, was the number of pitches from female entrepreneurs. The stereotype has it that women in the Middle East are subjugated, oppressed and barely let out of their houses. But if that is the case, how come 40% of the pitches were from women—a higher percentage than is typical in equivalent conferences held in Europe? Nor was this closer-to-equal representation of women unique to ArabNet--other conferences in the region boast similar ratios."
Chrome

The Fixes That Google Chrome OS Still Needs To Make 128

Posted by timothy from the ok-but-where's-the-windows-menu dept.
CowboyRobot writes "Thomas Claburn at Information Week opines that Google's Chrome OS is actually morphing into the Windows-style os that it intended to make obsolete. There's still room to grow, and here are his suggestions for how to make it better: Get better hardware, Include a Web-based IDE, Support local storage, Allow offline apps. 'When Chrome OS was launched in 2010, Google SVP of Chrome and apps Sundar Pichai declared, "Chrome OS is nothing but the Web." Now, if you peer behind the browser pane, it's clear that Chrome OS is looking beyond the Web. It's not a complete repudiation of Google's bet on the appeal of a thin-client system that keeps user data in the cloud. But it is a concession to the realities of a market that's more comfortable with the familiar desktop metaphor.'"

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