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Submission + - Developers angry as New Zealand folds on software patent ban (zdnet.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement negotiations could put paid to New Zealand's newly-minted ban on software patents. Open Source Association leader Dave Lane is 'livid' that negotiators have sold the interests of developers down the river.

"It's a huge threat to the entire open source ecosystem," Lane said. "But all software development and all software developers are threatened by software patents regardless of their size or their business models."

Submission + - MH370: Found Airplane Debris is believed to be from missing Malaysian 777

Submitted by McGruber
McGruber writes: Air crash investigators have 'a high degree of confidence' that a piece of wreckage found on the Indian Ocean island of La Reunion is from a Boeing 777 — the same model as the doomed MH370 which disappeared in March 2014. Investigators will need to examine closely the wreckage to link it to MH370, but MH370 was the only Boeing 777 over lost over water.

NOTE: The Daily Mail article I'm submitting has the best pictures of the debris that I've been able to find.

Submission + - Windows 10: A Potential Privacy Mess, and Worse (vortex.com)

Submitted by Lauren Weinstein
Lauren Weinstein writes: I had originally been considering accepting Microsoft's offer of a free upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 10. After all, reports have suggested that it's a much more usable system than Windows 8/8.1 — but of course in keeping with the "every other MS release of Windows is a dog" history, that's a pretty low bar.

However, it appears that MS has significantly botched their deployment of Windows 10. I suppose we shouldn't be surprised, even though hope springs eternal.

Since there are so many issues involved, and MS is very aggressively pushing this upgrade, I'm going to run through key points here quickly, and reference other sites' pages that can give you more information right now.

But here's my executive summary: You may want to think twice, or three times, or many more times, about whether or not you wish to accept the Windows 10 free upgrade on your existing Windows 7 or 8/8.1 system.

Submission + - AMD's $550 Radeon R9 Fury On Linux Competes With $200~350 NVIDIA GPUs (phoronix.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Earlier this month AMD released the air-cooled Radeon R9 Fury graphics card with Fury X-like performance, but the big caveat is the bold performance is only to be found on Windows. Testing the R9 Fury X on Linux revealed the Catalyst driver delivers devastatingly low performance for this graphics card. With OpenGL Linux games, the R9 Fury performed between the speed of a GeForce GTX 960 and 970, with the GTX 960 retailing for around $200 while the GTX 970 is $350. The only workloads where the AMD R9 Fury performed as expected under Linux was the Unigine Valley tech demo and OpenCL compute tests. There also is not any open-source driver support yet for the AMD R9 Fury.

Submission + - North Korea Tightens Ban On 'Songs Of Resistance' (dailynk.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In an attempt to root out elements that can lead to potential political instabilities in the country, North Korea is stepping up music censorship and scrapping all cassette tapes and CDs that contain state-banned songs even if homegrown. Kim Jong-Un is believed to have issued such orders out of concern that certain songs could instill people with criticism or resistance against the leadership. The local propaganda departments are going to people's homes to comb through music records. Some women have gotten so angry that they've stormed into the local propaganda offices complaining that they incinerated their goods without even telling them.

Submission + - Wired and wireless LANs in Cuba

Submitted by lpress
lpress writes: Cuba has developed a hacker/maker culture out of necessity and neighborhood local area networks are one manifestation of that culture. The networks are used for file sharing, game playing, and discussion of sports, culture, technology, etc., but not politics. We all stand to benefit from Cuban innovation.

Submission + - Rematch--Newegg beats patent troll over SSL and RC4 encryption (newegg.com)

Submitted by codguy
codguy writes: After a previous failed attempt (http://yro.slashdot.org/story/13/11/26/1927254/jury-finds-newegg-infringed-patent-owes-23-million) to fight patent troll TQP Development in late 2013, Newegg has now beaten this troll in a rematch (http://blog.newegg.com/newegg-vs-patent-trolls-when-we-win-you-win/). From the article:

"Newegg went against a company that claimed its patent covered SSL and RC4 encryption, a common encryption system used by many retailers and websites. This particular patent troll has gone against over 100 other companies, and brought in $45 million in settlements before going after Newegg."

This follows on Intuit's recent success in defending itself against this claim (http://yro.slashdot.org/story/14/06/26/1353216/intuit-beats-ssl-patent-troll-that-defeated-newegg).

Submission + - The First Airplane on Mars

Submitted by braindrainbahrain
braindrainbahrain writes: Undergoing research by NASA, the Preliminary Research Aerodynamic Design to Land on Mars, or Prandtl-M (not-so-coincidentally named after German aeronautical engineer Ludwig Prandtl) program is developing an airfoil with the ultimate goal of flying in the Martian atmosphere. The program has flown 12-ft. span models, the Prandtl-D1 and -D2, in Earth's atmosphere to prove that the flying wing design could overcome adverse yaw effects without including a tail. A larger 25 ft. model will be tested shortly and further tests call for prototypes to be balloon dropped at 85,000 feet and later at 115,000 feet to simulate Martian atmospheric density. If all goes well, it could be deployed from a cubesat container after hitching a ride to Mars with a rover in 2022.

Alternate, non-pay walled source: http://www.nasa.gov/centers/ar...

Submission + - Microsoft's Windows 10 now live

Submitted by mrspoonsi
mrspoonsi writes: Right on schedule, Microsoft has begun prompting users of Windows 7 and 8.1 to upgrade their machines to Windows 10. The process has begun in the parts of the world where it is already July 29th; this includes China. The company began taking reservations for Windows 10 back in June, and as we reported earlier this morning, it is already starting to pre-load the OS on to those machines. While not everyone will get the OS tomorrow through the upgrade program, it does appear that there will be quite a few users who will be able to install the OS as a free upgrade on the 29th. Windows 10 is expected to be installed on a billion devices within the next three years and to achieve that milestone, they will need to upgrade a significant number of devices to the new OS from Windows 7 or 8.1.

Feed Google News Sci Tech: How hackers can take control of your Android with one text message - Christian Science Monitor (google.com)

From feed by feedfeeder

Christian Science Monitor
How hackers can take control of your Android with one text message
Christian Science Monitor
A flaw in the Android operating system could give hackers easy access to 95% of Android devices, according to cyber security firm Zimperium. By Gretel Kauffman, Staff July 28, 2015. Save for later Saved. close. A hostess displays the Samsung Galaxy S6...
Stagefright: Android phone flaw may let hackers in via text messageSyracuse.com
Millions of Android phones at risk of being sent malware-infected textsTelegraph.co.uk
Android Flaw Allows Hacks Via Text MessageDiscovery News
ABC News-CBS Local-BBC News
all 438 news articles

Submission + - Advertising companies accused of deliberately slowing page-load times for profit (thestack.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: An industry insider has told Business Insider [http://www.businessinsider.com/conspiracy-web-pages-load-slowly-because-they-make-more-money-that-way-2015-7] of his conviction that ad-serving companies deliberately prolong the 'auctioning' process for ad spots when a web-page loads in order to maximise revenue by allowing automated 'late-comers' to participate beyond the 100ms limit placed on the decision-making process. The unnamed source, a principal engineer at a global news company (whose identity and credentials were confirmed by Business Insider), concluded with the comment "My entire team of devs and testers mostly used Adblock when developing sites, just because it was so painful otherwise,". Publishers use 'daisy-chaining' [http://www.masternewmedia.org/online-advertising-management-ad-network-defaulting-and-daisy-chaining-for-ad-revenue-optimization/#ixzz2bKLfDIU9] to solicit bids from the most profitable placement providers down to the 'B-list' placements, and the longer the process is run, the more likely that the web-page will be shown with profitable advertising in place.

Submission + - Why your software project is failing (opensource.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: At OSCON this year, Red Hat's Tom Callaway gave a talk entitled "This is Why You Fail: The Avoidable Mistakes Open Source Projects STILL Make." In 2009, Callaway was starting to work on the Chromium project—and to say it wasn't a pleasant experience was the biggest understatement Callaway made in his talk.

Callaway said he likes challenges, but he felt buried by the project, and reached a point where he thought he should jut quite his work. (Callaway said it's important to note that Chromium's code is not bad code; it's just a lot of code and a lot of code that Google didn't write.) This was making Callaway really frustrated, and people wanted to know what was upsetting him. Callaway wanted to be able to better explain his frustration, so he crafted this list which he called his "Points of Fail."

Submission + - Chrome Extension Thwarts User Profiling Based On Typing Behavior

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Per Thorsheim, the founder of PasswordsCon, created and trained a biometric profile of his keystroke dynamics using the Tor browser at a demo site. He then switched over to Google Chrome and not using the Tor network, and the demo site correctly identified him when logging in and completing a demo financial transaction. Infosec consultant Paul Moore came up with a working solution to thwart this type of behavioral profiling. The result is a Chrome extension called Keyboard Privacy, which prevents profiling of users by the way they type by randomizing the rate at which characters reach the DOM. A Firefox version of the plugin is in the works.

Submission + - .NET 4.6 optimizer bug causes methods to get wrong parameters

Submitted by tobiasly
tobiasly writes: A serious bug in the just-released .NET 4.6 runtime causes the JIT compiler to generate incorrectly-optimized code which results in methods getting called with different parameters than what were passed in. Nick Craver of Stack Exchange has an excellent write-up of the technical details and temporary workarounds; Microsoft has acknowledged the problem and submitted an as-yet unreleased patch.

This problem is compounded by Microsoft's policy of replacing the existing .NET runtime, as opposed to the side-by-side runtimes which were possible until .NET 2.0. This means that even if your project targets .NET 4.5, it will get the 4.6 runtime if it was installed on that machine. Since it's not possible to install the just-released Visual Studio 2015 without .NET 4.6, this means developers must make the difficult choice between using the latest tools or risking crippling bugs such as this one.

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