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Games

Submission + - Conway's Game of Life continues to inspire (newscientist.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Conway's Game of Life is now forty two years old, but it continues to inspire as well as being the basis of an actively researched field: with computer scientists now announcing they have found a new form of the famous "glider" pattern (once suggested by Eric S Raymond as the insignia of computer hackers) that runs over a so-called Penrose universe.
Encryption

Submission + - Quantum Cryptography Theory Has A Security Defect (net-security.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Researchers at Tamagawa University, Quantum ICT Research Institute, announced today that they had proved the incompleteness and limit of the security theory in quantum key distribution. They showed that the present theory cannot guarantee unconditional security. Until now, the majority of researchers in quantum information science have believed that quantum cryptography (quantum key distribution) can provide unconditional security. The guarantee of its unconditional security is given by the trace distance, which is a quantum version of the evaluation of a mathematical cipher. However, since 2006, new developments in the field have cast criticism over the meaningful security of cryptography ensured only by the trace distance. Despite these criticisms, many papers have continued to claim that the trace distance guarantees unconditional security in quantum key distribution.
Microsoft

Submission + - Acer: Microsoft Surface Will Have 'Huge Negative Impact' (techweekeurope.co.uk)

Submitted by
twoheadedboy
twoheadedboy writes: "Acer has yet again talked about its concerns over Microsoft's Surface tablet, which is due to launch alongside Windows 8 on 26 October. JT Wang, chairman and chief executive of computer maker Acer, said the device would have a “huge negative impact” for the Windows 8 ecosystem. "It will create a huge negative impact for the ecosystem and other brands may take a negative reaction," he told the FT."
Your Rights Online

Submission + - Three years in jail for receiving an image of fisting? 1

Submitted by
wwwrench
wwwrench writes: "In the UK, it may be illegal to receive an emailed image of legal and consensual sex. The Crown Prosecutation Service is currently trying a man for receiving an image of two people fisting. Under the U.K.'s 2008 obsenity law it is illegal to view a pornographic image of extreme sex, even if the image depicts a legal act. Questions have been raised about the motives for the case, as the defendent is openly gay, and used to prosecute corrupt police officers. Although the case has been virtually ignored by the media, this is also the first trail in the U.K. where one of the lawyers has been allowed to tweet during the trial (under the hashtag #porntrial).""
Google

Submission + - Captchas Are Becoming Ridiculous (andrewmunsell.com)

Submitted by andrewmunsell
andrewmunsell writes: A couple of years ago, I don’t remember being truly baffled by a captcha. In fact, reCAPTCHA was one of the better systems I’d seen. It wasn’t difficult to solve, and it seemed to work when I used it on my own websites. Fast forward to 2012, and I am trying to log into my Envato Marketplace account on Graphic River. I haven’t been there in a few months, and recently I’ve been working on changing my passwords to be unique-per-site. Understandably, I forgot my password. After a couple of attempts and failures, I was presented with a reCAPTCHA. But this time, I couldn’t read it.
Google

Submission + - Lone Grad Student Scooped the Government (motherjones.com)

Submitted by Pigskin-Referee
Pigskin-Referee writes: Jonathan Mayer had a hunch.

A gifted computer scientist, Mayer suspected that online advertisers might be getting around browser settings that are designed to block tracking devices known as cookies. If his instinct was right, advertisers were following people as they moved from one website to another even though their browsers were configured to prevent this sort of digital shadowing. Working long hours at his office, Mayer ran a series of clever tests in which he purchased ads that acted as sniffers for the sort of unauthorized cookies he was looking for. He hit the jackpot, unearthing one of the biggest privacy scandals of the past year: Google was secretly planting cookies on a vast number of iPhone browsers. Mayer thinks millions of iPhones were targeted by Google.

Submission + - 7000 Irish e-voting machines to be scrapped (independent.ie)

Submitted by lampsie
lampsie writes: You may recall back in January 2012 that the Irish government had deemed their stock of 7000 e-voting machines 'worthless'. Turns out they are not — after spending upwards of €54 million euro purchasing them almost a decade ago, all 7000 will now be scrapped for €70,000 (just over nine euros each). The machines were scrapped because 'they could not be guaranteed to be safe from tampering [...] and they could not produce a printout so that votes/results could be double-checked.'
Java

Submission + - Write BASIC, run Java (wordpress.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: BINSIC allows you to write BASIC code, as though for an old Sinclair machine, and run it anywhere you have Java. Source code is available and it comes with code to run Conway's Game of Life.
BINSIC is actually written in Groovy, which runs atop the JVM but is supplied in JAR form and so can be used just as a Java JAR.
Google

Submission + - The New Google Tablet (empowernetwork.com)

Submitted by
samueln
samueln writes: "Google Tablet

Google Tablet is A 7-inch tablet, co-developed by Google and Asus will be hitting the market from July. Google chairman Eric Schimidt told an Italian publication that the company would produce an Android-powered tablet of the hishest quality within the following six months. Now halfway round the year, behold the new "Google Tablet" latest Google product in town"
Firefox

Submission + - Firefox "privacy flaw" may be a bug in human behavior

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Firefox 13 recently introduced thumbnail images to the New Tab page — including images snapshotted from your HTTPS traffic. Security news sites made much of this as a "bug" and a "privacy flaw"; Mozilla said they'd fix it.

Here's an article which looks into the New Tab functionality in detail and cuts through the FUD we've had so far. The author argues that the "bug" is in our own behavior — our urge to keep far too much browser history, simply because it's convenient. He points out that the information in the new thumbnails has always been in the Firefox cache where it's easy enough to find, but now that it's even more obvious, people are freaking out. Instead they should just clear browser history on exit and be done with it.

http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2012/06/29/anatomy-of-a-bug-firefox-new-tab-feature-thumbnails-https-pages/
Google

Submission + - Google Onshores Manufacturing of the Nexus Q (nytimes.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Etched into the base of Google's new wireless home media player that was introduced on Wednesday is its most intriguing feature. On the underside of the Nexus Q is a simple inscription: Designed and Manufactured in the U.S.A. The Google executives and engineers who decided to build the player here are engaged in an experiment in American manufacturing. "We've been absent for so long, we decided, 'Why don't we try it and see what happens?' "
Education

Submission + - BASIC as a domain-specific language (wordpress.com)

Submitted by
00_NOP
00_NOP writes: "BINSIC is a reimplementation of Timex Sinclair 1000/1500 (ZX80/ZX81) BASIC that runs on Groovy/Java and is supplied, to start you off, with a BASIC script that runs the hacker classic Conway's Game of Life.
BINSIC — the name stands for Binsic Is Not Sinclair Instruction Code — actually extends the Sinclair BASIC (e.g. to support an ELSE clause in IF..THEN..ELSE) but does have a few issues about GOTO statements (the lack of native support for them in Java and Groovy makes them very difficult to emulate — though GOTO does work outside loops. The BASIC of the 1980s was crude but also had some expressive power lacking in today's much more sophisticated programming environments — INPUT can do in one line what it takes Java 20 to 25 lines to master. The initial thought for the "domain" was introducing kids' to programming skills (something also taken up by the RaspberryPi people) but now I am not so sure, but I hope it brings fun if nothing else."
Canada

Submission + - Canadian DOJ Warned About Unconstitutionality of Copyright Digital Lock Rules (michaelgeist.ca)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Canadian House of Commons may have passed the Canadian DMCA, but the constitutional concerns with the copyright bill and its digital lock rules will likely linger for years. Michael Geist has obtained internal government documents that indicate that the Department of Justice issued a legal opinion warning about the potential for constitutional violations. The DOJ legal opinion warned of the need to link circumvention with copyright infringement and of the particular danger of not providing the blind with an exception. The Canadian law misses the mark on both counts with no link to infringement and an exception that blind groups say is "nullified" by strict conditions.
Java

Submission + - Can we build a better mouse trap/hex editor? (wordpress.com) 4

Submitted by
00_NOP
00_NOP writes: "Hex editors are probably one of the most basic parts of any serious coder's toolkit, yet earlier this year, when working on a filesystem driver for Linux I could not find one that did what I wanted — handle big and little endian 16 bit representations and block:offset addressing (I am not saying it doesn't exist, only that I could not find it).
I had a bit of a moan on my blog and then decided to do the free software thing of writing my own (in Groovy). I've now done that — and it's available for testing — but apart from personal satisfaction, was it really worth it? Should we still be working on such basic tools or getting on with building higher applications?"

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