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Submission + - Is PJ sneaking back into business on Groklaw?

Submitted by leigh8904
leigh8904 writes: I just noticed two new News Picks on http://groklaw.net/: "U.K. Cabinet Office Adopts ODF as Exclusive Standard for Sharable Documents" (25-July-2014) & "USPTO Moves to Strongly Enforce Eligibility Limitations" (28-July-2014). I wonder will PJ get back into business? For myself, I miss the informative and entertaining discussions which were to be had on Groklaw.

Submission + - Microsofts Android patents .. (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by lippydude
lippydude writes: '73 patents that are said to be "standard-essential patents," or SEPs, implemented in smartphones generally, followed by 127 patents that Microsoft says are implemented in Android' ..

'The patent lists are strategically significant, because Microsoft has managed to build a huge patent-licensing business by taxing Android phones without revealing what kind of legal leverage they really have over those phones' ...

Submission + - NVIDIA found a way to quadruple display performance in low-res LCDs

Submitted by mrspoonsi
mrspoonsi writes: Problem: how do they manufacture low-cost products with high-resolution screens? NVIDIA researchers have one solution — stack two low-resolution panels on top of each other to increase pixel density on the cheap. The solution is so simple it sounds ridiculous, but apparently, it works. Researchers disassembled two 1,280 x 800 LCD panels and rebuilt them into a single display with slightly offset pixels, a filter to weed out polarization conflicts and a bit of customized software to force the display components to work in tandem. NVIDIA calls the resulting prototype a "cascaded display," and in tests it has quadrupled the spatial resolution of the original panels (thanks, in part, to how the pixel offset crams an additional four pixels behind every one of the first panel's visible pixel).

Submission + - New software drowns out NSA surveillance (clique4.us)

Submitted by clique4.us
clique4.us writes: DAYTON, OHIO July 26, 2014 — A computer security researcher at Wright State University has released a new tool for communicating invisibly over the Internet. The new software, named Clique, works by organizing users into large groups where everyone is always communicating, whether or not any particular pair of users actually knows one another or has anything of significance to say. This arrangement prevents eavesdroppers from being able to determine if an intercepted message has actual meaning, or is simply one more among millions of encrypted decoys.

“Millions are frustrated concerning the assimilation of their electronic communication by intelligence agencies, yet this problem is actually within human capability of solving,” writes Marc Abel, a Ph.D. student affiliated with the project. “There is always a tradeoff between convenience and security that every user has to make. Even online freedom isn’t free. But Clique offers unprecedented freedom to drop out of the dragnet completely, even when communicating across international boundaries, provided one is ready to invest the talent and patience needed to cope with a new system.”

It’s not only Clique’s users who will need to cope with change. Clique’s communications are immune to conventional interception methods while en route, so intelligence agencies will have to revert to older, costlier means of monitoring in order to target communicants, reducing the number of citizens an agency can track. Lawmakers will also face new hurdles. “Because Clique is completely decentralized, it cannot be taken down by changes to existing law, letters from copyright trolls, or other authoritarian regimes,” Abel says. “Now established, the global Clique network will remain in operation until the plug to the very last node gets pulled out of the wall.”

Technical details about the Clique network protocol, as well as the software itself, is available online at http://clique4.us/ at no cost.

Comment How has slashdot come to this? (Score 1) 150

Who's paying these researchers at Codenomicon to research Android vulnerabilities? Howard A. Schmidt, Chairman of the Board at Codenomicon.

“Some people might have been providing a vulnerability on purpose in order to do something nasty .. Who are they working with? Do they have sideline jobs somewhere else? The developers might be getting their dollars from ad networks"

Is this what slashdot has been reduced to, regurgitating anti Open Source FUD on behalf of a most probably a false-front for the MICROS~1 organization?

Submission + - Microsoft veteran laid off by a computer (latesttoptechnews.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: “Somehow, some algorithm put me on a list, and that was the end of it,” Berg explained. “I’d like to think that I was probably laid off by a computer. A computer put me on a list for whatever reason and sent me packing.”

Submission + - Pi Power - the power supply the Raspberry Pi *should* have come with (geppettoelectronics.com)

Submitted by nsayer
nsayer writes: The Raspberry Pi is awesome. There's only one thing I dislike about it — how you're meant to power it. Crappy USB power supplies are ubiquitous, and the power more or less goes straight onto the +5 rail. Not only that, but the micro USB connector is SMT, and USB cables are much thicker and heavier than their 2.1mm barrel connector cable counterparts. No, it's just not the best tool for the job.

So I made Pi Power. It's a small board that sits on the GPIO pins (it comes with a stacking header so you can piggyback onto it) and has a 2.1mm barrel connector that will accept any DC voltage from 6-15 volts and output up to 2A of well regulated 5V power.

I sell them on Tindie for $15 ( https://www.tindie.com/product... ) and am running an IndieGoGo campaign to fund building 1000 of them at http://igg.me/at/PiPower .

Comment Security issues of emails .. (Score 3, Insightful) 128

by lippydude (#47521381) Attached to: The Psychology of Phishing
"Phishing emails are without a doubt one of the biggest security issues consumers and businesses face today."

Only on Microsoft Windows, the Operating System that made clicking on a URL or opening an email attachment dangerous. Mainly because Windows doesn't know the difference between OPEN and RUN. If you want to be safe doing your online banking then use a LiveCD

Submission + - The Time The US Blew Up A Passenger Plane — And Tried To Cover It Up

Submitted by mrspoonsi
mrspoonsi writes: Fury and frustration still mount over the downing of Malaysia Air Flight 17, and justly so. But before accusing Russian President Vladimir Putin of war crimes or dismissing the entire episode as a tragic fluke, it’s worth looking back at another doomed passenger plane—Iran Air Flight 655—shot down on July 3, 1988, not by some scruffy rebel on contested soil but by a U.S. Navy captain in command of an Aegis-class cruiser called the Vincennes. A quarter-century later, the Vincennes is almost completely forgotten, but it still ranks as the world’s seventh deadliest air disaster (Malaysia Air Flight 17 is the sixth) and one of the Pentagon’s most inexcusable disgraces. In several ways, the two calamities are similar. The Malaysian Boeing 777 wandered into a messy civil war in eastern Ukraine, near the Russian border; the Iranian Airbus A300 wandered into a naval skirmish—one of many clashes in the ongoing “Tanker War” (another forgotten conflict)—in the Strait of Hormuz. In 1992, four years after the event (and shortly after I moved on to a different beat), Adm. Crowe admitted on ABC’s Nightline that the Vincennes was in Iranian waters at the time it shot down the plane. Back in 1988, he and others had said that the ship was in international waters. Not long after the shoot-down, Iran asked the United Nations Security Council to censure the United States for its “criminal act” against Iran Air Flight 655. Vice President George H.W. Bush, who was running to succeed Ronald Reagan as president, said on the campaign trail, “I will never apologize for the United States—I don’t care what the facts are.”

Submission + - FCC Reminds ISPs That They Can Be Fined for Lacking Transparency

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The FCC issued a notice on Wednesday reminding ISPs that, according to the still-intact transparency rule of the 2010 Open Internet Order, they are required to be transparent about their services. "The FCC's transparency rule requires that consumers get the information they need to make informed choices about the broadband services they purchase." Applicable scenarios include "poorly worded service offers or inaccurate counts of data against a data cap...[as well as] blocking or slowing certain types of traffic without explaining that to the customer." The transparency rule gives the FCC the power to fine ISPs for non-compliance.

Submission + - Vancouver's SkyTrain Crashes Twice Due To No Redundancies

Submitted by Freshly Exhumed
Freshly Exhumed writes: Vancouver's automated SkyTrain rapid transit system has crashed not once but twice in one week due to single points of failure in control systems. Authorities have controversially thrown an electrician under the train for accidentally tripping a single breaker, crippling the entire control system for over 5 hours at peak ridership time. In another case, the failure of a single computer card reduced large portions of the system to a standstill for several hours, with both crashes resulting in risky evacuations of SkyTrain cars high above ground level. To go with their abysmally bad PR, the SkyTrain authorities seem to be avoiding discussing the obvious absence of uptime/availability capability.

Submission + - Internet Explorer Vulnerabilities Increase 100%

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Bromium Labs analyzed public vulnerabilities and exploits from the first six months of 2014. The research determined that Internet Explorer vulnerabilities have increased more than 100 percent since 2013 , surpassing Java and Flash vulnerabilities. Web browsers have always been a favorite avenue of attack, but we are now seeing that hackers are not only getting better at attacking Internet Explorer, they are doing it more frequently.

Submission + - UK to use Open Document Format for government documents (themukt.com)

Submitted by sfcrazy
sfcrazy writes: UK has decided to use ‘open standards’ for sharing and viewing government documents. The announcement was made by the Minister for the Cabinet Office, Francis Maude. One of the primary objectives of this move is to create a level playing field for suppliers of all sizes. The move must put some pressure on Google to offer full support for ODF in Chrome, Android and Google Docs.

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