58767675
submission
alphadogg writes:
Alex Ebert, whose band Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros is best known for its song "Home," is promoting a new website that lets Americans visualize where their tax dollars go vs. where they wish the money would go. TheNewIRS.com http://thenewirs.com/taxplan/n... team actually compliments Whitehouse.gov for providing “a great interactive webpage to see what tax money goes towards on a national level,” but faults it for only letting you see what happens after the fact. The goal of TheNewIRS.com site is to let tax filers find out whether their wishes for where tax dollars go after this year’s April 15 filing deadline match up with reality. TheNewIRS.com concept was conceived by Ebert at the Sundance Film Festival’s “Hackdance” hackathon.
58702617
submission
alphadogg writes:
There's a new sign on the door to Courtroom 5 at the federal courthouse in San Jose, the home to the Apple v. Samsung battle that's playing out this month: "Please turn off all cell phones." For a trial that centers on smartphones and the technology they use, it's more than a little ironic. The entire case might not even be taking place if the market wasn't so big and important, but the constant need for connectivity of everyone is causing problems in the court, hence the new sign. The problems have centered on the system that displays the court reporter's real-time transcription onto monitors on the desks of Judge Lucy Koh, the presiding judge in the case, and the lawyers of Apple and Samsung. The system, it seems, is connected via Wi-Fi and that connection keeps failing.
58644525
submission
alphadogg writes:
Canada Revenue Agency has halted online filing of tax returns by the country's citizens following the disclosure of the Heartbleed security vulnerability that rocked the Internet this week. The country's Minister of National Revenue wrote in a Twitter message https://twitter.com/KerryLynne... on Wednesday that interest and penalties will not be applied to those filing 2013 tax returns after April 30, the last date for filing the returns, for a period equal to the length of the service disruption. The agency has suspended public access to its online services as a preventive measure to protect the information it holds, while it investigates the potential impact on tax payer information, it said.
58388409
submission
alphadogg writes:
An argument between developers of some of the most basic parts of Linux turned heated this week, resulting in a prominent Red Hat employee and code contributor being banned from working on the Linux kernel. Kay Sievers, a well-known open-source software engineer, is a key developer of systemd, a system management framework for Linux-based operating systems. Systemd is currently used by several prominent Linux distributions, including two of the most prominent enterprise distros, Red Hat and SUSE. It was recently announced that Ubuntu would adopt systemd in future versions as well. Sievers was banned by kernel maintainer Linus Torvalds on Wednesday for failing to address an issue that caused systemd to interact with the Linux kernel in negative ways.
58325541
submission
alphadogg writes:
You'd almost think Apple rival Samsung underwrote the upcoming movie "Sex Tape" when you see the just released NSFW trailer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... A couple, played by Cameron Diaz and Jason Segel, have their life turned upside down after they record a sex tape that then spreads through iCloud to a bunch of iPads they've given as gifts to family, friends and even the mailman. Poignant questions asked in the aftermath of the sex tape seeping onto the cloud include: "How the hell do you get it back?" and "You know the cloud?" (to which Diaz's character replies @*$)#&!
58292523
submission
alphadogg writes:
Oracle has overtaken rival IBM as the world's second-largest software vendor by pulling in $29.6 billion in software revenue during 2013, according to analyst firm Gartner. "Global trends around big data and analytics with business investment in database and cloud-based applications helped to drive Oracle's top-line growth," Gartner research vice president Chad Eschinger said in a statement. Microsoft retained its first-place ranking, at $65.7 billion in software revenue, while IBM moved down to third place with $29.1 billion. SAP remained in fourth place, at $18.5 billion, Gartner said.
58263265
submission
alphadogg writes:
Technology that remotely makes a stolen smartphone useless could save American consumers up to $2.6 billion per year if it is implemented widely and leads to a reduction in theft of phones, according to a new report. Law enforcement officials and politicians are pressuring cellular carriers to make such technology standard on all phones shipped in the U.S. in response to the increasing number of smartphone thefts. They believe the so-called "kill switch" would reduce the number of thefts if stolen phones were routinely locked so they became useless. But carriers have resisted these requests and there are now bills proposed at the U.S. Senate, U.S. House of Representatives and California State Senate that would mandate such a system. The report, by William Duckworth, an associate professor of statistics, data science and analytics at Creighton University, found most of the savings for consumers would come from reduced insurance premiums.
58190035
submission
alphadogg writes:
Attorneys say they're making progress toward a possible settlement in Silicon Valley's employee poaching case, in which Google, Apple and other companies are accused of conspiring not to hire employees from other tech giants. During a hearing on Thursday in a San Jose court, attorneys on both sides said they were working daily with a mediator to resolve the dispute, which involves alleged secret agreements among the firms not to poach each other's workers. Those agreements would violate federal antitrust laws. The case dates back to 2011, when Silicon Valley software engineers alleged that Adobe Systems, Apple, Google, Intuit, Intel, Lucasfilm and Pixar engaged in an "overarching conspiracy" to fix and suppress employee compensation and to restrict employees' mobility. The class covered by the suit is estimated at 60,000 workers.
58103891
submission
alphadogg writes:
Google has revamped its portfolio of enterprise cloud services, by cutting prices, adding new features, and touting a refreshed enthusiasm for the cloud market. "We have been very seriously committed to the cloud as a business and product family," one executive said, noting that Google now runs over 4.75 million active applications on its services. Cloud Storage is now priced at $0.026 cents per GB per month, and $0.020 cents per GB per month for an option with reduced availability, regardless of the amount of data stored. Formerly, the company had a number of pricing tiers for storage, based on the amount of data being stored. Prices previously ranged from $0.085 per GB per month to $0.054 per GB per month. Google's news follows Cisco's pledge to put $1B into cloud services, http://www.networkworld.com/co... while Microsoft's new CEO Satya Nadella on Thursday is expected to make a big cloud announcement. http://www.networkworld.com/ne...
57943641
submission
alphadogg writes:
Web servers running a long-outdated version of the Linux kernel were attacked with dramatic speed over two days last week, according to Cisco Systems. All the affected servers were running the 2.6 version, first released in December 2003. "When attackers discover a vulnerability in the system, they can exploit it at their whim without fear of it being remedied," Cisco said. After the Web server has been compromised, the attackers slip in a line of JavaScript to other JavaScript files within the website. That code bounces the website's visitors to a second compromised host. "The two-stage process allows attackers to serve up a variety of malicious content to the visitor," according to Cisco. http://blogs.cisco.com/securit...
57833617
submission
alphadogg writes:
Leslie Lamport, a Microsoft Research principal, has been named the winner of the 2013 ACM A.M. Turing Award, http://amturing.acm.org/ also known as the “Nobel Prize in Computing.” The computer scientist was recognized by the Association for Computing Machinery for “imposing clear, well-defined coherence on the seemingly chaotic behavior of distributed computing systems, in which several autonomous computers communicate with each other by passing messages.” His algorithms, models and verification systems have enabled distributed computer systems to play the key roles they’re used in throughout the data center, security and cloud computing landscapes.
57679177
submission
alphadogg writes:
It’s the holiday for every mathematician small and large: Pi Day. If you’re not familiar, math enthusiasts around the world embrace March 14 to commemorate the mathematical constant. No matter the size of the circle, the ratio of its circumference to its diameter will always be 3.14. What better way to celebrate this than on 3/14? Here are fashion, food, activities and more to get you into the spirit.
57590115
submission
alphadogg writes:
A sneak peek at the annual Computing Research Association's (CRA) report on computer science enrollments at colleges shows that strong demand for technically-savvy workers is luring students in a big way. The full 2013 Taulbee Report will be published in May, but the CRA revealed a few tidbits this week in its Computer Research News publication. http://cra.org/resources/crn-o... Among the findings: Among 123 departments responding last year and the year before, there was a 22% increase in enrollment for computer science bachelor’s degree programs at U.S. schools. Degrees awarded increased 0.9% and new enrollments rose 13.7%
57585075
submission
alphadogg writes:
As a company that draws more than 2 billion eyeballs per month, Facebook was a fitting harbinger of trends to come at an optical networking conference. The social networking goliath is lighting up its own optical fiber, deploying 100Gbps links in its data centers and looking towards emerging silicon photonics technology, Facebook Director of Technical Operations Najam Ahmad said this week at an Optical Society of America meeting held alongside the annual Optical Fiber Communications Conference in San Francisco. Facebook's challenges mirror those of other enterprises and data center operators, with fast-growing data traffic and rapidly evolving network needs, but with 1.2 billion active monthly users, it's facing those issues sooner than some. Though his company is unique in some ways, Ahmad's comments in an on-stage interview may shed some light on the future of connectivity.
57409709
submission
alphadogg writes:
Having lots of Wi-Fi networks packed into a condominium or apartment building can hurt everyone's wireless performance, but Stanford University researchers say they've found a way to turn crowding into an advantage. In a dorm on the Stanford campus, they're building a single, dense Wi-Fi infrastructure that each resident can use and manage like their own private network. That means the shared system, called BeHop, can be centrally managed for maximum performance and efficiency while users still assign their own SSIDs, passwords and other settings. The Stanford project is making this happen with inexpensive, consumer-grade access points and SDN (software-defined networking).
