Comment Re:What's the catch? (Score 1) 107
4853rd
Unified NoSQL Query Language Launched 194
splitenz writes "Hoping to unify the growing but disparate market of NoSQL databases, the creators behind CouchDB and SQLite have introduced a new query language for the format, called UnQL (Unstructured Data Query Language — .PS). It has Microsoft's backing."
How Google Killing Accounts Can Leave Androids Orphaned 210
jfruhlinger writes "As we've heard in cases of pseudonym-users in Google+, or in the case of Dylan Marcheschi that went viral last week, Google can kill your account at any time — and since Google is keen on tying your account to its entire range of services, that means you could lose data stored everywhere from Gmail to Picasa. Blogger Dan Tynan examined one particular aspect of this problem — namely, the plight of someone who's been Google-executed and who uses an Android phone."
Comment interesting (Score 1) 188
This (minor?) victory puts the notion of Intelligent Disobedience in a new light.
Comment Re:More misinformation. (Score 2) 354
I question your reasoning that "he has nothing to do with lulzsec". A 70 year old grandma in Kenya would have nothing to do with lolzsec, but, in this case, Ryan willingly hosted an IRC server for lulzsec, hence he had *something* to do with them and the feds will find out what. And btw, why did they need their own public IRC server? Did we run out of IRC networks? Last I checked, freenode was still alive.
Comment if (Kilobots == Zerglings) (Score 1) 121
My life for Aiur!
Kilobots — Cheap Swarm Robots Out of Harvard 121
An anonymous reader writes with news of a research project at Harvard into controlling large swarms of small robots. This article describes what they call Kilobots. (Which, for clarity's sake, have nothing to do with killing. Yet.) Quoting:
"They're fairly simple little robots about the size of a quarter that can move around on vibrating legs, blink their lights, and communicate with each other. On an individual basis, this isn't particularly impressive, but Kilobots aren't designed to be used on an individual basis. Costing a mere $14 each and buildable in about five minutes, you don't just get yourself one single Kilobot. Or ten. Or a hundred. They're designed to swarm in the thousands."
Comment Good news (Score 1) 114
I hope the CEO of Blizzard reads this news and says: "We're going to create our own movie studio!". Hell, it's about time.
OS X Crimeware Kit Emerges 202
Trailrunner7 writes "Crimeware kits have become a ubiquitous part of the malware scene in the last few years, but they have mainly been confined to the Windows platform. Now, reports are surfacing that the first such kit targeting Apple's Mac OS X operating system has appeared. The kit is being compared to the Zeus kit, which has been one of the more popular and pervasive crimeware kits for several years now. A report by CSIS, a Danish security firm, said that the OS X kit uses a template that's quite similar to the Zeus construction and has the ability to steal forms from Firefox."
Mac users are also being targeted by a new piece of scareware called MAC Defender.
Comment Black Mercedes? (Score 1) 138
This looks like the Russian Mafia.
Microsoft Counts Down To XP Death 766
mikejuk writes "Microsoft have just released an end-of-support countdown gadget that ticks off the days until XP is no longer supported — but it only runs under Vista or Windows 7! It focuses the mind on the fact that XP is being forcibly retired. It is a wake-up call to think hard about the unpleasant situation and consider the alternatives.So as you watch the count down to XP's death tick by think about the problems created by using software that actually belongs to someone else..."
Comment Re:making crap up? (Score 1) 300
This is plausible, IMO, if their internal network is configured to disallow all incoming connections, but allows outgoing HTTP/HTTPS connections via a proxy (who can live without the Internets in this age?). You can't exploit services remotely, because the ports are being blocked, so the only strategies left is to either bring the virus into the network via USB (i.e. infect the entire country and hope that someone will bring it to the internal network), trick someone to download and install it (which is difficult when you don't know who has access to the network) or attack the actual firewall (fat chance, plus the IDS would raise red flags, assuming it could detect malicious packets). As soon as the virus gets in, it could easily make requests to a server in Texas via the proxy.
Comment impossible (Score 1) 213
Google does no evil!
Court Rejects Winklevoss Twins' Facebook Appeal 106
angry tapir writes "A US federal appeals court has denied a request by the Winklevoss twins to release them from their settlement with Facebook over their allegations that Mark Zuckerberg improperly appropriated their idea for the social networking site. Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, along with another Harvard classmate, agreed to the settlement in 2008 but the twins later asked a district court to let them back out, saying they were misled by Facebook about the value of the company's shares they received as part of the deal. On Monday, a three-judge appeals court panel sided with the lower court, noting that the Winklevoss twins have actually fared quite well since the settlement was hammered out because the value of Facebook, pegged recently at around $50 billion, means that their shares have more than tripled in value."
Comment a "thousand millisieverts per hour" .... (Score 1) 280
is not that cool. You know what's cool? a billion nanosieverts per hour!
