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Desktops (Apple)

Submission + - Developers Prefer Mac OS Over Linux Reveals Survey (itproportal.com)

Submitted by hypnosec
hypnosec writes: A new report claims that more North Americans are now gradually becoming inclined towards Mac, rather than Linux as their preferred developing platform. The study, dubbed, The North American Development Survey was carried out by Evans Data, and it claims that the Mac operating system by Apple has finally surpassed Linux in terms of popularity amongst coders. While the Mac OS can brag about having near about 7.9 percent market share, one of its key rival Linux lagged behind significantly with only a 5.6 percent stake in the market.
News

Submission + - Police make new arrest over phone hacking (vietnamnewstime.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A 61-year-old man has been arrested on suspicion of hacking phones, police said Wednesday, the 12th person detained over the long-running scandal.

“At approximately midday today a 61-year-old man was arrested by appointment at a London police station by officers from Operation Weeting and is currently in custody,” Scotland Yard said in a statement.

A police source said the arrested man was former News of the World news editor Greg Miskiw, who said last month that he was planning to return to Britain from his home in Florida for questioning.

Operation Weeting is the police investigation into phone hacking at the News of the World, the Rupert Murdoch-owned tabloid shut down last month over the scandal.

The man was arrested on suspicion of unlawful interception of communications and on suspicion of conspiring to intercept communications, police said.

Police began investigating phone hacking in 2006, which resulted in the jailing of the News of the World’s royal editor and a private investigator.

In January, the probe was reopened amid revelations that the practice of illegally accessing private voicemails was widespread at the paper.

Among those arrested so far are former News of the World editors Andy Coulson, who quit as Prime Minister David Cameron’s media chief in January, and Rebekah Brooks, who quit as chief executive of Murdoch’s British media empire last month.
Facebook

Submission + - Can Anonymous Really 'Kill' Facebook? 1

Submitted by adeelarshad82
adeelarshad82 writes: Recent news about Anonymous taking down Facebook on Nov. 5 has gotten a lot of attention. While the entire Anonymous team may not agree with the plan, the real question is whether they can take it down even with everyone on board with the plan. Sophos senior security adviser, Chester Wisniewski, sheds some light on the issue talking about previous attempts, the type of attacks, new tools Anonymous could possibly use and whether there is a chance that they'll succeed.
IBM

Submission + - IBM: At 30 Years, The PC Is Dying (conceivablytech.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The IBM PC will turn 30 tomorrow and can look back at an astonishing accomplishment that has changed billions of lives. Yet IBM believes that the PC is already dying and will soon share its fate with the typewriter.
Technology

Submission + - Iron Man-like Exoskeleton Nears Production (technologyreview.com)

Submitted by fangmcgee
fangmcgee writes: By now, with films like Iron Man, its sequel, and Avatar, Hollywood has made us thoroughly familiar with the idea of the robotic exoskeleton. Less well known, however, is that researchers are actually building robotic exoskeletons like the ones envisioned by Hollywood and the comic book visionaries from whom Hollywood pilfers its most lucrative ideas. Among the developers of real-life Iron Man suits (of which there are many, the world over) is a group called Raytheon Sarcos. And as IEEE Spectrum reports in this month's issue, its impressive second-generation exoskeleton robotics suit, dubbed the XOS 2, is nearing production.
Crime

Submission + - London police post riot suspect photos on Flickr (computerworlduk.com)

Submitted by DMandPenfold
DMandPenfold writes: The Metropolitan Police has begun posting on Flickr a set of photos from CCTV cameras of suspected London rioters, as it prepares a full-on bid to have the criminals identified by local people.

After days of rioting in London and the spread of violence to other UK cities including Manchester, Salford, Liverpool, Nottingham and Birmingham, the police have vowed to make public the images of those responsible.
Technology

Submission + - Software More Valuable Than Oil (computerworld.com)

Submitted by smitty777
smitty777 writes: Software has become more valuable than oil. At least briefly on Wall Street, according to this article in Computer World. From the article"Apple saw its stock price rise enough — gaining more than 5% — that it briefly surpassed Exxon Mobil, as the most valuable company in the U.S., according to an Associated Press analysis of its market cap...Most of the other major tech companies — Intel, IBM, Dell, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard — all finished in positive territory yesterday, as markets made up ground lost in the big sell-off on Monday that also hit oil prices and other commodities".
Australia

Submission + - Australian research network plans for 100Gbps (computerworld.com.au)

Submitted by
angry tapir
angry tapir writes: "The Australian Academic and Research Network (AARNet) has announced a wide range of initiatives around network upgrades, collaboration, and mobility as part of a new five-year plan. The plan includes delivering a 100Gbps backbone to its education and research customers, to ensure sufficient "headroom" for major projects such as the Square Kilometre Array radio telescope, which Slashdot has previously discussed."
Robotics

Submission + - Sonys Face to Avatar system uses autonomous blimp (suasnews.com)

Submitted by garymortimer
garymortimer writes: Sony are creating the first real world drone avatar.

“We want cloud interface, not cloud computing,” said Hiroaki Tobita, a researcher at the Sony Computer Laboratory.

That sentence didn’t make much sense. It seemed like the by product of a language barrier.

Then a giant, cloud-like robot blimp floated by, sporting video of a human face, and that pronouncement became much clearer.

Submission + - IBM Plays SimCity with Portland Oregon

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Greg Lindsay reports that Portland Oregon will be the first city to use IBM's new app called Systems Dynamics for Smarter Cities containing 3,000 equations which collectively seek to model cities’ emergent behavior and help them figure out how policy can affect the lives of their citizens. The program seeks to quantify the cause-and-effect relationships between seemingly uncorrelated urban phenomena. "What’s the connection, for example, between ...obesity rates and carbon emissions?" writes Lindsay. "To find out, simply round up experts to hash out the linkages, translate them into algorithms, and upload enough historical data to populate the model. Then turn the knobs to see what happens when you nudge the city in one direction." One of the drivers of the “Portland Plan” is the city’s commitment to a 40 percent decrease in carbon emissions by 2030, which necessitates less driving and more walking and biking. Running the model planners discovered a positive feedback loop: More walking and biking would lead to lower obesity rates for Portlanders. In turn, a fitter population would find would find walking and biking a more attractive option. But as the field of urban systems gathers steam, it’s important to remember that IBM and its fellow technology companies aren’t the first to offer a quantitative toolkit to cities. In the 1970's RAND built models they thought could predict fire patterns in New York, and then used them to justify closing fire stations in NYC's poorest sections in the name of efficiency, a decision that would ultimately displace 600,000 people as their neighborhoods burned."
Emulation (Games)

Submission + - JavaScript Gameboy emulator, detailed in 8 parts (imrannazar.com)

Submitted by Two9A
Two9A writes: JavaScript has shed its image of being a limited language, tied to DOM manipulation in a browser; in recent years, new engines and frameworks have given JS a reputation as a language capable of bigger things. Mix this in with the new elements of HTML 5, and you have the capacity to emulate a game console or other system, with full graphical output. This series of articles looks in detail at how an emulator is written in JavaScript, using the example of the Gameboy handheld: starting at the CPU, and (as of part 8) running a copy of Tetris.
Apple

Submission + - End of the Road for Apple's Xserve (automatica.com.au)

Submitted by
PhunkySchtuff
PhunkySchtuff writes: "Apple announced recently that they are killing the Xserve.
In their Transition Guide, they mention the replacement options of the Mac Pro or the Mac mini with Snow Leopard Server as replacement options. Neither are anything like a direct replacement — the Mac Pro is considerably larger and uses more power (largely due to the more powerful graphics card as a standard configuration) and the Mac mini is a small and energy efficient workgroup server that can't handle anywhere near the same workload.

In the past few years, Apple have been making inroads into larger enterprise businesses, largely thanks to the success of the iPhone and the ever-growing range of software available (for instance, Autodesk have recently committed themselves to the Mac platform) and now there's no longer going to be a real enterprise server offering."
Security

Major Security Holes Found In Mobile Bank Apps 107

Posted by Soulskill from the and-you-can-take-that-to-the-uh-nevermind dept.
NeverVotedBush writes with this excerpt from CNet: "A security firm disclosed holes today in mobile apps from Bank of America, USAA, Chase, Wells Fargo and TD Ameritrade, prompting a scramble by most of the companies to update the apps. ... Specifically, viaForensics concluded that: the USAA's Android app stored copies of Web pages a user visited on the phone; TD Ameritrade's iPhone and Android apps were storing the user name in plain text on the phone; Wells Fargo's Android app stored user name, password, and account data in plain text on the phone; Bank of America's Android app saves a security question (used if a user was accessing the site from an unrecognized device) in plain text on the phone; and Chase's iPhone app stores the username on a phone if the user chose that option, according to the report. Meanwhile, the iPhone apps from USAA, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and Vanguard and PayPal's Android app all passed the security tests and were found to be handling data securely."

Submission + - Europe simulates total cyber war (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by Tutter
Tutter writes: The first-ever cross-European simulation of an all out cyber attack was planned to test how well nations cope as the attacks slow connections.

The simulation steadily reduced access to critical services to gauge how nations react. The exercise also tested how nations work together to avoid a complete shut-down of international links. Neelie Kroes, European commissioner for the digital agenda, said the exercise was designed to test preparedness and was an "important first step towards working together to combat potential online threats to essential infrastructure". The exercise is intended to help expose short-comings in existing procedures for combating attacks. As the attacks escalated, cyber security centres had to find ever more ways to route traffic through to key services and sites. The exercise also tested if communication channels, set up to help spread the word about attacks, were robust in the face of a developing threat and if the information shared over them was relevant.

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