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Submission + - Linux based OS for Smart Router and Smart Home Appliances (technode.com)

Submitted by Taco Cowboy
Taco Cowboy writes: A maker of wifi router from China, HiWiFi, has opened up its Smart-Router OS, HiWiFi-OS, based on Linux, to developers and makers of smart devices, including routers, home appliances and other devices that fall into the internet of things category, to enable the developers and maker to build applications for the platform and adopting a WiFi solution for the smart devices which might resulted in a further evolution of a new internet of things ecology

The operating system supports routers using MediaTek-based chips

Submission + - "Canvas Fingerprinting" Online Tracking Difficult To Block (propublica.org)

Submitted by globaljustin
globaljustin writes: First documented in a forthcoming paper by researchers at Princeton University and KU Leuven University in Belgium, this type of tracking, called canvas fingerprinting, works by instructing the visitor’s Web browser to draw a hidden image. Because each computer draws the image slightly differently, the images can be used to assign each user’s device a number that uniquely identifies it.

[The] fingerprints are unusually hard to block: They can’t be prevented by using standard Web browser privacy settings or using anti-tracking tools such as AdBlock Plus.

The researchers found canvas fingerprinting computer code, primarily written by a company called AddThis, on 5 percent of the top 100,000 websites.

Submission + - Google to speed up Web with smaller photos (cnn.com)

Submitted by mpicpp
mpicpp writes: Giant photos are slowing the Web down. Google has a plan to make your pages load faster.

The search giant has developed a new kind of image format that promises to shrink the size of Web photos and graphic files down by about 35%. That's a big deal, considering that images are responsible for nearly two-thirds of the size of an average website — a figure that grew by more than 30% last year, according to the HTTP Archive.

To boost load times for websites, Google (GOOGL, Tech30) developed a new image format, called WebP. At its I/O developers conference last month, Google announced that it has converted most of YouTube's thumbnail images to WebP, improving the site's load time by 10%. That may not sound like much, but Google says that alone has saved users a cumulative 140,000 hours each day.
Google has also changed the Chrome Web store and Google Play store over to WebP, speeding up load times on those sites by nearly a third. Facebook, Netflix, eBay (EBAY, Tech30) and several other websites have also begun supporting WebP.

Submission + - Nokia to Buy Mobile Phone Base Station Business from Panasonic (nikkei.com)

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: Panasonic has apparently reached a basic agreement to sell its cellphone base station business to Nokia. Panasonic will part with the base station operations of subsidiary Panasonic System Networks, which include wireless control systems for communications equipment. The transaction's value is likely to be in the billions of yen. According to MCA, a Tokyo-based mobile industry research company, Japan's base station market was worth about 260 billion yen in fiscal year 2013. Nokia is the market leader with a 26% share. Since 2007, the Finnish company has had a partnership with Panasonic to develop products for NTT Docomo's LTE high-speed telecommunications services. Now Nokia intends to capitalize on Panasonic's ties with NTT Docomo to further expand its market share in Japan.

Submission + - The Loophole Obscuring Facebook and Google's Transparency Reports

Submitted by Jason Koebler
Jason Koebler writes: The number of law enforcement requests coming from Canada for information from companies like Facebook and Google are often inaccurate thanks to a little-known loophole that loops them in with US numbers.
For example, law enforcement and government agencies in Canada made 366 requests for Facebook user data in 2013, according to the social network's transparency reports. But that's not the total number. An additional 16 requests are missing, counted instead with US requests thanks to a law that lets Canadian agencies make requests with the US Department of Justice.

Submission + - Activist group sues US border agency over new, vast intelligence system

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) has sued the United States Customs and Border Protection (CBP) in an attempt to compel the government agency to hand over documents relating to a relatively new comprehensive intelligence database of people and cargo crossing the US border. EPIC’s lawsuit, which was filed last Friday, seeks a trove of documents concerning the 'Analytical Framework for Intelligence' (AFI) as part of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. EPIC’s April 2014 FOIA request went unanswered after the 20 days that the law requires, and the group waited an additional 49 days before filing suit. The AFI, which was formally announced in June 2012 by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), consists of 'a single platform for research, analysis, and visualization of large amounts of data from disparate sources and maintaining the final analysis or products in a single, searchable location for later use as well as appropriate dissemination.'

Comment Do you have any hands-on experience ? (Score 2) 667

by Taco Cowboy (#47497303) Attached to: Russian Government Edits Wikipedia On Flight MH17

And they are brain dead easy to run

I have read too many quotes similar to the above, but there is just a _tiny_ problem - most (if not all) of the people who said that the missile system is easy (or like the above has put it "brain dead easy ") to operate themselves never had any hands-on experience on any of the missile system whatsoever !

Comment When pic of a dead baby is used as propaganda tool (Score -1, Flamebait) 667

by Taco Cowboy (#47496909) Attached to: Russian Government Edits Wikipedia On Flight MH17

The issue is what constitutes a "terrorist" depends on which side you're on

A little baby suffered a horrible death and its (dunno if it's a girl or a boy) remains lie on the ground

Someone took a picture of that little baby and that pic was used as a propaganda tool against another side ...

I was utterly disgusted with the way Ukraine is using this tragedy to further their political agenda - They have utterly no regard for anything, even the dead body of a little baby in their hand becomes a political tool !!

Comment Why then Netflix didn't deal with Level3 directly? (Score 1) 390

by Taco Cowboy (#47487617) Attached to: Verizon's Accidental Mea Culpa

Well, NetFlix could also enter into agreements with ever backbone provider, thereby forcing Verizon to either do the same to everyone or start upgrading

This brings to the question of why Netflix has chosen to deal with Verizon instead of with Level3 directly in the first place ?

Even if Netflix didn't know of the existence of Level3 (which I find too ludicrous to be possible) that they had signed up with Verizon, they could have changed the situation right now by dealing directly with Level3, and why wait anymore ?

Comment Microsoft used to be very picky (Score 1) 272

by Taco Cowboy (#47487577) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: How Many Employees Does Microsoft Really Need?

A well managed company would be continuously evaluating employees and their work and making adjustments to personnel requirements every month

Microsoft used to be very picky of whom they hire

A legendary (remain un-named) programmer that I know was interviewed by Microsoft back in the mid 1980's but was rejected because at that time Microsoft puts a lot of effort to hire people who can contribute to what they had in mind

That legedary programmer later went on to join Id Software and developed some awesome pixel routine for them, and what he did in Id impressed Intel so much that they hired him to help them in their Larrabee project

But Microsoft changed into a totally different company after Bill Gates stepped down --- and it started to take in all kinds of useless code monkeys (and many more who can't even code!) under their payroll

I have been in the industry for decades and have witness how the companies changed after the founders have left

Submission + - Australian website waits three years to tell customers about a data breach (itnews.com.au)

Submitted by AlbanX
AlbanX writes: Australian daily deals website Catch of the Day waited three years to tell its customers their email addresses, delivery addresses, hashed passwords, and some credit card details had been stolen.

Its systems got hacked in April 2011 and the company told police, banks and credit cards issues, but didn't tell the Privacy Commissioner until later, or customers until last night.

Submission + - Math, Programming, and Language Learning (svbtle.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: There's often debate amongst modern programmers about how much math developers should know, and to what extent programming is math. Learning to program is often viewed as being on a spectrum between learning math and learning spoken/written languages. But in a new article, Jeremy Kun argues that the spectrum should be formulated another way: Human language -> Mathematics -> Programming. "Having studied all three subjects, I’d argue that mathematics falls between language and programming on the hierarchy of rigor. ... [T]he hierarchy of abstraction is the exact reverse, with programming being the most concrete and language being the most abstract. Perhaps this is why people consider mathematics a bridge between human language and programming. Because it allows you to express more formal ideas in a more concrete language, without making you worry about such specific hardware details like whether your integers are capped at 32 bits or 64. Indeed, if you think that the core of programming is expressing abstract ideas in a concrete language, then this makes a lot of sense. This is precisely why learning mathematics is 'better' at helping you learn the kind of abstract thinking you want for programming than language. Because mathematics is closer to programming on the hierarchy. It helps even more that mathematics and programming readily share topics."

Submission + - Linux Needs Resource Management for Complex Workloads (enterprisestorageforum.com)

Submitted by storagedude
storagedude writes: Resource management and allocation for complex workloads has been a need for some time in open systems, but no one has ever followed through on making open systems look and behave like an IBM mainframe, writes Henry Newman at Enterprise Storage Forum. Throwing more hardware at the problem is a costly solution that won’t work forever, notes Newman.

He writes: 'With next-generation technology like non-volatile memories and PCIe SSDs, there are going to be more resources in addition to the CPU that need to be scheduled to make sure everything fits in memory and does not overflow. I think the time has come for Linux – and likely other operating systems – to develop a more robust framework that can address the needs of future hardware and meet the requirements for scheduling resources. This framework is not going to be easy to develop, but it is needed by everything from databases and MapReduce to simple web queries.’

Submission + - Tesla Model S hacking prize claimed (autoblog.com)

Submitted by savuporo
savuporo writes: AutoBlogGreen reports: The $10,000 prize for successfully hacking a Tesla Model S has been claimed. A team from Zhejiang University in China claimed victory at the Symposium on Security for Asia Network (SyScan360) event in Beijing by exploiting a "flow design flaw," whatever that means, to gain access to vital systems including the door locks, horn and window controls, while the vehicle was moving.

Last year, potential security pitfalls of high-tech electric and hybrid cars came to light when the DARPA successfully hacked into hybrids from Ford and Toyota. For illustration about why this might become a big deal, here is a video report about Prius ECUs and internal CAN network being messed around with while driven.

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