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Submission + - QR Code apps caught sharing scanned data and GPS coordinates (bucknell.edu)

Submitted by layertwo
layertwo writes: "Researchers from Franklin & Marshall College (www.fandm.edu) published a paper on Ed Felten's Freedom to Tinker blog (https://freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/kollarssmith/scan-this-or-scan-me-user-privacy-barcode-scanning-applications/) which shows that most QR Code scanning apps share the contents of all scanned barcodes with the application developers. Many apps--including the most popular scanner on both iOS and Android--also send the device's GPS coordinates along with the barcode contents."

Submission + - The Problem with End-to-End Web Crypto (indolering.com)

Submitted by fsterman
fsterman writes: Since the Snowden revelations, E2E web crypto has become trendy. There are browser add-ons that bolt a PGP client onto webmail and both Yahoo and Google are planning to support PGP directly. They attempt to prevent UI spoofing with icons similar to the site-authentication banks use to combat phishing.

The problem is that a decade of research shows that users habituate to these icons and come to ignore them. An attacker can pull off UI spoofing with a 90%+ success rate.

Submission + - Turkey blocks Facebook, YouTube and Twitter; Zuckerberg caves in, Google fights (betanews.com)

Submitted by Mark Wilson
Mark Wilson writes: Today Turkey blocked access to a number of websites including YouTube and Twitter. The ban came after the sites published images of a prosecutor being taken hostage at a court in Istanbul earlier in the week. Google has vowed to getting things back up and running, but it's not the same story for everyone.

While a block was also put in place on Facebook, the social network sidestepped the ban by agreeing to comply with a court ruling. This is not the first time Mark Zuckerberg's site has bowed to pressure from Turkey. At the beginning of the year, despite previous claims to stand up for free speech, Facebook bowed to pressure to block pages that insulted or offended the Prophet Mohammad. Now it looks as though history is repeating itself.

Submission + - Watch your 'Likes': Police emails show few restrictions on who & why they wa (muckrock.com)

Submitted by v3rgEz
v3rgEz writes: Love to show off your love of guns on Facebook? So do millions of other people ... but it's enough to spark monitoring of your account page by local police, even if you're two hundred miles from their city. That's what newly released emails from Austin's Regional Intelligence Center show, as details of how one man's feed was monitored came to life — and how little of a policy covered potential privacy concerns.

Submission + - Carly Fiorina Calls Apple's Tim Cook a 'Hypocrite' on Gay Rights

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: David Knowles reports at Bloomberg that former Hewlett-Packard CEO and potential 2016 presidential candidate Carly Fiorina called out Apple CEO Tim Cook as a hypocrite for criticizing Indiana and Arkansas over their Religious Freedom Restoration Acts while at the same time doing business in countries where gay rights are non-existent. “When Tim Cook is upset about all the places that he does business because of the way they treat gays and women, he needs to withdraw from 90% of the markets that he’s in, including China and Saudi Arabia,” Fiorina said. “But I don’t hear him being upset about that.”

In similar criticism of Hillary Clinton on the Fox News program Hannity, Fiorina argued that Clinton's advocacy on behalf of women was tarnished by donations made to the Clinton Foundation from foreign governments where women's rights are not on par with those in America. ""I must say as a woman, I find it offensive that Hillary Clinton travels the Silicon Valley, a place where I worked for a long time, and lectures Silicon Valley companies on women's rights in technology, and yet sees nothing wrong with taking money from the Algerian government, which really denies women the most basic human rights. This is called, Sean, hypocrisy." While Hillary Clinton hasn't directly addressed Fiorina's criticisms, her husband has. “You’ve got to decide, when you do this work, whether it will do more good than harm if someone helps you from another country,” former president Bill Clinton said in March. “And I believe we have done a lot more good than harm. And I believe this is a good thing.”

Submission + - USPTO Demands EFF Censor Its Comments (techdirt.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: As you know, last year the Supreme Court made a very important ruling in the Alice v. CLS Bank case .. the USPTO apparently was offended at parts of the EFF's comment submission, claiming that it was an "improper protest."

Submission + - New optimizations for X86 in upcoming GCC 5.0: PIC in 32 bit mode. (intel.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: PIC in 32 bit mode is used to build Android applications, Linux libraries and many other products. Thus GCC performance in that case is very important ..

EBX is returned to an allocation making all 7 registers available. This boosts applications with hot integer loops suffering from register pressure. Below are results for a stress test with high register pressure in integer loop.

Submission + - No more Kinect for Windows (pcgamer.com)

Submitted by puddingebola
puddingebola writes: Microsoft has announced it will no longer manufacture Kinect for Windows. Only the Xbox One version will be available for purchase. Microsoft said it could not meet demand for the device, a strange claim for a company to make.

Submission + - This Is Big: A Robo-Car Just Drove Across the Country (wired.com)

Submitted by Press2ToContinue
Press2ToContinue writes: AN AUTONOMOUS CAR just drove across the country.

Nine days after leaving San Francisco, a blue car packed with tech from a company you’ve probably never heard of rolled into New York City after crossing 15 states and 3,400 miles to make history. The car did 99 percent of the driving on its own, yielding to the carbon-based life form behind the wheel only when it was time to leave the highway and hit city streets.

This amazing feat, by the automotive supplier Delphi, underscores the great leaps this technology has taken in recent years, and just how close it is to becoming a part of our lives. Yes, many regulatory and legislative questions must be answered, and it remains to be seen whether consumers are ready to cede control of their cars, but the hardware is, without doubt, up to the task.

Submission + - Is this the death of the Easter egg? (bbc.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: BBC reports that more and more companies are cracking down on the practice of hiding harmless snippets of code in their products. Known as "Easter eggs", they can be anything from the names of the developers, to pictures, to games like pinball, to a flight simulator. Is this simply professionalism, or is it stifling programmers' quirky, playful side?

Submission + - Are Bug Bounties the Right Solution for Improving Security? (codinghorror.com)

Submitted by saccade.com
saccade.com writes: Coding Horror's Jeff Atwood is questioning if the current practice of paying researchers bounties for the software vulnerabilities they find is really improving over-all security. He notes how the Heartbleed bug serves as a counter example to "Linus's Law" that "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow".

...If you want to find bugs in your code, in your website, in your app, you do it the old fashioned way: by paying for them. You buy the eyeballs.

While I applaud any effort to make things more secure, and I completely agree that security is a battle we should be fighting on multiple fronts, both commercial and non-commercial, I am uneasy about some aspects of paying for bugs becoming the new normal. What are we incentivizing, exactly?

Submission + - Valve Bootstrapped Source 2 Engine On An Open-Source Vulkan Driver (phoronix.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A new article out details how Valve bootstrapped their VULKAN back-end with the Source 2 Engine over a period of just four months thanks to relying on an open-source driver. With designing for the open-source Intel Vulkan Linux driver developed by LunarG, Valve developers were quickly able to resolve issues and progress the driver in a turn-key manner. This Intel Linux driver will be released as open-source once the Khronos VULKAN specification has been published.

Submission + - Senator calls for The Anarchist Cookbook to be "Removed from the Internet" (arstechnica.com) 1

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: In the wake of the Thursday arrest of two women accused of attempting to build a bomb, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) wrote on her website that the 1971 book on bomb making, which may have aided the terror suspects in some small way, should be "banned from the Internet."

The senator seems to fail to realize that not only has The Anarchist Cookbook been in print for decades it's sold on Amazon!, but also has openly circulated online for nearly the same period of time. In short, removing it from the Internet would be impossible.

The sooner these ignorant fossils are put out to pasture the better. It would be nice if Leahy, Hatch, McConnell and Feinstein followed Reid's lead.

Submission + - Al Franken urges FBI to prosecute "revenge porn" (nationaljournal.com) 1

Submitted by mi
mi writes: National Journal writes:

Sen. Al Franken is urging the FBI to more quickly and aggressively pursue and respond to reports of revenge porn, marking a rare burst of attention on a controversial topic about which Congress has typically been quiet.

In a letter to FBI Director James Comey, the Minnesota Democrat asked for more information about the agency's authority to police against revenge porn, or the act of posting explicit sexual content online without the subject's consent, often for purposes of humiliation and extortion. Its popularity has ballooned in recent years, and victims are disproportionately women.

Extortion is illegal, but humiliating somebody is not. I am not sure, how it can be made illegal without violating the First Amendment.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: What Makes a Good Work Environment For Developers and IT? (isocpp.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: I've been unexpectedly placed in charge of a our small technology department at work. We have three dedicated developers, two dedicated IT people, and one "devops" guy who does some of both. It's the first team I've managed, and I'd to do a good job of it, so I ask you: what makes a good work environment? I have my own likes and dislikes, of course, and I'm sure everyone can appreciate things like getting credit for their work and always having the fridge stocked with soda. But I'd like to hear about the other things, big and small, that make it more fun (or at least less un-fun) to come into work every day. This can be anything — methods of personal communication, HR policies (for example, how can reviews be not-terrible?), amenities at the office, computer hardware/software, etc. I also wouldn't mind advice on how to represent my team when dealing with other departments.

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