49696067
submission
colinneagle writes:
Bryan Lunduke has always been somewhat anti-cloud, but he ended up using Gmail, Dropbox, and a couple of other cloud services just for the convenience. It's gotten to the point where he now has roughly 2 gigs of email stored in Gmail, for example.
Now he's considering abandoning the cloud entirely, so he's seeking advice from across the tech world:
How do you remove such a massive amount of data from the cloud manually?
49559475
submission
colinneagle writes:
In 1981, a San Francisco TV news station reported on some of the world's first internet users — San Francisco newspaper editors who were overseeing a new investment aimed at streamlining newspaper operations. Little did they know how successful it would be. Calling it "the newest form of electronic journalism," the reporter explains how editors at the San Francisco Examiner used an early phone-based internet connection to transfer all text content for the daily print edition. The system apparently couldn't transfer photos, advertisements, or comics at the time. The San Francisco Examiner also put out a web edition of the paper, inviting readers to gain access by cutting a coupon out of the print paper and sending it to the newspaper office.
The report is especially interesting for the comments made about the internet and its potential impact on the newspaper business. The lead anchor introducing the story seems shocked at the idea of a "home computer"; an editor at the San Francisco Examiner says they're "not in it to make money" and estimates that "they're not going to lose a lot [of money]." That same anchor closes the story by speculating that "the new telepaper won't be much competition for the 20-cent street edition."
49306605
submission
colinneagle writes:
Amid the cynicism among the InfoSec crowd at Black Hat in Las Vegas, Alan Shimel started asking people the same question: would you want your child to grow up to work in InfoSec? The answers range — many said they would support whatever their children wanted to do as long as it made them happy, some valued the "integrity" that comes with working in InfoSec, while others bemoaned recent trends in the industry and said they wouldn't want their children to become as "cynical" as the industry has made them.
So why not expand the question to Slashdot? To those of you working in security — would you want your children following in your footsteps?
49282093
submission
colinneagle writes:
File-sharing advocates are seeking to spread the Missionary Church of Kopimism, a religion steeped in file sharing as a philosophical concept, to Russia in an effort to overturn the country's controversial new anti-piracy law. Activists in several parts of Russia — Moscow, St. Petersburg, Nizhny Novgorod, Kazan and Khabarovsk — are applying to form an officially recognized church of Kopimism, which they hope will enable them to challenge the anti-piracy law. One couple even participated in Russia's first Kopimi wedding over the weekend, which involves the exchange of vows and silicon chips.
Activists are reportedly planning to file lawsuits challenging the law as soon as the applications are filed. However, Russian lawyers and lawmakers told a Russian news site that the country's separation of church and state will make it difficult to make any progress through this approach.
Kopimism was legally recognized by Sweden's government, where the religion was first founded, in January 2012.
49215043
submission
colinneagle writes:
Google doesn't break out the profit and loss of products in its annual reports, but the best picture we have comes from the lawsuit between Google and Oracle. During trial, the judge revealed that Android generated roughly $97.7 million in revenue during the first quarter of 2010, well below Oracle's estimate. Granted, $400 million a year is nothing to sneeze at, but for a company the size of Google, it is chump change.
And then there's Windows Phone 8. Now, Motley Fool estimates Nokia pays Microsoft about $35 per device, while other analysts have guestimated the licensing fee for Windows Phone 8 to be around $30 to $35 per device. Microsoft has never officially confirmed it. With 7.4 million Lumias sold in the most recent quarter, that's an estimated $259 million for Microsoft. I can't rightfully compare it to the $97.7 million estimate from the Android trial since that is based on a 2010 number, but I can compare Android's position in the market in 2010 to Windows Phone's in the most recent quarter. In the first quarter of 2010, Android was breezing past Apple to account for 28% of the market, assuming the No. 2 spot in the market behind Research In Motion, the NPD Group estimated at the time. Meanwhile, Windows Phone 8 reached an all-time high in market share in the most recent quarter — a whopping 4%, according to Strategy Analytics.
By these estimates, we can say Microsoft earns more revenue from a platform that accounts for 4% of the market than Google did when Android stood at 28%.
So while it's far from a slam dunk, it looks like Windows Phone brings in more money for Microsoft than Android, the vastly more popular OS, has for Google in the past. Admittedly, these aren't perfect numbers, but the bigger picture here is that the Windows Phone 8 strategy stands to earn Microsoft a whole lot of money if it can get some momentum.
49113975
submission
colinneagle writes:
Bryan Lunduke took on another challenge recently, trying to conduct all of his daily work-related tasks (from writing to designing a comic to software development) exclusively on Android platforms. Surprisingly, it worked out pretty well.
The writing and design processes were pretty easy — Photoshop Touch and Google Drive on a Nexus 7 tablet. For software development, it got a little more tricky, involving a remote desktop, a virtual private server, and a mouse-and-keyboard connected to the Nexus. While he admits that using a remote desktop maybe considered cutting corners, he still gets to program on a mobile device, and that was the point in the first place.
49089131
submission
colinneagle writes:
A team of students at the University of Texas at Austin built and successfully tested a custom GPS spoofing device to remotely redirect an $80 million yacht onto a different route. The project was completed with the permission of the yacht's owners in the Mediterranean Sea this past June.
Because the yacht's crew relies entirely on GPS signal for direction, the students were able to lead the yacht onto a different course without the knowledge of anyone on-board. The GPS spoofing device essentially over-powered all other GPS signals using until the spoofed signal was the only one that the yacht followed.
The team then used the GPS spoofing device to convince the ship's crew to redirect onto a different route voluntarily. By changing the signal on the spoofing device, the students led the crew to believe that the ship was drifting off-course to the left. In response, the crew steered the ship to the right, thinking that it would get the ship back on course, when it actually brought the ship off the course entirely.
49082863
submission
colinneagle writes:
AllThingsD reported, Bob Mansfield, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Technologies, has disappeared from the executive management team at Apple. But it was only last October when Mansfield was widely reported to have been convinced to return from retirement by Apple CEO Tim Cook for a two-year stint.
His return to the company may have been cut short on account of Apple's continued reliance on Samsung for its mobile SOC processors, for which Apple paid an estimated $10 billion to Samsung last year. Mansfield's group was to have played a major role in this, and apparently it has not been able affect this change.
48937697
submission
colinneagle writes:
With Canonicals' $32 million crowd-funding campaign for an Ubuntu smartphone drumming up a lot of discussion about the topic, Bryan Lunduke put together a visual history of mobile Linux, with screenshots of the most important platforms over the years.
48911143
submission
colinneagle writes:
Office 365 was among the seven "bad" sites that allowed cookie re-use and could be hijacked, as pointed out by ethical hacking teacher Sam Bowne last week.
At the time, Microsoft's Office 365, Twitter, LinkedIn, Yahoo email, Amazon, eBay, WordPress, and Netflix were found to be vulnerable. Since then, the sites for Chase bank and American Express have been added, along with Apple's iCloud, StumbleUpon, Flickr, The New York Times, The Huffington Post, Reddit and others.
Adding to the insult is both the fact that Microsoft was informed of the vulnerability in late 2012, and that Gmail is not susceptible.
48793785
submission
colinneagle writes:
A resident in the small town of Deer Trail, Colorado, recently proposed a townwide ordinance that would offer $25 licenses to hunt and shoot down drones. Announcing bluntly that "we do not want drones in this town," Deer Trail resident Phillip Steel says that, although he has never seen a drone flying in the town, if "they fly in town, they get shot down."
The proposed ordinance mandates a $25 fee for drone hunting licenses in the town and sets specific "rules of engagement" for hunting the aerial robots. However, drone hunters in Deer Trail stand to earn a $100 reward for a successfully destroyed drone, the ordinance suggests. So far, Steel's proposal has earned support from local government leaders. "Even if a tiny percentage of people get online (for a) drone license, that's cool," said David Boyd, a board member in Deer Trail, according to ABC7. "That's a lot of money to a small town like us. Could be known for it as well, which probably might be a mixed blessing, but what the heck."
The town clerk mentioned holding a town-run drone hunt, "a skeet, fun-filled festival."
48737035
submission
colinneagle writes:
Eldar Murtazin of Mobile Review writes (Google translation of Russian) that the next version of Windows Phone will be both a tablet and smartphone operating system and that Microsoft plans to ditch the existing code and start over almost from scratch.
"I can say with accuracy that once again we will be offered a different vision of UI (Metro UI will not be able to admit a mistake, it is too actively advertised, but the next version will probably be different). At the moment, the new interface does not exist, as well as the demands generated by the OS, but it is certain that the first time Microsoft will try to create a system that will operate initially as on smartphones and tablets," wrote Murtazin.
Ok, let's pick that apart. I don't know how long or how much time UI development takes, but there has to be a secondary consideration: what will this do to apps? There are 145,000 Windows Phone 8 apps out there and Microsoft cannot break them and hope to keep people from throwing their hands up and walking away. Second, if Microsoft wants to keep WP in sync with PCs, then you would have to figure on a 2015 release date. Microsoft has committed to a three-year release cycle for its PC operating system. Will they really leave WP 8.5 on the market, unchanged, for two more years? They will at the very least have to make some kind of updates.
48731097
submission
colinneagle writes:
Even though you need to live in Spain or Poland to buy one (either the “ZTE Open” from Telefonica or the “Alcatel One Touch Fire” from Deutsche Telekom), the Firefox OS is shipping, and it's more impressive than I had expected. The team has delivered a quality, gorgeous-looking phone experience. And its “app” ecosystem is already starting to gain serious momentum (thanks, in large part, to their usage of/dependence on HTML5/JS as the primary software development stack). The Firefox Marketplace is already up to 1,260 apps available. Even if you consider only 1 percent of those apps to be of a good quality, that's still a lot of apps for such a young platform.
48707889
submission
colinneagle writes:
Ethical hacking professor Sam Bowne recently put a cookie re-use method to test on several major web services, finding that Office 365, Yahoo mail, Twitter, LinkedIn, Amazon, eBay, and WordPress all failed the security test. Both Amazon and eBay can be tied directly to your money via the method of payment you have on record. And, just for kicks, we tried it with Netflix. And it worked.
Microsoft has apparently known that accounts can be hijacked since at least 2012 when The Hacker News reported the Hotmail and Outlook cookie-handling vulnerability, so Bowne was curious if Microsoft closed the hole or if stolen cookies could still be re-used. He claims he "easily reproduced it using Chrome and the Edit This Cookie extension."
Bowne is asking other people to test more services and tweet the results to him @sambowne.
48673261
submission
colinneagle writes:
Microsoft makes some good points in its business pitch for the Xbox One, most notably that, at $499, it would be a pretty easy expense write-off. But The Xbox One will also offer Skype, SkyDrive, IE and Office and Wi-Fi Direct, plus you can write your own apps for it. Since the Xbox One is powered by an x86 chip courtesy of AMD, most PC developers should not be overly challenged in writing custom apps. The Kinect One audio/video detector will be the real selling point here, as it is much more advanced than any Webcam, with wide-angle 1080p motion detection that can be operated by voice and gestures. Wi-Fi Direct will allow owners of Xbox One to send presentations from a tablet or notebook to the console for display on the TV, and you can use the Smart Glass controller to navigate through the PowerPoint presentation or use a tablet to control Internet Explorer.
And that's all out of the box. Since Xbox One will support third-party applications, you can build all kinds of custom business tools that utilize the hardware, including Kinect, and software.
