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Businesses

Submission + - 439 Fewer Ways to Hate Bank of America

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Haters of Bank of America and CEO Brian Moynihan now have 439 fewer ways to express their disdain for the bank. In recent days, at least 439 domain names that are critical of BofA’s top officials were taken off the market. The registrations of the domain names, which include imaginative swipes at the bank's CEO, such as BrianMoynihanBlows.com and BrianTMoynihanSucks.net, will stop BofA-haters from slamming the bank's top execs and directors with a couple of very specific pejoratives. Companies have made it a practice to scoop up negative web addresses that might be used by disgruntled customers, but this domain name buy is unusual in that it focuses on BofA's directors and corporate officers rather than the corporate brand. In other BofA news, a cloud of suspense surrounds Bank of America and WikiLeaks amidst speculation that BofA may be the next target of Julian Assange.

Submission + - Licensing books

Submitted by arit
arit writes: I recently got a review copy of a book from a publisher with the following note "Evaluation copies are provided to qualified academics ... for review purposes only ... These copies are licensed and may not be sold or transferred to a third party." Has anyone heard of licensing books (as opposed to software)? If it is valid, why hasn't anyone tried this before to limit first-sale privileges?
Hardware

Submission + - Computing Pioneer Thacker to Win Turing Award (wsj.com)

Submitted by btcoal
btcoal writes: The Wall Street Journal has a profileof Charles Thacker, of Alto fame. It reads, "The Association for Computing Machinery on Tuesday is naming Thacker the latest recipient of the A.M. Turing award, which comes with $250,000 and carries prestige akin to a Nobel Prize in the industry. Thacker is being recognized largely for the Alto, a machine developed in 1974 at Xerox’s famed Palo Alto Research Center that is often called the world’s first personal computer. The ACM is also citing Thacker’s contributions at Xerox PARC to the invention of Ethernet–the most widely used technology for local networks–as well as work on tablet-style computers since becoming a researcher at Microsoft in the 1990s.

'This guy is a real genius,' says Alan Kay, a researcher who worked with Thacker at PARC and a fellow Turing award winner. 'We don’t like to sling that word around in our field, but he is one. He is magic.'"
Cellphones

Submission + - Which smartphone keyboard is the best? (pcpro.co.uk) 1

Submitted by Barence
Barence writes: A debate that crops up time and again is whether it’s better to have a dedicated keyboard on your smartphone or whether an on-screen keyboard with text correction is adequate. Some phones with screen-based keyboards have started to provide tactile feedback, either using an ultra-quick spin of their vibration alert or, like the BlackBerry Storm2, using clever piezo-electric technology to simulate the feel of a button press. But which system works best? PC Pro's Paul Ockendon gathered six of the most popular handsets around and put them through a timed typing test to see which proved quickest and most typo-free.

Submission + - FBI: Suspect wanted to cyber-bomb insruance co. (networkworld.com)

Submitted by coondoggie
coondoggie writes: Threatening e-mails, false public statements and spam were all part of a California man's cyber-extortion plan against the New York Life insurance company, according to the FBI. The FBI said it arrested Anthony Digati of Chino, California on March 6, 2010, on charges of attempting to extort approximately $200,000 — which would go to $3 million if the firm didn't comply in time — from a New York-based insurance company which was later identified as New York Life. Digati allegedly threatened to make false public statements and blast computer spam in an effort to damage the reputation of the company and cost it millions of dollars in revenue.
Security

Submission + - HTC Google Phones Preinstalled with Malware (threatpost.com)

Submitted by Trailrunner7
Trailrunner7 writes: Security researchers have found that Vodafone, one of the world's larger wireless providers, is distributing some HTC phones with malware pre-installed on them. The phone, the HTC Magic, runs the Google Android mobile operating system, and is one of the more popular handsets right now. A researcher at Panda Software received one of the handsets recently, and upon attaching it to her PC, found that the phone was pre-loaded with the Mariposa bot client. Mariposa has been in the news of late thanks to some arrests connected to the operation of the botnet.

Submission + - Cybercrooks Surpassed Old School Bankrobbers in 09 (krebsonsecurity.com)

Submitted by krebsonsecurity
krebsonsecurity writes: Organized cyber criminal gangs stole $25 million in the 3rd quarter alone last year, by pilfering the online bank accounts of small to midsized businesses, the FDIC reported last week. In contrast, traditional bank robbers hauled just $9.4 million in 1,184 bank robberies during that same period, according to an analysis of FBI bank crime statistics by krebsonsecurity.com. From that story: "The federal government sure publishes a lot more information about physical bank robberies that it makes available about online stick-ups. Indeed, the FBI’s bank crime stats are extraordinarily detailed. For example, they can tell you that in the 3rd quarter of last year, bank robbers were more likely to hold up their local branch between the hours of 9 a.m. and 11 a.m. on a Wednesday than at any other time or day of the week; they can tell you the number of tear gas and dye packs taken with the loot, the number of security cameras activated, the number of food stamps taken, even what percentage of suspected perpetrators had illegal drug habits at the time of the robberies. About the only thing the stats don’t tell you is what brand of jeans the perpetrators were wearing and whether the getaway car had cool vanity plates. What do we get about e-crime statistics from the federal government? One guy from the FDIC giving a speech at the RSA conference.
Java

Submission + - Java devs spend 1/3 of their dev time on tooling 3

Submitted by nerdyglasses
nerdyglasses writes: Developers don't code 8 hours a day, more like 5 hours. Out of those 5 hours the Java guys spend 1/3 on waiting for tools to complete their tasks (compiling, packaging) and also for the resulting applications to run (redeploy) — altogether turnaround cost. This is a lot of wasted time and forced context switching. Take those numbers, average pay and # of Java devs and we see money sent to /dev/null. Are the other technology stacks also so developer unfriendly? How much time is wasted in the .NET/(your fav platform) realm?

Comment coding theory (Score 1) 196

by arit (#24467233) Attached to: Error-Proofing Data With Reed-Solomon Codes
There is an entire field of study related to this topic, but, in short, Reed-Solomon codes are not currently the state of the art. There are much more efficient iterative codes (e.g. Low-Density Parity-Check codes) and there are also rateless codes for a more incremental protection. At any rate, the right place to use these is probably at the hardware level ... even if efficiency is not an issue, they tend to require a fair amount of redundancy.

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