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Technology

Report: Apple To Unveil "Smart Home" System 174

Posted by samzenpus from the ask-the-house dept.
An anonymous reader writes "According to a report Apple will be unveiling a new smart home system at the upcoming Worldwide Developers Conference. The system will allow users to control security systems, appliances and lighting with their iPhones. A "select number" of device makers will be certified to offer products that work with Apple's upcoming system, according to the report, which didn't name any of the manufacturers."

Submission + - Lavabit Founder Explains Why He Was Forced To Shut It Down (theguardian.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Ladar Levison, founder of the encrypted email service Lavabit that shut down last year because of friction with U.S. government data requests, has an article at The Guardian where he explains the whole story. He writes, 'My legal saga started last summer with a knock at the door, behind which stood two federal agents ready to to serve me with a court order requiring the installation of surveillance equipment on my company's network. ... I had no choice but to consent to the installation of their device, which would hand the U.S. government access to all of the messages – to and from all of my customers – as they travelled between their email accounts other providers on the Internet. But that wasn't enough. The federal agents then claimed that their court order required me to surrender my company's private encryption keys, and I balked. What they said they needed were customer passwords – which were sent securely – so that they could access the plain-text versions of messages from customers using my company's encrypted storage feature. (The government would later claim they only made this demand because of my "noncompliance".) ... What ensued was a flurry of legal proceedings that would last 38 days, ending not only my startup but also destroying, bit by bit, the very principle upon which I founded it – that we all have a right to personal privacy.'
Handhelds

Surface Pro 3 Has 12" Screen, Intel Inside 316

Posted by timothy from the touch-it dept.
crookedvulture (1866146) writes "Microsoft unveiled its Surface Pro 3 tablet at a press event in New York this morning. The device has a larger 12" screen with a 2160x1440 display resolution and a novel 3:2 aspect ratio. Intel Core processors provide the horsepower, starting with the Core i3 in the base model and extending all the way up to Core i7 in pricier variants. The tablet is just 9.1 mm thick, which Microsoft claims is the thinnest ever for a Core-based device. Microsoft developed a new radial fan that's suppose to distribute airflow evenly inside the chassis without generating audible noise. The tablet weights 800 g, shaving 100 g off the Surface Pro 2, and it's supposed to have longer battery life, as well. Microsoft has also rolled out new keyboard accessories, a pressure-sensitive stylus, and a docking station that supports 4K video output. The Surface Pro 3 is scheduled to be available tomorrow with prices starting at $799." Update: 05/20 17:12 GMT by T : Mary Jo Foley points out at ZDNet that one thing not announced today is an ARM-powered Mini version.
China

China Bans Government Purchases of Windows 8 200

Posted by timothy from the everybody's-got-priorities dept.
itwbennett (1594911) writes "Last week, China's Central Government Procurement Center posted a notice on new requirements for government tender, that included, among other things, the mysterious request that Windows 8 be excluded from the bidding process on computer purchases. The agency could not be reached Tuesday, but China's state-controlled Xinhua News Agency said that the government was forbidding the use of Windows 8 after Microsoft recently ended official support for Windows XP."

Submission + - Free software foundation condemns Mozilla's move to support DRM in Firefox. (fsf.org)

Submitted by ptr_88
ptr_88 writes: Free software foundation has opposed Mozilla's move to support DRM in Firefox browser partnership with Adobe. This is what FSF has to say about this move : The Free Software Foundation is deeply disappointed in Mozilla's announcement. The decision compromises important principles in order to alleviate misguided fears about loss of browser market share. It allies Mozilla with a company hostile to the free software movement and to Mozilla's own fundamental ideals .
Input Devices

Some Users Find Swype Keyboard App Makes 4000+ Location Requests Per Day 191

Posted by timothy from the now-where-are-you dept.
New submitter postglock (917809) writes "Swype is a popular third-party keyboard for Android phones (and also available for Windows phones and other platforms). It's currently the second-most-popular paid keyboard in Google Play (behind SwiftKey), and the 17th highest of all paid apps. Recently, users have discovered that it's been accessing location data extremely frequently, making almost 4000 requests per day, or 2.5 requests per minute. The developers claim that this is to facilitate implementation of 'regional dialects,' but cannot explain why such frequent polling is required, or why this still occurs if the regional function is disabled. Some custom ROMs such as Cyanogenmod can block this tracking, but most users would be unaware that such tracking is even occurring." Readers in the linked thread don't all seem to see the same thing; if you are a Swype user, do you see thousands of location requests, none, or something in between?
Handhelds

Figuring Out the iPad's Place 333

Posted by Soulskill from the glued-to-the-ceiling dept.
An anonymous reader writes "One of the most interesting notes from Apple's recent quarterly report was that iPad sales are down. Pundits were quick to jump on that as evidence that the iPad was just a fad, but there were still more than 16 million units sold. iPads, and the tablet market as a whole, clearly aren't a fad, but it's also unclear where they're going. They're not convincingly replacing PCs on one end or phones on the other. Meanwhile, PCs and phones are both morphing into things that are more like tablets. New form factors often succeed (or fail) based on what they can do better than old form factors, and the iPad hasn't done enough to make itself distinct, yet. Ben Thompson had an insightful take on people demanding desktop functionality from the iPad: 'This sounds suspiciously like the recommendation that the only thing holding the Macintosh back was its inability to run Apple II programs. It's also of a piece with the vast majority of geek commentary on the iPad: multiple windows, access to the file system, so on and so forth. I also think it's misplaced. The future of the iPad is not to be a better Mac. That may happen by accident, just as the Mac eventually superseded the Apple II, but to pursue that explicitly would be to sacrifice what the iPad might become, and, more importantly, what it already is.'"

Submission + - iOS 7 Updates Silently Removes Encryption for Email Attachments (thehackernews.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Apple has removed encrypted email attachments from iOS 7. Apple said back in June 2010 in regards to iOS 4.0: "Data protection is available for devices that offer hardware encryption, including iPhone 3GS and later, all iPad models, and iPod touch (3rd generation and later). Data protection enhances the built-in hardware encryption by protecting the hardware encryption keys with your passcode. This provides an additional layer of protection for your email messages attachments, and third-party applications." Not anymore.
Bug

XP Systems Getting Emergency IE Zero Day Patch 179

Posted by timothy from the patches-galore dept.
msm1267 (2804139) writes "Microsoft announced it will release an out-of-band security update today to patch a zero-day vulnerability in Internet Explorer, and that the patch will also be made available for Windows XP machines through Automatic Update. At the same time, researchers said they are now seeing attacks specifically targeting XP users.

Microsoft no longer supports XP as of April 8, and that includes the development and availability of security updates. But the about-face today speaks to the seriousness of the vulnerability, which is being exploited in limited targeted attacks, Microsoft said. Researchers at FireEye, meanwhile, said multiple attackers are now using the exploit against XP machines, prompting the inclusion of XP systems in the patch."

Submission + - laser lit lunar eclipse (nasa.gov)

Submitted by Mister Liberty
Mister Liberty writes: Tom Murphy, astrophysicist at UCSD (https://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/) writes:
While not related to Do the Math, I encourage you to check out this (http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap140418.html) stunning photo taken by Dan Long capturing our recent laser ranging efforts during the April 15 lunar eclipse. This is a real photo, taken through a C-11 telescope with a focal reducer (700 mm, f/2)—the outgoing laser beam has not been artificially superimposed. Normally it is really difficult to get a picture of our faint beam heading toward the Moon, because the Moon is so glaringly bright. The eclipse provided a great photo-op, and also a means to test the hypothesis of dusty reflectors. To me, this shot is just gorgeous. But I have more invested in it than the average Joe: this picture serves as a visual representation of a key focus in my life over the last 14 years—so of course I’m enamored."

Comment History repeats itself (Score 5, Insightful) 86

by ptaff (#46816157) Attached to: David Auerbach Explains the Inside Baseball of MSN Messenger vs. AIM

Yeah, those long forgotten chat-silo days when you needed an ICQ account, an AIM account, a MSN account, a Yahoo account to reach all your friends... fortunately XMPP/Jabber would solve all of this, and even Google would embrace the open standard with their new GTalk.

Oh! wait... it was a bait and switch.

Don't be evil does not mean be good.

Submission + - There's got to be more than the Standard Model

Submitted by StartsWithABang
StartsWithABang writes: The Standard Model of particle physics is perhaps the most successful physical theory of our Universe, and with the discovery and measurement of the Higgs boson, may be all there is as far as fundamental particles accessible through terrestrial accelerator physics. But there are at least five verified observations we've made, many in a variety of ways, that demonstrably show that the Standard Model cannot be all there is to the Universe. Here are the top 5 signs of new physics.

Comment Automate everything using chef/puppet (Score 1) 136

by ptaff (#46727457) Attached to: Seven Habits of Highly Effective Unix Admins

Using anything like puppet or chef under version control to do all server ops will not only leave you with a full timestamped documentation, but will allow you to easily horizontally scale servers, rebuild them should disaster strike and protect you from stupid upstream package updates that b0rk your config files.

Have a staging and production environment? pushing your chef/puppet scripts to production after they're proven to work insures you have the same changes applied on both sides, and avoid manual operations on production.

Submission + - Heartbleed OpenSSL Vulnerability: A Technical Remediation

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Since the announcement, there has been buzz around the underground and malicious actors have been actively leaking software library data and using one of the several provided PoC code to attack the massive amount of services available on the internet. One of the more complicated issues is that the OpenSSL patches were not in-line with the upstream of large Linux flavors. We have had a opportunity to review the behavior of the exploit and have come up with the following IDS signatures to be deployed for detection.
Privacy

Dropbox's New Policy of Scanning Files For DMCA Issues 243

Posted by samzenpus from the lets-see-what-you-have-there dept.
Advocatus Diaboli (1627651) writes "This weekend a small corner of the Internet exploded with concern that Dropbox was going too far, actually scanning users' private and directly peer-shared files for potential copyright issues. What's actually going on is a little more complicated than that, but shows that sharing a file on Dropbox isn't always the same as sharing that file directly from your hard drive over something like e-mail or instant messenger. The whole kerfuffle started yesterday evening, when one Darrell Whitelaw tweeted a picture of an error he received when trying to share a link to a Dropbox file with a friend via IM. The Dropbox web page warned him and his friend that 'certain files in this folder can't be shared due to a takedown request in accordance with the DMCA.'"

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