Comment Re:"focus their talents on defensive technologies" (Score 1) 111
Note that Trusted Computing (TPM etc) and Trustworthy Computing (secure coding etc) are very, very different things.
Comment Has anyone actually RTFAed? (Score 4, Informative) 354
Stupid question I know, but Apple is NOT patenting rotation, but rather two gestures to lock the screen in either portrait or landscape mode, regardless of detected orientation. Whether or not such a matter is patentable is another kettle of fish.
On a related matter, Apple long ago bought a patent from British Telecom that appears actually to be for screen rotation.
New Apple Multi-Touch Patent Is Too Broad 310
adeelarshad82 writes "Nearly three and a half years later, Apple has finally been awarded the U.S. patent number 7,966,578, which according to the patent experts should worry rivals. According to exclusive interviews with patent experts, the incredibly broad patent puts Apple in a strong position when it comes to displaying content and using certain finger gestures on smart phones. The patent is so broad that not only will Apple's legal team target iPhone competitors but will also look to go after iPad and iPod rivals. Experts also discussed the scenario of Apple licensing its patented technology or for that matter, the courts completely scrapping the patent in public's interest."
Over 7.5 Million Facebook Users Are Under 13 194
liqs8143 writes "Of the 20 million minors who actively used Facebook in the past year, 7.5 million of them were younger than 13, according to projections from Consumer Reports' latest State of the Net survey. Facebook's terms of service require users to be at least 13 years old. Also among this group of minors using Facebook, more than 5 million were 10 and under. Consumer Reports' survey found that their accounts were largely unsupervised by their parents, exposing them to malware or serious threats such as predators or bullies."
Netflix Subscriber Base Eclipses Comcast's 333
NicknamesAreStupid writes "Netflix just announced its earnings and claims to have more subscribers than Comcast. 'Netflix's global subscriber base grew almost 70% over the past year, to 23.6 million users. ... More than 7% of Americans now subscribe to Netflix.' Does that go to show how great Netflix really is or, well, you know?"
Comment Trusted Computing seems significant in Chrome (Score 2, Interesting) 132
There's quite a few places where the Trusted Platform Module and Chromium intersect, which looks like being an interesting approach to certain problems.
Submission + - Chrome OS has support for Trusted Computing (chromium.org)
KNicolson writes: Looking at the recently-released documentation for Chromium OS, I couldn't help but notice that the Trusted Platform Module features in the specifications, and the latest source tree even has a directory reserved for a TPM emulator. Some blog speculation highlights that Trusted Boot would be trivial and fully locked-down Secure Boot is quite feasible.
Submission + - Newspapers Face the Prisoner's Dilemma with Google
Hugh Pickens writes: "Nicholas Carr has an interesting analysis of Rupert Murdoch's threat to de-list News Corp's stories from Google and Microsoft's eager offer to make Bing Murdoch's exclusive search engine for its content. Carr writes that newspapers are caught in a classic Prisoner's Dilemma with Google because while Google's search engine "prevents them from making decent money online — by massively fragmenting traffic, by undermining brand power, and by turning news stories into fungible commodities" if any single newspaper opts out of Google, their competitors will pick up the traffic they lose. There is only one way that newspapers can break out of the prison — if a critical mass of newspapers opt out of Google's search engine simultaneously, they would suddenly gain substantial market power. Murdoch is signaling to other newspapers that "we'll opt out if you'll opt out" positioning himself as the would-be ringleader of a massive jailbreak, without actually risking a jailbreak himself and there are signs that Murdoch's signal is working with reports that the publishers of the Denver Post and the Dallas Morning News are now also considering blocking Google. In the meantime, Steve Ballmer is more than happy to play along with Murdoch because although a deal with News Corps would reduce the basic profitability of Microsoft's search business, it would inflict far more damage on Google than on Microsoft. "Faced with a large-scale loss of professional news stories from its search engine, Google would likely have little choice but to begin paying sites to index their content," writes Carr. "That would be a nightmare scenario for Google — and a dream come true for newspapers and other big content producers.""
Submission + - Robo-chefs and fashion-bots on show in Tokyo
avishere writes: The International Robot Exhibition kicked off this week in Tokyo, unveiling the latest whirring and buzzing inventions from 192 companies and 64 organizations from at home and abroad — an bringing humanity another step closer to irrelevancy. Among the humanoid cavalcade was a prototype robo-chef, showing off its cooking and cutting skills, along with robots to play with your children, model clothes and search for disaster victims. There was also one made almost exclusively of cardboard. The exhibition — which opened with a human-like robot called Nextage cutting the ribbon — runs until Saturday.
Comment And Gov2.0 considers Trusted Computing a key (Score 2, Interesting) 138
I wonder how this is related to a recent announcement of Wave System, OpenID, Google, PayPal, etc into an initiative to have a single sign-on for e-government?
Submission + - Company laptop, my data: can they co-exist?
An anonymous reader writes: I recently replaced my old laptop. The owner of my company heard about this and offered to reimburse me for it since he knows I have and will continue to do company work on my own hardware. I'd like the extra $1,250, but I think if I accept his offer that legally he has the right to any data on it (personal emails, files, blog posts, etc.) Even if I decide to put my personal stuff on a 2nd drive that even using what is now company property to save and write to separate storage still gives the company the right to it. The apps (Office, etc.) are my own licenses. We do NOT have a policy of intellectual property developed on company assets to belong to the company, but that doesn't mean it couldn't be argued if I figured out the One Great Internet Business Idea or write the Great American Novel and used the company laptop to produce it that the company now owns it. Unlikely, but scary. How many Slashdotters have been in this situation and what agreement did you and your management come up with?
Comment The data is incomplete for one big reason (Score 2, Insightful) 250
The company does not survey the carrier's own shops, which are major players in the Japanese cellphone market. In addition, number three, the Panasonic 830P is an almost one year old phone (last year's winter model) since superceded by two newer Panasonic phones, and the Casio W63CA is similarly an ancient (in Japanese terms) model.
Thus, to anyone who knows about the Japanese mobile phone market (such as anyone who reads my blog) the survey results are obviously biased towards bulk retailers and the people who frequent them rather than to the average Taro who frequents the carrier's own store on the High Street.
Amateur Astronomer Grabs Amazing ISS Picture 80
The Bad Astronomer writes "Ralf Vandebergh is an amateur astronomer, and using a simple telescope with a video camera attached to it, he took an incredibly detailed picture of the International Space Station. You can easily see the recently-installed truss and solar panels, as well as the Space Shuttle Discovery docked to the station."
Human Eye Could Detect Spooky Action At a Distance 255
KentuckyFC writes "The human eye is a good photon detector--it's sensitive enough to spot photons in handfuls. So what if you swapped a standard photon detector with a human eye in the ongoing experiments to measure spooky-action-at-a-distance? (That's the ability of entangled photons to influence each other, no matter how far apart they might be.) A team of physicists in Switzerland have worked out the details and say that in principle there is no reason why human eyes couldn't do this kind of experiment. That would be cool because it would ensure that the two human observers involved in the test would become entangled, albeit for a short period time. The team, led by Nic Gisin, a world leader on entanglement, says it is actively pursuing this goal (abstract) so we could have the first humans to experience entanglement within months."
Comment Re:So Let me get this straight (Score 2) 233
My (well, not mine really, as I can't vote) Prime Minister reads manga and his ex-Defense Minister builds plastic models of battleships and fighter planes, but they are far, far, far from *AWESOME*!
