63607187
submission
jfruh writes:
Apple put a lot of work into making the iOS secure, but by designing it so that it has to occasionally connect to a PC, they left some crucial holes open. "We believe that Apple kind of overtrusted the USB connection," said security researcher Tielei Wang.
63607063
submission
jfruh writes:
Since 2000, many U.S. companies have signed on to the voluntary EU Safe Harbor framework, agreeing to treat the personal data of European citizens with more care and privacy than they otherwise would. The problem, as one might expect from an entirely voluntary agreement that runs against a company's finacial interests, is that many of the companies are simply ignoring their own promises. Violators include Adobe, AOL, and Salesforce.com.
63606699
submission
jfruh writes:
In South Korea, programming becomes a required subject for middle schoolers starting this year. In the UK, all state school students will need to learn to write algorithms in two languages by age 11. These are just two countries that are making a dedicated effort to inculcate a coding culture into their children, but there are a more across the world.
63589713
submission
itwbennett writes:
Cisco Systems will cut as many as 6,000 jobs over the next 12 months, saying it needs to shift resources to growing businesses such as cloud, software and security. Cisco has about 74,000 employees, so the cuts will affect about 8 percent of its staff. The move will be a reorganization rather than a net reduction, the company said. It needs to cut jobs because the product categories where it sees the strongest growth, such as security, require special skills, so it needs to make room for workers in those areas, it said.
63589255
submission
itwbennett writes:
Japan is one of the last countries in the world where telegrams are still widely used. A combination of traditional manners, market liberalization and innovation has kept alive this age-old form of messaging. Companies affiliated with the country's three mobile carriers, NTT DoCoMo, KDDI and SoftBank, offer telegrams, which are sent via modern server networks instead of the dedicated electrical wires of the past (Morse telegraphy hasn't been used since 1962), and then printed out with modern printers instead of tape glued on paper. But customers are still charged according to the length of the message, which is delivered within three hours. A basic NTT telegram up to 25 characters long can be sent for ¥440 ($4.30) when ordered online.
63579665
submission
jfruh writes:
A casual observer at the latest DEFCON conference in Las Vegas might not have noticed much change from last year — still tons of leather, piercing, and body art, still groups of men gathered in darkened ballroons furiously typing commands. But this year there's a new focus: hacking not just for the lulz, but focusing specifically on highlighting comptuer security problems that have the potential to do real-world physical harm to human beings.
63515957
submission
itwbennett writes:
Blaming 'bureaucratic dysfunction,’ Oracle has sued Oregon for breach of contract, seeking more than $20 million in fees the state is withholding for its work on Cover Oregon, a troubled insurance exchange website developed as part of President Barack Obama's health care policy overhaul. The move is a preemptive strike by Oracle against Oregon, whose governor, John Kitzhaber, has advocated suing Oracle.
63455499
submission
jfruh writes:
Many security experts agree that our current authentication system, in which end users are forced to remember (or, more often, write down) a dizzying array of passwords is broken. DARPA, the U.S. Defense Department research arm that developed the Internet, is trying to work past the problem by eliminating passwords altogether, replacing them with biometric and other cues, using off-the-shelf technology available today.
63455447
submission
jfruh writes:
The Xbox one isn't just a game console: it's also a nifty media set-top box, and it interacts very well with your TV service — as long as you have cable. Cord-cutters will soon be able to attach their Xbox to an antenna — but only in Europe.
63421257
submission
jfruh writes:
A few years ago, PC makers were falling all over each other to provide discrete GPUs in laptops that would help rival the video power of desktop machines. Today, most laptops for sale just go with integrated graphics. What happened? One possibility involves the social lives of gamers, who were the target market for such machines: LAN parties are largely being replaced by group internet gaming, making portability irrelevant.
63421175
submission
jfruh writes:
Not everyone in tech has a job like Homer Simpson, who's been replaced at various times by a brick tied to a lever and a chicken named Queenie. But many IT workers have come up against mind-numbing, repetitive tasks that probably could be automated. So: what to do about it? Well, the answer depends on how much power you have in an organization and how much your bosses respect your opinion.
63412341
submission
itwbennett writes:
Google is taking Internet security into its own hands, punishing sites that don't use encryption by giving them lower search rankings. The use of https is now one of the signals, like whether a Web page has unique content, that Google uses to determine where a site will appear in search rankings, although it will be a 'lightweight' signal and applies to about 1 percent of search queries now, wrote Zineb Ait Bahajji and Gary Illyes, both Google webmaster trends analysts, in a blog post.
63411891
submission
itwbennett writes:
China is tightening control over mobile messaging services with new rules that limit their role in spreading news. Under the new regulations, only news agencies and other groups with official approval can publish whatever the government considers political news via public accounts. 'All other public accounts that have not been approved cannot release or reprint political news,' the regulations said. Users of the instant messaging services will also have to register with their official IDs, and agree to follow relevant laws.
63387323
submission
itwbennett writes:
Wikimedia, which operates Wikipedia, published its first transparency report Wednesday detailing two years of alteration and takedown requests as well as requests for user data it received. Of the 304 general content removal requests, none were granted, Wikimedia said in a blog post. And while the amount of copyright takedown requests was notably low, the requests that were made included a selfie taken by a black macaque monkey and an entire aboriginal language, among other eyebrow-raising items.
63375547
submission
jfruh writes:
NetSuite faced a potentially ugly situation in which one of its own customers sued because they said they had been bamboozled by aggressive salesmen into buying "manifestly unusable" software. The lawsuit has been settled out of court, but the message that software companies should be anxious about, according to one analyst, is that "in some cases the only way you can get a vendor's attention is to bring in a lawyer."
