Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Submission + - New antenna technology to revolutionize Wifi (myce.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A new company founded by a Dutch billionaire and a technology veteran promises to revolutionize Wifi with cheaper and 6-8x better performing antenna’s which soon could end up in mobile phones from HTC, LG and Samsung.The technology is based on optimizing the shape of the antenna by using a formula that describes shapes and curves founded in nature. The antenna's can be produced using 3D printing from cheap materials like PVC.

Submission + - US Supreme Court: Patent Holders Must Prove Infringment (itworld.com)

Submitted by jfruh
jfruh writes: The Supreme Court issued a ruling that might help marginally curb patent madness. Ruling on a case between Medtronic and Mirowski Family Ventures, the court rules that the burden of proof in patent infringement cases is always on the patent holder. This is true even in the specific case at hand, in which Medtronic sought a declaratory judgement that it was not violating the Mirowski patents.

Submission + - Google faces off against Intellectual Ventures in landmark patent trial (reuters.com)

Submitted by enharmonix
enharmonix writes: Although Google initially invested in Intellectual Ventures, a patent holding firm, the two have since parted ways and are about to face off in court over some technologies used in Motorola (and other) phones. This is an important battle and the timing is significant given Congress's recent interest in patent reform.

Submission + - This is what it's like inside a generic drugmaker in India (acs.org)

Submitted by carmendrahl
carmendrahl writes: India produces a significant chunk of the generic medications used worldwide. Yet the country has had some problems as of late – product recalls, bans, and fines to companies with plant problems. The country is also under pressure to make its patent system more Western. Cipla is one of India's largest generic drugmakers. It rarely lets cameras inside its manufacturing facility outside Mumbai. Here is a rare look inside the plant and a very basic explainer of current Good Manufacturing Practices, the FDA standard plants such as Cipla's must follow.

Submission + - Engineers: Traffic Studies Use Simulation Software, Not Lane Closings (computerworld.com)

Submitted by Lucas123
Lucas123 writes: The so called traffic study that closed New Jersey access lanes on the heavily traveled George Washington Bridge last September has left engineers scratching their heads because in modern America, simulation software is used instead of closing down lanes. One of the best sources for simulation data are video camera systems that use software to count vehicles on roadways. Traffic studies use microscopic traffic simulations to create virtual environments that can model driver behavior to road changes with exacting detail. Instead, the Port Authority, under Gov. Chris Christie, shut down two of the three access lanes for four days last September from Fort Lee to the George Washington Bridge without warning the public, citing a "traffic study." "I would be pretty confident that if we knew exactly which lanes are closed we could replicate that, and it would show exactly how bad the backups are going to be," said Lorenzo Rotoli, an engineer and vice president at Fisher Associates, a civil engineering firm in New York that works on roads, bridges and signal systems.

Comment Testing Methodology vs Cost Effectiveness. (Score 1) 250

by pillageplunder (#45942811) Attached to: Target Confirms Point-of-Sale Malware Was Used In Attack

For Retailers and Credit card providers both, it appears their ability to understand the validity of robust security testing and practices revolves around cost. Not having to pay any perceived penalty due to a data breach means these corporate types can assign a relatively low risk to data breaches. Low risk usually means low test efforts as well. And this is what we as consumers appear to be satisfied with. I'm more of the opinion that if you have a data breach, it should cost you as a company X dollars per person affected...and start X somewhere above 5 figures. Each person would get that payout. How serious then would corporations take data security?

Submission + - James Gosling Grades Oracle's Handling of Sun's Tech

Submitted by snydeq
snydeq writes: With the four-year anniversary of Oracle's Sun Microsystems acquisition looming, InfoWorld reached out to Java founder James Gosling to rate how Oracle has done in shepherding Sun technology. Gosling gives Oracle eyebrow-raising grades, lauding Oracle's handling of Java, despite his past acrimony toward Oracle over Java (remember those T-shirts?), and giving Oracle a flat-out failing grade on what has become of Solaris OS.

Submission + - Target Confirms Point-of-Sale Malware Was Used in Attack (securityweek.com)

Submitted by wiredmikey
wiredmikey writes: According to Target Chairman and CEO Gregg Steinhafel, point-of-sale (POS) malware was used in the recent attack that compromised millions of credit and debit card account numbers of customers across the country. Steinfhafel told CNBC’s Becky Quick in an interview that malware was used in attacks that compromised the company’s point of sale registers.

According to a report from Reuters, Target and Neiman Marcus may not be alone, as other popular U.S. retailers may have been breached during the busy the holiday shopping season.

According sources who spoke to Reuters, attackers used RAM scraper, or Memory parser malware to steal sensitive data from Target and other retail victims. Visa issued alerts about attacks utilizing these types of malware in April 2013 and again in August 2013.

Memory parser malware targets payment card data being processed “in the clear” (unencrypted) in a system’s random access memory (RAM).

“The malware is configured to hook into a payment application binary responsible for processing payment transactions and extracts the systems memory for full track data,” Visa explained in a security advisory.

Submission + - Claims that NSA Spying Stopped Terrorism are 'Overblown and Misleading' (ibtimes.co.uk) 2

Submitted by DavidGilbert99
DavidGilbert99 writes: A new report by Washington think tank New American Foundation claims that the US governments claims that the NSA spying programs had helped stop 50 terrorist plots are "'overblown and even misleading." The report concludes that the NSA's controversial spying programs have had "no discernible impact on preventing acts of terrorism."

Submission + - Programmer Debunks Source Code Shown In Movies And TV Shows

Submitted by rjmarvin
rjmarvin writes: Someone is finally pausing TV shows and movies to figure out if the code shown on screen is accurate or not http://sdt.bz/67573. British programmer and writer John Graham-Cumming started taking screenshots of source code from movies such as "Elysium," "Swordfish" and "Doctor Who," and when it became popular turned the concept into a blog. Source Code in TV and Films http://moviecode.tumblr.com/ posts a new screenshot daily, proving that, for example, Tony Stark's first "Iron Man" suit was running code from a 1998 programmable Lego brick.

Submission + - How Quickly Will The Latest Arms Race Accelerate

Submitted by tranquilidad
tranquilidad writes: Russia was concerned enough about the U.S. development of a Prompt Global Strike (PGS) capability in 2010 that they included restrictions in the the new Start treaty (previously discussed on Slashdot). It now appears that China has entered the game with their "Ultra-High Speed Missile Vehicle." While some in the Russian press may question whether fears of the PGS are "rational" it appears that the race is on to develop the fastest weapons delivery system. The hypersonic arms race is focused on "precise targeting, very rapid delivery of weapons, and greater survivability against missile and space defenses" with delivery systems traveling between Mach 5 and Mach 10 after being launched from "near space".

Submission + - If I Had A Hammer

Submitted by Hugh Pickens DOT Com
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: Tom Friedman begins his latest op-ed in the NYT with an anecdote about Dutch chess grandmaster Jan Hein Donner who when asked how he’d prepare for a chess match against a computer like IBM.’s Deep Blue replied: “I would bring a hammer.” Donner isn’t alone in fantasizing that he’d like to smash some recent advances in software and automation like self-driving cars, robotic factories and artificially intelligent reservationists says Friedman because they are "not only replacing blue-collar jobs at a faster rate, but now also white-collar skills, even grandmasters!" In the First Machine Age (The Industrial Revolution) each successive invention delivered more and more power but they all required humans to make decisions about them. Therefore, the inventions of this era actually made human control and labor “more valuable and important.” Labor and machines were complementary. Friedman says that we are now entering the "Second Machine Age" where we are beginning to automate cognitive tasks because in many cases today artificially intelligent machines can make better decisions than humans. "We’re having the automation and the job destruction," says MIT’s Erik Brynjolfsson. "We’re not having the creation at the same pace. There’s no guarantee that we’ll be able to find these new jobs. It may be that machines are better than that." Put all the recent advances together says Friedman, and you can see that our generation will have more power to improve (or destroy) the world than any before, relying on fewer people and more technology. "But it also means that we need to rethink deeply our social contracts, because labor is so important to a person’s identity and dignity and to societal stability." "We’ve got a lot of rethinking to do," concludes Friedman, "because we’re not only in a recession-induced employment slump. We’re in technological hurricane reshaping the workplace."

Submission + - Chefs Preview Edible Prototypes of Surface Tension-based Cocktail Garnishes (acs.org)

Submitted by carmendrahl
carmendrahl writes: Last fall, MIT researchers made news for developing two bioinspired cocktail toppers-- a moving cocktail boat and a floral pipette-- in collaboration with James Beard Award-winning chef José Andrés. Both the boat and floral pipette operate by taking advantage of surface tension-- either to propel the boat forward or to keep small drops of liquid inside the flower's petals. Some of those early garnishes were nominally edible. But to make them worthy of a restaurant debut requires balancing of flavors, temperature, density, and alcohol content, among other factors. A story and video go inside Andrés' company ThinkFoodGroup to see how the project is coming along. The toppers aren't available to the public just yet.

Submission + - Windows 9 Already? Apparently, Yes. (slashdot.org)

Submitted by Nerval's Lobster
Nerval's Lobster writes: A little over a year after Microsoft released Windows 8, and a mere three months after it pushed out a major update with Windows 8.1, rumors abound that Windows 9 is already on its way. According to Paul Thurrott’s Supersite for Windows, Microsoft will begin discussing the next version of Windows (codenamed “Threshold,” at least for the moment) at April’s BUILD conference. “Threshold is more important than any specific updates,” he wrote. “Windows 8 is tanking harder than Microsoft is comfortable discussing in public, and the latest release, Windows 8.1, which is a substantial and free upgrade with major improvements over the original release, is in use on less than 25 million PCs at the moment.” Microsoft intends Threshold to clean up at least a portion of Windows 8’s mess. Development on the latest operating system will supposedly begin in late April, which means developers who attend BUILD won’t have access to an early alpha release—in fact, it could be quite some time before Microsoft locks down any new features, although it might double down on Windows 8’s controversial “Modern” (previously known as “Metro”) design interface. Yet if Thurrott’s reporting proves correct, Microsoft isn’t abandoning the new Windows interface that earned such a lackluster response—it’s betting that the format, once tweaked, will somehow revive the operating system’s fortunes. With Ballmer leaving the company and a major reorganization underway, it’ll be the next Microsoft CEO’s task to make sure that Windows 9 is a hit; in fact, considering that rumored 2015 release date, shepherding the OS could become that executive’s first major test.

Slashdot Top Deals

The optimum committee has no members. -- Norman Augustine

Close