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Submission + - Skype Bypasses Windows 8.1 Lock Screen 2

Submitted by ChristW
ChristW writes: From a blog entry on the Skype website, it is clear that "you can answer calls directly from your lock screen". So, if I lock my Windows PC and walk away, any passer by can answer my personal Skype calls.

Submission + - Change.org petition, ARM SoC changes for Linux 3.12 invite Torvalds' fury (paritynews.com) 1

Submitted by hypnosec
hypnosec writes: Linus Torvalds, in response to a petition on Change.org to remove RdRand from /dev/random, has lambasted the petitioner by called him ignorant for not understanding the code in Linux Kernel. Kyle Condon from UK raised a petition on Change.org to get Linus to remove RdRand from /dev/random in a bid “to improve the overall security of the linux kernel.” In his response, Torvalds asked the Condon and the supports of the petition to gain an understanding of Linux drivers, cryptography and then "come back here and admit to the world that you were wrong." Torvalds stressed that kernel maintainers knew what they were doing and the petitioner didn’t. Torvalds, in a similar outburst just yesterday, hoped that "ARM SoC hardware designers all die in some incredibly painful accident." This came in response to a message from Kevin Hilman when he noted that there were quite a few conflicts in the ARM SoC pull request for Linux 3.12, which were a result of the platform changes conflicting with driver changes going in to the V4L tree.

Submission + - Credit Suisse CIO Discusses Return On Investment for IT (diginomica.com)

Submitted by Drewdad
Drewdad writes: Stuart Lauclan writes on Steve Hilton's statements at VMWorld:

Hilton has been speaking at the VMworld conference in San Francisco this week about the challenges he faces as an IT decision maker of a major enterprise. His account makes for insightful reading – and covers a set of challenges all too familiar to his peer group.

On security:

“I was saying to somebody just the other day, I actually believe that we need to start viewing the data center network as untrusted. We’ve just got to the point we’re viewing our LAN, our office network, we’re viewing as untrusted."

On hybrid clouds:

And while hybrid cloud is something that is worth considering, Hilton isn’t keen on the idea of OpenStack: “My answer’s no. It’s not worth it. I’ve got 15,000, 20,000 VDI systems running on VMware. I’ve got probably another 30,000 virtual servers, 25,000 to 30,000. I like having a single fabric. It’s very important to have a single fabric. If I go back and go OpenStack, that’s not where the money is. “The money is in my people having to build, having to certify, and run it and operate it. The money we spend with integrated stack like VMware pays for itself, magnitudes, like hundreds of times when it comes to my people’s cost to run it.”

Submission + - Indian Government to ban use of US email services for official communications (paritynews.com)

Submitted by hypnosec
hypnosec writes: The Government of India is planning to ban the use of US based email services like Gmail for official communications and is soon going to send out a formal notification to it half a million officials across the country asking them to use official email addresses and services provided by National Informatics Centre. The move is intended to increase the security of confidential government data and information and protect it from overseas surveillance.

Submission + - MIT Students Release Code To 3D-Print High Security Keys (forbes.com)

Submitted by Sparrowvsrevolution
Sparrowvsrevolution writes: At the Def Con hacker conference Saturday, MIT students David Lawrence and Eric Van Albert released a piece of code that will allow anyone to create a 3D-printable software model of any Schlage Primus key, despite Schlage’s attempts to prevent the duplication of the restricted keys. With just a flatbed scanner and their software tool, they were able to produce precise models of Primus keys that they uploaded to the 3D-printing services Shapeways and i.Materialise, who mailed them working copies of the keys in materials ranging from nylon to titanium. Primus high-security locks are used in government facilities, healthcare settings, and detention centers, and their keys are coded with two distinct sets of teeth, one on top and one on the side. That, along with a message that reads "do not duplicate" printed on the top of every key, has made them difficult to copy by normal means. With Lawrence and Van Albert's software, anyone can now scan or take a long-distance photo of any Primus key and recreate it for as little as $5.

Submission + - Will This Accessory Help Google Glass' Short Battery Life? (mashable.com)

Submitted by cflclosers
cflclosers writes: After seeing so many complaints from Explorers about Google Glass Battery Life, I thought I would post this Mashable article about a new accessory that claims to triple battery life.

"Called PWRGlass, the lithium-ion-powered, rechargeable attachment hooks onto the back of Glass. While it's not the hippest-looking accessory around — resembling a weird spinoff of Croakies — the device claims to triple Glass' battery life. What's more, it can be recharged via a USB charger."

Submission + - Looks are Everything in New Google Patent

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: NYT: "All the news that fits." Google: "All the news that fits how old you look." In its newly-granted patent for Estimating Age Using Multiple Classifiers, Google envisions a world where how old you look helps determine what you see online. So, if a camera catches you looking like "an old fuddy-duddy", for instance, Google's patent drawings explain that you may be shown content like "Elderly Driving". Or, as Google's lawyers so eloquently put it, "During state (E), content may be selected for presentation to the individual 112 (e.g., the elderly man), based at least in part on the age estimate 128 (e.g., 84 years old) produced by the regressor 126. In the present example, the website which provides video content to users may receive the age estimate 128, and may provide content 130 (e.g., "Senior Network", "Elderly Driving", etc.) suitable for presentation to the elderly man via the content presentation device 106." Poor Jack may never get to watch Nickelodeon on his Chromebook! By the way, what exactly does Google feel constitutes "low-quality patents", anyway?

Submission + - 1,700 Websites In Russia Go Dark In SOPA-Style Protest

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Russians are going nuts over a new anti-piracy law that enables Roskomnadzor (the Federal Supervision Agency for Information Technologies and Communications) to ‘blacklist’ Internet resources before the issue of a court order. Indeed, 1700 websites have issued a blackout, just like US firms did in protest at the Stop Online Piracy Act. The law, widely known as the Russian SOPA, has been slammed by some major tech firms from the country, including Yandex. Freedom of speech campaigners are worried it could be used for political censorship, while digital companies say it will slow down the development of Internet services in the country.

Submission + - Pwnie Awards 2013 winners: Barnaby Jack, Edward Snowden, NMap, Evad3rs (paritynews.com)

Submitted by hypnosec
hypnosec writes: Winners of the Pwnie Awards 2013 were announced at a special event during Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas and the highlight of the awards were Edward Snowden, NMap and Barnaby Jack (ofcourse). Barnaby Jack was given posthumous Pwnie award for ‘lifetime achievement’ while Edward Snowden and NSA were jointly given the award of ‘Epic 0wnage’. Nmap on the other hand was awarded ‘Most Epic FAIL’. Best Privilege Escalation Bug award went to David Wang aka planetbeing and the Evad3rs team.

Submission + - Call of Duty: Ghosts pre-orders down due to console transition (arabicgamers.com)

Submitted by PartyPooper
PartyPooper writes: Call of Duty: Ghosts pre-orders are lower than those of last year's Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 due to the upcoming console transition, claimed Activision.

Activision Publishing CEO Eric Hirshberg revealed the lower figures during an investor call yesterday, which he blamed on players not knowing which console they'll be playing on.

"As one might expect in this console transition year, pre-orders for Call of Duty: Ghosts are well below the record-setting pace set by Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 last year," he said.

"However, our quantitative consumer research indicates that hesitation amongst past club pre-orders is primarily due to not knowing which platform they will be playing on, which is natural at this time in the console transition."

Submission + - Microsoft Paid Sinofsky $14M to be Jobless for a Year

Submitted by SmartAboutThings
SmartAboutThings writes: If you’ve been following Microsoft news lately, then you know that Steven Sinofsky resigned from Microsoft in November, 2012. But we didn’t see mister Sinofsky getting hired anywhere, right? We knew that when Sinofsky quit his job at Microsoft, he agreed not to compete with Microsoft by accepting employment at “certain competitors”. But only recently have we found out which are those competitors — Amazon, Apple, EMC, Facebook, Google, Oracle, VMWare. The information was revealed by Microsoft itself as part of company’s annual 10-K filling. And the fact that Sinofsky hasn't been hired yet means he is jobless and will most likely stay like that until the 1st January, 2014, where one of the above mentioned companies will most likely "grab" him with an offer he won't be able to refuse. He is jobless, but definitely not poor.

Submission + - KDE Releases Calligra 2.7 (calligra.org)

Submitted by jrepin
jrepin writes: The Calligra team is proud and pleased to announce the release of version 2.7 of the Calligra Suite, Calligra active and the Calligra Office Engine. Words, the word processing application, has a new look for the toolbox. In the same toolbox there are also new controls to manipulate shapes with much enhanced usability. Author, the writer’s application, has new support for EPUB3: mathematical formulas and multimedia contents are now exported to ebooks using the EPUB format. There is also new support for book covers using images. Plan, the project management application, has improvement in the scheduling of tasks. The formula shape now has new ways to enter formula: a matlab/octave mode and a LaTEX mode.

Submission + - NSA Whistleblower Edward Snowden Offered a Job on Russian Facebook (ibtimes.co.uk)

Submitted by DavidGilbert99
DavidGilbert99 writes: The global recession is still in full effect in most parts of the world, but not for Edward Snowden it seems. Just hours after being allowed to leave Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport yesterday having been granted temporary asylum he has been offered a high profile job with one of the biggest tech companies in Russia. David Gilbert reports for the IBTimes that VK, the second biggest social network in Europe, wants Snowden to join them to work on the "protection of personal data for our millions of users." And they weren't even being ironic.....

Submission + - 30 Percent Of Mobile Malware Made By 10 Russian Firms

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Almost a third of all mobile malware is made by 10 Russian organisations, according to Lookout Mobile Security. It made that claim after looking at its detections for this year, and after an investigation that uncovered the malware HQs' operations, which saw thousands of affiliates working alongside the factories to dupe users into downloading rogue apps. Those apps are fairly crude, sending SMS messages to premium rate numbers in the background, whilst users think they have downloaded a legitimate application. Lookout isn't revealing the names of the malware factories, however, nor is it divulging how far law enforcement are involved in cracking down on the Russian organisations. It is presenting its full findings at the DEF CON 21 conference.

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