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Submission + - Chinese government probes Microsoft over anti-monopoly issues

Submitted by DroidJason1
DroidJason1 writes: The Chinese government is investigating Microsoft for possible breaches of anti-monopoly laws, following a series of surprise visits to Redmond's offices in cities across China on Monday. These surprise visits were part of China's ongoing investigation, and were based on security complaints about Microsoft’s Windows operating system and Office productivity suite. Results from an earlier inspection apparently were not enough to clear Microsoft of suspicion of anti-competitive behavior. Microsoft's alleged anti-monopoly behavior is a criminal matter, so if found guilty, the software giant could face steep fines as well as other sanctions.

Submission + - Six Ways Big Telecom Tries to Kill Community Broadband

Submitted by Jason Koebler
Jason Koebler writes: Beyond merely staying out of each other's way in many big cities, ISPs have managed to throw up legal, logistical, and financial roadblocks at every turn to prevent municipally owned fiber networks from taking hold in many parts of the country.
The lobbying money is well-documented, but some of the other strategies, such as threatening to cut off business with companies who help build municipal fiber networks, are less known. Catharine Rice of the Coalition for Local Internet Choice, says there are at least six distinct tactics national telecom companies have perfected to do this.

Submission + - Are you being tracked by your phone's wifi?

Submitted by toshikodo
toshikodo writes: The authorities in the UK city of York are about to role out a system supplied by Purple Wifi that will, according to the BBC, track people as they move around the city using the mac address from the wifi pings received from their mobile phones. They claim that this tracking will be anonymous unless you sign up for their "free" wifi, but what if they have already obtained your mac address from some other source, say some hotel you stayed in two years ago? Will this really be anonymous, and is this something local government should ever be involved with?

Submission + - Old Apache Code at Root of Android FakeID Mess (securityledger.com)

Submitted by chicksdaddy
chicksdaddy writes: The Security Ledger reports that a four year-old vulnerability in an open source component that is a critical part of Android mobile OS leaves hundreds of millions of mobile devices susceptible silent malware infections. (https://securityledger.com/2014/07/old-apache-code-at-root-of-android-fakeid-mess/)

The vulnerability was disclosed on Tuesday (http://bluebox.com/news/). It affects devices running Android versions 2.1 to 4.4 (“KitKat”), according to a statement released by Bluebox. According to Bluebox, the vulnerability was found in a package installer in affected versions of Android. The installer doesn't attempt to determine the authenticity of certificate chains that are used to vouch for new digital identity certificates. In short, Bluebox writes “an identity can claim to be issued by another identity, and the Android cryptographic code will not verify the claim.”

The security implications of this are vast. Malicious actors could create a malicious mobile application with a digital identity certificate that claims to be issued by Adobe Systems. Once installed, vulnerable versions of Android will treat the application as if it was actually signed by Adobe and give it access to local resources, like the special webview plugin privilege, that can be used to sidestep security controls and virtual ‘sandbox’ environments that keep malicious programs from accessing sensitive data and other applications running on the Android device.

In a scenario that is becoming all too common: the flaw appears to have been introduced to Android through an open source component — this time from Apache Harmony (http://harmony.apache.org/), an open source alternative to Oracle’s Java. Google turned to Harmony as an alternative means of supporting Java in the absence of a deal with Oracle to license Java directly.

Work on Harmony was discontinued in November, 2011. However, Google has continued using native Android libraries that are based on Harmony code. The vulnerability concerning certificate validation in the package installer module persisted even as the two codebases diverged.

Submission + - University of Michigan solar car wins fifth straight national title (mlive.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: For the fifth consecutive year, the solar car team from the University of Michigan has won the American Solar Car Challenge. The event is an eight-day, 1,700-mile race with a total of 23 participating teams. The Umich victory comes in spite of a 20-30 minute delay when they had problems with the motor at the very beginning of the race. "They made the time up when team strategists decided to push the car to the speed limit while the sun was shining bright, rather than hold back to conserve energy." Footage of the race and daily updates on the car's performance are available from the team's website, as are the specs of the car itself. Notably, the current iteration of the car weighs only 320 pounds, a full 200 pounds lighter than the previous version.

Submission + - 35% of (American) Adults Have Debt "In Collections" 1

Submitted by meeotch
meeotch writes: According to a new study by the Urban Institute, 35% of U.S. adults with a credit history (91% of the adult population of the U.S.) have debt "in collections" — a status generally not acquired until payments are at least 180 days past due. Debt problems seem to be worse in the South, with states hovering in the 40%+ range, while the Northeast has it better, at less than 30%. The study's authors claim their findings actually underrepresent low-income consumers, because "adults without a credit file are more likely to be financially disadvantaged."

Oddly, only 5% of adults have debt 30-180 days past due. This latter fact is partially accounted for by the fact that a broader range of debt can enter "in collections" status than "past due" status (e.g. parking tickets)... But also perhaps demonstrates that as one falls far enough along the debt spiral, escape becomes impossible. Particularly in the case of high-interest debt such as credit cards — the issuers of which cluster in states such as South Dakota, following a 1978 Supreme Court ruling that found that states' usury laws did not apply to banks headquartered in other states.

Even taking into account the folks to lost a parking ticket under their passenger seat, 35% is a pretty shocking number. Anyone have other theories why this number is so much higher than the 5% of people who are just "late"? How about some napkin math on the debt spiral? (And unfortunately, cue the inevitable geek snobbery about how people in debt must be "idiots".)

Comment Re:Rinse Lather Repeat. (Score 1) 1198

by neiras (#47112201) Attached to: Misogyny, Entitlement, and Nerds

Some variation of this comes up now and then, this has been a topic and argument within geekdom for, well, as long as I can remember at least. Sadly I rarely see people actually starting to see from another perspective and instead just circling the wagons to defend about their misogyny.

It's a topic that relates as much to geekdom as it does to any other group. There's no evidence that geekdom is any worse than, say, stockbrokerdom or cardealerdom.

Most people here are objecting to the pigeonholing of our subculture as "misogynistic" when in fact the problem of misogyny is much more widespread.

Comment Let's play the labelling game. (Score 1) 1198

by neiras (#47112143) Attached to: Misogyny, Entitlement, and Nerds

Rapist. Misogynist. Nerd. All labels.

You can apply them to individuals specific criteria. Have you raped? You're a rapist. Do you hate all females? Mysogynist. Overly intellectual, obsessive, or socially impaired? Nerd.

However. The existence of Nerd Mysoginists does not make all members of the Nerd set into Mysoginists. The existence of Rapist Misogynists does not mean that all Misogynists are Rapists.

The author has a problem with Mysoginists. Hating women is not part of any nerd culture I've ever seen or participated in.

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