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Feed Google News Sci Tech: Motorola Asks AT&T to Return Bad Batch of Nexus 6 Phones - PC Magazine (google.com)

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Motorola Asks AT&T to Return Bad Batch of Nexus 6 Phones
PC Magazine
As first reported by Droid Life, the software glitch makes the Nexus 6 inoperable. AT&T customers who got the buggy smartphones are being met with a black screen and the inability to connect when turning on their devices. Motorola confirmed to Re/code that...
Uh-oh, Moto: AT&T is sending back early Nexus 6 units over a bugEngadget
AT&T Nexus 6 plagued with major software bug, according to reportPCWorld

all 134 news articles

Submission + - Another hint for Kryptos

Submitted by rastos1
rastos1 writes: Four years ago Jim Sanborn, the sculptor who created the wavy metal pane called Kryptos that sits in front of the CIA in Langley revealed a clue for breaking the last remaining part of the encrypted message on Kryptos. The clue was: BERLIN.

But the puzzle resisted all all decryption efforts and is still unsolved.

To honor the 25th anniversary of the Wall’s demise and the artist’s 69th birthday this year, Sanborn has decided to reveal a new clue to help solve his iconic and enigmatic artwork. It’s only the second hint he’s released since the sculpture was unveiled in 1990 and may finally help unlock the fourth and final section of the encrypted sculpture, which frustrated sleuths have been struggling to crack for more than two decades. The next word in the sequence is: “clock”.

Feed Google News Sci Tech: Uh-oh, Moto: AT&T is sending back early Nexus 6 units over a bug - Engadget (google.com)

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Uh-oh, Moto: AT&T is sending back early Nexus 6 units over a bug
Engadget
If you're an AT&T customer eager to get your hands on the over-sized Nexus 6, get ready to wait a bit. AT&T stores are apparently returning the first crop of Nexus 6 units to Motorola over a software bug, Droid Life reports. And it'll likely be a while until their...
Yes, the Nexus 6 is a great phone, but I'm buying a Moto X 2014Gigaom
AT&T Nexus 6 Bug Prompts Smartphone Returns to MotorolaTech Times
First in line to order a Nexus 6? AT&T has a BRICK for youRegister
PCWorld-IntoMobile (blog)-Re/code
all 123 news articles

Submission + - How about paid, open-source style development...

Submitted by enbody
enbody writes: A year-old startup, Assembly, is built on the premise of creating products using open-source style development, but structured in a way that you get paid for your contributions. Open-source development is well-known in the Slashdot community, as are a variety of ways to earn a living around open-source, such as support. What is new here is being paid as part of the development, and not just for coding — your contribution might be as project manager or sales. A nice description with video showed up today on the Verge. Of course, the devil is in the details, but they have products so someone in Slashdot land may be interested. (Bias warning: I know one of these guys.)

Submission + - Best practices for starting and running a software shop

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: I'm a systems architect (and a former Unix sysadmin) with many years of experience on the infrastructure side of things. I have a masters in CS but not enough practical exposure to professional software development. I'd like to start my own software product line and I'd like to avoid outsourcing as much as I can. I'm seeking advice on what you think are the best practices for running a software shop and/or good blogs/books on the subject.

To be clear, I am not asking about what are the best programming practices or the merits of agile vs waterfall. Rather I am asking more about how to best run the shop as a whole. For example, how important is it to have coding standards and how much standardization is necessary for a small business? What are the pros and cons of allowing different tools and/or languages? What should the ratio of senior programmers to intermediate and junior programmers be and how should they work with each other so that nobody is bored and everyone learns something?

Thanks for your help.

Submission + - Critical XSS Flaws Patched in WordPress and Popular Plug-in (itworld.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: The WordPress development team on Thursday released critical security updates that address an XSS vulnerability in the comment boxes of WordPress posts and pages. An attacker could exploit this flaw to create comments with malicious JavaScript code embedded in them that would get executed by the browsers of users seeing those comments. 'In the most obvious scenario the attacker leaves a comment containing the JavaScript and some links in order to put the comment in the moderation queue,' said Jouko Pynnonen, the security researcher who found the flaw.

Submission + - Mozilla's 2013 Report: Revenue Up Just 1% to $314M, Again 90% Came From Google

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Mozilla has released its annual financial report for 2013, and the numbers hint as to why the organization signed a five-year deal with Yahoo, announced by the duo on November 19. Revenue increased just 1 percent, and the organization’s reliance on Google stayed flat at 90 percent. The total revenue for the Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiaries in 2011 was $163 million, and it increased 90.2 percent to $311 million for 2012. Yet that growth all but disappeared last year, as the total revenue moved up less than 1 percent (0.995 percent to be more precise) to $311 million in 2013. 85 percent of Mozilla’s revenue came from Google in 2011, and that figure increased to 90 percent in 2012. While the 90 percent number remained for 2013, it’s still a massive proportion and shows Mozilla last year could not figure out a way to differentiate where its money comes from.

Submission + - Aterlo Networks wants to put a Netflix cache in your router (gigaom.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Tech startup Aterlo Networks is offering a service that lets residential Internet subscribers with low usage caps or slow speeds watch Netflix in High Definition. The service works by running software on a home router, predicting what shows will be watched next, and downloading them to a USB drive plugged into the router in the middle of the night. After that, the shows are served from the home router to any device watching Netflix in the home. The company is doing a gradual rollout of the service, and has a signup page for invitations here.

Submission + - Google's Project Loon Can Now Launch Up To 20 Balloons Per Day, Fly 10x Longer

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Google today shared an update from Project Loon, the company’s initiative to bring high-speed Internet access to remote areas of the world via hot air balloons. Google says it now has the ability to launch up to 20 of these balloons per day. This is in part possible because the company has improved its autofill equipment to a point where it can fill a balloon in under five minutes. This is a major achievement, given that Google says filling a Project Loon balloon with enough air so that it is ready for flight is the equivalent of inflating 7,000 party balloons.

Submission + - Group Sets Out to 3D Print a 42 Story Tall Model of Earth in 10.5 Million Pieces (3dprint.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Great Globe project is an educational program which has set out to 3D print a 42 story tall 1:100,000 scale model of the Earth. The model will be printed in 10.5 million different pieces by school children around the world in an effort to education them about geography, history, and other subjects. The project aims for completion within 3 years.

Submission + - Brick & mortar retail stores in India refuse to sell Android One phones

Submitted by oyenamit
oyenamit writes: Online shopping in India is still in its infancy but is growing tremendously to reach the mostly untapped market of 1.2 billion people. Invariably, the conflict between pure online retailers like Amazon and Flipkart and brick and mortar stores was bound to emerge. Unfortunately for Google's Android One, it has been on the receiving end of this friction. Leading brick and mortar retailers in India have refused to sell Android One handsets ever since the US company chose to launch its products exclusively online.

The three Android One makers in India — Micromax, Karbonn and Spice — launched their handsets exclusively online in mid-September. When sales did not meet their expectations, they decided to release their products via the brick and mortar store channel. However, smaller retailer and mom-n-pop shops have decided to show their displeasure at having being left out of the launch by deciding not to stock Android One.

Submission + - Open air laser communication at up to 2.5tb/s speed (gizmag.com)

Submitted by Taco Cowboy
Taco Cowboy writes: A proof of concept open-air data-transmission experiment using laser beam was run at Vienna, Austria just the other day

Researchers from the University of Vienna beamed a green laser mounted on a radar tower at the Central Institute for Meteorology and Geodynamics, which was aimed at a receiver at the University of Vienna 3 km (1.8 mi) away, with a twist

The latest twist is based on the Orbital Angular Momentum of light or OAM, which allows a beam of a particular color – or wavelength – to be twisted into a corkscrew shape to increase the number of potential communication channels available. So rather than one wavelength of light serving as a single channel, each of the theoretically infinite number of turns acts as a separate communication channel

The light beam was configured into 16 patterns corresponding to binary numbers. These were used to encode grey-scale images of Wolfgang-Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig Boltzmann, and Erwin Schrödinger, which were the subjects of the transmission. At the receiver, a camera picked up the beam, which was fed into an artificial neural network to filter out atmospheric interference. In terms of individual photons of light, it means that instead of spinning like the Earth around its own axis, their energy traces out a spiral. It is the same sort of momentum that sees the Earth orbit the sun, but the photons are also moving forward at the speed of light. That corkscrew-like motion is useful because instead of just having two possible directions like polarisation (clockwise or anticlockwise), it can turn in either direction with a potentially infinite number of twists — much like a screw with multiple threads. This is why physicists have been investigating whether twisted light could help transmit information very quickly: each twist configuration could be its own channel, just like different colours of light inside an optical fiber

The team sees a number of applications for the technology, including satellite and other open air channels. In addition, the quantum nature of the light twists would make eavesdropping very difficult. Encryption keys, for example, could be sent securely because trying to read the beam in flight would alter its quantum state and destroy the data. "We have shown for the first time that information can be encoded onto twisted light and sent through a 3 km intra-city link with strong turbulences," says team member Mario Krenn. "The OAM of light is theoretically unbounded, meaning that one has, in theory, an unlimited amount of different distinguishable states in which light can be encoded. It is envisaged that this additional degree of freedom could significantly increase data-rates in classical communication”

BBC also carries the news @ http://www.bbc.com/news/scienc...

Feed Google News Sci Tech: Russian webcam spy site 'may take time to shut down' - Telegraph.co.uk (google.com)

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Telegraph.co.uk
Russian webcam spy site 'may take time to shut down'
Telegraph.co.uk
A Russian website allowing voyeurs to watch people in their homes via their own webcams may take some time to shut down, the Information Commissioner has warned. Images of children's bedrooms and views into family living rooms and kitchens can be...
VIDEO: Hackers Snooping on Unsecure WebcamsPC Magazine
Russian website streams thousands of private webcamsCNNMoney
Experts: Home, Baby Cameras Not Secure WorldwideABC News
Christian Science Monitor-BBC News-Irish Times
all 367 news articles

Submission + - fake Price Comparison fools Walmart (clarkhoward.com)

Submitted by turkeydance
turkeydance writes: People are reportedly creating fake Amazon pages to show fake prices on electronics and other items. In the most heavily publicized cases, Walmart was reportedly duped into selling $400 PlayStation 4 consoles for under $100.

Here's how this scam has played out: The perpetrators create fake Amazon pages and show these fake listings to Walmart cashiers (and ultimately to store managers) in an attempt to con them into matching the phantom prices.

Submission + - Intel planning thumb-sized PCs for next year (computerworld.com.au)

Submitted by angry tapir
angry tapir writes: Intel is shrinking PCs to thumb-sized "compute sticks" that will be out next year. The stick will plug into the back of a smart TV or monitor "and bring intelligence to that," said Kirk Skaugen, senior vice president and general manager of the PC Client Group at Intel, during the Intel investor conference in Santa Clara, California.

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