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Submission + - Smartphone sales: Apple squeezed, Blackberry squashed, Android 81.3%

Submitted by mrspoonsi
mrspoonsi writes: Engadget reports: Smartphone market share for the third quarter...as you'd imagine, the world is still Android's oyster. Strategy Analytics estimates that the OS has crossed the symbolic 80 percent mark, reaching 81.3 percent of smartphone shipments by the end of September. Not that Google was the only company doing well — Nokia's strong US sales helped Windows Phone grow to 4.1 percent of the market, or nearly double what it had a year ago.

Submission + - Oracle, RedHat tapped to fix Obama Health Care site. (nbcnews.com)

Submitted by nairnr
nairnr writes: The troubled federal health insurance website, which went offline just before a climactic hearing in Congress, is back in action again, officials said Thursday.

They said Healthcare.gov was working and handling fairly high volumes. And after days of badgering from Congress, journalists and critics, officials named two of the tech whizzes drafted to help fix the troubled site.

“Our focus now is really on maintaining system stability and testing,” Julie Bataille spokesperson for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which runs the site, told reporters in a telephone briefing.

Obama says an "A-team" of technical experts has been brought in to fix the problems. He appointed his incoming chief economic adviser, Jeff Zients, to head the project. But CMS had given little detail about just who was working on the site.

Bataille finally named some of them. “They come from leading technology companies such as Red Hat and Oracle; and include individuals with expertise on site reliability; stability; and scalability," she said.

Submission + - Debian to Adopt New Init System (phoronix.com)

Submitted by rdnetto
rdnetto writes: Debian developers have been in a very polarized discussion recently about replacing their default SysVinit system with a more modern init system; namely, Debian developers are evaluating whether to use systemd or Upstart.

Debian wants to switch a modern event-based init system that is more robust and provides more features, provides stable support for advanced environments (e.g. SAN), being more similar to the likes of Ubuntu and RHEL, and modern open-source packages like GNOME 3.x are easier to package. Among other reasons, Debian hasn't been quick to switch init systems over lots of work needing to be accomplished.

In one of the latest init system discussions, it was stated "since the init system strongly shapes many other packages, there has to be only one and no other supported options."

Submission + - How Kentucky Built The Country's Best Obamacare Website

Submitted by Hugh Pickens DOT Com
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: Dylan Scott writes at TPM that Kentucky, with its deeply conservative congressional delegation, might seem like an unlikely place for Obamacare to find success but the state's online health insurance web sites has become one of the best marketplaces since its launch and shown that the marketplace concept can work in practice. Kentucky routinely ranks toward the bottom in overall health, and better health coverage is one step toward reversing that norm. Whatever the federal website seems to have failed to do to ensure its success on the Oct. 1 launch, Kentucky did. It started with the commitment to build the state's own website rather than default to the federal version. On July 17, 2012, a few weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the Affordable Care Act, Democratic Gov. Steve Beshear created the exchange via executive order, over the objections of a Republican-controlled state legislature, which sought other means — including an effort to prevent the exchange from finding office space — to block the site's creation. The recipe for success in Kentucky was: A pared-down website engineered to perform the basic functions well and a concerted effort to test it as frequently as possible to work out glitches before the Oct. 1 launch. Testing was undertaken throughout every step of the process, says Carrie Banahan, kynect's executive director, and it was crucial because it allowed state officials to identify problems early in the process. She laid out the timeline like this: From January 2013 to March, they developed the system; from April to June, they built it; from July to September, they tested it. From a design standpoint, Kentucky made the conscious choice to stick to the basics, rather than seeking to blow users away with a state-of-the-art consumer interface. It “doesn’t have all the bells and whistles that other states tried to incorporate,” like interactive features, says Jennifer Tolbert. “It’s very straightforward in allowing consumers to browse plans without first creating an account.” A big part of that was knowing their demographics: A simpler site would make it easer to access for people without broadband Internet access, and the content was written at a sixth-grade reading level so it would be as easy to understand as possible. "What we've found in Kentucky when we started talking with people was that there was a huge amount of misinformation and misunderstanding. People were very confused," says Beshear . "What I've been telling them is: Look, you don't have to like the president, and you don't have to like me. It's not about the president and it's not about me. It's about you, it's about your family, it's about your children."

Submission + - New LinkedIn app 'hijacking email" (bishopfox.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: 'Intro' reconfigures your iOS device (e.g. iPhone, iPad) so that all of your emails go through LinkedIn’s servers. You read that right. Once you install the Intro app, all of your emails, both sent and received, are transmitted via LinkedIn’s servers. LinkedIn is forcing all your IMAP and SMTP data through their own servers and then analyzing and scraping your emails for data pertaining towhatever they feel like.

Submission + - Chrome Is Used More Than Firefox, IE, And Opera Combined

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Social analytics firm Shareaholic today released browser share data for the year 2013 so far. There are quite a lot of figures to go over, but the biggest trend that immediately jumps out is Chrome’s utter dominance. In September, Chrome was used more than Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Opera combined. If you combine Chrome and the Android stock browser, Google’s browsers have greater usage share than Firefox and Safari combined.

Submission + - UI TA attaches porn to student assignments. Oops.

Submitted by dragonard
dragonard writes: It seems that a University of Iowa teaching assistant, instead of attaching an answer to a homework assignment for her students, accidentally attached a still shot taken from a private chat session with her boyfriend. The TA showed up for class today, but apparently took great pains to try to ignore the situation.
The school has taken no official action yet.

Submission + - Open Office/Libreoffice lose over 50% of their marketshare in organizations (neowin.net)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: LibreOffice and OpenOffice remain very popular for users of Linux with many using it on Macs and Windows based PCs as well at home. Organizations are still as addicted as as ever with MS office formats. In 2011 13% of organizations had OpenOffice variants installed on some computers. Today that number has dipped to 5% according to Forrester Research. It is unknown if organizations are leaving due to angry users who do not like change or because of office compatibility issues or MS offering better pricing? The poll included is over 100% as many organizations have multiple versions of offices installed. Also surprising Office 2003 is alive kicking and screaming as almost 1/3 of companies and governments still use it even though EOL for Office 2003 ends with XP on the same date! The good news is online cloud based platforms are gaining traction with Google Docs and Office 365 which are not so tied to Windows on the client. Are we too focused on old school PC install based office suites or should more effort be taken to online and cloud based replacements?

Submission + - Healthcare.gov Website Violates Open Source Licensing Agreement (weeklystandard.com)

Submitted by PoliTech
PoliTech writes:

The latest indication of the haphazard way in which Healthcare.gov was developed is the uncredited use of a copyrighted web script for a data function used by the site, a violation of the licensing agreement for the software.

The script in question is called DataTables, a very long and complex piece of website software used for formatting and presenting data. DataTables was developed by a British company called SpryMedia which licenses the open-source software freely to anyone who complies with the licensing agreement.

... a cursory comparison of the two scripts removes any doubt that the source for the script used at Healthcare.gov is indeed the SpryMedia script. The Healthcare.gov version even retained easily identifiable comments by the script's author ...

Submission + - 5,300-Year-Old Iceman Has 19 Living Relatives In Austria (ibtimes.com)

Submitted by minty3
minty3 writes: Ötzi the iceman may have perished 5,300 years ago, but the mummy has relatives that are alive and well in Austria.

A team of researchers at the Institute of Legal Medicine at Innsbruck Medical University found 19 men related to the mummy using DNA samples taken from 3,700 blood donors from the state of Tyrol in western Austria.

Submission + - Linux RNG may be insecure after all (iacr.org)

Submitted by Okian Warrior
Okian Warrior writes: As a followup to Linus's opinion of people skeptical of the linux random number generator, a new paper analyzes the robustness of /dev/urandom and /dev/urandom.

From the paper: "From a practical side, we also give a precise assessment of the security of the two Linux PRNGs, /dev/random and /dev/urandom. In particular, we show several attacks proving that these PRNGs are not robust according to our definition, and do not accumulate entropy properly. These attacks are due to the vulnerabilities of the entropy estimator and the internal mixing function of the Linux PRNGs. These attacks against the Linux PRNG show that it does not satisfy the "robustness" notion of security, but it remains unclear if these attacks lead to actual exploitable vulnerabilities in practice."

Submission + - How Microsoft invented, or invisibly runs, almost everything (networkworld.com)

Submitted by colinneagle
colinneagle writes: In a recent contribution to Forbes on "the worst thing about working at Microsoft," Matt Wallaert gave a detailed description of how frustrating it is to hear criticism from people outside of the company. In the process, he ended up basically crediting Microsoft with inventing or contributing to the invention of almost everything in the world.

Submission + - Nokia design guru urges Apple to end cable chaos (afr.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Nokia's former head designer has called on Apple to work with the broader technology industry and end its policy of having proprietary connectors for its device chargers and accessories. Other experts say Apple cannot continue to go it alone with Lightning Connectors and ignore Micro USB

Submission + - Charlie Stross: Why Microsoft Word Must Die (antipope.org)

Submitted by Jeremiah Cornelius
Jeremiah Cornelius writes: Rapture of the Nerds co-author Charlie Stross hates Microsoft Word, worse than you do. Best of all, he can articulate the many structural faults of Word that make his loathing both understandable and contagious. "Steve Jobs approached Bill Gates... to organize the first true WYSIWYG word processor for a personal computer -- ...should it use control codes, or hierarchical style sheets? In the end, the decree went out: Word should implement both formatting paradigms. Even though they're fundamentally incompatible... Word was in fact broken by design, from the outset — and it only got worse from there." Can Free Software do any better, than to imitate the broken Microsoft model? Does document formatting even matter this much, versus content?

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