15226886
submission
Stoobalou writes:
An Android game called Tapsnake could be used to spy on the movements of smartphone users.
The free game, which uses the same basic game elements as the original 70s arcade game Tron and a thousand snake-based clones, appears to be harmless but a bug-busting outfit has discovered that the Android OS app actually gathers GPS data on the location of the handset and reports it to another application called GPS Spy.
15226766
submission
olddoc writes:
This story by the BBC reports on people who live with minimal possessions besides computers. With all your music, photos and work on your computer, it is possible to live out of a backpack.
Just don't suffer a disk crash!
15225672
submission
D-Fly writes:
Well, here's another nail in Bing's coffin as far as I am concerned. They've introduced regional preferences that are not changeable when you are traveling. I am in North Africa right now, in one of the Arab countries, and Bing's preferences are not allowing me to turn off Safe Searching. The preferences page says "Your country or region requires a strict Bing SafeSearch setting, which filters out results that might return adult content." Even people who don't use search engines to look for adult content often turn off "Safe Searching" since it can block material that isn't pornographic. But Microsoft won't give people here that option. Google on the other hand still permits "Safe Search" to be switched off.
BMP screen shots attached.
13659272
submission
timothy writes:
According to Liliputing, Intel is bringing the sweet eye candy of Android to x86, which — if all goes well — means it will land on (more) netbooks and tablets soon. I'm more excited about ARM-based tablets, for their current advantage in battery life, but the more the merrier, when it comes to breaking up the tight circle of OSes available for any given arbitrary class of computing devices. Given all the OS swings that the OLPC project has gone through, maybe they should be thinking of Android, too.
13659268
submission
nzNick writes:
Yesterday we saw a story about how innovation and application development is focusing on portable devices — no secret there, and no real surprise.
Today Intel announced the end of PCI.
The question I have for slashdotters is 'When will we see the end of the PC?'
By this I mean desktop machines, and I include many of the current laptops in this. Google has said the future is Mobile — all the Telcos around the world are promoting data services and trying to get a share of the mobile data pie.
Traffic congestion in all major cities has made many companies attempt to encourage working from home — this has been hampered in the most part by poor bandwidth and a lack of truly mobile devices and applications.
Does the iPad, iPhone, Android and other mobile devices start to expose a future direction of computing?
Will we start to see applications that currently run on PC's moved to the cloud, and being accessed from more and more portable devices.
I am predicting that the sale of PC's will be 50% of current levels in 5 years, and in 10 years PCs will only be used for legacy applications.
I am not talking about specialised machines, I think we will see an explosion of very specific form factor machines such as PVRs, mini 'Home' servers for storage and gaming platforms — but the general purpose PC that is in 90% of homes and offices — I suspect we are seeing the peek of it's existence now — and we are already beginning to see the mobile revolution overtake the PC.
Do you agree?
If so — do you thing my prediction of 5 years having a 50% reduction in current sales, and being all but extinct in 10 years is correct?
What are your thoughts on this topic
Nick
13658548
submission
BeatTheChip writes:
The White House has plans to display it's blueprint Friday of a national internet ID number as part of the National Strategy for Trusted Identity in Cyberspace or NSTIC. Little information is known about how it will affect US publics. However, institutions of such enumeration systems have Big Brother implications for citizens in the UK when it comes to national identification. Let's hope with enough information and public involvement the user can retain privacy rights.
13657176
submission
recoiledsnake writes:
Apple is suing HTC again over patent infringement. Apple is adding two new patents to the twenty included in the earlier case while adding additional details to two patents already included previously. Although Android is not mentioned in any of the court documents, many of the patent infringement complaints refer to the software rather than the hardware that HTC manufactures, leading to speculation that Google is the real target, especially considering that Android sales are surpassing the iPhone's. With HTC countersuing Apple, Microsoft siding with HTC over Android, and Apple trying to stop import of Nokia phones, it seems like Apple has set off a patent Armageddon in the mobile space.
13656990
submission
AHuxley writes:
US law enforcement bodies view the sale of instant messaging service ICQ to a Russian company as a threat to homeland security.
The US notes it is sure that most criminals use ICQ and, therefore, constant access to the ICQ servers is needed to track them down.
As the system is based in Israel, American security service have had access.
In spring 2010, Russia’s largest Internet investment company, Digital Sky Technologies purchased of the service for $187 million from AOL
13628038
submission
killer6 writes:
I have a small-medium sized business (SMB) owner who recently was swindled out of hundres of thousands of USD from a well-know and trusted bank located in the US. They are currently going through the pains of the legal and documentation process that they lost money transferred via EFT from an unknown source outside the company. Has Slashdot had any experience requesting and/or forcing banks to provide two-factor tokens for on-line banking for large companies, small companies, or even high-worth individuals?
13622710
submission
UgLyPuNk writes:
Laurel County resident Travis Hammack has been indicted for murder by a grand jury. According to police reports, the 15 year-old Kentuckian shot his cousin, Craig Hammack, after an argument over an unnamed video game.
13621828
submission
UgLyPuNk writes:
From August 1, China’s online game companies will be required to take steps to protect the country’s young from “unwholesome and corrupting content,” according to new regulations issued by the Ministry of Culture earlier this week.
13621560
submission
Dexter Herbivore writes:
A 2 year long enquiry into cyber-crime by a standing committee of the Australian House of Representatives has found that unless consumers have installed anti-virus and firewall software, they shouldn't be granted internet access by their ISP. The report, titled Hackers, Fraudsters and Botnets: Tackling the Problem of Cyber Crime also found that "Companies who release IT products with security vulnerabilities should be open to claims for compensation by consumers." News.com.au covers the story.
13621310
submission
DragonHawk writes:
Mozilla Firefox 3.6.4 went to general release today. The big new feature in this release is out-of-process plugins (OOPP). This means things like Flash, Java, QuickTime, etc., all run in separate processes. So when Flash decides to crash, it won't take your browser out with it. If Flash jumps to hyperspace and starts consuming all the CPU it can find, you can kill it without nuking your browser session. Or if Flash just starts acting funny, you can restart it separately. I've been using this feature since it was in the "nightly build" stage, and it was *still* more stable than 3.6.3, just because Flash was isolated.
