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Microsoft

Submission + - The Hacker Who Found the Secrets of the Next Xbox and PlayStation (kotaku.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Stephen Totilo at Kotaku has a long article detailing the exploits of an Australian hacker who calls himself SuperDaE. He managed to break into networks at Microsoft, Sony, and Epic Games, from which he retrieved information about the PS4 and next-gen Xbox 'Durango' (which turned out to be correct), and he even secured developer hardware for Durango itself. He uncovered security holes at Epic, but notified the company rather than exploiting them. He claims to have done the same with Microsoft. He hasn't done any damage or facilitated piracy with the access he's had, but simply breaching the security of those companies was enough to get the U.S. FBI to convince Australian authorities to raid his house and confiscate his belongings. In an age where many tech-related 'sources' are just empty claims, a lot of this guy's information has checked out. The article describes both SuperDaE's activities and a journalist's efforts to verify his claims.

Submission + - "This is your second and final notice" robocallers revealed: Brenda Helfenstine (nytimes.com)

nbauman writes: A New York Times consumer columnist tracked down the people who run a "This is your second and final notice" robocall operation.

The calls came from Account Management Assistance, which promises to negotiate lower credit card rates with banks. One woman paid them $1,000, and all they did was give her a limited-time zero-percent credit card that she could have gotten herself.

AMA has a post office box in Orlando, Florida. The Better Business Bureau has a page for Your Financial Ladder, which does business as Account Management Assistance, and as Economic Progress. According to a Florida incorporation filing, Economic Progress is operated by Brenda Helfenstine, with her husband Tony.

The Arkansas attorney general has sued Your Financial Ladder for violating the Telemarketing Consumer Fraud and Abuse Prevention Act. The Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services investigated Your Financial Ladder, but the investigator went to 1760 Sundance Drive, St. Cloud, which turned out to be a residence, and gave up.

The Times notes that you can type their phone number (855-462-3833) into http://800notes.com/ and get lots of reports on them.

Submission + - NASCAR Tries To Squelch Video of Spectators Injured by Crash 1

An anonymous reader writes: Dozens of fans attending a NASCAR race at Daytona Speedway were injured when a crash during the last lap triggered a chain reaction, culminating in the front section of Kyle Larson's car ricocheting into the fence in front of the stands (Larson escaped injury). While the footage accompanying the Fox News story is dramatic enough, an even more riveting clip showing the chaotic scene in the stands from up close was posted on YouTube, but was taken down after NASCAR claimed it violated their copyright . YouTube has since restored the fan's video. A NASCAR spokesman has issued a clarification, saying that the takedown request was done out of respect for those injured. The race was an opening act for the main event, the Daytona 500, which officials say will proceed as scheduled. "With the fence being prepared tonight to our safety protocols, we expect to go racing tomorrow with no changes," Speedway President Joie Chitwood told CNN.
Advertising

Submission + - Buying Their Way Onto The NY Times Bestsellers List 4

Freshly Exhumed writes: An endorsement from Oprah Winfrey. A film deal from Steven Spielberg. A debut at the top of The New York Times bestsellers list. These are the things every author craves most, and while the first two require the favor of a benevolent God, the third can be had by anyone with the ability to write a check — a pretty big one to ResultSource, a San Diego-based marketing consultancy ...in what Forbes says is essentially a laundering operation aimed at deceiving the book-buying public into believing a title is more in-demand than it is. Soren Kaplan, a business consultant and speaker, hired ResultSource to promote his book “Leapfrogging.” Responding to the WSJ article on his website, Kaplan breaks out the economics of making the list.“It’s no wonder few people in the industry want to talk about bestseller campaigns,” he writes “Put bluntly, they allow people with enough money, contacts, and know-how to buy their way onto bestseller lists.”
Cloud

Submission + - Microsoft Azure total outage for secured storage (sfgate.com) 2

rtfa-troll writes: There has been worldwide (all locations) total outage of storage in Microsoft's Azure cloud. Apparently "Microsoft unwittingly let an online security certificate expire Friday, triggering a worldwide outage in an online service that stores data for a wide range of business customers." according to the San Francisco Chronicle (also Yahoo and the Register). Perhaps too much time has been spent sucking up to storage vendros and not enough looking after the customers? This comes directly after a week long outage of one of Microsoft's SQL server components in Azure. This is not the first time that we have discussed major outages on Azure and probably won't be the last. It's certainly also not the first time that we have discussed Microsoft cloud systems making user's data unavailable.

Comment DDR and Just Dance Kinect (Score 1) 550

Even if she is 200 pounds overweight these games are fun. Get a Kinect and 2 ddr dance pads. Hopefully you don't know this game very well yet. When she sees you miserably failing she'll give it a try. I haven't played "Just Dance" but I have tons of DDR experience and this is a great game for men and women. It's great exercise and great fun. This is a good way to get into gaming and into the habit of turning on the xbox when bored. If you advance faster than her it's okay as you can play at different levels at the same time on the same song.

Comment cell phones have too much delay (Score 1) 445

And calling cell to cell is the worst. It's much worse for conference calls with 3 people (or more). What happens is when one person stops talking the other 2 start in simultaineously and you get 3 words in before you realize two of you are talking and then you both stop for a whole second and then both start up. Plus the sound quality isn't as good because cell phone calls are overly-compressed.

There's probably less delay calling Australia on a land line than downtown to downtown cell to cell.

Cell phones are great - don't get me wrong - for a 1 minutes conversation. But a 1 hour intense business discussion - forget it.

Comment Limiting bet sizes hurts accuracy of the market (Score 1) 80

The more sure you are about something the more you are willing to bet.

One of the reasons markets are more accurate than pundits is that some of them have inside information of sorts.

The reason intrade is useful for predictions is that the people who bet there do very careful research. For example when betting on American Idol vote-offs they look carefully at the data at dialidol.com. The people who don't look carefully quickly learn not to bet on intrade as they lose too much money. They also used to be able to look at download quantites on itunes for the previous week's singers songs. There is data out there that is tricky to find and the people who find it sometimes jump on intrade and make a bet. Instead of trusting someone to integrate all the data, it's easier to let the people betting at intrade do it for you. Also some of those people are friends and they chat about the data and how they interpreted it and argue about what it all means. The smarter people make the most money and keep at it, and they are the ones with their bigger bets that set the market price accurately.

There were hundreds of poll results but making heads or tails of it and including the electoral college of each state and figuring out which polls are biased and so on is a lot of work. Easier to just check intrade - let the experts (not pundits) make the bets.

If democrats tried to fool intrade by betting on Obama, then why did Obama's price go down so much after the first debate?

Maybe manipulating intrade isn't that easy in a big market like presidential win?

Comment Better pictures and video here (Score 3, Informative) 49

On one picture you can see how the visual image and the gamma radiation agree at the corner of a wall. You can see that the radiation spot turns 90 degrees with the bottom edge of the wall and how the radioactive materials kind of puddled near the bottom of the wall. It's cool to see that the two images agree.

Also there is video of the actual camera which is pretty big and not so portable. You probably want to keep it in a car most of the time.

http://www.japanprobe.com/2012/03/30/camera-can-see-radiation/

Comment html5 (Score 4, Informative) 188

Read about the canvas element. You should be able to write the whole thing in javascript. You should be able to get an extremely basic version up and running within a few hours. Just play around a bit in javascript and read about <canvas>. The physics is trivial - you store the x,y vx,vy value of everything that is moving (velocity x,y). You add vx to x every cycle through your loop. You adjust vy by gravity through every cycle. Also known as ay. And you also adjust vx,vy by every gravitational point nearby. You calculate the distance sqrt((x1-x2)^2+(y1-y2)^2 ) to each object and use gravity formula which is realted to 1/distance squared so you can get rid of that sqrt and make the code more efficient. Then find the portion of accel that is due to x and y. Anyway, it's just a few hours work. Just give it a shot - don't read any books - just find an html primer website that talks about <canvas>.

Comment Re:if you are a good programmer there will be no p (Score 1) 435

Yeah, I know - it's hard getting people in Timbuktu, Idaho with 15 years of PHP & Javascript experience who will work for $8/hour .

I'm in the Boston area and I already told you. Zero experience in javascript or any specific language is required. And we pay very well. Because we have to. Because the only people we can find we have to hire away from other companies. But damn it, you better know how to write code in *some* language. I figure they can learn javascript after we hire them. My ad in Monster got 20 responses over a month and when I called them all back they all had found jobs except for 4 crappy programmers who didn't know how to make for loops and one we made an offer to who also went elsewhere (he had 3 offers and ours was the highest). I keep hearing ads for Mathworks which has 200 open requisitions. I have neighbors who work there and they say they are able to find programmers but it is a struggle.

Comment if you are a good programmer there will be no prob (Score 2) 435

Good programmers are very hard to find right now. If you can write good clean code that is easy to maintain and read by others and if you are reasonably fast it shouldn't matter how old you are. I'm having a hell of a time finding anyone - I would love those skills (php, javascript especially) but I'll just take someone who knows how to write in java or c and train them. I think we may have finally filled both our positions (fingers crossed) but it took 18 months to fill 2 positions! It sucks out there if you are trying to hire. Other's I know who are trying to hire programmers have a similar story. Programmers have their companies by the short hairs right now. All of us should be asking for raises (the good programmers anyway).

Also you should know that there is much less age discrimination with contract programmers versus permanent programmers. And the pay is better. If you are in an industry were someone with just 1 year javascript experience gets $50k then you can get $50 per hour ($90k, $90 per hour, etc this is the general rule but doesn't always work for every situation). Your second contract that rate will go up and within a few years you should be at $100 per hour. If you are good. Also if you go through an agency for the first few gigs you will find that they market you in ways that you can't market yourself ("his coworker, John, said he's the fastest programmer he ever met" or whatever). And life is less stressful for contract programmers because there is a little less emotional investment and also less meetings.

Comment I have the same need (Score 2) 145

We are happily using prism for our customer's (also in law enforcement) whose IT department refuses to let them install "firefox". Right now prism is great but it would be nice to eventually get those ff ver 4 and ver 5 faster javascript interpreters (engines?).

I'm not sure if using --chrome would help us because I suspect I would have to use the firefox setup.msi file which would give away our secret as usually the IT department is the group going around installing our software on our user's machines. Unless creating my own ff installer is simple (I'm experienced creating an msi file but the prism one is so simple because all it does is copy files - no registering of dlls or registry changes).

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