Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Submission + - Mega-mergers. The fight isn't over yet.. AT&T + DirecTV may go through (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Hot on the heals of Comcast's failed attempt to swallow-up Time Warner Cable, AT&T's pursuit of satellite provider DirecTV is plowing forward. What would be the result of a wireline and cellular mega-monopoly buying one of only two subscription satellite TV providers? Has to be worse than a Comcast/TWC marriage.. at least there, the territories and services offered didn't overlap at all, but AT&T offers voice, data, and television in many markets already.. adding satellite would stifle competition for television services (and to a lesser extent, because satellite is only best suited for rural installations, data).

http://www.wsj.com/articles/di... (paywalled)
http://arstechnica.com/busines... (readable)

Submission + - More Broadband Competition for Comcast and Verizon (xconomy.com)

Submitted by gthuang88
gthuang88 writes: Just days after Comcast and Time Warner Cable abandoned their mega-merger plans, wireless Internet service provider Webpass is expanding to Boston, its fifth major market. The region can boast of MIT, a rich history in Internet and Web, and lots of networking companies---but very little in the way of broadband competition, until now. Webpass’s very high-speed service, which is currently available in the Bay Area, San Diego, Miami, and Chicago, should be up and running in downtown Boston in three or four weeks. The company joins NetBlazr, Monkeybrains, and other broadband tech companies that are finding a niche as more people opt to “cut the cord” from big cable and telecom providers.

Submission + - 'Tom and Jerry syndrome' causes seizures in old cats (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Mice and rats communicate in the ultrasonic frequency range, and it’s thought that cats evolved the ability to hear those high-pitched squeaks to better hunt their prey. Now, a new study suggests that sensitivity to higher pitched sounds may cause seizures in some older cats. After receiving reports of the problem, nicknamed the “Tom and Jerry syndrome” because of how the cartoon cat is often startled by sounds, researchers surveyed cat owners and examined their pets’ medical records, looking for insight into the types and durations of seizures and the sounds that provoked them. In 96 cats, they found evidence of the syndrome they call feline audiogenic reflex seizures. The most common types of seizure-eliciting sounds included crinkling tinfoil, clanking a metal spoon on a ceramic feeding bowl, and clinking glass. The severity of the seizure ranged from brief muscle jerks to more serious episodes where the cat lost consciousness and stiffened and jerked for several minutes.

Submission + - Has the Native vs. HTML5 Mobile Debate Changed? (itworld.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: The tools available to developers who need to build an application once and deploy everywhere have exploded. Frameworks like famo.us, Ionic, PhoneGap, Sencha Touch, Appcelerator, Xamarin, and others are reducing the grunt work and improving the overall quality of web based mobile applications dramatically. The benefits of a build once, deploy everywhere platform are pretty obvious, but are they enough to make up for the hits to user experience?

Submission + - Alibaba Looks To Rural China To Popularize Its Mobile OS (itworld.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: E-commerce giant Alibaba Group hasn’t given up on its YunOS mobile operating system, and is taking the software to China’s rural markets through a series of low-cost phones, which will be built by lesser-known Chinese brands and will range from 299 yuan ($49) to 699 yuan. Slashdot readers may remember that in 2012, Google claimed it was a variant of its Android OS, sparking a clash that threatened to derail Alibaba’s effort to popularize the mobile OS.

Submission + - JavaScript Devs: Is It Still Worth Learning jQuery? Yes. (dice.com)

Submitted by Nerval's Lobster
Nerval's Lobster writes: If you’re learning JavaScript and Web development, you might be wondering whether to learn jQuery. After nearly a decade of existence, jQuery has grown into a fundamental part of JavaScript coding in Web development. But now we’re at a point where many of the missing pieces (and additional features) jQuery filled in are present in browsers. So do you need to learn jQuery anymore? Some developers don't think so. The official jQuery blog, meanwhile, is pushing a separate jQuery version for modern browsers, in an attempt to keep people involved. And there are still a few key reasons to keep learning jQuery: Legacy code. If you’re going to go to work at a company that already has JavaScript browser code, there’s a strong possibility it has jQuery throughout its code. There’s also a matter of preference: People still like jQuery and its elegance, and they’re going to continue using it, even though they might not have to.

Submission + - Second HTTPS Snooping Flaw Breaks Security for Thousands of iOS Apps (itworld.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: Attackers can potentially snoop on the encrypted traffic of over 25,000 iOS applications due to a vulnerability in a popular open-source networking library. The vulnerability stems from a failure to validate the domain names of digital certificates in AFNetworking, a library used by a large number of iOS and Mac OS X app developers to implement Web communications — including those over HTTPS (HTTP with SSL/TLS encryption).

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: How to close a email account when you are not the owner? 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: I provide a local small business with a website and general IT consulting as an independent contractor. Before I got on the scene, the conditions were pretty scary. A self hosted website that was glaring with security issues, a massively shared single email address, and basically no clue on where to go.

Anyway, I got them setup with a nice site and Google Apps for business. It took them a bit of time to get use to the Gmail, but they have come around and I think they have seen the light. The old account is a free AOL account which has been around for years. They know the password, but they do not know who set it up nor do they know the security word/phrase. You cannot do anything to the account without that phrase. They want to close the account, because people still have access to it, but when I called AOL to shut it down, they wouldn't talk to me as I was not the account holder nor did I know the pass phrase. I mean, honestly, the system is working as designed, because in the past there have been numerous instances where someone used a bit of social engineering to gain access to an email account and from there, wreck havoc, so I get the apprehensiveness of AOL to deal with me.

Does anyone have any advice? Hell, I would even be willing to throw up on the index page for this business a message saying that we own it and want to close this free mail account, but the tier 1 help desk person over in India is not going to have any idea what I am talking about.

Submission + - Smart headlights adjust to aid drivers in difficult conditions (thestack.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute are developing smart headlights that not only trace a car’s movement around bends, but are programmable to assist a driver in a wide range of driving conditions. The research team, at the institute’s Illumination and Imaging Laboratory, is looking into designing headlights which do not highlight raindrops and snowflakes in bad weather, instead passing light around the individual drops and improving visibility. Its near-future design would also be able to avoid glare even when the high beam is in use, detecting up-coming vehicles and disabling the range of light that is directed at it. They also hope to incorporate GPS data to adjust the direction of the headlights according to the lane that a driver is occupying, illuminating it more brightly compared to surrounding lanes. The technology is supported by a looped system which will constantly read, assess and react to driving conditions. The prototype also features a built-in camera to capture visual data before transferring it to a computer processor installed in the vehicle, where it can be analysed.

Submission + - Tiredness enhances the brain's creativity

Submitted by monkeyzoo
monkeyzoo writes: Research has found that people perform better on creative tasks when they are a bit tired than when they are fully awake. One study published in Thinking and Reason divided people into two groups (night owls and morning people) according to their answers to a questionnaire and then asked them to solve two types of problems: "analytical" math-based problems and "insight" problems that require creative thinking. Both groups of subjects did consistently better on the insight problems during their sleepier time of day. The explanation offered is that creative problem solving requires seeing things from a new point of view, and during your most productive hours of the day, your ability to focus and block out distracting thoughts is higher. When you are a bit groggy, the brain is more prone to random, passing thoughts, and these can lead to a breakthrough in solving a challenging problem.

Submission + - Bodyprint turns your smartphone's touchscreen display into a biometric scanner

Submitted by jan_jes
jan_jes writes: Recent mobile phones integrate fingerprint scanners to authenticate users biometrically and replace passwords, making authentication more convenient for users. Researchers at Yahoo Labs have created a new technology called ‘Bodyprint’ that turns your smartphone’s touchscreen display into a biometric scanner. It allows the touch sensor to scan users body parts such as ears, fingers, fists, and palms by pressing them against the display. Bodyprint implements the four-eye principle for locking sensitive documents; accessing the document requires the presence of the people involved, it may 2 or more. Another application is "it authenticates the user
by their ear for an incoming call".

Submission + - Tesla to announce home battery-based energy storage (latimes.com)

Submitted by Okian Warrior
Okian Warrior writes: Billionaire Elon Musk will announce next week that Tesla will begin offering battery-based energy storage for residential and commercial customers.

The batteries power up overnight when energy companies typically charge less for electricity, then are used during the day to power a home.

In a pilot project, Tesla has already begun offering home batteries to SolarCity (SCTY) customers, a solar power company for which Musk serves as chairman. Currently 330 U.S. households are running on Tesla's batteries in California.

The batteries start at about $13,000, though California's Pacific Gas and Electric Co. (PCG) offers customers a 50% rebate. The batteries are three-feet high by 2.5-feet wide, and need to be installed at least a foot and a half off the ground. They can be controlled with a Web app and a smartphone app.

Submission + - Privileged malware coming to a CPU near you? (virusbtn.com)

Submitted by ArmoredDragon
ArmoredDragon writes: For the past few years, Intel has been developing a new technology called Software Guard Extensions. The gist of it is that software can be protected from snooping or manipulation from untrusted higher privileged processes, or even from processes running outside of a VM. This sounds good in principle because it could protect your trusted software from malware, especially for cloud environments where IT security is paramount. The problem however is that it is very much a double edged sword. Malware, such as that found in a botnet, could easily hide itself from any kind of scanning software, or even a white-hat hacker trying to debug it. Or even worse, entities like the NSA could potentially issue an NSL to give themselves authority to create trusted applications that are allowed to spy on protected processes, while everybody who isn't whitelisted by Intel would be placed at a major disadvantage if they ever wanted to audit such software.

Submission + - Teachers Might Profit From Watching This Teen Game Developer Learn (xconomy.com)

Submitted by Xconomy'sBT
Xconomy'sBT writes: As I interviewed this teenager who first got hooked on first-person-shooter games when he was 12, I saw lessons for teachers and educational technology companies. The pursuit of fun led Harrison Yuan to teach himself computer programming and earn $thousands on the game design site ROBLOX. He's 18 now, and headed for UCLA soon to study engineering.

Slashdot Top Deals

Old programmers never die, they just hit account block limit.

Close