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Bitcoin

Submission + - Bitcoin crosses 1 billion USD market value threshold (examiner.com)

Submitted by jeremy85mai
jeremy85mai writes: From the article:
"Today, Bitcoin crossed an important milestone for the decentralized currency, in that the net worth of all bitcoins currently minted now exceeds 1 billion US dollars. At the moment, bitcoin is trading around $94, which makes the current net market value 1.03 billion USD. This is a significant milestone, since many consider this to be the point at which bitcoin should be taken as a serious currency."
Networking

Submission + - Open DNS Resolvers Center Stage in Massive DDoS Attacks (threatpost.com)

Submitted by msm1267
msm1267 writes: While the big traffic numbers and the spat between Spamhaus and illicit webhost Cyberbunker are grabbing big headlines, the underlying and percolating issue at play here has to do with the open DNS resolvers being used to DDoS the spam-fighters from Switzerland. Open resolvers do not authenticate a packet-sender’s IP address before a DNS reply is sent back. Therefore, an attacker that is able to spoof a victim’s IP address can have a DNS request bombard the victim with a 100-to-1 ratio of traffic coming back to them versus what was requested. DNS amplification attacks such as these have been used lately by hacktivists, extortionists and blacklisted webhosts to great success.
News

Submission + - United States begins stealth bombing runs over South Korea. (nytimes.com)

Submitted by skade88
skade88 writes: The New York Times is reporting that the United States of America has started flying B-2 Stealth Bomber runs over South Korea as a show of force to North Korea during raised tensions in the region. The bombers flew 6,500 miles to bomb a South Korean island with mock explosives. Earlier this month the US Military ran mock B-52 bombing runs over the same South Korean island. The US Military says it shows that it can execute precision bombing runs at will with little notice needed. The US also reaffirmed their commitment to protecting it's allies in the region.

The North Koreans have been making threats to turn South Korea into a sea of fire. North Korea has also made threats claiming they will nuke the United States' main land.
Privacy

Submission + - WSJ Covers Tor outside Firewall (wsj.com)

Submitted by
retroworks
retroworks writes: "Geoffrey Fowler of the Wall Street Journal does a mostly sympathetic portrayal of the Tor browser, despite leading with a cautionary allegory. William Weber of Austria allowed his computer to be used as a Tor server, and was arrested on November 28 for possession of child pornography — evidently streamed through his PC by another TOR user."
Hardware

Submission + - Open Hardware & Software Laptop

Submitted by mihai.todor85
mihai.todor85 writes: It looks like Andrew "bunnie" Huang has been quite busy lately, developing a nice open hardware laptop. He was even kind enough to provide all the schematics without NDA. For anybody interested in owning such a device, he says that he "might be convinced to try a Kickstarter campaign in several months, once the design is stable and tested" if enough people are interested.
AMD

Submission + - AMD reveals 8000M series of GPU's (examiner.com)

Submitted by nyan.kitty256
nyan.kitty256 writes: From the article:
"
Today, AMD took the wraps off of it's latest line of graphics cards for the notebook market, the 8000M series. Specifically, the flavors of the cards that they announced was the 8800M, 8700M, 8600M, and 8500M lines. These lines have the engineering name 'Solar', compared to the current generation(the 7000M series) name, 'London'. The first laptop announced with this new line of cards has already been announced as the Asus Vivoook U38DT. All of these cards support DirectX 11.1, as well as(most likely) at least OpenGL 4.2, but AMD did not unveil details about their OpenGL compatibility with these cards.
"
Google

Submission + - Gmail drops support for connecting to pop3 servers with self signed certs (google.com) 2

Submitted by DECula
DECula writes: In a move not communicated to it's users before hand, Google's Gmail servers were reconfigured to not connect to remote pop3 servers that have self-signed certificates, leaving folks with unencrypted connections, or no service when getting email from other services.
Not good for for the small folks. One suggestion was to allow placing the public keys on Googles side in the user configuration. That would be a heck of a lot better than just dropping users into never never land.

Submission + - HTML5 vs. Native apps: Developers offended by Zuckerberg knock on HTML5 make app (networkworld.com)

Submitted by
BButlerNWW
BButlerNWW writes: "A team of mobile app developers offended by Facebook czar Mark Zuckerberg dissing HTML5 have created a Facebook app that they say works better than native versions because of the HTML5 coding.

Zuckerberg famously knocked HTML5 in an interview this fall when he said relying too much on it instead of developing native mobile apps was "the biggest mistake we made as a company."

"When Mark Zuckerberg said HTML5 wasn't ready, we took a little offense to the comment," wrote developers at Sencha, a mobile app company that focuses on HMTL5 development.

Sencha Monday released Fastbook, a mobile app that performs almost the exact same functions as native Facebook apps for smartphones, but is built on an HMTL5 framework. The HTML5 version has faster load times, more responsive formatting and increased ability to toggle between different views without needing to reload information compared to the iOS and Android native Facebook apps, the developers claim. "We set out to show that you can build the challenging parts of the native Facbeook app in HTML5 and we built a framework that makes that possible," says Jamie Avins, an engineering manager at Sencha. "We believe HTML5 is the technology and it's ready right now.""

Submission + - Indian Govt. scraps a patent based on traditional/ancient knowledge (indiatimes.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Indian government denied a patent for diabities care based on extracts of plants by saying that for centuries, it was known that the plants were used for management of diabetes and there were no inventions. "When plants are known to act against a particular disease, extracts would certainly perform the same function," an official said. Besides, the government is of the view that a patent cannot be granted for validating something that is part of traditional knowledge.
Politics

Submission + - Lawrence O'Donnell Encourages You to Vote Third Party (msnbc.com)

Submitted by wiegeabo
wiegeabo writes: Politcal analyst, and MSNBC host, Lawrence O'Donnell covered the recent 3rd party Presidential Debate on his show "The Last Word". While showing clips from the debate about topics not covered in the main debates, O'Donnell discusses a few of the issues brought up including the drug war and the NDAA. He also discusses the media's bias towards coverage of only the two main parties, how the candidates only focus on key swing states, 'wasting votes', and the connection to low voter turn out.

Especially poignant is his comment, " I have actually voted for the winner of the presidency exactly once, so please don’t try to tell me that voting for a candidate who loses is wasting a vote in a democracy."
Android

Submission + - LG Nexus 4 Leaked, includes video (examiner.com) 1

Submitted by nyan.kitty256
nyan.kitty256 writes: "Earlier today, several sources revealed the specs and leaked images of the next Google Nexus device. This device will most likely be the launch vehicle for the next iteration of the Android Operating System. which will likely be a small incremental upgrade over a larger one. The device has a 4.75 inch screen, but it also has a smaller top bezel than the Galaxy Nexus does. It'll contain a quad core Qualcomm processor, and 2 GB of ram to supplement that. It does have a different rear design, which takes from the Nexus 7's back. You can click on the image of the device above to see more of it's design."

Submission + - Yahoo will ignore IE 10's "Do Not Track" (ypolicyblog.com) 1

Submitted by dsinc
dsinc writes: And so it begins... Yahoo has made it official: it won't honor the Do Not Track request issued by Internet Explorer 10. Their justification? "[T]he DNT signal from IE10 doesn’t express user intent" and "DNT can be easily abused".
Businesses

Submission + - "excitement" over Surface launch was faked (theatlanticwire.com)

Submitted by whoever57
whoever57 writes: A report in The Atlantic wire quotes Geekwire in a description of lines "around the building" but,
"a significant portion of those in line are somehow affiliated with Microsoft, either as employees, vendors, or contractors."

The same article describes a "press only" Surface tablet event at which the "clapping and hollering" came from a group of people who had badges that were different to the press badges.

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