68336869
submission
jfruh writes:
Tablets and e-readers are more convenient in many ways than paper books, but many people have complained that the physical experience of using them isn't as good. Andnow we have some specific quantification of this fact: a study has shown that people who read text on a tablet before bed don't sleep as well as those who read a traditional book.
68327163
submission
itwbennett writes:
Slashdot readers will remember that back in August, Autonomy's ex-CFO was trying to block the settlement between Hewlett-Packard and shareholders of a lawsuit centering on the 2012 botched Autonomy acquisition, saying that HP wanted to hide its 'own destruction of Autonomy's success after the acquisition.' On Friday last week the settlement hit another snag, when a federal judge rejected HP’s proposal for being too broad, potentially releasing the company from potential liabilities beyond Autonomy. 'The shareholders appear to be relinquishing a whole universe of potential claims regarding HP governance and practices with no factual predicates that overlap the Autonomy acquisition,' wrote Charles Breyer, judge for the U.S. District Court for Northern California.
68315071
submission
itwbennett writes:
Without naming the group responsible, the Tor project warned that it could face attempts to incapacitate its network in the next few days through the seizure of specialized servers called directory authorities. These servers guide Tor users on the list of distributed relays on the network that bounce communications around. 'We are taking steps now to ensure the safety of our users, and our system is already built to be redundant so that users maintain anonymity even if the network is attacked. Tor remains safe to use,' wrote 'arma' in a post Friday on the Tor project blog. The 'arma' developer handle is generally associated with project leader Roger Dingledine. There were no reports of a seizure by late Sunday. The project promised to update the blog and its Twitter account with new information.
68209069
submission
itwbennett writes:
T-Mobile US will pay at least $90 million to settle a Federal Communications Commission (FCC) suit that alleged it looked the other way while third parties charged T-Mobile subscribers for services they didn’t want. The settlement is the second largest ever for so-called 'cramming,' following one that the FCC reached with AT&T in October. It came just two days after the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau sued Sprint for the same practice.
68157495
submission
itwbennett writes:
In a blog post Tuesday, security service provider Alert Logic warned of a Linux vulnerability, named grinch after the well-known Dr. Seuss character, that could provide attackers with unfettered root access. The fundamental flaw resides in the Linux authorization system, which can inadvertently allow privilege escalation, granting a user full administrative access. Alert Logic warned that Grinch could be as severe as the Shellshock flaw that roiled the Internet in September.
68113499
submission
itwbennett writes:
The tech industry has a well-publicized problem (including on Slashdot here and here and here) with a lack of diversity. After years of denial and evasion, the industry is starting to acknowledge the underrepresentation of women and minorities, particularly among those in technology roles. And this year a number of them went public with diversity data about their total workforce and about their tech workers specifically. Here's how 11 of them stack up.
68079533
submission
jfruh writes:
Many technologists dream of working for big names like Facebook, Google, or Apple. But a recent job-satisfaction survey revealed that some non-tech companies are beloved by their technical staff as well. Just about any company needs high-tech help these days, and many are competing with tech firms with Silicon Valley-style perks to get the best.
68079469
submission
jfruh writes:
The moment most of us have expected has arrived: Sony has been hit with a lawsuit over the huge hack it suffered. Specifically, former employees are suing over the release of personal data, arguing that the company had an obligation to improve its security.
68014629
submission
itwbennett writes:
In a recent study, ten volunteers used Android phones that tracked app behavior using a monitoring app, Mobilitics, developed by the French National Institute for Informatics Research (INRIA) in conjunction with the National Commission on Computing and Liberty (CNIL). Almost two-thirds of apps studied in the three-month real-world test accessed at least one mobile phone identifier, a quarter of them at least two identifiers, and a sixth three or more. Apps don’t need many permissions to build up a comprehensive user profile, said INRIA researcher Vincent Roca. He described how, simply by requesting access to the permissions 'Internet' and 'Access_Wifi_State,' an application could identify the phone through the MAC address of its Wi-Fi adapter and track its movements around the world.
68013401
submission
itwbennett writes:
Even for hackers, data is a numbers game. If 10,000 cards are stolen, as few as 100 may have the potential for a successful cash out and maybe 10 cards will actually be productive, says Alex Holden, founder and CISO for Hold Security, a Wisconsin-based company that specializes in finding stolen data on underground websites. And, similar to the gold rush, where many profited by selling shovels and mining equipment, there’s a healthy trade in email lists of potential victims, spam messages crafted to evade filters and specialized malware that can slip past antivirus software. But those expenses all ultimately come out of a hacker’s bottom line. 'Cybercriminals don’t have enough resources to monetize stolen data in big volumes,' adds Andrew Komarov CEO of security company IntelCrawler. 'It really has a small margin, and it is pretty complicated to resell it in big amounts.'
68001419
submission
itwbennett writes:
According to a report in Korean IT Times, Samsung Electronics has begun production of the A9 processor, the next generation ARM-based CPU for iPhone and iPad. Korea IT Times says Samsung has production lines capable of FinFET process production (a cutting-edge design for semiconductors that many other manufacturers, including AMD, IBM and TSMC, are adopting) in Austin, Texas and Giheung, Korea, but production is only taking place in Austin. Samsung invested $3.9 billion in that plant specifically to make chips for Apple. So now Apple can say its CPU is 'Made in America'.
67990155
submission
jfruh writes:
Google Chairman Eric Schmidt told a conference on surveillance at the Cato Institute that Edward Snowden's revelations on NSA spying shocked the company's engineers — who then immediately started working on making the company's servers and services more secure. Now, after a year and a half of work, Schmidt says that Google's services are the safest place to store your sensistive data.
67989755
submission
jfruh writes:
A company called Max Sound has filed a lawsuit against Google and YouTube in Germany over a streaming video patent it holds, but this could be the beginning of a much, much bigger fight. Max Sound claims its patent gives it rights over anyone who uses the H.264 video compression format, which is just about anyone who streams video over the web.
67847741
submission
itwbennett writes:
Swapnil Bhartiya has posted a handy how-to for installing the new Fedora, a process that is made more problematic due to a couple of UX flaws in the Anaconda installer. First, is the all-but-hidden placement of an error message if the user enters a too-weak password. Second, is the de-selection of the 'user creation' button, which would result in the the installation continuing with only a root user.
67776989
submission
itwbennett writes:
Facebook has made several acquisitions over the years to help advertisers target their ads and extend their reach. Custom Audiences is one such targeting tool, allowing retailers to match shoppers in their stores with their accounts on Facebook. It’s often done through an email address, phone number or name. Facebook won’t give hard numbers, but there seems to be a lot of matching going on. For decades, marketers have been trying to understand more about what’s happening at the point of sale, ‘so their systems are really robust at capturing a strikingly large amount of transactions,’ says Brian Boland, Facebook’s VP of advertising technology.
