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Submission + - Hyundai Unveils Its Electric Egg (ibtimes.com)

Submitted by redletterdave
redletterdave writes: A product of Hyundai’s Advanced Design Department, the egg-shaped Hyundai E4U unveiled at this week's Seoul Motor Show is a 24-volt electric one-seater vehicle that can move in any direction, with its maximum speed topping out around 18 miles per hour. The E4U’s propulsion is controlled by foot pedals, which causes the E4U’s front to tilt and move forward thanks to its rotating front sphere and two training wheels on the back. Turning the vehicle is caused by pushing on the pedal closest to the direction you want to turn. The "E" in the E4U, according to Hyundai, represents "egg, evolution, and ecology."

Submission + - For Microsoft, going private may not be such a bad idea (networkworld.com)

Submitted by colinneagle
colinneagle writes: Should Microsoft go private? Don't dismiss the question, it's a valid one, even if it would be extraordinarily difficult. The stocks of most of the old guard of the tech industry have been stagnant for years, even though the companies have done reasonably well or even very well in some cases. Yet they get no appreciation from Wall Street and are taken for granted. At this point, they have to ask what they gain by being public.

You go public to have shares to trade for acquisitions. Most of the acquisitions made by Microsoft are actually very small, strategic purchases. Its only big ones have been Skype and aQuantive, and boy was the latter one an utter failure. You go public to get the attention of institutional investors and build brand equity. Does anyone NOT know what Microsoft is?

It would be difficult, of course, but it might be worth it. Microsoft has a complicated, multi-year strategy to execute. It needs time and patience, something people clearly do not have with Windows RT. What better way to execute than to do it outside of the impatient eyes of Wall Street analysts who only care about next quarter's projections. It's not easy to implement a multi-year strategy when four times a year you have to hear 'what are you going to do for me next quarter?'
Networking

Misconfigured Open DNS Resolvers Key To Massive DDoS Attacks 179

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the check-your-sources dept.
msm1267 writes with an excerpt From Threat Post: "While the big traffic numbers and the spat between Spamhaus and illicit webhost Cyberbunker are grabbing big headlines, the underlying and percolating issue at play here has to do with the open DNS resolvers being used to DDoS the spam-fighters from Switzerland. Open resolvers do not authenticate a packet-sender's IP address before a DNS reply is sent back. Therefore, an attacker that is able to spoof a victim's IP address can have a DNS request bombard the victim with a 100-to-1 ratio of traffic coming back to them versus what was requested. DNS amplification attacks such as these have been used lately by hacktivists, extortionists and blacklisted webhosts to great success." Running an open DNS resolver isn't itself always a problem, but it looks like people are enabling neither source address verification nor rate limiting.
The Media

What Does It Actually Cost To Publish a Scientific Paper? 166

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the one-trillion-dollars dept.
ananyo writes "Nature has published an investigation into the real costs of publishing research after delving into the secretive, murky world of science publishing. Few publishers (open access or otherwise-including Nature Publishing Group) would reveal their profit margins, but they've pieced together a picture of how much it really costs to publish a paper by talking to analysts and insiders. Quoting from the piece: '"The costs of research publishing can be much lower than people think," agrees Peter Binfield, co-founder of one of the newest open-access journals, PeerJ, and formerly a publisher at PLoS. But publishers of subscription journals insist that such views are misguided — born of a failure to appreciate the value they add to the papers they publish, and to the research community as a whole. They say that their commercial operations are in fact quite efficient, so that if a switch to open-access publishing led scientists to drive down fees by choosing cheaper journals, it would undermine important values such as editorial quality.' There's also a comment piece by three open access advocates setting out what they think needs to happen next to push forward the movement as well as a piece arguing that 'Objections to the Creative Commons attribution license are straw men raised by parties who want open access to be as closed as possible.'"
Google

Submission + - Google pledges not to sue open source software, unless first attacked (muktware.com)

Submitted by sfcrazy
sfcrazy writes: Google has announced the Open Patent Non-Assertion (OPN) Pledge. In it's pledge Google says that they will not sue any user, distributor or developer of open-source software on specified patents, unless first attacked. Under this pledge, Google is starting off with 10 patents relating to MapReduce, a computing model for processing large data sets first developed at Google. Google says that over time they intend to expand the set of Google’s patents covered by the pledge to other technologies.

Comment Re:funny thing is (Score 1) 276

by mhsobhani (#43214215) Attached to: Galaxy S 4 Dominates In Early Benchmark Testing

You're surprised that a quad core 1.4GHz processor outperforms a dual core 1.3GHz processor?

I'm more surprised that they were so close....

Quad what core? ARM CORTEX-A9
Dual what core? ARM CORTEX-A15
Does clock speed matter? Not as much as architecture when they are clocked at nearly the same speed.
EU

Submission + - EU Launches Effort to Model the Human Brain (slashdot.org)

Submitted by
Nerval's Lobster
Nerval's Lobster writes: "The European Union has announced an ambitious project to model the human brain. The “Human Brain Project” is one of two EU-based projects that will receive 1 billion Euros each as part of the Future and Emerging Technologies competition. The project, which is expected to last a decade, will create the world’s largest experimental facility for developing a detailed model of the brain and how it works. That could ultimately assist in the development of personalized treatment of neurological diseases, according to the EU. (The other winning project will study graphene, the carbon-based material that conducts electricity much better than copper, and also has unique optical properties.) The Swiss government and private agencies will chip additional funds into the Human Brain project’s estimated 1.19 billion Euro cost. That money will support the efforts of neuroscientist and project leader Henry Markram’s laboratory at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. It will also go towards the Swiss Supercomputing Center in Lugano, which will provide the chief supercomputing facilities for what Markram terms the Brain Simulation Platform."

Submission + - Evad3rs Launch iOS 6, 6.1 Untethered Jailbreak (paritynews.com)

Submitted by hypnosec
hypnosec writes: The much awaited untethered iOS 6 jailbreak from evad3rs has been released just a few minutes back is available on evasi0n.com as an easy to use tool for all three major operating system: Windows, Linux and Mac. The jailbreak is claimed to be working on all the iDevices — the iPhone 5, 4S, 4, 3GS, iPod Touch 4th generation and 5th generation and both the iPad Mini and iPad 3rd & 4th generation.
Google

Submission + - Microsoft and Google push for FCC's public Wi-Fi for free networks (networkworld.com)

Submitted by colinneagle
colinneagle writes: How sweet would it be to dump that monthly cellphone bill in favor of making calls over free Wi-Fi networks, so powerful it would be like "Wi-Fi on steroids"? Microsoft and Google are working together to support the FCC's powerful Wi-Fi for free proposal.

Now, the Washington Post reports that Google, Microsoft and other tech giants "say a free-for-all WiFi service would spark an explosion of innovations and devices that would benefit most Americans, especially the poor."

Meanwhile, AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile and chip makers Intel and Qualcomm are lobbying hard against the FCC's proposal. These wireless carrier companies are opposed to using the spectrum for free Wi-Fi to the public and insist that the airwaves should instead be sold to businesses.

But FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski has designed the free Wi-Fi plan. If you are interested, you can read Genachowski's Presentation on White Spaces for Wireless Broadband and Genachowski's remarks to the President's Council of Advisors on Science & Technology.
Blackberry

Submission + - The best news BlackBerry could possibly get (bgr.com)

Submitted by redkemper
redkemper writes: BlackBerry laid all its cards on the table last week as it unveiled its new BlackBerry 10 platform and the two next-generation smartphones that will carry it through the first half of the year. BlackBerry fans were blown away, but as we discussed in a feature last week, the real challenge for the struggling smartphone vendor will be wooing users away from leading smartphone platforms. Early reviews were not convinced that the BlackBerry Z10 would gain much ground in this regard, however a recent research note from CIBC suggests BlackBerry may already be off to a phenomenal start with 50% of preregistration coming from non-BlackBerry users...
Businesses

Submission + - Google Invests $1 Billion To Build New London HQ (ibtimes.com)

Submitted by
redletterdave
redletterdave writes: "Google just purchased a 2.4-acre plot in the King’s Cross Central development in London, where the company plans to build a brand-new, 1 million square foot office. Google reportedly invested about £650 million ($1.04 billion) on the property, which, when finished, will be valued at more than £1 billion ($1.6 billion). While Google traditionally leases its overseas offices, the company's decision to buy rather than rent in this case was likely tax motivated, since Google can’t repatriate its cash to the US without paying a hefty tax."
Java

Submission + - Latest Java Update Broken; Two New Sandbox Bypass Flaws Found (threatpost.com)

Submitted by msm1267
msm1267 writes: Oracle's long security nightmare with Java just gets worse. A post to Full Disclosure this morning from a security researcher indicated that two new sandbox bypass vulnerabilities have been discovered and reported to Oracle, along with working exploit code. Oracle released Java 7u11 last Sunday and said it fixed a pair of vulnerabilities being exploited by all the major exploit kits. Turns out one of those two bugs wasn't completely patched. Today's bugs are apparently not related to the previous security issues.

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