71026853
submission
itwbennett writes:
A new Pew survey looking at how people have changed their online behaviors to avoid government surveillance has found that in the wake of the Snowden revelations most Americans have carried on as usual, uninterested in using encryption or identity-cloaking browsers like Tor. Roughly a third of respondents didn’t even know what Tor is.
71019497
submission
itwbennett writes:
Facebook’s Omar Baldonado set off a round of cheering last week when he told engineers there’s finally an open-source hardware design that they can use to build switches. But it's going to take time for open networking to get traction in the average company. The evolution from proprietary to open networking is like the move from Unix to Windows and Linux in servers, except with much higher risk, said Gartner analyst Joe Skorupa. 'If you get things wrong with a network, you don’t lose an application, you lose the entire data center.'
70949991
submission
itwbennett writes:
After so many years of spinning its wheels, Intel is reportedly about to make a big step into mobile by providing Apple with LTE modem chips for its hot-selling iPhone. The news comes courtesy of VentureBeat, which cites two separate sources of the plans. The story says Apple will begin using Intel’s new 7360 LTE modem processor in place of a Qualcomm chip, which has been there for a few generations.
70949749
submission
itwbennett writes:
Titan Aerospace, the drone-maker acquired last year by Google to help realize the company's ambitious plans to provide Internet access to remote areas via solar-powered drones, recently applied for and received two licenses from the U.S. Federal Communications Commission to run tests over the next six months.
70947169
submission
jfruh writes:
Steve Jobs was a well-known audiophile and music lover, which helps explain why Apple transformed the music industry in the '00s with the iPod and iTunes. But according to a new biography soon to be released, Apple may have failed to do the same for TV because of Steve Jobs's disdain for the medium. One of his first acts upon returning to the company was to kill the flashy, expensive 20th Anniversary Macintosh, in part because it had a built-in TV tuner. 'Apple will never make a TV again," Jobs declared.
70942925
submission
itwbennett writes:
The Senate Intelligence Committee, meeting behind closed doors, voted 14-1 late Thursday to approve the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act [CISA]. Senator Ron Wyden, who cast the lone vote against the legislation, said it doesn’t adequately protect privacy. 'If information-sharing legislation does not include adequate privacy protections, then that’s not a cybersecurity bill — it’s a surveillance bill by another name,' Wyden said in a statement. The bill would have a 'limited impact' on U.S. cybersecurity, he added.
70941735
submission
itwbennett writes:
The privacy breach involves whois, a database that contains contact information for people who’ve bought domain names. For privacy reasons, people can elect to make information private, often by paying an extra fee. But Craig Williams, senior technical leader for Cisco’s Talos research group, discovered that the privacy settings for domain names registered through the company eNom were being turned off right at the time when the domains were up for renewal, starting around mid-2013. Williams contacted Google, and in about six days the privacy settings had been restored. In a notice, Google blamed a 'software defect.' Cisco said in a blog post that some 282,867 domains were affected.
70924727
submission
jfruh writes:
Uber may seem like an unstoppable juggernaut, but its main carhailing service rival Lyft isn't giving up. The company just raised half a billion dollars in funding, much of it form Japanese investors.
70923329
submission
itwbennett writes:
Qualcomm's DragonBoard 410c is an uncased computer a little larger than a credit card, with all the important components on one board. With Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, location tracking and 64-bit Snapdragon chips, it offers many capabilities not yet available in other low-cost boards. It likely won’t be as cheap as the $35 Raspberry Pi 2, but it should not be more than $200, which gets into the territory for high-end boards like Nvidia’s Jetson TK1.
70922873
submission
itwbennett writes:
Organizers of SXSW said this week that flying of drones is banned for safety reasons. 'The airwaves and/or frequency spectrums generally used in the remote control of drones are too congested during the popular event to ensure operation safe from interference,' they said in a statement. The Austin Police Department will be watching for drones in crowded or public areas and anyone flying one could have it seized, the organizers warned.
70914093
submission
itwbennett writes:
We're not saying that Steve Jobs was listening to "Irreplaceable" when he introduced the iPhone — but just about everyone else was. What about when Google search was launched or MS-DOS was first released? "Honey" by Mariah Carey and "The One That You Love" by Air Supply, respectively, were the #1 hits of the day. ITworld's Phil Johnson made copious use of Playback.fm to round up an amusing, if not insightful collection of musical milestones.
70913313
submission
alphadogg writes:
Google researchers have written the first-ever attack code that takes advantage of electrical interference between densely packed memory cells, a unique style of attack that could require changes in chip design. The work builds on a paper http://users.ece.cmu.edu/~yoon... published last year by Carnegie Mellon University and Intel, which found it was possible to change binary values in stored memory by repeatedly accessing nearby memory cells, a process called “bit flipping.
70897195
submission
itwbennett writes:
Emails sent and received by Clinton in early 2009 were vulnerable to eavesdropping — just when British and American intelligence agencies were reportedly spying on world leaders. Internet records show the clintonemail.com domain was first registered on Jan. 13, 2009. Clinton became Secretary of State eight days later, but it wasn’t until March 29 that the first SSL certificate was issued for the domain, according to security company Venafi.
70895025
submission
jfruh writes:
With every PC and most commodity servers running x86 chips, you'd be forgiven for thinking that, outside of mobile, the battle for chip architecture was over. But x86 doesn't always do best when it comes to specialized kinds of processing — and one big data startup claims its FPGA-based servers blow x86 out of the water.
70885517
submission
itwbennett writes:
Big news for fans of static typing! Google and Microsoft have partnered to both enhance TypeScript and rebuild Angular in the TypeScript language. TypeScript, Microsoft's attempt at improving on JavaScript development, has been out there for a while without a notable use case. Likewise, Dart, Google's attempt at a language which accomplishes many of the same goals, hasn't seen a lot of traction outside of Google. With Google creating the next version of its popular framework Angular 2 using TypeScript, some weight is being thrown behind a single effort. Of course, Angular has its fair share of haters, and a complete re-write in version 2 that breaks compatibility with previous versions isn't going to help matters.
