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Submission + - Oracle Sues Oregon Over Troubled Obamacare Website (itworld.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: Blaming 'bureaucratic dysfunction,’ Oracle has sued Oregon for breach of contract, seeking more than $20 million in fees the state is withholding for its work on Cover Oregon, a troubled insurance exchange website developed as part of President Barack Obama's health care policy overhaul. The move is a preemptive strike by Oracle against Oregon, whose governor, John Kitzhaber, has advocated suing Oracle.

Submission + - DARPA Wants To Kill The Password (itworld.com)

Submitted by jfruh
jfruh writes: Many security experts agree that our current authentication system, in which end users are forced to remember (or, more often, write down) a dizzying array of passwords is broken. DARPA, the U.S. Defense Department research arm that developed the Internet, is trying to work past the problem by eliminating passwords altogether, replacing them with biometric and other cues, using off-the-shelf technology available today.

Submission + - Whatever Happened To Discrete Laptop GPUs? (itworld.com)

Submitted by jfruh
jfruh writes: A few years ago, PC makers were falling all over each other to provide discrete GPUs in laptops that would help rival the video power of desktop machines. Today, most laptops for sale just go with integrated graphics. What happened? One possibility involves the social lives of gamers, who were the target market for such machines: LAN parties are largely being replaced by group internet gaming, making portability irrelevant.

Submission + - What Do You Do When Your Mind-Numing IT Job Should Be Automated? (itworld.com)

Submitted by jfruh
jfruh writes: Not everyone in tech has a job like Homer Simpson, who's been replaced at various times by a brick tied to a lever and a chicken named Queenie. But many IT workers have come up against mind-numbing, repetitive tasks that probably could be automated. So: what to do about it? Well, the answer depends on how much power you have in an organization and how much your bosses respect your opinion.

Submission + - Google Lowers Search Ranking of Websites That Don't Use Encryption (itworld.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: Google is taking Internet security into its own hands, punishing sites that don't use encryption by giving them lower search rankings. The use of https is now one of the signals, like whether a Web page has unique content, that Google uses to determine where a site will appear in search rankings, although it will be a 'lightweight' signal and applies to about 1 percent of search queries now, wrote Zineb Ait Bahajji and Gary Illyes, both Google webmaster trends analysts, in a blog post.

Submission + - China Cracks Down On Mobile Messaging (itworld.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: China is tightening control over mobile messaging services with new rules that limit their role in spreading news. Under the new regulations, only news agencies and other groups with official approval can publish whatever the government considers political news via public accounts. 'All other public accounts that have not been approved cannot release or reprint political news,' the regulations said. Users of the instant messaging services will also have to register with their official IDs, and agree to follow relevant laws.

Submission + - Monkey Selfie, Aboriginal Language Among Wikipedia Copyright Takedown Requests (itworld.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: Wikimedia, which operates Wikipedia, published its first transparency report Wednesday detailing two years of alteration and takedown requests as well as requests for user data it received. Of the 304 general content removal requests, none were granted, Wikimedia said in a blog post. And while the amount of copyright takedown requests was notably low, the requests that were made included a selfie taken by a black macaque monkey and an entire aboriginal language, among other eyebrow-raising items.

Submission + - Lawsuit Against NetSuite Over 'Manifestly Unusable' Software Dismissed (itworld.com)

Submitted by jfruh
jfruh writes: NetSuite faced a potentially ugly situation in which one of its own customers sued because they said they had been bamboozled by aggressive salesmen into buying "manifestly unusable" software. The lawsuit has been settled out of court, but the message that software companies should be anxious about, according to one analyst, is that "in some cases the only way you can get a vendor's attention is to bring in a lawyer."

Submission + - Ex-Autonomy CFO: HP Trying To Hide Truth (itworld.com)

Submitted by jfruh
jfruh writes: The fallout from HP's Autonomy acquisition keeps getting more dramatic. Autonomy's ex-CFO is trying to block the settlement of lawsuits that arsoe the botched deal, claiming that HP is trying to hide its "own destruction of Autonomy's success after the acquisition." HP hit back, saying the ex-CFO "was one of the chief architects of the massive fraud on HP that precipitated this litigation."

Comment we're missing the METERS (Score 4, Insightful) 218

by jfruh (#47589111) Attached to: The Great Taxi Upheaval

The meters on traditional cabs may sometimes be tinkered with, but that's illegal, and in the vast majority of cases they're accurate and legally binding. Whereas with the new wave of rideshare apps there's no indication of what charges you're reacking up until you arrive. You can get an estimate to start with on at least some of the apps but it's not binding, and especially when surge pricing is in effect you can end up with large and unexpected charges that are difficult to predict.

I use Uber and Lyft a lot, and I'm the first to admit that traditional taxis brought this on themselves, by often refusing to take credit cards and by never adopting a convenient method of hailing a cab for the increasing pool of people who use smartphones. But traditional rules around taxis were put in place for a reason, and meters in particular were created and regulated to protect consumers against arbitrary price-gouging.

Submission + - Critics To FTC: Why Do You Hate In-App Purchasing Freedom?

Submitted by jfruh
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."

Submission + - Judge: US Search Warrants Apply To Overseas Computers (itworld.com)

Submitted by jfruh
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.

Submission + - Japan: Still At The Forefront Of Tech Innovation (itworld.com)

Submitted by jfruh
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.

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