73679649
submission
jfruh writes:
Facebook today announced Moments, a new mobile app that uses Facebook's facial recognition technology to let you sync up photos only with friends who are in those photos with you. Somewhat unusually for a new app, the bulk of it is built in the venerable C++ language, which turned out to be easier for building a cross-platform mobile app than other more "modern" languages.
73679553
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jfruh writes:
Ten times over four separate nights in the past year, telecom cables have been mysteriously cut in various locations around the San Francisco Bay Area. Now the FBI is investigating the incidents as potential sabotage.
73678869
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nickweller writes:
So many people are leaving Reddit that its closest competitor crashed and had to ask for donations to stay up.
Many users of the site protested and left when last week it banned five subreddits for harassment. And since, users have been making good on threats to leave the site — going instead to a Swiss clone of the site, Voat.
73552421
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itwbennett writes:
Yes, it was just a matter of time before voicemail, the old office relic, the technology The Guardian's Chitra Ramaswamy called “as pointless as a pigeon with a pager,” finally followed the fax machine into obscurity. Last week JPMorgan Chase announced it was turning off voicemail service for tens of thousands of workers (a move that CocaCola made last December). And if Bloomberg's Ramy Inocencio has the numbers right, the cost savings are significant: JPMorgan, for example, will save $3.2 million by cutting voicemail for about 136,000. As great as this sounds, David Lazarus, writing in the LA Times, warns that customer service will suffer.
73547853
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itwbennett writes:
Steve Casselman at Seeking Alpha was among the first to suggest that Xilinx should buy AMD because, among other reasons, it 'would let Xilinx get in on the x86 + FPGA fabric tsunami.' The trouble with this, however, is that 'AMD's server position is minuscule.... While x86 has 73% of the server market, Intel owns virtually all of it,' writes Andy Patrizio. At the same time, 'once Intel is in possession of the Altera product line, it will be able to cheaply produce the chip and drop the price, drastically undercutting Xilinx,' says Patrizio. And, he adds, buying AMD wouldn't give Xilinx the same sort of advantage 'since AMD is fabless.'
73526665
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itwbennett writes:
At Apple's WWDC 2015 event yesterday, Craig Federighi, Apple's senior vice president of software engineering, announced that the company planned to open source the Swift language. Reaction to this announcement so far has sounded more or less like this: Deafening applause with undertones of 'we'll see.' As a commenter on this Ars Technica story points out, 'Their [Apple's] previous open-source efforts (Darwin, WebKit, etc) have generally tended to be far more towards the Google style of closed development followed by a public source dump.' Simon Phipps, the former director of OSI, also expressed some reservations, telling ITworld's Swapnil Bhartiya, 'While every additional piece of open source software extends the opportunities for software freedom, the critical question for a programming language is less whether it is itself open source and more whether it's feasible to make open source software with it. Programming languages are glue for SDKs, APIs and libraries. The real value of Swift will be whether it can realistically be used anywhere but Apple's walled garden.'
73522667
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itwbennett writes:
Although it 'believes the action has no merit,' HP today announced it will pay $100 million in a settlement with PGGM Vermogensbeheer B.V., the lead plaintiff in the securities class action arising from the impairment charge taken by HP following its acquisition of Autonomy. This is just the latest episode in the fallout from HP's Autonomy acquisition.
73499053
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itwbennett writes:
Would you trust your aircraft inspection to a drone? Budget airline easyJet is testing just such a system, aimed at reducing the amount of time an aircraft is out of service. Instead of having humans perform on-site visual inspections, the drone will 'fly around an aircraft snapping images, which will then be fed to engineers for analysis.'
73496785
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jfruh writes:
Poltical party caucuses are one of the quirkier aspects of American political life: local party members gather in small rooms across the state, discuss their preferences, and send a report of how many delegates for each candidate will attend later county and statewide caucuses to ultimately choose delegates to the national convention. It's also a system with a lot of room for error in reporting, as local precinct leaders have traditionally sent in reports of votes via telephone touch-tone menus and paper mail. In 2016, Microsoft will help both Democrats and Republicans streamline the process in a fashion that will hopefully avoid the embarassing result from 2012, when Mitt Romney was declared the winner on caucus night only for Rick Santorum to emerge as the true victor when all votes were counted weeks later.
73496671
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jfruh writes:
An advanced prosthetic limb that can move in response to a person's muscle movements can cost an amputee as much as $10,000. But now a Japanese startup is aiming to use 3-D printing technology and open source Arduino computers to radically decrease the cost, with materials for each limb only running into a few hundred dollars.
73495111
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itwbennett writes:
If competition results in lower prices, some good news may be on the way for those of you who need mobile data in more remote areas of the U.S. Linconlnville Center, Maine based Kitty Wireless, usually a Page Plus reseller, started activating its own Puppy 4g LTE service on Friday. And Selectel, another Page Plus reseller, has also announced that it is about to start selling Verizon LTE data directly, according to Prepaid Phone News.
73406965
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itwbennett writes:
The U.S. National Security Agency is reportedly intercepting Internet communications from U.S. residents without getting court-ordered warrants, in an effort to hunt down malicious hackers. The previously undisclosed NSA program monitors Internet traffic for data about cyberattacks originating outside the U.S., according to a New York Times article published Thursday and based on leaks from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
73397807
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itwbennett writes:
Hewlett-Packard has given a glimpse of what the company’s separation looks like from an internal IT perspective, and not surprisingly, there are some big numbers involved. The ongoing task involves dividing up or retooling 2,800 applications and 75,000 APIs (application programming interfaces) before the company becomes Hewlett-Packard Enterprise and HP Inc. on Nov. 1. Then there's the 50,000 servers in 6 data centers. And, of course, the layoffs.
73376529
submission
itwbennett writes:
Earlier this year, researcher Ben Cox collected the public SSH (Secure Shell) keys of users with access to GitHub-hosted repositories by using one of the platform’s features. After an analysis, he found that the corresponding private keys could be easily recovered for many of them. The potentially vulnerable repositories include those of music streaming service Spotify, the Russian Internet company Yandex, the U.K. government and the Django Web application framework. GitHub revoked the keys, but it's not clear if they were ever abused by attackers.
73375701
submission
itwbennett writes:
European governments will be able to review the source code of Microsoft products to confirm they don’t contain security backdoors, at a transparency center the company opened in Brussels on Wednesday. The center is the second of its kind. Last June, the company opened a center in Redmond, Washington. The centers are part of Microsoft’s Government Security Program, launched in 2003 to help create trust with governments that want to use Microsoft products.
