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Submission + - Vaadin switches to C# overnight (vaadin.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The popular Java UI Framework Vaadin (using GWT under the hood) switches to C# over night in a bold move. All the tools go commercial through Microsoft and MSWTF framework is used underneath.

Submission + - The inside story of Gmail on its tenth anniversary (time.com)

Submitted by harrymcc
harrymcc writes: Google officially--and mischievously--unveiled Gmail on April Fools' Day 2004. That makes this its tenth birthday, which I celebrated by talking to a bunch of the people who created the service for TIME.com. It's an amazing story: The service was in the works for almost three years before the announcement, and faced so much opposition from within Google that it wasn't clear it would ever reach consumers.

Submission + - Foxconn to Restaff Entirely with US Adjunct Professors

Submitted by Applehu Akbar
Applehu Akbar writes: (Xinhua) Foxconn Technology Group, the world’s largest electronics contract manufacturer, announced today its response to the increasing cost of local labor: by 2Q 2015, it will have completed replacement of its assembly staff with American adjunct professors. Said an executive who did not wish to be named, “Adjunct professors are not only highly educated but are used to working for nothing more than ramen and a basement cot. They are not spoiled like our local Chinese assembly workers.” They are for the most part docile, and used to operating within rigid bureaucracies.

The US educational system turns out far larger numbers of adjuncts, especially in the humanities, than can ever hope to be employed by academe. The excess adjuncts live on the streets of major American cities, but, after being pushed aside by the tougher and crazier traditional homeless, gravitate to the more congenial west coast, where roving bands of them subsist on odd jobs and shoplifting. Here they are easily picked up by Foxconn raiding parties, which dicker with what we know in China as People’s Shining Path Moral Guidance Cadres. In the US these are called “Homeowner Associations,” and they gratefully cooperate to turn in bands of feral adjuncts, whose constant bickering and messy campsites are an ongoing annoyance to the people of America’s West Coast.

Once captured, the adjuncts are loaded into Foxconn’s fleet of wind-powered EcoFreighters and sedated for the slow sea voyage on the “Central Passage” from Long Beach to the Shanghai labor auction docks. Now that there is human cargo to bring back to China, the EcoFreighters no longer have to return empty after unloading their troves of consumer goods in Los Angeles.

Foxconn has been anxious to grab the most easily trainable workers before more Chinese companies take an interest in American adjunct professor labor. “At first we tried a breeding program for even greater long term savings,” said the Foxconn exec, “But the males, raised as they have been in western academic culture, have developed such a deep-seated fear of their own females that fertile matings were rare, even when naked, unchained females were placed right in males' dormitory cells.” But why fight to change an alien culture, the thinking now goes, when fresh adjuncts are so easily hunted down on the California/Oregon coast? So long as this situation persists, the EcoFreighters will sail full and world’s supply of low-cost products will not be in danger.

Submission + - EA to buy out Chris Robert's Star Citizen. (themittani.com)

Submitted by E-Sabbath
E-Sabbath writes: In the first major purchase by EA since Popcap in 2011, Chris Roberts announced his acquisition by the publishing giant on Monday, March 31st. EA CEO Andrew Wilson is quoted as saying,

CIG's proven track record and original IP add to EA’s momentum and accelerate our drive towards a multi-billion dollar digital business. With EA’s global reach and publishing network through Origin, Star Citizen is getting the bump it needs to compete with other FPS Space Sim Semi-Sandbox Role Playing Action Games out there in the market.

Submission + - Judge Again Denies Government Digital Search Warrant for Being Too Broad

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Judge John Faccioli, federal magistrate judge of D.C., has once again denied a government request for a search warrant for a suspect's electronic data on the grounds that the request is too broad. In this latest case, the judge has denied the government access to a suspect's iPhone, stating that 'the government fails to articulate how it will limit the possibility that data outside the scope of the warrant will be searched.' He specifically asked for a search protocol which would address not only 'how [the government] will determine which blocks [of the flash drive] should be searched for data within the scope of the warrant' but also how the government would handle data that it may find outside the scope of the warrant. In a similar case earlier this March, Judge Faccioli denied a government request for a warrant to search a suspect's email account for also being too broad.

Submission + - The Mystery of the 'Only Camera to Come Back from the Moon' (vice.com)

Submitted by Daniel_Stuckey
Daniel_Stuckey writes: After a furious bidding war in Vienna on Saturday, a Japanese camera collector has bought a Hasselblad camera for $910,000 in a record-setting auction of what's been widely called the "only camera to come back from the moon."

But contrary to claims repeated across the Internet on Monday, this isn't the only camera to come back from the moon. In fact, some think it may have never landed on the moon at all. And because of rules surrounding most NASA property, its sale may actually violate US law.

One thing we know for sure, maybe: the 70mm Hasselblad 500 is one of fourteen cutting-edge cameras that astronauts used in orbit around the moon and on the lunar surface during the Apollo program. All of the images we have from those moon missions were taken by these machines, which were either mounted inside the command module that circled the moon or were attached to space suits at the chest.

This particular camera was, reports the Verge, among many other sources, "used on the moon during the Apollo 15 mission in 1971," and "is special in the fact that it's returned to Earth." That's because astronauts were often instructed to jettison their cameras on the lunar surface in order to save precious kilograms during the return trip.

Submission + - MtGox finds 200,000 missing bitcoins in old wallet (bbc.co.uk) 3

Submitted by strikethree
strikethree writes: BBC — Bankrupt Japanese firm MtGox said in a filing that it has found 200,000 lost bitcoins.

The firm said it found the bitcoins — worth around $116m (£70m) — in an old digital wallet from 2011.

That brings the total number of bitcoins the firm lost down to 650,000 from 850,000.

MtGox, formerly the world's largest bitcoin exchange, filed for bankruptcy in February, after it said it lost thousands of bitcoins to hackers.

Submission + - WPA2 wireless security cracked

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Achilleas Tsitroulis of Brunel University, UK, Dimitris Lampoudis of the University of Macedonia, Greece and Emmanuel Tsekleves of Lancaster University, UK, have investigated the vulnerabilities in WPA2 and present its weakness. They say that this wireless security system might now be breached with relative ease by a malicious attack on a network. They suggest that it is now a matter of urgency that security experts and programmers work together to remove the vulnerabilities in WPA2 in order to bolster its security or to develop alternative protocols to keep our wireless networks safe from hackers and malware.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2014-03-w...

Submission + - Julie Ann Horvath Quits GitHub, Citing Harrassment (twitter.com)

Submitted by PvtVoid
PvtVoid writes: From TechCrunch: The exit of engineer Julie Ann Horvath from programming network GitHub has sparked yet another conversation concerning women in technology and startups. Her claims that she faced a sexist internal culture at GitHub came as a surprise to some, given her former defense of the startup and her internal work at the company to promote women in technology.

Submission + - How to dazzle facial recognition algos? (diyphotography.net) 1

Submitted by sandbagger
sandbagger writes: Dazzle painting was that zebra striping used during the Great War to make surface ships difficult to follow in the foggy North Atlantic. Similar cosmetic pattern breaking may be proving useful in confusing facial recognition. Adding moth-like cosmetic paint daubs to the cheeks appears to break at least some facial recognition software. What's your experience, and, theoretically at least, what are its uses. (If anyone at Fort Meade is reading this, this is just a purely theoretical exercise.)

Submission + - Comcast to Acquire Time Warner Cable for $45 Billion (nytimes.com) 1

Submitted by davidannis
davidannis writes:

Comcast is expected to announce on Thursday an agreement to acquire Time Warner Cable for more than $45 billion in stock, a deal that would combine the biggest and second-biggest cable television operators in the country. For Comcast, which completed its acquisition of NBC Universal, the television and movie powerhouse, from General Electric less than a year ago, the latest deal would be its second big act to radically reshape the media landscape in the United States. And the merger is almost certain to bring to an end a protracted takeover battle that Charter Communications has been waging for Time Warner Cable.

For consumers, this means an even larger company with a reputation for poor customer service aggressively lobbying against things like net neutrality.

Submission + - "Shark Tank" Competition Used to Select Education Tech

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: With support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the tech billionaire-backed NewSchools Venture Fund, the Silicon Valley Education Foundation used a competition based on the reality show Shark Tank to determine which educational technology entrepreneurs would win the right to have teachers test their technology on students for the rest of the year. 'Ten companies, selected from 80 original applicants,' reports Mercury News columnist Mike Cassidy, 'had three minutes to convince a panel of educators and then a panel of business brains that their ideas would be a difference maker in middle school math classes.' The winners? Blendspace, which helps teachers create digital lessons using Web-based content; Front Row Education, which generates individual quizzes for students and tracks their progress as they work through problems; LearnBop, which offers an automated tutoring system with content written by math teachers; and Zaption, which lets teachers use existing online videos as lessons by adding quizzes, discussion sections, images and text.

Submission + - China's Jade Rabbit Fights to Come Back From the Dead

Submitted by Hugh Pickens DOT Com
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: CNN reports that reports of Jade Rabbit's demise may have been premature as signs are emerging that China's first lunar rover may be up and running again. Following technical malfunctions Xinhua says that the lunar rover had lost communication with mission control but on Thursday the state news agency said that the rover was "fully awake" and had returned to its normal signal-receiving status. "Jade Rabbit has fully resurrected and is able to receive signals, but still suffers a mechanical control abnormality," says China's lunar program spokesman Pei Zhaoyu. "The rover entered hibernation while in an abnormal state. We were worried it wouldn't be able to make it through the extreme cold of the lunar night. But it came back alive. The rover stands a chance of being saved as it is still alive." The lunar rover's end seemed near when it signed off at the end of January with a poignant message: "Goodnight humanity." Yutu, as the device is known in Mandarin, had been out of action for two weeks following a technical malfunction, and media around the world filed its obituary late on Wednesday after a short statement on Chinese state media alerted the world to its apparent terminal failings. Should Jade Rabbit make a full recovery, it would cap another success for space exploration, which has seen NASA's Opportunity Mars rover, currently exploring the red planet, far outlast its expected lifespan.

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