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Submission + - Home Depot Confirms Breach Of Its Payment Systems (itworld.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: Home Depot said Monday that its payment systems had been breached, potentially affecting any customers who shopped at its stores in the U.S. and Canada since April. There's no evidence yet that debit card PIN numbers had been compromised, the company said, though it is still figuring out the scope and scale of the attacks.

Submission + - How China's E-waste Capital Is Trying to Clean Itself Up (itworld.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: If you want to see where your old electronics go to die, take a trip to Guiyu. For two decades, PCs, phones and other electronics have been shipped to this town on the southeast coast of China, where locals in thousands of small workshops pull them apart with buzz saws and pliers to extract the valuable components inside. But things may finally be changing. A sign posted by a small stream in the town declares that Guiyu will crack down on any 'acid cleaning, and burning activities.' And residents said it's rare now to see 'board burning' in the town itself, with that and other dangerous activities having been moved to an industrial park to the north.

Submission + - Microsoft Takes Down Slideshow-Building Tool After Getty Images Lawsuit (itworld.com)

Submitted by jfruh
jfruh writes: Slideshows are an increasingly popular (and, for publishers, lucrative) web content genre. So why not automate their production? Microsoft had a beta tool that was part of Bing Image Search that did just that, but took it down in the face of a lawsuit from Getty Images. It turns out that, unlike a human web content producer, Bing couldn't distinguish between images publishers have the rights to use and images they didn't.

Submission + - Chinese Man Sues State-Owned Cell Phone Company For Blocking Google

Submitted by jfruh
jfruh writes: China is notorious for censoring the Internet for its citizens, and access in the country became particularly spotty last year as the government tried to block any commemoration of the 25th anniversary of the Tiannamen Square massacre. But now one Chinese man is striking back through the courts. A 26-year-old legal practitioner is suing his cell phone company, the government-owned China Unicom, and demanding a refund for periods in which he was unable to access Gmail or Google's Hong Kong search page.

Submission + - Just Five Gangs in Nigeria Are Behind Most Craigslist Buyer Scams (itworld.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: Five Nigerian criminal gangs are behind most scams targeting sellers on Craigslist, and they've taken new measures to make their swindles appear legitimate, according to a study by George Mason University researchers Damon McCoy and Jackie Jones. In a new innovation, they're using professional check-writing equipment plus U.S.-based accomplices to not raise suspicions among their victims. McCoy and Jones will present their paper on Sept. 24 at the IEEE eCrime Research Summit in Birmingham, Alabama.

Submission + - What Are the Most Confounding Features of Various Programming Languages? (itworld.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: Every programming language has its own unique quirks, such as weird syntax, unusual functionality or non-standard implementations, things that can cause developers new to the language, or even seasoned pros, to scratch their heads in wonder (or throw their hands up in despair). ITworld's Phil Johnson has rounded up some of the WTFiest — from the + operator in JavaScript to the trigraphs in C and C++ and indentation level in Python. What programming language oddities cause you the most grief?

Submission + - Salesforce.com: Business Apps For Wearables Are The Next Big Thing (itworld.com)

Submitted by jfruh
jfruh writes: Does the idea of a smartwatch with "Clock In" and "Clock Out" buttons fill you with techo-efficiency glee or Orwellian panopticon dread? Either way, if you believe Salesforce.com, business apps for wearable devices like smartwatches and Google Glass are going to be a very important part of those ecosystems in the immediate future. Of course, Salesforce is investing resources in that area, so you'd expect them to say that.

Submission + - White House Names Google's Megan Smith As CTO (itworld.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: The White House has named long-time Google executive Megan Smith as the government's new CTO, in charge of improving technology and the use of data across agencies. Smith most recently served as vice president at Google's tech lab, Google[x]. She previously served as CEO of PlanetOut, helped design early smartphone technologies at General Magic and worked on multimedia products at Apple Japan in Tokyo. She holds bachelor's and master's degrees in mechanical engineering from MIT, and just might be, as noted in a previous Slashdot post, the first US CTO worthy of the title. Also on Thursday, the White House named Alexander Macgillivray, a former general counsel and head of public policy at Twitter, as deputy U.S. CTO.

Submission + - The Forensic Tool That Grabs Nude Selfies From iCloud Accounts (itworld.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: There's a seedy trade in compromising photos stored in Apple iCloud accounts, and it is in part aided by a software program that cleanly collects the data. The software tool they're using is Moscow-based Elcomsoft's Phone Password Breaker (EPPB), one of many forensic tools the company develops for law enforcement and other clients. Elcomsoft CEO Vladimir Katalov said via email on Wednesday that there are legitimate uses for his company's software and that it doesn't exploit flaws in Apple services, but at the same time, Elcomsoft doesn’t restrict who it sells EPPB to and over time the software has been sold and then leaked to underground websites, like Anon-IB where some of the nude celebrity photos are believed to have first been circulated.

Submission + - China Gives Microsoft 20 Days To Answer Questions In Anti-Monopoly Probe (itworld.com)

Submitted by jfruh
jfruh writes: Microsoft has been given 20 days to answer questions from China's anti-monopoly watchdog about "compatibility problems" with Windows and Office. The questions arise from complaints that Microsoft has "not been fully open", which may be related to the company's attempts to cripple users of the widespread pirated versions of Microsoft software in China.

Submission + - Appeals Court Clears Yelp Of Extortion Claims (itworld.com)

Submitted by jfruh
jfruh writes: A U.S. appeals court cleared Yelp of charges of extortion related to its interaction with several small businesses who claim Yelp demanded that they pay for advertising or face negative reviews. While Yelp says it never altered a business rating for money, the court's finding was instead based on a strict reading of the U.S. extortion law, classifying Yelp's behavior as, at most, "hard bargaining."

Submission + - Oregon Suing Oracle Over Obamacare Site, But Still Needs Oracle's Help (itworld.com)

Submitted by jfruh
jfruh writes: Oracle and the state of Oregon are in the midst of a particularly nasty set of lawsuits over the botched rollout of Oregon's health care exchange site, with Oregon claiming that Oracle promised an "out-of-the-box solution" and Oracle saying that Oregon foolishly attempted to act as its own systems integrator. But one aspect of the dispute helps illustrate an unpleasant reality of these kinds of disputes: even as Oregon tries to extract damages from Oracle, it still needs Oracle's help to salvage the site.

Submission + - Post-Microsoft Nokia Offering Mapping Services To Samsung (itworld.com)

Submitted by jfruh
jfruh writes: With Nokia's Windows Phone handset line sold off to Microsoft, one of the company's remaining businesses is its Here digital mapping service. No longer feeling loyalty to Microsoft or its OS, Nokia has inked a deal with Samsung to supply Here services to both Tizen and Android devices, including the upcoming Samsung smartwatch.

Submission + - Facebook Testing Mobile Searches For Old Posts (itworld.com)

Submitted by jfruh
jfruh writes: A major critique of newsfeed cascade apps like Facebook and Twitter is that they exist in an eternal present: sure, you may see that your friend Rob is planning on kayaking this weekend, but three hours later when a mutual friend asks you about it in real life, will you remember where he's going and when he's leaving? Facebook is trying to solve this problem, testing out a feature that will let you search for content from older posts from your phone.

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