69321617
submission
jfruh writes:
Since a smartphone is an easily portable — and easily losable, and easily stealable — device that contains all sorts of personal data, the idea of a remote "kill switch" or wipe solution is a popular one. Now Qualcomm is looking to build the concept right into their next-gen Snapdragon chip, preventing any OS-level workarounds.
69283075
submission
Lucas123 writes:
Over the past five years, the solar power industry has grown the number of jobs it offers, by 20% year over year for the past three years. According to the fifth installment of the Solar Jobs Census released today, solar power industry created 31,000 new jobs last year, bringing the total number of directly-related industry jobs to 173,000. When components the materials supply chain is added in, there are more than 705,000 jobs related to the solar power industry. The job growth has been so substantial that within a few months, the solar industry will be providing twice as many living wage jobs compared to the declining coal mining industry.
69278279
submission
jfruh writes:
Since the middle of December, visitors to sites that run Google AdSense ads have intermittently found themselves redirected to other sites featuring spammy offerings for anti-aging and brain-enhancing products. While webmasters who have managed to figure out which advertisers are responsible could quash the attacks on their AdSense consoles, only now has Google itself managed to track down the villains and ban them from the service.
69277705
submission
itwbennett writes:
The story began a few months ago when it was reported that both Verizon and AT&T were injecting unique identifiers in the Web requests of their mobile customers. AT&T has since stopped using the system, but Verizon continues. Now, Stanford computer scientist Jonathan Mayer has found that one advertising company called Turn, which tracks users across the Web when they visit major sites including Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, BlueKai, AppNexus, Walmart and WebMD, uses the Verizon UIDH to respawn its own tracking cookies.
69243233
submission
jfruh writes:
China's state-owned Internet service providers are improving the nation's connection to the worldwide Internet, adding seven new access points to the world's Internet backbone to improve speed and reliability for Chinese customers. This reveals the nation's essential Internet contradiction, improving its physical connection even as the government continues to block a number of important Intenet sites.
69236001
submission
itwbennett writes:
The alleged mastermind behind the notorious Silk Road online marketplace maintained his innocence in court on Tuesday, asserting, through his lawyer, that while he started the site, he turned over all operations to other parties shortly thereafter.
69206439
submission
jfruh writes:
A lot of handwriting recognition tech involves writing with a finger or stylus on a screen of some sort, but Fujitsu has a different approach. It's introducing a Bluetooth ring that allows the wearer to "write" Japanese or Latin characters in midair, with the text appearing on a paired smartphone or computer. The company claims 95% accuracy in transcription, and is aiming the device at maintenance and repair workers who need to do data entry but also keep their hands free.
69206299
submission
jfruh writes:
More than 20 travel-related websites have experienced data breaches in the past two months, according to a security expert who tracks the trade in stolen data, with United Airlines reporting that some customers' frequent flier mileage accounts were compromised as recently as this past Sunday. The reason they're such tempting targets: frequent flier points, and the airline tickets they can be redeemed for, are easy to sell for quick profits.
69205567
submission
itwbennett writes:
Social learning platform Piazza looked at over 2 million questions asked and answered during four recent semesters by almost 1 million undergraduate and graduate students at schools in the U.S. and Canada in a wide range of fields to see if they could identify a gender confidence gap (defined as the percentage difference between the average number of questions answered by male and female students). Overall, they found a noticeably greater confidence gap between the genders in computer science than in other STEM fields. Among CS students, women answered 37% fewer questions than men, as compared to 18% fewer in non-CS STEM fields. Outside of STEM, the confidence gap is much lower and sometimes reversed, where women answered just 7% fewer questions than men in humanities while actually answering more questions than the men in business and social sciences, 11% more and 5% more, respectively. But take this with a grain of salt: The most confident aren't always (or even often) the most correct.
69204887
submission
itwbennett writes:
A California court has issued a preliminary sales ban for controller chips that SanDisk uses in its high-speed SSDs. The injunction 'affects all modules containing Diablo components,' said Netlist, a U.S. company that designs and manufactures high-performance, logic-based memory subsystems for servers. This means that the order has an effect on IBM, which uses components derived from Diablo technology in ULLtraDIMM and eXFlash modules. It could also have an effect on Huawei, Lenovo and Supermicro, which are looking to offer ULLtraDIMMs in their server platforms, Netlist added.
69201709
submission
sfcrazy writes:
It’s been long since we heard a good rant from Linus Torvalds. Linux doesn't rant much, but when he does he hits the nail and he doesn't mince worlds and this time he targeted Apple's HFS+. Linus says, "The true horrors of HFS+ are not in how it’s not a great filesystem, but in how it’s actively designed to be a bad filesystem by people who thought they had good ideas."
69182379
submission
itwbennett writes:
Saying that having access to people's communications is vital for combating terrorism, U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron has laid out surveillance plans that may involve banning online messaging services that offer encryption such as WhatsApp and Apple's iMessage. 'In our country, do we want to allow a means of communication between people which, even in extremists ... that we cannot read?' Cameron said, adding later, 'No, we must not.'
69174345
submission
jfruh writes:
The longtime open source dream of Linux on the desktop looks like it's never going to arrive — but, then again, we live in a world where the desktop is less and less important. Nothing could make that clearer than this year's CES, where five of the biggest announcements may not have been branded with a smiling penguin, but had Linux under the hood just the same.
69170515
submission
itwbennett writes:
The FBI’s access to email and other data collected from overseas targets in the NSA’s Prism program has been growing since 2008, according to a 2012 U.S. Department of Justice inspector general’s report declassified last Friday by the DOJ in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by the New York Times. Here are some of the milestones mentioned in the report: In 2008, the FBI began reviewing email accounts targeted by the NSA through the Prism program. In October 2009, the FBI requested that information collected under the Prism program be 'dual routed' to both the NSA and the FBI so that the FBI 'could retain this data for analysis and dissemination in intelligence reports.' And in April 2012, the FBI began nominating email addresses and phone numbers that the NSA should target in it surveillance program, according to the document.
69138113
submission
jfruh writes:
Facebook may be having a hard time holding on to teens, but one demographic there is growing: seniors. 56 percent of people over the age of 65 who use the Internet now have a Facebook account, up from 45 percent just a year ago.
