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Bug

Stock Market Sell-Off Might Stem From Trader's Fat Finger 643

Posted by timothy from the knight-of-the-order-of-magnitude dept.
s122604 points out a CNBC story according to which "the catalyst for today's extraordinary price swing (at one point the Dow lost almost 9 percent in less than an hour) may have been because a trader entered a 'B' for billions instead of an 'M' for millions on a trade of Procter and Gamble: 'According to multiple sources, a trader entered a "b" for billion instead of an "m" for million in a trade possibly involving Procter & Gamble, a component in the Dow. (CNBC's Jim Cramer noted suspicious price movement in P&G stock on air during the height of the market selloff).' Unbelievable there are no safeguards to protect against this."
Medicine

UK Docs Perform First Remote-Control Heart Surgery 142

Posted by timothy from the a-a-b-up-down-a-b-no-wait dept.
ByronScott writes "Doctors at a British hospital have just carried out the world's first surgery using a remote-controlled robot. The procedure fixed a patient's irregular heart rhythm, and although the doctor was in the same hospital as the patient — just through the wall in another room — developers of the RC surgery technology believe this is the first step toward long-distance operations. Imagine a doctor in London performing surgery on your heart in New York!"

Comment Quick translation of article (Score 1) 237

by zalas (#32014024) Attached to: Apple Bans Online Sales In Japan

On April 23, Yodobashi Camera announced through their online sales site "Yodobashi.Com" and their telephone sales service "Moshi Moshi Yodobashi" that they are discontinuing sales of Apple products. Sales at their retail stores will still continue.

According to Yodobashi Camera, "it has become the case that [they] can no longer sell any Apple products, including iPods, MacBooks, iMacs and related accessories." Furthermore, they say that it was "according to the wishes of Apple."

Customers can continue to use the "store pick-up" service where they order an item online at Yodobashi.Com and pick up the item in person at a store. They can also continue to determine whether a product is in stock through their "in stock inquiry service."

"We have no comments beyond what has been said online" is the statement from Yodobashi Camera.

With regards to online sales of Apple products, many other high volume retailers such as Bic Camera and Yamada Denki have similarly stopped. Bic Camera also stated that they cannot comment on what led to this, but vehemently state that "since you can pick up ordered items at the store, we don't believe it should be that big of an issue."

In addition to high volume retailers, Mac-specific small-time shops "Akihabara Mac Collection" and "kitcut" that were selling Apple products through Rakuten [an online market place in Japan] have also stopped sales. (However, kitcut as of this writing, April 26, still continues selling products on their own site.) Furthermore, upon seeing many Rakuten shops having marked [Apple items] as "out of stock" or "no longer available", one might be able to say that this issue is a life and death situation for online shops who do not have physical storefronts.

With so many retailers stopping online sales of Apple products, Apple's very own "Apple Store" still continues to sell them, unsurprisingly. Furthermore, the foreign-owned Amazon continues to do so as well.

As of April 26, Apple has not made an official announcement and refuses to comment on the situation.

Comment Re:Cheapness? (Score 1) 237

by zalas (#32013624) Attached to: Apple Bans Online Sales In Japan

What is the source for that, anyway? It's not mentioned in the linked article. Since Apple products are still on sale on Amazon Japan, people have speculated that retailers like Yodobashi did not like some new online sales agreement pushed down from Apple. What's amusing is that according to the linked article, you can still order from Yodobashi's website and simply pick up the items in person at the store.
Internet Explorer

IE8's XSS Filter Exposes Sites To XSS Attacks 84

Posted by kdawson from the first-do-no-harm dept.
Blue Taxes writes "The cross-site scripting filter that ships with Microsoft's Internet Explorer 8 browser can be abused by attackers to launch cross-site scripting attacks on websites and web pages that would otherwise be immune to this threat. The IE8 filter works by scanning outbound requests for strings that may be malicious. When such a string is detected, IE8 will dynamically generate a regular expression matching the outbound string. The browser then looks for the same pattern in responses from the server. If a match is made anywhere in the server's response, the browser assumes that a reflected XSS attack is being conducted and the browser will automatically alter the response so that the XSS attack cannot succeed. The researchers figured out a way to use IE8's altered response to conduct simple abuses and universal cross-site scripting attacks, which worked against sites that would not otherwise have been vulnerable to XSS." Here is the researchers' backgrounder (PDF) on the attack. Microsoft says that they have issued two patches that address the issue, but the researchers insist that holes remain.
Update: 04/20 14:06 GMT by KD : Microsoft's Security Response Center has issued a statement on the vulnerability.

Comment Re:Waste of time... (Score 1) 204

by zalas (#31819298) Attached to: Review of Adobe Creative Suite 5

I didn't find the DRM in CS3 all that annoying from a practical point of view, but the installer itself was really terrible. It used up a lot of resources and took forever to copy over files. Furthermore, if your installation botched in the middle (like it did with mine; got a blue screen halfway through), you have to delete everything and reinstall. If you don't, it'll happily continue installing a half-broken package. Even some of the Adobe devs complain about the installer...
Social Networks

Insomniacs, the Phantoms of the Internet 234

Posted by kdawson from the knitting-the-raveled-sleeve-of-care dept.
theodp writes "Ever since she was a toddler, freelance writer Lily Burana has been a Stay Up Late kind of girl. When her kindergarten teacher asked students 'What time do you go to bed?,' young Lily felt compelled to lie rather than rat out her own mother by saying, 'Oh, between midnight and 1 a.m.' She still suffers from insomnia, but has discovered that Facebook is the Promised Land for the awake and alone. She finds comfort in the company of others who, like her, live counter to the conventional rhythm of a sunny-day world."
The Internet

Time To Take the Internet Seriously 175

Posted by kdawson from the weather-eye dept.
santosh maharshi passes along an article on Edge by David Gelernter, the man who (according to the introduction) predicted the Web and first described cloud computing; he's also a Unabomber survivor. Gelernter makes 35 predictions and assertions, some brilliant, some dubious. "6. We know that the Internet creates 'information overload,' a problem with two parts: increasing number of information sources and increasing information flow per source. The first part is harder: it's more difficult to understand five people speaking simultaneously than one person talking fast — especially if you can tell the one person to stop temporarily, or go back and repeat. Integrating multiple information sources is crucial to solving information overload. Blogs and other anthology-sites integrate information from many sources. But we won't be able to solve the overload problem until each Internet user can choose for himself what sources to integrate, and can add to this mix the most important source of all: his own personal information — his email and other messages, reminders and documents of all sorts. To accomplish this, we merely need to turn the whole Cybersphere on its side, so that time instead of space is the main axis. ... 14. The structure called a cyberstream or lifestream is better suited to the Internet than a conventional website because it shows information-in-motion, a rushing flow of fresh information instead of a stagnant pool."
The Military

Defending Against Drones 368

Posted by Soulskill from the hobbyist-vs-terrorist dept.
theodp writes "The US has not had to truly think about its air defense since the Cold War. But as America embraces the use of unmanned aerial vehicles, Newsweek says it's time to consider how our greatest new weapon may come back to bite us. Smaller UAVs' cool, battery-powered engines make them difficult to hit with conventional heat-seeking missiles. And while Patriot missiles can take out UAVs, at $3 million apiece such protection carries a steep price tag, especially if we have to deal with $500 DIY drones."

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