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Submission + - Now possible to test over 170 models of Android devices from your browser (cyberagent.co.jp)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: CyberAgent, Inc. (Head office: Shibuya-ku, Tokyo; President: Susumu Fujita; listed in the first section of Tokyo Stock Exchange; Stock Code: 4751) has developed “STF-Smartphone Test Farm,” a system for testing all terminals, including the latest model of Android, from a browser, and will make it an open source. This system can be used in both Japanese and English.

Submission + - Supreme Court justices hold stock in tech vendors, other firms (pcworld.com)

Submitted by xantonin
xantonin writes: "Chief Justice John Roberts owned up to US $750,000 in shares of Time Warner and its subsidiaries at the time the media giant filed a brief in ABC v. Aereo, which broadcasters won 6-3 last June, with Roberts in the majority. Aereo was a start-up offering TV service to subscribers through specialized antenna farms."

Submission + - Aussie ISP bakes in geo-dodging for Netflix, Hulu (crn.com.au)

Submitted by ste7en7
ste7en7 writes: A new Australian ISP is integrating geo-blocking circumvention into its broadband service, allowing customers to access streaming services like Hulu, Netflix USA, BBC iPlayer and Amazon Prime. When Yournet launches in August, customers will be able to sign up for broadband that allows users to instantly change the country they are supposedly surfing from.

Submission + - Mozilla accidentally exposes the T-shirt sizes of its developers (betanews.com)

Submitted by BrianFagioli
BrianFagioli writes: In mid-March, Mozilla had a contest, where it asked developers to come up with a t-shirt design. In mid-June, a winner was chosen and the developers were invited to reserve a t-shirt online using Google Form. Unfortunately, someone at Mozilla pulled a boner, and the t-shirt sizes of 70 developers were made public. Oh, the humanity!

Submission + - Google: Stop Making Apps! (A Love Letter)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Seasoned Silicon Valley software executive and investor Domenic Merenda has written a love letter to Google, and it's filled with "tough" love. The main thesis is that Google, as a company, should stop making apps, and instead focus on using its enormous data assets to make meaningful connections between people and facilitate organic engagement within a rich ecosystem. Interestingly, the article cites Wikipedia's information that Google maintains over 70 apps on the Android platform alone.

Submission + - Cameron reaffirms there will be no "safe spaces" from UK government snooping (arstechnica.co.uk)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The UK's prime minister, David Cameron, has re-iterated that the UK government does not intend to "leave a safe space—a new means of communication—for terrorists to communicate with each other." This confirms remarks he made earlier this year about encryption, when he said: "The question is are we going to allow a means of communications which it simply isn’t possible to read. My answer to that question is: no, we must not."

David Cameron was replying in the House of Commons on Monday to a question from the Conservative MP David Bellingham, who asked him whether he agreed that the "time has come for companies such as Google, Facebook and Twitter to accept and understand that their current privacy policies are completely unsustainable?" To which Cameron replied: "we must look at all the new media being produced and ensure that, in every case, we are able, in extremis and on the signature of a warrant, to get to the bottom of what is going on."

Submission + - Paradoxical Crystal Baffles Physicists (quantamagazine.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In a deceptively drab black crystal, physicists have stumbled upon a baffling behavior, one that appears to blur the line between the properties of metals, in which electrons flow freely, and those of insulators, in which electrons are effectively stuck in place. The crystal exhibits hallmarks of both simultaneously.

“This is a big shock,” said Suchitra Sebastian, a condensed matter physicist at the University of Cambridge whose findings appeared today in an advance online edition of the journal Science. Insulators and metals are essentially opposites, she said. “But somehow, it’s a material that’s both. It’s contrary to everything that we know.”

Submission + - Porn Time Shoots Past 1M Downloads, Shows Interest In Oculus Rift

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Porn Time has hit a new milestone: 1 million downloads. The app launched on June 7 for Windows, Mac, and Linux, and for Android on June 18. Today’s announcement comes on July 2, meaning Porn Time has hit the seven-digit mark in less than a month. As its name implies, Porn Time is the naughty version of Popcorn Time, the infamous app for streaming video torrents. It handles pornographic movies for you: Instead of you using a torrent client and a media player, the app takes care ofgrabbing the torrent file, downloading the content, and the playback all in one.

Submission + - Rocket Labs picks New Zealand for its launch site

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: The small sat rocket company Rocket Labs has chosen a location in New Zealand as its future launch site.

Rocket Lab's all-black Electron booster offers launch for less than $5 million. The company, whose investors include Lockheed Martin, is targeting clients such as university programs and small start-ups, Beck said, and it already has 30 potential clients.

The company didn't specify how much it was investing in the site, which is due to be completed in the fourth quarter. New Zealand, which has been used in the past by the National Aeronautical and Space Administration, is considered a prime location because rockets launched from that deep in the Southern hemisphere can reach a wide range of Earth orbits. Rocket Lab's remote site on the Kaitorete Spit in the Canterbury region also means it has less air and sea traffic, which translates into more frequent launches and economies of scale, the company said. It also will no longer compete for airspace with the U.S. government.

Rocket Labs will have to actually launch something to really make the competition heat up. This announcement, however, illustrates that in the long run, the United States has some significant disadvantages as a spaceport location.

Submission + - Angler Exploit Kit Evasion Techniques Keep Cryptowall Thriving (threatpost.com)

Submitted by msm1267
msm1267 writes: Since the Angler Exploit Kit began pushing the latest version of Cryptowall ransomware, the kit has gone to great lengths evade detection from IDS and other security technologies. The latest tactic is an almost-daily change to URL patterns used by the kit in HTTP GET requests for the Angler landing page, requests for a Flash exploit, and requests for the Cryptowall 3.0 payload. Traffic patterns as of yesterday are almost unrecognizable compared to those of as recent as three weeks ago.

Submission + - Introducing s2n, a New Open Source TLS Implementation (amazon.com)

Submitted by Pigskin-Referee
Pigskin-Referee writes: At Amazon Web Services, strong encryption is one of our standard features, and an integral aspect of that is the TLS (previously called SSL) encryption protocol. TLS is used with every AWS API and is also available directly to customers of many AWS services including Elastic Load Balancing (ELB), AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Amazon CloudFront, Amazon S3, Amazon RDS, and Amazon SES.

The last 18 months or so has been an eventful time for the TLS protocol. Impressive cryptography analysis highlighted flaws in several TLS algorithms that are more serious than previously thought, and security research revealed issues in several software implementations of TLS. Overall, these developments are positive and improve security, but for many they have also led to time-consuming operational events, such as software upgrades and certificate rotations.

Part of the challenge is that the TLS protocol, including all of its optional extensions, has become very complex. OpenSSL, the de facto reference implementation, contains more than 500,000 lines of code with at least 70,000 of those involved in processing TLS. Naturally with each line of code there is a risk of error, but this large size also presents challenges for code audits, security reviews, performance, and efficiency.

In order to simplify our TLS implementation and as part of our support for strong encryption for everyone, we are pleased to announce availability of a new Open Source implementation of the TLS protocol: s2n. s2n is a library that has been designed to be small, fast, with simplicity as a priority. s2n avoids implementing rarely used options and extensions, and today is just more than 6,000 lines of code. As a result of this, we’ve found that it is easier to review s2n; we have already completed three external security evaluations and penetration tests on s2n, a practice we will be continuing.

Over the coming months, we will begin integrating s2n into several AWS services. TLS is a standardized protocol and s2n already implements the functionality that we use, so this won’t require any changes in your own applications and everything will remain interoperable.

If you are interested in using or contributing to s2n, the source code, documentation, commits and enhancements are all publically available under the terms of the Apache Software License 2.0 from the s2n GitHub repository.

s2n isn’t intended as a replacement for OpenSSL, which we remain committed to supporting through our involvement in the Linux Foundation’s Core Infrastructure Initiative. OpenSSL provides two main libraries: “libssl”, which implements TLS, and “libcrypto,” which is a general-purpose cryptography library. Think of s2n as an analogue of “libssl,” but not “libcrypto.”

Oh and the name? s2n is short for “signal to noise” and is a nod to the almost magical act of encryption—disguising meaningful signals, like your critical data, as seemingly random noise.

Submission + - UK government illegally spied on Amnesty International (betanews.com)

Submitted by Mark Wilson
Mark Wilson writes: A court has revealed that the UK intelligence agency, GCHQ, illegally spied on human rights organization Amnesty International. It is an allegation that the agency had previously denied, but an email from the Investigatory Powers Tribunal backtracked on a judgement made in June which said no such spying had taken place.

The email was sent to Amnesty International yesterday, and while it conceded that the organization was indeed the subject of surveillance, no explanation has been offered. It is now clear that, for some reason, communications by Amnesty International were illegally intercepted, stored, and examined. What is not clear is when the spying happened, what data was collected and, more importantly, why it happened.

Submission + - Can New Chicago Taxes on Netflix, Apple, Spotify Withstand Legal Challenges? (247wallst.com)

Submitted by Mr D from 63
Mr D from 63 writes: In a tax ruling issued in early June, the city of Chicago expanded its amusement tax to include amusements such as TV shows, movies, videos, music and online games, if they are delivered by electronic means to customers in the city. The ruling became effective July 1.

The initial tax rate is 9% on streaming content. Sales of movies and music and the rest is not taxable, and the tax must be paid whether a customer is paying a subscription charge, a per event fee or some other variation. Chicago expects to collect $12 million a year as a result of the new tax ruling.

Amusement Tax Ruling;

The amusement tax applies to charges paid for the privilege to witness, view or participate in an amusement. This includes not only charges paid for the privilege to witness, view or participate in amusements in person but also charges paid for the privilege to witness, view or participate in amusements that are delivered electronically. Thus:

        a) charges paid for the privilege of watching electronically delivered television shows, movies or videos are subject to the amusement tax, if the shows, movies or videos are delivered to a patron (i.e., customer) in the City (see paragraph 13 below);

        b) charges paid for the privilege of listening to electronically delivered music are subject to the amusement tax, if the music is delivered to a customer in the City;

        c) and charges paid for the privilege of participating in games, on-line or otherwise, are subject to the amusement tax if the games are delivered to a customer in the City.

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