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Android

Submission + - Samsung stop sale of Galaxy Tab 10.1 in Australia (digitizor.com)

Submitted by
kai_hiwatari
kai_hiwatari writes: "Apple sought an injunction in the Australian Federal Court in Sydney to ban the sales of the Galaxy Tab 10.1 until the lawsuit has been resolved. It is reported an agreement was reached between the Apple lawyers and the Samsung lawyers during a break in the hearing.

According to the agreement, Samsung has agreed to stop the advertisement and sales of the tablet until the lawsuit is over or the court gives them the approval. If Samsung wins the patent lawsuit, Apple has agreed to compensate for the lost sales."
Security

Submission + - Personal Data Of 35 Million South Koreans Stoles (digitizor.com)

Submitted by kai_hiwatari
kai_hiwatari writes: More than 35 million South Korean had their personal data stolen after two popular South Korean websites were hacked. The two websites hacked are Nate, a web portal, and Cyworld, a social network. Considering the fact that South Korea has a population of around 49 million, that makes for around 70% of the entire population.
Mozilla

Submission + - Boot to Gecko – Mozilla's Web-Based OS (digitizor.com)

Submitted by
kai_hiwatari
kai_hiwatari writes: "Mozilla has launched a new project called “Boot to Gecko”. The aim of this project is to develop a complete operating system for the open web. Unlike Google’s version of a web-based OS – the Chrome OS – Mozilla’s version is not aimed at netbooks. With Boot to Gecko, Mozilla is aiming for smartphones – and Android forms a part of their plan."
Google

Submission + - Google+ Has A Huge Privacy Problem With Its Photo (digitizor.com)

Submitted by
kai_hiwatari
kai_hiwatari writes: "As one Google+ user has noticed, it seems like tagging someone on a photo means that he/she can see the whole album even if you have not shared it. This is not actually a bug – but rather a feature in Google+.
The person who was tagged can also share your private album to others. There is an option to turn off sharing but it is enabled by default."
Android

Submission + - Android passwords are stored on disk in plain text (google.com) 1

Submitted by derGoldstein
derGoldstein writes: A new issue page was added to the Android project site: "Issue 10809: Password is stored on disk in plain text". The issue details: "The password for email accounts is stored into the SQLite DB which in turn stores it on the phone's file system in plain text". Andy Stadler replied in a comment: "rest assured, I am not closing this bug. We recognize that this is causing concern for some users, and we're going to look at identifying steps that can make your data more secure."
Oracle

Submission + - Oracle Removes Former Sun CEO's Blog Posts (digitizor.com) 1

Submitted by
kai_hiwatari
kai_hiwatari writes: "When Google announced Android back in 2007, Jonathan Schwartz, the CEO of Sun Microsystems at the time, wrote a blog post congratulating Google.
Until recently, Schwartz’s blog post published on November 5th, 2007 titled “Congratulations Google. Red Hat and the Java Community” could be found at http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/congratulations_google. After the acquisition of Sun Microsystems, the URL was redirected to http://blogs.oracle.com/jonathan/entry/congratulations_google. However, if you check either of the links now, you will get a 404 page.
It is worth noting that Google included this blog post in its defense against Oracle's Android lawsuit."
Google

Submission + - Google to discontinue Google Labs (digitizor.com)

Submitted by
kai_hiwatari
kai_hiwatari writes: "Today, Google has announced that they are closing down Google Labs. They say that this will help them prioritize their product effort. Google says that closing Google Labs means ending many of their experiments. However, not every experiment will be gone. Google will be incorporating the Labs experiments they have decided to continue in other product areas. Android apps such as Google Goggles, Google Listen etc. will continue to be available in the Android Market."
Android

Submission + - 8% of Android Apps Are Leaking Private Information (digitizor.com) 1

Submitted by
kai_hiwatari
kai_hiwatari writes: "Neil Daswani, who is also the CTO of security firm Dasient, says that they have studied around 10,000 Android apps and have found that 800 of them are leaking private information of the user to an unauthorized server. Neil Daswani is scheduled to present the full findings at the Black Hat Conference in Las Vegas which starts on July 30th. The Dasient researchers also found out that 11 of the apps they have examined are sending unwanted SMS messages."
Apple

Submission + - Linus Torvalds: OS X file system is "utter crap" (digitizor.com)

Submitted by kai_hiwatari
kai_hiwatari writes: Torvalds said that OS X Leopard is a much better system compared to Windows Vista but the HFS+ file system that OS X uses is “complete and utter crap”.

"I don't think they're equally flawed — I think Leopard is a much better system. (But) OS X in some ways is actually worse than Windows to program for. Their file system is complete and utter crap, which is scary."
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft Accused Of Stealing Kinect From Inventor (digitizor.com)

Submitted by kai_hiwatari
kai_hiwatari writes: Allegations are surfacing that Microsoft the technology behind Kinect from Columbian inventor Carlos Anzola. Anzola is said to have developed a similar technology, which he called the Human interface Electronic Decice (HiE-D), in 2007.

The HiE-D works by projecting a pattern of dots on the user using infra-red. The infra-red patterns are invisible to the human eye but can be easily picked up by the an-infra red camera. When the user moves, the pattern changes and this is picked up by the camera and translated into functions which the computer can recognize. This is very similar to the technology that Microsoft’s Kinect uses.
Google

Submission + - The massive mystery of Google's Finance (siliconvalleywatcher.com)

Submitted by
kai_hiwatari
kai_hiwatari writes: "The partner sites are part of Google's AdSense network and include large media companies such as The New York Times.

Google's own sites, such as search, gmail, etc showed 39% growth in the most recent quarter compared with the year ago quarter, to $6.23 billion.

Google partner sites grew at nearly half the rate: just 20% compared with a year ago, to $2.48 billion.

This huge disparity between the growth rates of Google sites and partner sites is without precedent for most of its history. For example, in 2010, Google sites never exceeded the growth rate of partner sites"
Microsoft

Submission + - Did Microsoft steal the tech behind Kinetic? (hackaday.com)

Submitted by kaptink
kaptink writes: In 2009, while Microsoft was busy designing and marketing what would become the Kinect, Carlos Anzola, an inventor, tinkerer, and self-ascribed geek from Bogotá, Colombia, had been working for years on a nearly identical gesture interface for the PC. His creation, the Human interface Electronic Device, or HiE-D – pronounced ‘Heidi’ — was capable of gesture recognition years before Microsoft would release the Kinect.

After developing his gesture recognition device in 2007, Microsoft showed interest in Carlos‘s device – going so far as to request a prototype. Microsoft suggested that he should apply for a patent on his technology. Carlos did just that, sending in patent applications to both the United States Patent and Trademark Office and the World Intellectual Property Organization a mere two days before the announcement of Project Natal and a full seven months before Microsoft applied for their Kinect patent.
While any action on Microsoft’s part would be speculation, we will say that the Kinect is remarkably similar to the HiE-D. Both use a ‘constellation’ of infrared dots projected on the user, and both can are able to detect the ‘skeleton’ of a user for motion control. The image below, from the HiE-D patent, shows how the movement of a face can be tracked.

Today, Carlos is in talks with a few interested companies that would like to produce the HiE-D. He says it would sell for only $50 USD, compared to $140 for a Microsoft Kinect. The HiE-D doesn’t have a camera to capture video of a user, so playing dress up with a HiE-D would be impossible. This wouldn’t be to much of a drawback, because some of the most impressive Kinect hacks we’ve seen wouldn’t change at all with the HiE-D.

Carlos says he’s been in contact with a few lawyers in Boston, who believes he has a case against Microsoft for patent infringement. He’s undecided about how to proceed at this point – Microsoft does have the war chest to go after Google for Android and defend itself over its use of 3D mapping. If we were Carlos, we’d be pretty skeptical about our chances as well.

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