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Comment Re:Force in numbers (Score 1, Insightful) 86

by Xemu (#43164463) Attached to: Why Freeloaders Are Essential To FOSS Project Success

If your FOSS project only has a handful of users, it's nice.

If your FOSS project has thousands of users, it's good.

If your FOSS project has millions of users, it's excellent.

You have mixed up cause and effect, good Sir.

e.g

The way you wrote it: If your egg lays a millions of chickens, it's excellent.
The right way: If your chicken lays a million eggs, it's excellent.

Comment Re:New and interesting technology (Score 4, Funny) 180

by Xemu (#43138611) Attached to: Mobile Sharing: "Bezos Beep" Vs. Smartphone Bump

New form of urban terrorism: Ringtone trolling. Set your ringtone to loud, have it as the encoded URL to $ShockSite.

In the next generation of this technology, there will be a secure way of transmitting messages by moving the audio in a small tube connected to the other device.

Future developments may include sending audio messages to multiple devices across a network of interconnected tubes.
Displays

Did Steve Jobs Pick the Wrong Tablet Size? 433

Posted by Soulskill from the nobody's-perfect dept.
An anonymous reader writes "During the 2010 Christmas shopping season, Steve Jobs famously dissed the 7-inch tablets being rolled out by competitors, including Samsung's Galaxy, as being 'tweeners: too big to compete with a smartphone and too small to compete with the [9.7-inch diagonal] iPad,' adding that 'the current crop of 7-inch tablets are going to be DOA — dead on arrival.' A year later Jobs was dead, and the iPad Mini, with a 7.9-inch diagonal screen, was rolled out under his successor Tim Cook in October, 2012. Looking at industry-wide tablet sales numbers for January 2013, which show that the iPad Mini surprisingly outsold its larger sibling by a substantial margin (as did 7-inch Android tablets from competitors), Motley Fool's Evan Niu thinks that the 7.9-inch form factor was the correct size all along, contrary to Jobs' pronouncements (which, of course, was partly marketing bluster — but he chose the larger size in the first place). Of course the Mini is cheaper, but not by much — $329 vs. $399 for the larger iPad, for the baseline model with WiFi only and 16GB storage. Had Apple introduced the iPad with the smaller size to begin with, Niu argues, competitors would have faced a much more difficult task grabbing market share. While the Mini is currently available only with 'Super VGA' resolution (1024x768), rumors are afloat that Minis with the Retina display (2048x1536) are close to production."
Software

Ask Slashdot: Software To Help Stay On Task? 301

Posted by Soulskill from the electric-shock-if-you-alt-tab-for-too-long dept.
GiboNZ writes "Like many others, I easily get distracted when working on a computer. Say I work on a task — be it a programming job or bookkeeping or whatever — and need to quickly check something on Google. Unfortunately after a while I often find myself on Slashdot or eBay or reading emails instead of continuing with the job I was doing before. Maybe if I had a 'single-tasking desktop' it wouldn't be such an issue. I couldn't Alt-Tab to my email client with tempting 200 unread emails, Alt-Tab to browser with 10 tabs open for later, Alt-Tab to unfinished document from yesterday, Alt-Tab to ... you know what I mean. I want to be forced by some technical means to work on the problem I should work on. Will alone doesn't work — I tried. Like when mowing a lawn — there I've got nothing else to do and I keep mowing until it's finished. If I could multitask in the same way I can on a computer our little backyard would take me the whole day to do. Any ideas how to inhibit the distractions ever present on modern multi-tasking internet-connected desktops? I genuinely want to be more productive but the technology is against me."
Microsoft

A New Version of MS Office Every 90 Days 292

Posted by Soulskill from the because-business-love-change dept.
Billly Gates writes "It appears Microsoft is following Chrome's agile development model like Mozilla did. At a recent tech conference, Kurt DelBene, president of the Office division, said they have mechanisms in place to update Office on a quarterly basis. Of course to get these new wondrous features and bugfixes you have to have a subscription to Office 365. Are the customers who most prefer subscriptions (corporate) going to want new things in the enterprise every 90 days? It is frustrating to see so many of them still on IE 7, XP, and Office 2003, which hurts Windows and Office sales and holds back innovation. At the same time, the accountants notice significant savings by keeping I.T. costs down with decade/semi decade updates to their images, while I.T. only puts out fires in between. Will this bring change to that way of doing things, or will Microsoft's cloud offerings with outsourced Exchange and Sharepoint make up for it using cost savings and continually updated software in the enterprise?"

Submission + - Bradley Manning Pleads Guilty (latimes.com) 1

Submitted by
Entropy98
Entropy98 writes: "Army Pfc. Bradley Edward Manning pleaded guilty Thursday to 10 charges that he illegally acquired and transferred highly classified U.S. government secrets, agreeing to serve 20 years in prison for causing a worldwide uproar when WikiLeaks published documents describing the inner workings of U.S. military and diplomatic efforts in Iraq, Afghanistan and around the globe.

The 25-year-old soldier, however, pleaded not guilty to 12 more serious charges, including espionage for aiding the enemy, meaning that his criminal case will go forward at a general court-martial in June. If convicted at trial, he risks a sentence of life in prison at Ft. Leavenworth, Kan."
Privacy

Submission + - Tor Exit Nodes Located and Mapped (hackertarget.com)

Submitted by
Itsik
Itsik writes: "Tor Exit Nodes are the gateways where encrypted Tor traffic hits the Internet. This means an exit node can be abused to monitor Tor traffic (after it leaves the onion network). It is in the design of the Tor network that locating the source of that traffic through the network should be difficult to determine. However if the exit traffic is unencrypted and contains identifying information then an exit node can be abused.
The torproject therefore is dependent on a diverse and wide range of exit nodes. This is an attempt to display the exit nodes diversity in a Google map with Geolocation. The map was built using Google Maps API v3, with Marker Clusterer."

Comment Re:In temperate climates we'll just time shift (Score 2) 337

by Xemu (#43024773) Attached to: NOAA Report: World Labor Capacity Dropping Because of Increased Temperatures

I understand that the topics won't be able to adapt to the loss of outdoor working days by time shifting them to the winter, but it seems to be a pretty even swap for the temperate climates.

Also, it seems that in cold climates like Canada and Scandinavia, they will have a net gain of outside work days.

Or am I being too optimistic?

Yes, too optimistic. Warming is not a "swap "- global warming is destabilising the climate, leading to more violent ups-and-downs, like hurricanes and blizzards. In the case of Scandinavia, a global warming could mean constant heavy rains, which reduces the outside work days a lot. In Canada, warming can mean violent ice storms and draughts. It is not so much the warm peaks that are the problem but that the average temperature is changing and causing temperatures to be distributed differently.
Toys

Submission + - Etch-a-Sketch inventor Andre Cassagnes, has died at 86 (geeksofdoom.com)

Submitted by
Xemu
Xemu writes: "Andre Cassagnes, the inventor of the Etch-A-Sketch has died in Paris at the age of 86. The famous toy was actualized during the presidential campaign Etch-A-Gate when Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich, began holding up Etch-A-Sketches during their rallies. The toy is pretty advanced as it is essentially a manually operated plotter with a built-in erasing system. Plenty of hacks out there exists to mod the plotter to draw greyscale robotically, turn it into a temperature logger etc. Thank you Andre!"
IOS

Submission + - Evasi0n iOS Jailbreak Exploits Five Unique Zero-Day Bugs (forbes.com)

Submitted by Sparrowvsrevolution
Sparrowvsrevolution writes: In the escalating chess match between Apple's security team and the jailbreakers who work to disassemble the restrictions on its devices, the exploit for every device ends up being more complex than the last. So it's no surprise that the latest, for iOS 6.1, has reached practically a grand master level of technological complexity.

David Wang, a developer for the hacker team that calls themselves the evad3rs has broken down the workings of the team's new iOS jailbreak, evasi0n, in an interview. He explains how the exploit chains together five distinct new bugs in iOS to escalate from a minor vulnerability in the device's mobile backup system into a series of tricks that defeat both the device's code-signing restrictions and its Address Space Layout Randomization to gain the ability to write persistent changes to the kernel. The step-by-step description of the process highlights just how much work and innovation went into evasi0n--and how hard Apple is working to raise the bar for jailbreakers.
Science

Submission + - Humans smell in Stereo (nature.com)

Submitted by
Xemu
Xemu writes: "Humans can locate an odour source thanks to a feature called stereo sniffing, says researchers in an article just published in Nature Communications. To further enhance odorant location capabilties, mammals combine serial sampling with bilateral nasal cues. Much like your average teenager in a dark basement would locate that smelly sock. Blocking one nostril makes it harder."
Your Rights Online

Submission + - WSJ: IBM Security Tool Can Flag "Disgruntled Employees" (wsj.com)

Submitted by supervico
supervico writes: An article on the WSJ's CIO Journal describes IBM's new security tool using Big Data that would scan employees' email, social media, and browsing history to flag disgruntled employees who may reveal company secrets

From the article: "The new tool, called IBM Security Intelligence with Big Data, is designed to crunch decades worth of emails, financial transactions and website traffic, to detect patterns of security threats and fraud. Beyond its more conventional threat prevention applications, the new platform, based on Hadoop, a framework that processes data-intensive queries across clusters of computers, will allow CIOs to conduct sentiment analysis on employee emails to determine which employees are likely to leak company data, Mr. Bird said. That capability will look at the difference between how an employee talks about work with a colleague and how that employee discusses work on public social media platforms, flagging workers who may be nursing grudges and are more likely to divulge company information. 'By analyzing email you can say this guy is a disgruntled employee and the chance that he would be leaking data would be greater,' Mr. [Sandy] Bird [CTO, IBM’s Security Systems Division] said of IBM’s new tool."

Could an employer really introduce this new surveillance technology/policy that can go back "decades" on your emails/browsing history, even if only to set a behavioral baseline? Or would they have to do this "going forward"?

Comment Re:It's that simple (Score 1) 112

by Xemu (#42794753) Attached to: Untethered iOS 6.1 evasi0n Jailbreak Arrives For iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch

Just run a closed source undocumented binary tool released by anonymous people against your iPhone and you can install more closed source undocumented binaries by people with no names right on your phone with all security features disabled. What could go wrong?

Seriously, this is like driving out the Apple with the Chinese. Yes, I jailbreak. Still, I hate it. There's no source, there's no docs, there's nobody responsible. It's like you're freeing your phone from Apple by allowing every hacker in the world to run binaries on it.

Be cautious and curious.

It would be so much better if only signed binaries were allowed to run, but I could choose which signatures (app stores) I would trust.

There is middle ground here.

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