Wulfson - Slashdot User

Submission + - EFF reverse engineers Carrier IQ config (extremetech.com)

Submitted by

MrSeb

on Thursday December 22, 2011 @08:35AM

MrSeb writes: "At this point we have a fairly good idea of what Carrier IQ is, and which manufacturers and carriers see fit to install it on their phones, but the Electronic Frontier Foundation — the preeminent protector of your digital rights — has taken it one step further and reverse engineered some of the program’s code to work out what’s actually going on. There are three parts to a Carrier IQ installation on your phone: The program itself, which captures your keystrokes and other “metrics”; a configuration file, which varies from handset to handset and carrier to carrier; and a database that stores your actions until it can be transmitted to the carrier. It turns out that that the config profiles are completely unencrypted, and thus very easy to crack."

Submission + - Lego's new line ... for girls? (businessweek.com)

Submitted by oneiros27 on Friday December 16, 2011 @11:20PM

oneiros27 writes: Lego is rolling out a Lego Friends after Christmas (Dec 26th in the UK, Jan 1st in the US) to better appeal to girls. This time around, they took a few years to study how girls play, and design sets and figures specifically for them, rather than just add ponies and color it pink. (although, there are animals and new colors)

Submission + - Square Enix Possibly Compromised (square-enix-europe.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 16, 2011 @10:27PM

An anonymous reader writes: Just received this alarming email from Square Enix. It appears that they recently were compromised. Preliminary reports state that there was no compromised user data. They are now allowed to join the list that includes the PSN and Steam. Lets hope they don't shut down servers.

Submission + - YouTube Says Universal Had No 'Right' to Take Down (wired.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 16, 2011 @08:49PM

An anonymous reader writes: Contrary to a previous story, Google played no part in the Megaupload takedown. From Wired: "YouTube said Friday that Universal Music abused the video-sharing site’s piracy filters when it employed them to take down a controversial video of celebrities and pop superstars singing and praising the notorious file-sharing service Megaupload."

Submission + - Google Wallet Stores Card Data In Plain Text (darkreading.com)

Submitted by nut on Thursday December 15, 2011 @04:04PM

nut writes: The much-hyped payment application from Google on Android has been examined by viaForensics and appears to store some cardholder data in plaintext. Google wallet is the first real payment system to use NFC on Android. Version 2 of the PCI DSS (the current standard) mandates the encryption of transmitted cardholder data encourages strong encryption for its storage. viaForensics suggest that the data stored in plain text might be sufficient to allow social engineering to obtain a credit card number.

Submission + - Microsoft to IE6: Dead browser walking! (cnet.com)

Submitted by

DrMcNasty

on Thursday December 15, 2011 @09:54AM

DrMcNasty writes: "Come January, the company will start forcing people to update from older versions of Internet Explorer. If you have Automatic Updates enabled in Windows Update, Microsoft says that the update will occur in a seamless, Chrome-like experience.

The company already provides security updates to Internet Explorer through Windows Update, but this means that legacy browser users will see a full-point jump. Windows XP users on Internet Explorer 6 and Internet Explorer 7 will be upgraded to version 8, and Windows Vista users will be pushed up the stairs to Internet Explorer 9. IE9 doesn't work on Windows XP.
"

Submission + - NTSB recommends ban on all cell phone and portable (ap.org) 3

Submitted by ducomputergeek on Tuesday December 13, 2011 @02:24PM

ducomputergeek writes: So what about all the cars today that come with built in computer, nav, internet, and cell phones?

Submission + - Global use map of Windows XP versus Windows 7 (nwlinux.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 13, 2011 @02:07PM

An anonymous reader writes: For the first time ever, Windows 7 has overtaken Windows XP in global use. China is still the dominant user of XP with 74.02% with the highest use of Windows 7 found in Luxembourg.

Submission + - Chinese Government Tries to Control Rainfall With (inhabitat.com)

Submitted by formaggio on Tuesday December 13, 2011 @02:03PM

formaggio writes: China's government is intervening with nature by rolling out four regional programs to artificially increase precipitation across the country by 10 percent before 2015. The program is anticipated to bring in an additional 230 billion cubic meters of precipitation per year by 2015. This is on top of the 50 billion China already artificially creates annually in the northeastern province of Jilin.

Submission + - DRM Free Comedy (gigaom.com)

Submitted by wkurzius on Tuesday December 13, 2011 @01:15PM

wkurzius writes: Comedian Louis C.K. released his new stand-up special in a unique way: online without DRM and for only $5. On the page where you can buy it, he writes "I don't really get the whole 'torrent' thing. I don't know enough about it to judge either way. But I'd just like you to consider this: I made this video extremely easy to use against well-informed advice. I was told that it would be easier to torrent the way I made it, but I chose to do it this way anyway, because I want it to be easy for people to watch and enjoy this video in any way they want without 'corporate' restrictions."

GigaOM has a nice write-up about what Louis C.K. is doing, along with the typical rational for distributing content without DRM.

Submission + - UK Police Test "Temporarily Blinding" LASER (bbc.co.uk) 1

Submitted by esocid on Tuesday December 13, 2011 @12:21PM

esocid writes: Called the SMU 100 it costs £25,000 and sends out a three-metre "wall of light" that leaves anyone caught in it briefly unable to see. Designed by a former Royal Marine Commando, it was originally developed for use against pirates in Somalia. While tasers and CS gas work well over short distances the laser is said to be effective at up to 500 metres (1,640ft). Being targeted by the beam has been compared to staring into the sun before being forced to turn away.Paul Kerr, managing director of Clyde-based Photonic Security Systems, which came up with the design, said "If you can't look at something you can't attack it."

Submission + - Building A $1000 Gaming PC

Submitted by adeelarshad82 on Tuesday December 13, 2011 @11:40AM

adeelarshad82 writes: You get what you pay for applies to building a gaming PC just as much as anywhere else. In recent attempts, a hardcore PC enthusiast built a $200 PC and a $500 gaming PC where sacrifice was the name of the game. However, with a slightly higher budget this time around, he tries to see what he can put together with a $1000 budget. Using Nvidia GeForce GTX 570 (second-fastest single-GPU card in Nvidia's lineup) and the Core i5-2500K processor with the Gigabyte GA-Z68XP-UD3 motherboard, he was able to squeeze in a 4GB of Kingston HyperX Blu memory, Lite-On DVD burner and 1.5TB Western Digital hard drive along with other necessary components.

Submission + - Microsoft wants you to diss Android for a free WP7 (cnet.co.uk)

Submitted by

phonewebcam

on Tuesday December 13, 2011 @11:12AM

phonewebcam writes: "As the WP7 market share hovers around what Android would consider a rounding error, Microsoft sinks to a new level of desperation:

"This could be a little controversial. Microsoft is offering the chance of winning a free Windows Phone, in exchange for Android owners sharing tales of woe on Twitter concerning Google's operating system, Electric Pig reports.

People are encouraged to use the hashtag #droidrage to vent their dissatisfaction.

Windows Phone 'evangelist' Ben Rudolph tweeted: "Share your android malware story... and you could win a #windowsphone upgrade."""

Submission + - Android ranked most 'closed' open source OS (bgr.com)

Submitted by zacharye on Tuesday December 13, 2011 @11:06AM

zacharye writes: A new report has ranked Google’s Android operating system the most “closed” open source platform among eight major open source projects. VisionMobile on Monday published The Open Governance Index, a deep look at the relative openness of Android, Qt, Symbian, MeeGo, Mozilla, WebKit, Linux and Eclipse. Going beyond licensing models and using governance as a core metric, the firm determined that Qt is the most open open source platform with an Open Governance Index of 58% while Google’s Android was the most closed open source platform analyzed in its report...

Submission + - LHC Homes In On Possible Higgs Boson Around 126GeV (web.cern.ch)

Submitted by Ginger Unicorn on Tuesday December 13, 2011 @10:48AM

Ginger Unicorn writes: In a seminar held at CERN today, the ATLAS and CMS experiments presented the status of their searches for the Standard Model Higgs boson. Their results are based on the analysis of considerably more data than those presented at the summer conferences, sufficient to make significant progress in the search for the Higgs boson, but not enough to make any conclusive statement on the existence or non-existence of the elusive Higgs. The main conclusion is that the Standard Model Higgs boson, if it exists, is most likely to have a mass constrained to the range 116-130 GeV by the ATLAS experiment, and 115-127 GeV by CMS. Tantalising hints have been seen by both experiments in this mass region, but these are not yet strong enough to claim a discovery.

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