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.
62855213
submission
jfruh writes:
Dutch law makes it illegal for the Dutch intelligence services to conduct mass data interception programs. But, according to a court in the Hague, it's perfectly all right for the Dutch government to request that data from the U.S.'s National Intelligence Agency, and doing so doesn't violate any treaties or international law.
62796225
submission
jfruh writes:
Liquid Robotics and its Wave Glider line of autonomous seafaring robots became famous when Java inventor James Gosling left Google to join the company. Now one of its robots has passed an impressive real-world test, shrugging off a monster typhoon in the South China Sea that inflicted hundreds of millions of dollars of damage on the region.
62795995
submission
jfruh writes:
While the Internet has made communications easier, that ease had made us very dependent on the Internet for communications — and, when disaster strikes, power and infrastructure outages tend to shut down those communications networks when we need them most. But now researchers are examining how the so-called "Internet of Things" — the proliferating array of Internet-communicating devices in our lives — can transmit emergency messages via ad-hoc networks even when the Internet backbone in a region is inoperable.
62743875
submission
itwbennett writes:
Google was among 60 entities that attended a meeting on May 12 to discuss a project to replace or supplement as many as 10,000 pay phones around the city, turning the relics of the past into 'communication points' of the future with free Wi-Fi and cellphone charging. The list came to light in a Bloomberg News report on Monday. Other participants included Samsung, IBM, Cisco Systems, Verizon Wireless, Cablevision and Time Warner Cable.
62743187
submission
jfruh writes:
Nonrelational databases NoSQL databases have become increasingly popular, especially for dealing with big data applications. But the theory on what databases are good for what purposes is still somewhat unsettled, and there's a much wider variety of products and open source projects that there is in the RDBMS world. Tech blogger Matthew Mombrea is grappling with his choice. How would you make yours?
62742949
submission
jfruh writes:
The EFF has released the beta version of Privacy Badger, a browser plug-in for Chrome and Firefox that blocks third-party trackers. While Privacy Badger doesn't block advertising per se, so many web ads are built around tracking your moves around the web that the ads you will see will be different and fewer.
62687473
submission
jfruh writes:
While several U.S. judges have refused as overbroad warrants that sought to grant police access to a suspects complete Gmail account, a federal judge in New York State OK'd such an order this week. Judge Gabriel W. Gorenstein argued that a search of this type was no more invasive than the long-established practice of granting a warrant to copy and search the entire contents of a hard drive, and that alternatives, like asking Google employees to locate messages based on narrowly tailored criteria, risked excluding information that trained investigators could locate.
62687109
submission
jfruh writes:
Google's "don't be evil" mantra already seemed pretty dated last year December when it purchased Boston Dynamics, a company that designs actual robot soldiers. But since the takeover, Boston Dynamics income from military and government sources has dropped dramatically. It may be that Google as an international corporation can't be tied too closely to any single state or its military; it may also be possible that Google has other uses in mind for Boston Dynamics robots.
62543161
submission
jfruh writes:
Point-of-sale systems aren't cheap, so it's not unusual for smaller merchants to buy used terminals second-hand. An HP security researcher bought one such unit on eBay to see what a used POS system will get you, and what he found was distrubing: default passwords, a security flaw, and names, addresses, and social security numbers of employees of the terminal's previous owner.
