63269629
submission
jfruh writes:
The FTC has moved aggressively recently against companies that make it too easy for people — especially kids — to rack up huge charges on purchases within apps. But at a dicussion panel sponsored by free-market think tank, TechFreedom, critics pushed back. Joshua Wright, an FTC commissioner who dissented in a recent settlement with Apple, says a 15-minute open purchase window produced "obvious and intuitive consumer benefits" and that the FTC "simply substituted its own judgment for a private firm's decision as to how to design a product to satisfy as many users as possible."
63269373
submission
jfruh writes:
Investigators in a criminal case want to see some emails stored on Microsoft's servers in Ireland. Microsoft has resisted, on the grounds that U.S. law enforcement doesn't have jurisdiction there, but a New York judge ruled against them, responding to prosecutors' worries that web service providers could just move information around the world to avoid investigation. The case will be appealed.
63247509
submission
jfruh writes:
The rapid rise of Japan's high-tech sector in the 1970s and '80s prompted widespread surprise and more than a little anxiety in the West, with many American sci-fi writers and movie makers depicting a Japanese-dominated near future. The country's economy entered a seemingly permanent recession in the 1990s and it was soon eclipsed by China as the world's #2 economy and source of Western fears about Asian dominance. But Japanese tech companies and enginners keep on innovating in areas ranging from airplanes to tuna.
63246723
submission
itwbennett writes:
Despite becoming one of the most widely used programming languages on the Web, PHP didn't have a formal specification — until now. Facebook engineer and PHP core contributor Sara Golemon announced the initiative at OSCON earlier this month, and an initial draft of the specification was posted Wednesday on GitHub.
63197289
submission
jfruh writes:
IBM has been trying to sell its chipmaking division for a while now as part of its plan to unload underperforming assets, but it's now turning out that nobody else wants an underperforming chipmaking divion either, at least not at the prices IBM is asking. Globalfoundries, which used to be AMD's manufacturing arm and is now largely owned by the government of Abu Dhabi, was reportedly interested in buying, but only wanted the intellectual proprty and engineering staff — they felt IBM's manufacturing plants were of "little or no value."
63196987
submission
jfruh writes:
The Association for Computing Machinery is a storied professional group for computer programmers, but its membership hasn't grown in recent years to keep pace with the industry. Vint Cerf, who recently concluded his term as ACM president, asked developers what was keeping them from signing up. Their answers: paywalled content, lack of information relevant to non-academics, and code that wasn't freely available.
63191553
submission
itwbennett writes:
In a personal blog post last week, ex-Oracle employee Kevin Closson said that Oracle database shops might unwittingly find themselves hit with pricey license fees if an audit turned up accidental usage of the in-memory option, which is turned on by default latest release of Database 12c. In a blog post late Monday, Maria Colgan, an Oracle product manager, responded to the claims, saying that while in-memory 'has been seamlessly integrated into the core of the database as a new component of the Shared Global Area (SGA),' it is not turned on by default. She then went on to spell out in detail the steps needed to enable the feature.
63137951
submission
itwbennett writes:
Since 2007, the U.S. telecom infrastructure has been targeted by more than a thousand malicious acts that resulted in severe outages, (those affecting at least 900,000 minutes of user calls, or when it impacts 911 service, major military installations, key government facilities, nuclear power plants or major airports) according to data obtained from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) under the Freedom of Information Act. For the last three years, vandalism was the single biggest cause of outages identified, accounting for just over a third of the incidents in each year. Gun shots accounted for 9 percent of the outages in 2013, 7 percent in 2012 and 4 percent in 2011. Cable theft accounted for roughly similar levels — 4 percent of outages in 2013, 8 percent in 2012 and 7 percent in 2011. The FCC didn't list all the causes.
63118179
submission
jfruh writes:
When Facebook launched social plugins that could be installed on third party websites, it promised the information those plugins gathered would not be used to target ads. But now the company has reversed course, announcing plans to track users across multiple websites and use their browsing history to target ads, just as Google does. Privacy groups are gearing up to try to stop them.
63068653
submission
itwbennett writes:
The cellphone unlocking bill that passed in the House of Representatives on Friday, and which President Obama said he would sign, comes with a catch that will likely prevent you from switching carriers — at least right away: Your existing wireless contract takes precedence over the law. So if your wireless contract says that you can't unlock your phone until your contract expires, you can't do it.
63060641
submission
itwbennett writes:
Attackers are exploiting a vulnerability in distributed search engine software Elasticsearch to install DDoS malware on Amazon and possibly other cloud servers. Last week security researchers from Kaspersky Lab found new variants of Mayday, a Trojan program for Linux that's used to launch distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. The malware supports several DDoS techniques, including DNS amplification. One of the new Mayday variants was found running on compromised Amazon EC2 server instances, but this is not the only platform being misused, said Kaspersky Lab researcher Kurt Baumgartner Friday in a blog post.
63058731
submission
jfruh writes:
For some time, Intel has been offering custom-tweaked chips to big customers. While most of the companies that have taken them up on this offer, like Facebook and eBay, put the chips into servers meant for internal use, Oracle will now be selling systems running on custom Xeons directly to end users. Those customers need to be careful about how they configure those systems, though: in the new Oracle 12c, the in-memory database option, which costs $23,000 per processor, is turned on by default.
62892227
submission
jfruh writes:
An investigation by Chinese jounralists led many Chinese citizens to worry that their every move is being tracked and personal data intentionally intruded upon. The nefarious institution conducting this surveillance? Apple, via iOS 7's "Frequent Locations" feature. In the wake of the report, which ran on a state-owned television channel, Apple released a statement assuring users that isn't tracking their location data, but that hasn't stopped a woman in China from filing a class action suit in a California Court.
62892065
submission
jfruh writes:
The crash of a U.S. State Department computer earlier this week still hasn't been fully recovered from, leading to delays in applications for U.S. visas and passports all over the world. The problems first surfaced after "routine maintenance" on the consular database, which is "one of the largest Oracle-based data warehouses in the world."
62855617
submission
jfruh writes:
Qualcomm is best known for making chips, but it also has a robust patent-licensing business — one that, according to Chinese regulators, it's been abusing in that country by charging for expired patents, bundling patent licensing with chip sales, and refusing to license patents to certain chipmakers. The Chinese antitrust agency hasn't reach any conclusions, but many Chinese companies seem to be taking matters into their own hands, withholding royalty payments or otherwise failing to comply with their contracts.
