Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Submission + - NSA Whistleblower Edward Snowden Offered a Job on Russian Facebook (ibtimes.co.uk)

Submitted by DavidGilbert99
DavidGilbert99 writes: The global recession is still in full effect in most parts of the world, but not for Edward Snowden it seems. Just hours after being allowed to leave Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport yesterday having been granted temporary asylum he has been offered a high profile job with one of the biggest tech companies in Russia. David Gilbert reports for the IBTimes that VK, the second biggest social network in Europe, wants Snowden to join them to work on the "protection of personal data for our millions of users." And they weren't even being ironic.....

Submission + - 30 Percent Of Mobile Malware Made By 10 Russian Firms

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Almost a third of all mobile malware is made by 10 Russian organisations, according to Lookout Mobile Security. It made that claim after looking at its detections for this year, and after an investigation that uncovered the malware HQs' operations, which saw thousands of affiliates working alongside the factories to dupe users into downloading rogue apps. Those apps are fairly crude, sending SMS messages to premium rate numbers in the background, whilst users think they have downloaded a legitimate application. Lookout isn't revealing the names of the malware factories, however, nor is it divulging how far law enforcement are involved in cracking down on the Russian organisations. It is presenting its full findings at the DEF CON 21 conference.

Submission + - Using Java in Low Latency Environments

Submitted by twofishy
twofishy writes: Something I've noticed amongst financial service companies in London is a growing use of Java in preference to c/c++ for exchange systems, High Frequency Trading and over low-latency work. InfoQ has a good written panel discussion with Peter Lawrey, Martin Thompson, Todd L. Montgomery and Andy Piper. From the article:

Often the faster an algorithm can be put into the market, the more advantage it has. Many algorithms have a shelf life and quicker time to market is key in taking advantage of that. With the community around Java and the options available, it can definitely be a competitive advantage, as opposed to C or C++ where the options may not be as broad for the use case. Sometimes, though, pure low latency can rule out other concerns. I think currently, the difference in performance between Java and C++ is so close that it's not a black and white decision based solely on speed. Improvements in GC techniques, JIT optimizations, and managed runtimes have made traditional Java weaknesses with respect to performance into some very compelling strengths that are not easy to ignore.

Submission + - New Samsung 840 EVO with TurboWrite TLC Technology (pcper.com)

Submitted by Vigile
Vigile writes: Samsung continues with strong releases into the SSD market with the new 840 EVO today. Based on the same TLC (triple level cell) flash that the original Samsung 840 drive used when it launched last year, Samsung has improved the write speeds of this new drive by implementing something called TurboWrite. By accessing a portion of that TLC memory as if it were SLC, it can be written to much faster that MLC or TLC allowing the drive to dump all writes to that area initially and then migrate the data to TLC when idle or when the cache is full. Initial write speeds of this write-back cache can be as high as 520 MB/s but after it's full (during sustained writes) it will drop to as low as 140 MB/s. Through testing at PC Perspective they found that average "flush times" of the cache will change based on the drive capacity and cache sizes which range from 3-12GB.

Submission + - DARPA Developing Brain-Controlled Prosthetics For Amputees (singularityhub.com)

Submitted by kkleiner
kkleiner writes: DARPA’s Reliable Neural-Interface Technology (RE-NET) program aims to return to amputees not just an arm or leg, but control and sensation of the limb that they lost. Toward this end, promising progress has been made in targeted muscle re-innervation that rewires the nerves to control prosthetics and flat interface nerve electrodes, which provide crude sensation for the amputee. These efforts are laying the groundwork for not only sophisticated prostheses, but future cybernetics.

Submission + - Fan Community Launches "Ender's Game Fans for Equality"

Submitted by elfprince13
elfprince13 writes: With talk of a boycott of the upcoming film, some enterprising fans have taken matters into their own hands. Rather than engaging in a boycott, they are suggesting that fans participate in a "political offset" fundraising campaign to counter the lobbying that Orson Scott Card's share of the profits might contribute to. The campaign is intended to support a variety of equal-rights themed charities spanning the political spectrum.

Submission + - Why Netflix is one of the most important cloud computing companies (networkworld.com)

Submitted by Brandon Butler
Brandon Butler writes: Netflix, yes the video rental company Netflix, is changing the cloud game. During the past two years the company has pulled back the curtains through its Netflix OSS program to provide a behind-the-scenes look into how it runs one of the largest deployments of Amazon Web Services cloud-based resources. In doing so, the company is creating tools that can be used by both entire business-size scale cloud deployments and even smaller test environments. The Simian Army, for example randomly kills off VMs or entire availability zones in Amazon's cloud to test fault tolerance, Asgard is a cloud resource dashboard and Lipstick on (Apache) Pig, is a data visualization tool for the Hadoop program; there are dozens of others that help deploy, manage and monitor the tens of thousands of VM instances the company company can be running at any single time. Netflix is also creating a cadre of developers who are experts in managing cloud deployments, and already its former employees are popping up at other companies to bring their expertise on how to run a large-scale cloud resources. Meanwhile, Netflix does this all in AWS’s cloud, which raises some questions of how good of a job it’s actually doing when it can be massively impacted by cloud outages, such as the one on Christmas Eve last year that brought down Netflix's services but, interestingly, not Amazon’s own video streaming system, which is a competitor to the company.

Submission + - Apple Found Guilty In eBook Trial (ibtimes.com)

Submitted by redletterdave
redletterdave writes: A federal judge found Apple Inc. guilty of conspiring to raise the retail prices of electronic books back in 2010. U.S. District Judge Denise Cote of Manhattan said the U.S. government and various states are entitled to injunctive relief, and Apple will await a separate trial to determine damages for violating antitrust law.

Submission + - German Court Affirms GPL: Source Must Match Executable

Submitted by Alsee
Alsee writes: Fantec was found to be distributing Linux based media players with an incorrect (older) version of source code. Fantec blamed their Chinese supplier for the problem, but a German Court ruled Fantec was responsible for ensuring their own compliance with the GPL. "According to the court, the company should have checked the completeness of the sources themselves or with the help of experts, even if that would have incurred additional costs." I propose a better solution. If your company is subcontracting software development simply use the supplied source to compile your executable.

Submission + - Evidence of the existence of the Flying Spagetti Monster (feedsportal.com)

Submitted by Big Hairy Ian
Big Hairy Ian writes: Pasta helps marathon runners keep the pace – and maybe some spinning stars too. The key to neutron stars' steady rotation may be spaghetti-shaped groupings of atomic nuclei that form lumps in the stellar crust.

A neutron star is the ultra-dense remnant of a stellar explosion, made up of a solid crust of atomic nuclei and a liquid core of free neutronsMovie Camera. These stars are born spinning rapidly, sometimes making multiple rotations per second. Some neutron stars also emit beams of radiation from their magnetic poles. If the beams sweep past Earth, we can detect the regular pulses of light and time the star's spin.

Without any outside influences, a neutron star will slow down over time as it radiates away energy. Curiously, X-ray pulsars, which are brighter and easier to observe than other types, appear to stop slowing down when they reach a rate of about 12 seconds per rotation.

Slashdot Top Deals

Friction is a drag.

Close