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Comment Re:How Blackberry could remain relevant (Score 1) 278

by Mr. Sketch (#44998821) Attached to: How BlackBerry Blew It

Samsung did this already. It's called Knox. As most Android vendors have discovered, competing with Samsung is a losing proposition.

True, but if anyone could compete with Samsung in the mindshare of the enterprise, it would be Blackberry. Samsung is pouring tons of money into building their mindshare and awareness in the enterprise space, something that Blackberry already has.

If that could easily be done, they would have done it for BB 10. And honestly, can you name one BlackBerry app worth having that doesn't exist on Android already? Ironically, BB did build Android compatibility into BB 10... but it apparently hasn't made the platform any more popular.

Yes, I was thinking later that this was more optional and extraneous. It would depend on how many enterprise apps were already custom made for Blackberry, not for games or other novelties that are Blackberry-only.

Comment How Blackberry could remain relevant (Score 3, Interesting) 278

by Mr. Sketch (#44996481) Attached to: How BlackBerry Blew It

Blackberry could succeed on their name, if they tweaked their brand a little and adopt a more 'Samsung' approach. Their name is already synonymous with enterprise level email, service and solutions, so capitalize on that, just with a different platform.

  • 1. Create an enterprise hardened version of Android
  • 2. Integrate with their existing Blackberry Enterprise Server (and of course other email providers, but provide a good business case for using their services like uptime, security, no NSA snooping, etc
  • 3. Provide a compatibility layer/VM for existing Blackberry apps on their devices

This would provide end users with a standard Android platform just with more security features (maybe fingerprint, retina scan, whatever, and market it for security conscious individuals), and it would provide enterprises with a trusted platform.

Individuals will still get an Android platform with all those apps, and Businesses will get a platform that plugin into a standard Android ecosystem.

Anyways, those are my thoughts about how they could still make it work

BTW, Blackberry, if you're looking for a new CEO or VP-level manager to implement this solution, I'm available.
Security

WeChat IM Application Could Disclose Your Password To Attackers 49

Posted by Soulskill from the conveniently-facilitates-account-sharing dept.
New submitter soulflyz writes "Security researchers found some security issues in WeChat, a popular instant messaging application developed by the Chinese company Tencet. By exploiting these vulnerabilities, any other application installed on the user's phone can force WeChat to send the user's password hash (in plain MD5 format) to an external web server, controlled by the attacker. Android versions of WeChat up to 4.5.1 are confirmed to be vulnerable, but similar issues could interest also other versions of the application. According to recent statistics, WeChat should have about 300 million registered users."
Biotech

Video Backyard Brains Shows You How to Remote Control a Cockroach (Video) 62

Posted by Roblimo from the we're-happy-scientists-not-mad-scientists dept.
This is our second video starring Backyard Brains (Motto: "Neuroscience for Everyone!"). The first one was pretty lab-oriented, with a twitching roach leg here and there. This one has more roaches, with most of them crawling on command. Will the DoD see this and decide to make cockroach soldiers? Or roboroach bomb detectors and defusers? Or cockroach drone pilots? Anything's possible these days. But meanwhile, relax and enjoy learning about roboroaches and watching how, with little circuit boards on their little backs, they scurry hither and yon under control of their human masters. WARNING: Excessively squeamish people should not watch this video, but should stick to the transcript.
Earth

Cometary Impacts May Have Provided Key Elements of Life 85

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the interstellar-snowball-fight dept.
trendspotter writes with news of research indicating that impact events might be responsible for seeding the Earth with reactive forms of the precursors to amino acids. From the article: "Early Earth was not very hospitable when it came to jump starting life. In fact, new research shows that life on Earth may have come from out of this world. Lawrence Livermore scientist Nir Goldman and University of Ontario Institute of Technology colleague Isaac Tamblyn (a former LLNL postdoc) found that icy comets that crashed into Earth millions of years ago could have produced life building organic compounds, including the building blocks of proteins and nucleobases pairs of DNA and RNA. Comets contain a variety of simple molecules, such as water, ammonia, methanol and carbon dioxide, and an impact event with a planetary surface would provide an abundant supply of energy to drive chemical reactions." The paper (PDF).
Communications

Ask Slashdot: Best Way To Archive and Access Ancient Emails? 282

Posted by timothy from the learn-them-like-the-ancient-memory-singers dept.
An anonymous reader writes "I started using email in the early 90s and have lost most of that first decade due to ignorance, botched backups, and so on. But since about 2000, I've got most — if not all — of my email in some form or other. I run Linux, so this has mainly been in a mix of various programs: Kmail, Evolution, Thunderbird. The past 2-3 years are still on the IMAP servers. My problem is that I only rarely NEED to look back to email of 5 years ago. But sometimes it's nice. Or I just want to reminisce about something...or find an old attachment that I was sent. But I do not want to be clogging my current email client of choice with vast backups and even more, I don't know if it will even easily convert. The file structures are different, some are mbox, others maildir, etc., and I would ideally like a way to 1) store and archive these emails, 2) access them, and 3) search by Sender, Subject, Date, Attachments. Is there anything I can do or do I just have to keep legacy applications on hand for this? Should I keep trying to upgrade and pull old files into the new applications? Any help or suggestions about what YOU do would be great."
Science

Ask Slashdot: How Many Time Standards Are There? 214

Posted by timothy from the didn't-suffer-slept-right-through-it dept.
jjoelc writes "Being one of those 'suffering' through the time change last night, the optimist in me reminded me that it could be much worse. That's when I started wondering how many different time/date standards there really are. Wikipedia is a good starting point, but is sorely lacking in the various formats used by e.g. Unix, Windows, TRS-80, etc. And that is without even getting into the various calendars that have been in and out of use throughout the ages. So how about it? How many different time/date 'standards' can we come up with? I'm betting there are more than a few horror stories of having to translate between them..."
Science

Scientists Have Re-Cloned Mice To the 25th Generation 134

Posted by Soulskill from the time-to-locate-jango-fett dept.
derekmead writes "Dolly's mere existence was profound. It was also unusually short, at just six years. But scientists in Japan announced yesterday they have succeeded in cloning mice using the same technique that created Dolly with more or less perfect results: The mice are healthy, they live just as long as regular mice, and they've been flawlessly cloned and recloned from the same source to the 25th generation. Researchers claim it's the first example of seamless, repeat cloning using the Dolly method—known as "somatic cell nuclear transfer" (SCNT)—in which the nucleus from an adult source animal is transferred to an egg with its nucleus removed. Until recently, the process was fraught with failures and mutations. But the team led by Teruhiko Wakayama, whose results were published today in the journal Cell Stem Cell, was able to create 581 clones from the same original mouse. Scientists, including Dolly's creator, have long felt the process was still too unstable—and too wasteful of precious eggs, given the failure rate—to be used on humans any time soon. But perhaps it's not so far off, after all."

Comment No real consequences imposed by the ISP (Score 0) 418

by Mr. Sketch (#43019121) Attached to: Six-Strikes System Starts In U.S.

After five or six "strikes," however, the person won't face any repercussions under the program and is likely to be ignored. It's unclear whether such repeat offenders would be more likely at that point to face an expensive lawsuit.

So, no termination of your account, or automatic penalties from your provider except maybe some bandwidth throttling. Seems like it's just an alert system for the RIAA/MPAA.
Piracy

Gubernatorial Candidate Speaks Out Against CAS 121

Posted by samzenpus from the power-to-the-people dept.
New submitter C0R1D4N writes "Carl Bergmanson, a New Jersey gubernatorial democrat running in the 2013 primary, has recently spoken out against the new 'six strike policy' being put in place this week by major ISPs. He said: 'The internet has become an essential part of living in the 21st century, it uses public infrastructure and it is time we treat it as a public utility. The electric company has no say over what you power with their service, the ISPs have no right to decide what you can and can not download.'"

Comment Re:Missing option: In Real-Time (Score 4, Insightful) 171

by Mr. Sketch (#42937643) Attached to: I organize my browser bookmarks ...

I would argue no. I think of organizing as bringing order to chaos, not keeping an already established order.

For example, if my bookshelf is organized first by author and then by title, and every time I buy a new book and place it on the shelf I just add it in where it belongs, then I wouldn't say I organize my bookshelf every time I buy a new book. I would just say my bookshelf stays organized, and that I just maintain the existing order.

However, if my bookshelf had no order and I sat down and arranged the books by author and then title, then I would say I organized the bookshelf.

In more relevant-to-the-discussion terms, I would only count organizing bookmarks as bringing up the bookmark manager, which I never have to do (Never meaning haven't used it since I adopted this system).

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