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Submission + - Music Industry Is Keeping Streaming Services Unprofitable (computerworld.com)

Submitted by Lucas123
Lucas123 writes: Music streaming services, forced to give from 60% to 70% of their revenue to the record industry, will never be profitable in their current state, a new report shows. Unless the services can monetize their user base by entering new product and service categories, or they can sell themselves to a larger company that can sustain them, they're doomed to fail. One method that subscription services might be able to use to achieve profitability is to up sell mobile deals or bundles to subscribers. For example, a select package of mobile services would be sold through the music service provider, the report from Generator Research suggested. "Services like iTunes Match and Google and Amazon are already heading in this direction," the report states. Another possibility would be for a larger company to purchase the music service or for the service to begin offering sanitized user behavioral data to advertisers, who could then better target a customer base.

Submission + - Target's internal security team warned management

Submitted by david.emery
david.emery writes: According to this story, Target's own IA/computer security raised concerns months before the attack: http://www.theverge.com/2014/2... Quoting a story in the Wall Street Journal.)
But management allegedly "brushed them off."

This begs a more general question for the Slashdot community? How many have identified vulnerabilities in your company's/client's systems, only to be "brushed off?" And if the company took no action, did they ultimately suffer a breach?

Submission + - Windows 8 Has Surpassed 200 Million Licenses Sold 2

Submitted by SmartAboutThings
SmartAboutThings writes: Back in March, 2013, we knew that the number of Windows 8 sold copies was somewhere near sixty millions, nearing almost 100 in the middle of last year. Now, Microsoft has confirmed that there are now more than 200 million Windows 8 sold licenses. The information was first made available by Tami Reller, Microsoft’s Executive Vice President of Marketing during Goldman Sachs Technology & Internet Conference. The number includes Windows licenses that ship on a new tablet or PC, as well as upgrades to Windows 8 but does not include volume license sales to enterprise.

Submission + - Google Publishes Commitments It Made To Settle EU Antitrust Case (itworld.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: According to a report on ITworld, Google has done what the European Commission declined to do: publish the details of the latest commitments Google made in a bid to settle a long-running antitrust case involving its treatment of rival specialist search services, among other matters. On the company's European policy blog, Google's senior vice president and general counsel, Kent Walker, announced the publication of what he called the 'full text' (PDF)of the company's commitments. In fact, the 93-page document contains a number of redactions, including details of a parameter used to rank search results, the identities of two companies with customized contracts for Adsense For Search, and a proposal for modification of those contracts to comply with the other commitments

Submission + - A pizza that stays fresh for three years

Submitted by kelk1
kelk1 writes: The AP reports that the US military may near the Holy Grail: a pizza that stays fresh for three years, on the counter and without refrigeration.

"How does it taste?"

"It pretty much tastes just like a typical pan pizza that you would make at home and take out of the oven or the toaster oven. The only thing missing from that experience would be it's not hot when you eat it. It's room temperature."

Not sure about the soldiers, but I guess that this would also be big news for the /. crowd.

Submission + - The Tale of How an NVIDIA Engineer's Cube Became His Castle (nvidia.com)

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: Jonathon Evans — who leads the team that designs the host interface and context scheduling unit for NVIDIA GPUs — decided to play a prank on one of his colleagues, Alan Kaatz, while he was away. So, he wrapped Alan’s computer, keyboard and many of the objects in his cube in cellophane. Alan, a quick-witted engineer with a keen sense of the absurd, decided to hit back — hard. 'I wanted to do something so big that it would be impossible to retaliate,' Alan says. So Alan and a small group of other GPU designers — Eric Tyson, Steve Mueller and Rafal Zboinski — huddled around a whiteboard to sketch out what revenge might look like. They would turn Jonathon’s cube into a castle. For the project King's Quest they would need high-quality cardboard and about 200 hours. The result is quite monumental and unequaled office prank.

Submission + - "The Color Run" violates agreement, then sues college photographer. (fstoppers.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: As a professional freelance photographer for a local college, and a hobbyist code junky, I'm intrigued by this story and how it should be a warning to me as either. As well, there is a good lesson to be learned here about taking for granted the legal implications in the manner in which you exchange your own intellectual property with anyone. Never mind that "The Color Run"'s actions here maybe deserve a good dose of media attention.

Submission + - NSF Report Flawed; Americans Do Not Believe Astrology is Scientific (neoacademic.com) 1

Submitted by RichDiesal
RichDiesal writes: A new report from the National Science Foundation, reported a few days ago right here on Slashdot, states that roughly 40% of Americans believe astrology to be scientific. But this is in fact false; most of those apparently astrology-loving Americans have actually confused astrology with astronomy. In a 100-person Mechanical Turk study with a $5 research budget, I verified this by actually asking people to define astrology. Among those that correctly defined astrology, only 10% believe it to be scientific; among those that confused astrology for astronomy, 92% believe "astrology" to be scientific. Apparently US science education is not so far behind the Chinese after all.

Submission + - Tesla Model S Caught Fire While Parked And Unplugged

Submitted by cartechboy
cartechboy writes: Tesla had a mixed bag last year when it came to headlines. The good news was the Model S received a top safety rating, but the bad news came with three of those electric cars catching fire after receiving damage to the battery packs. Now another Tesla Model S has caught on fire, but this time the car was parked and unplugged. The fire happened earlier this morning in the owner's garage in Toronto, Ontario. At this time no one knows what sparked the fire, but we do know the vehicle was only about four months old. Again, it wasn't plugged into a charging station, and it wasn't turned on. Parked. In a garage. With no one near it. Interestingly, the battery on this particular Model S was unscathed by the fire. In fact, the Toronto fire department says the fire didn't originate in the battery, the charging system, the adapter or electrical receptacle since all of those components weren't touched by the fire. So, how did this Tesla fire happen, and will this blow up into a larger issue for the new automaker?

Submission + - What to do for ongoing education? 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Lately, with the volatility of the economy, I have been thinking of expanding my education to reach into other areas related to my career. I have a computer science degree from Purdue and have been employed as a firmware engineer for 10+ years writing C and C++. I like what I do, but to me it seems that most job opportunities are available for people with skills in higher level languages such as ASP,.NET, C#, PHP, Scripting, Web applications and so on. Is it worth going back to school to get this training? I was thinking that a computer information technology degree would fit the bill, but I am concerned that going back to college would require a lot of time wasted doing electives and taking courses that don't get to the "meat" of the learning. What would you do?

Submission + - Facebook Pride " Define Gender Identity And Pronouns"

Submitted by qallk
qallk writes: Facebook says on its Facebook Diversity Page:

"" We collaborated with our Network of Support, a group of leading LGBT advocacy organizations, to offer an extensive list of gender identities that many people use to describe themselves. Moreover, people who select a custom gender will now have the ability to choose the pronoun they’d like to be referred to publicly — male (he/his), female (she/her) or neutral (they/their).
""

Submission + - Law is Code (datainnovation.org)

Submitted by itif
itif writes: "As Lawrence Lessig famously wrote 'code is law' by which he meant that the decisions of those who design computer systems ultimately shape our society. The converse, i.e., 'law is code,' is also true: the laws of our society ultimately shape the design of our computer systems. This maxim has important and surprising implications."

Comment Re:2014 won't be the year of Internet of Things (Score 1) 142

by donaldm (#46215325) Attached to: Why the Internet of Things Is More 1876 Than 1995

Why on Earth would your refrigerator have to be online to keep track of food expiration dates? Can't you use a tablet, phone or PC to keep track of that?

Err! wouldn't it be easier to write on the packages or containers if they don't have expiration date. Or just take a tentative smell on a regular basis and throw-out the foodstuff that has gone off or has mould growing on it ;). Having a policy of cleaning and checking your fridge at least once a month can save an embarrassing trip to the toilet or in severe cases the Doctor and it definitely beats maintaining a database/spreadsheet of your fridge.

Comment Trusted program, untrusted use (Score 1) 195

by donaldm (#46201777) Attached to: Is Whitelisting the Answer To the Rise In Data Breaches?

What is someone breaks in, gets command line access and uses trusted commands to send the data elsewhere. The hacker used trusted programs to do the breach so white list would not stop it.

Well your machine is now compromised. You now have to ask the question "What can I do". Normally in a case like this you should do a fresh OS install from a trusted source (eg. bootable CD/DVD, USB key) followed by appropriate customisations then updates from a trusted source. You could do a recovery from your OS backup but if you have been compromised I would not trust this.

Obviously you may need to recover your user data if that has also been compromised but if are looking at an enterprise system or even just a home PC, initially you may not need to do this until all interested parties (eg. DB administrators) have checked for issues since you cannot be sure if your backups have not been compromised as well. This is why an appropriate documented disaster recovery plan needs to be in place whether the system is a multi million dollar Enterprise system system or a home computer.

Comment Re:Do it in ROM (Score 4, Interesting) 195

by donaldm (#46201711) Attached to: Is Whitelisting the Answer To the Rise In Data Breaches?
You should always set-up your file-systems in such a way that the OS part is completely separate from user data such that it should be a simple matter to recover or even install and update just the system file-systems. Unix and now Linux has always recommenced this type of layout although you can even do something like this for Microsoft Windows.

I have Fedora 20 running on my PC's and I make sure I document my system layout, application requirements, customisations and of course my security files which I save. If on the off my system gets compromised I can easily 1) Do a system recovery or 2) Do a fresh install and update without compromising my /home or archive data.

The fresh install takes me approximately 1 hour then 15 minutes for customisations then about 1 hour for the update although during this time I can fully use the machine. It must be noted that a recovery from backup would most likely take me about 20 minutes for 10 GB to be recovered (over 2000 packages), however if you have been compromised it is usually safer to do a fresh install.

It is possible to have a read-only system file-system for a Unix/Linux but this would be a stupid idea since you have /var which contain logs and update information that is required to be read/write. Even / (/ and /usr) needs read/write on occasion. The same is true for a Microsoft OS. The best you can do is have a tested disaster recovery plan and surprisingly it need not be that elaborate but you do need to cover most what if's.

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