71276893
submission
itwbennett writes:
Late last week, Amazon was issued permission by the FAA to fly an experimental drone as part of its tests for a planned automatic delivery service but it came too late, Paul Misener, vice president of global public policy at Amazon, told lawmakers on Tuesday. 'The UAS [unmanned aircraft system] approved last week by the FAA has already become obsolete,' he said. As a result, Amazon has filed for permission to fly a more advanced drone—one that is already being flown in several countries including the U.K., said Misener, who was speaking at a hearing of the Senate Committee on commerce, science and transportation.
71275719
submission
itwbennett writes:
Nearly half of Android devices are vulnerable to an attack that could replace a legitimate app with malicious software that can collect sensitive data from a phone. Google, Samsung and Amazon have released patches for their devices, but 49.5 percent of Android users are still vulnerable, according to Palo Alto Networks, which discovered the problem. Google said it has not detected attempts to exploit the flaw.
71275637
submission
itwbennett writes:
It’s a commonly held belief among software developers that avoiding disk access in favor of doing as much work as possible in-memory will results in shorter runtimes. To test this assumption, researchers from the University of Calgary and the University of British Columbia compared the efficiency of alternative ways to create a 1MB string and write it to disk. The results consistently found that doing most of the work in-memory to minimize disk access was significantly slower than just writing out to disk repeatedly.
71253709
submission
itwbennett writes:
The vulnerability, known as CVE-2011-2461, was unusual because fixing it didn’t just require the Adobe Flex Software Development Kit (SDK) to be updated, but also patching all the individual Flash applications (SWF files) that had been created with vulnerable versions of the SDK. The company released a tool that allowed developers to easily fix existing SWF files, but many of them didn’t. Last year, Web application security engineers Luca Carettoni from LinkedIn and Mauro Gentile from Minded Security came across the old flaw while investigating Flash-based techniques for bypassing the Same-Origin Policy (SOP) mechanism found in browsers. They found SWF files that were still vulnerable on Google, Yahoo, Salesforce, Adobe, Yandex, Qiwi and many other sites. After notifying the affected websites, they presented their findings last week at the Troopers 2015 security conference in Germany.
71250721
submission
itwbennett writes:
A Dutch utility is inviting five families to use radiator-sized servers to heat their living rooms for free. In a trial organized by local utility Eneco, Nerdalize will install its server radiators in five homes, using them to deliver cloud computing services to its clients.
71220211
submission
itwbennett writes:
You don’t need to be the NSA to tap calls on Cisco’s SPA 300 and 500 IP phones: An authentication flaw allows potential attackers to do that by default.
71219981
submission
itwbennett writes:
For years, U.S. businesses and government agencies have complained about attacks originating from China, while the Chinese government persisted in denying attacking U.S. targets. Then last week the Chinese government noted the existence of the country’s cyberwarfare unit in “The Science of Military Strategy,” a publication put out by a research institute of the People’s Liberation Army, according to news reports.
71210231
submission
jfruh writes:
The Swiss watchmaking elite has largely shunned smartwatch developments, reluctant to merge their high-end business producing long-lasting products with one focused on electronics that will be upgraded every few years. But the imminent Apple Watch — especially the $10,000 Watch Edition — has them rethinking this decision, with major brands beginning to explore introducing Android watches.
71210139
submission
jfruh writes:
Nothing confronts you with how addicted you are to your phone than constantly taking it out of your pocket and entering and re-entering your passcode over and over again to unlock. But without fanfare, Google is releasing an Android update that might solve the problem: a "smart lock" that can figure out if your phone has been set down since the last time you unlocked it. As long as it stays on your person, you won't need to re-enter your password.
71142107
submission
itwbennett writes:
The report, which was mistakenly provided to the Wall Street Journal as part of a public records request, reveals that FTC staff concluded in 2012 that Google’s business tactics had caused 'real harm to consumers and to innovation,' and the staff recommended a lawsuit against the company. Among the findings: Google inflated rankings for its own services and scraped other companies' content, while threatening to remove those sites from its search listing if they objected.
71121689
submission
itwbennett writes:
More than 700,000 ADSL routers provided to customers by ISPs around the world contain serious flaws that allow remote hackers to take control of them. Most of the routers have a 'directory traversal' flaw in a firmware component called webproc.cgi that allows hackers to extract sensitive configuration data, including administrative credentials. The flaw isn’t new and has been reported by multiple researchers since 2011 in various router models.
71121387
submission
itwbennett writes:
Over the past four years, Albert Pastrana, Head of Engineering at a U.K. company, has interviewed many candidates for developer positions. As part of the interview process, he’s asked each one the same question: How would you define good code? Recently, he looked at the answers given by 65 developer candidates who were interviewed over the course of 2014; all were programmers with knowledge of Java or Scala and had five or more years of experience. Seventy-eight percent of interviewees said readability was the number one quality of good code. Of course, these folks were all trying to land jobs, so that might have influenced their answers. Without a job on the line, how would you answer that question?
71120785
submission
itwbennett writes:
More than 400 cities and 55 counties in California allow residents to rent out part or all of their homes and levy a transit occupancy tax on those rentals. But payment is sporadic and municipalities often have no way of knowing who in their community should be paying the tax. Senate Bill 593 would require operators of vacation rental services like AirBnB to report to local authorities the location of the residences, the number of nights they were occupied by visitors and the amount paid for the rentals.
71112625
submission
jfruh writes:
In the wake of the FCC passing net neutrality rules, the federal agency now has the authority to keep an eye on ISPs 'future conduct,' to prevent them from even starting to implement traffic-shaping plans that would violate net neutrality. Naturally, this has a lot of ISPs feeling nervous.
71112547
submission
jfruh writes:
A group of California taxi operators are suing Uber, claiming the ridehailing service is guilty of false advertising when it comes to rider safety. The taxi companies claim that Uber doesn't use a Live Scan fingerprint ID for drivers like they do, and that the $1 "safe rides" fee on every fare doesn't specifically go towards boosing safety.
