62687473
submission
jfruh writes:
While several U.S. judges have refused as overbroad warrants that sought to grant police access to a suspects complete Gmail account, a federal judge in New York State OK'd such an order this week. Judge Gabriel W. Gorenstein argued that a search of this type was no more invasive than the long-established practice of granting a warrant to copy and search the entire contents of a hard drive, and that alternatives, like asking Google employees to locate messages based on narrowly tailored criteria, risked excluding information that trained investigators could locate.
62543161
submission
jfruh writes:
Point-of-sale systems aren't cheap, so it's not unusual for smaller merchants to buy used terminals second-hand. An HP security researcher bought one such unit on eBay to see what a used POS system will get you, and what he found was distrubing: default passwords, a security flaw, and names, addresses, and social security numbers of employees of the terminal's previous owner.
62542699
submission
jfruh writes:
The tech press has been shocked by the scale of layoffs proposed by new Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella — tens of thousands of workers representing 14 percent of company headcount. But the numbers somewhat obscure the fact that a significant majority of those losing their jobs — almost 70 percent — are former Nokia employees who only came over in the course of Microsoft's acquistion of their company in the past year. The cuts may primarily represent Nadella's rejection of the Nokia merger, signalled by his changing Microsoft's mission from being a "devices and services" provider to instead focusing on "productivity and platform".
62495713
submission
jfruh writes:
The world of internal corporate budgeting is Darwinian and zero-sum. If you want to get a big project IT project funded by your company, one that will involve spending money up front, you can't just compare it to technical projects: you need to prove it's better than everything else the company could be spending money on, based on some metrics that aren't technical at all.
62425919
submission
jfruh writes:
A quarter of Japan's population is over 65, and Yahoo Japan sees that as a growth market. They're offering Yahoo Ending to help the elderly manage all electronic aspects of their deaths, from archiving their online existence to sending a pre-written note to their loved ones. The company hopes that eventually the site can be a portal to help simply the process of having an IRL funeral, too.
62425353
submission
jfruh writes:
In 1998, the US Congress passed a law that temporarily banned all taxes imposed by federal, state, and local governments on Internet access and Internet-only services, a ban that has been faithfully renewed every year since. Now the US House has passed a permanent version of the ban, which also applies to several states that had passed Internet taxes before 1998 and were grandfathered in under the temporary law. The Senate must pass the bill as well by November 1 or the temporary ban will lapse.
62193157
submission
itwbennett writes:
At the recent Society of Information Displays (SID), Nokia showed off displays that could be bent up to two times, and still continue to work. Well, Korea's LG Display just one upped them in a big way. It has just shown off an 18-inch flexible OLED panel that you can roll up like a newspaper to a radius of just 3 cm and still work. The company also showed off an 18-inch transparent OLED panel
62192957
submission
itwbennett writes:
When unknown television maker Seiki released the world’s cheapest 4K TV, many programmers jumped at the opportunity to gain a cheap 4K monitor. Early reports touted vast screen real estate and sharp picture as a massive productivity boost for developers. So when ITworld's Matt Mombrea saw a 50” Seiki 4K TV for $429, he had to give it a try. Consider this your chance to learn from his mistakes: Despite tweaking every possible thing there was to tweak, the TV still made for a sub-standard monitor — it was slow and laggy with a noticeable flickr. As a TV, though, it's just fine.
62192049
submission
itwbennett writes:
The Federal Communications Commission, in a 3-2 party-line vote Friday, approved a plan to revamp the 17-year-old E-Rate program, which pays for telecom services for schools and libraries, by phasing out funding for voice service, Web hosting and paging services, and redirecting money to Wi-Fi. FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler had proposed a $5 billion budget for Wi-Fi, but Republican commissioners and some lawmakers had questioned where the money would come from. Still, the E-Rate revamp approved Friday contemplates a $1 billion-a-year target for Wi-Fi projects 'year after year,' Wheeler said.
62176635
submission
jfruh writes:
We already have the Internet of Things, so why not the Security Breaches of Things? A security research firm released a case study of a company that ordered inventory scanners that ended up coming already infected with malware. Once the scanners were connected to the company's wireless network, the malware searched out Linux-based ERP servers with "finance" in their names and then went after known security holes.
62126653
submission
jfruh writes:
Patent trolling is a serious irritatnt and financial drain on many big tech companies — but those same companies can't guarantee that their own future management won't sell the patents they own to a 'non-practicing entity', especially in the case of sale or bankruptcy. That's why a number of tech giants, including Google and Dropbox, have formed the 'License or Tranfer Network,' in which a patent will automatically be licensed to everyone else in the network in the event that it's sold to a third party.
62126333
submission
jfruh writes:
Whenever new technology meets resistence from society at large, tech enthusiasts are quick to dismiss "techno-panics," invoking luddites and buggy-whip manufacturers as roadbumps to history. But actual instances of resistance to technology weren't always simply negative obstructionism. The original Luddites didn't hate machines; they were skilled machine operators engaged in a violent labor dispute. 19th 'Kodak fiends' met strong opposition that eventually solidified into social rules about public photography that maybe Google Glass users should consider. And maybe the vogue of using radioactive material in quack cures should have inspired more techno-panic than it did.
62073245
submission
itwbennett writes:
In late June, a handwritten letter was sent from the state prison in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, by 10 people seeking to join the Apple vs. Samsung case. The letter included the purported signatures of Jodi Arias, whose trial and conviction in 2013 for murdering her boyfriend achieved widespread coverage on cable news channels; James Holmes, who appears to be the same person accused of killing 12 people at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, in 2012; and Christopher Wirth, who was found guilty in 2013 of killing his girlfriend while driving under the influence of alcohol. It wasn't possible to verify the authenticity of the signatures, but the envelope used to send the letter bears a Pennsylvania Department of Corrections 'Inmate Mail' postmark and a return address of the state prison in Bellefonte, where seven of the 10 are listed as being incarcerated.
62071253
submission
Zothecula writes:
Gas-powered lawnmowers are notorious polluters. According to the US Environmental Protection Agency, running a new gas mower for one hour produces as much air pollution as would be generated by 11 typical automobiles being driven for the same amount of time. Switching to an electric or reel mower is certainly one option, but for those applications where it's gotta be gasoline, a team of engineering students from the University of California, Riverside are developing another: an attachment that they claim reduces noxious emissions by over 90 percent.
62070823
submission
jfruh writes:
Wearable tech has been a pretty niche product so far, and a widely derided one at that, but moves are in the works to help the category break into the mainstream. One of the biggest irritants is that most wearable devices must pair with a smartphone to actually connect to the Internet — but an AT&T exec says that his company will be selling a standalone wearable by the end of 2014. Google Glass has been a flashpoint of conflict not least because it's extremely obvious; its creator says that subtle, non intrusive versions are coming. And while everyone wonders what Apple's play in this space will be, it may be best to imagine what they're working on as a successor to their fading iPod line.
