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Cellphones

Researcher To Release Web-Based Android Attack 136

Posted by timothy from the oopsie-daisy dept.
CWmike writes "A computer security researcher says he plans to release code Thursday that could be used to attack some versions of Google's Android phones over the Internet. The attack targets the browser in older, Android 2.1-and-earlier versions of the phones. It is being disclosed Thursday at the HouSecCon conference by M.J. Keith, a security researcher with Alert Logic. Keith says he has written code that allows him to run a simple command line shell in Android (video) when the victim visits a website that contains his attack code. The bug used in Keith's attack lies in the WebKit browser engine used by Android. Google said it knows about the vulnerability. 'We're aware of an issue in WebKit that could potentially impact only old versions of the Android browser,' Google spokesman Jay Nancarrow confirmed in an e-mail. 'The issue does not affect Android 2.2 or later versions.' Version 2.2 runs on 36.2 percent of Android phones, Google says"
Image

Firefighters Let House Burn Because Owner Didn't Pay Fee 2058

Posted by samzenpus from the deadly-serious-homeowner's-association dept.
Dthief writes "From MSNBC: 'Firefighters in rural Tennessee let a home burn to the ground last week because the homeowner hadn't paid a $75 fee. Gene Cranick of Obion County and his family lost all of their possessions in the Sept. 29 fire, along with three dogs and a cat. "They could have been saved if they had put water on it, but they didn't do it," Cranick told MSNBC's Keith Olbermann. The fire started when the Cranicks' grandson was burning trash near the family home. As it grew out of control, the Cranicks called 911, but the fire department from the nearby city of South Fulton would not respond.'"

Comment I have a profile, but... (Score 1) 2

by Mark_in_Brazil (#33714290) Attached to: If there's one thing even more useless than failbook ...

At some point LinkedIn started charging to use what they claimed were useful features. Or something. I really don't remember or care. I didn't see much use for the whole thing anyway, even if everything were (or is) free. I still have a profile there, but I really don't use it. I've got a backlog of a bunch of contact requests, most of them from people I actually know, but I don't want to accept them and in that way encourage people to keep using this thing, especially to reach me.
Earth

German Military Braces For Peak Oil 764

Posted by timothy from the malthus-was-right dept.
myrdos2 writes "A study by a German military think tank leaked to the Internet warns of the potential for a dire global economic crisis in as little as 15 years as a result of a peak and an irreversible decline in world oil supplies. The study states that there is 'some probability that peak oil will occur around the year 2010 and that the impact on security is expected to be felt 15 to 30 years later. ... In the medium term the global economic system and every market-oriented national economy would collapse.' The report closely matches one from the US military earlier this year, which stated that surplus oil production capacity could disappear within two years and there could be serious shortages by 2015 with a significant economic and political impact."
Java

Submission + - Watch Out Java, Here Comes JavaScript (infoworld.com) 1

Submitted by
snydeq
snydeq writes: "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister sees recent experiments enabling a resurgence for JavaScript on the server, one likely to dent Java's role in the data center. 'Today, projects such as CommonJS and Node.js are extending JavaScript even further, allowing it to take on Java's traditional role in the data center. In a fascinating role reversal, JavaScript is becoming the versatile, powerful, all-purpose language for the Web, while Java risks becoming a kind of modern-day Cobol," McAllister writes. And though such experiments have a ways to go, the benefits of JavaScript as a server-side language are clear and striking. 'It allows Web application developers to implement their entire code base using a single syntax, reducing the clutter and confusion of typical Web apps. JavaScript's performance is increasing at a breakneck pace, which has built-in benefits for developers. Its event-driven programming model makes building parallel applications easy and logical. And JavaScript itself has matured into a fine language, with features that support both the object-oriented and functional programming styles.'"

Submission + - Murdoch's Paywall: The results ain't pretty at all (techdirt.com)

Submitted by phonewebcam
phonewebcam writes: The bad news (ho! ho!) is starting to come out regarding Murdoch's paywall experiment, and as usual its money doing the talking — in this case the advertisers have finally realised there's no point advertising to nobody, so are boycotting in droves. To make things worse, the actual suppliers of the news stories are beginning to avoid giving their scoops and interviews to the Times since no search engines can pick them up:

"Faced with a collapse in traffic to thetimes.co.uk, some advertisers have simply abandoned the site. Rob Lynam, head of press trading at the media agency MEC, whose clients include Lloyds Banking Group, Orange, Morrisons and Chanel, says, "We are just not advertising on it. If there's no traffic on there, there's no point in advertising on there." Lynam says he has been told by News International insiders that traffic to The Times site has fallen by 90 per cent since the introduction of charges."

Submission + - Changing the future of health care for infants (go.com)

Submitted by dina_sri
dina_sri writes: Engineers from SRI International are teaming up with Stanford University doctors to develop medical tools that cater to pediatric surgery. This important work is needed because the medical device industry does not make enough tools for the youngest patients and doctors often must improvise when working on infants and children.

Comment Re:If you cant tell the difference.... (Score 1) 650

by Mark_in_Brazil (#33402054) Attached to: Just Where Is The Lincoln Memorial, Anyhow?

[If you can't tell the difference] between the Lincoln memorial and the FDR memorial you have no business going to Washington DC.

It sounds like the PP is saying that anyone who doesn't know enough about DC shouldn't go to DC and learn about it. That strikes me as weird.

However if you decide to go anyway, they do have still pre-printed maps checked for accuracy that sell at any gas station or book store.

Bingo. Yet another hissy-fit over nothing. Nobody is going to miss the Beck anti-Democrat rally. The two sites are less than half a mile apart. Glenn Beck fans and other people in DC speak the same language, so they could, y'know, ask for directions. Additionally, as the PP noted, it's not hard to find maps.

However, "teh Googlz iz in on teh conspiracy" is a convenient excuse if the turnout doesn't meet their expectations.

It doesn't help that Glenn Beck has his fans terrified, convinced that Obama and Democrats are enemies of the US and that Obama is just like Hitler. Conspiracy theories like "Google Maps doesn't want us to find the Lincoln Memorial and save America because Obama and Pelosi are controlling Google" are easier to believe when somebody on a channel called FOX News has been trying to convince them for years that Obama is destroying the USA and is about to put the white man down because he's an angry black radical, impose Sharia law because he's a Muslim, send people to Gulags and turn the USA into the Soviet Union because he's just like Stalin, or maybe he'll just turn into a genocidal expansionist dictator because he's just like Hitler.

On Tuesday, I checked maps.google.com.br to find the names of the streets that meet at the corner where I wanted a friend to meet me near the Berrini station of the São Paulo metropolitan train. Google Maps showed the station out in the middle of the Pinheiros River. I wonder if Obama and Pelosi were trying to drown me or poison me with the pollution in the Pinheiros...
Google

Google Starts Charging a Signup Fee For Chrome Extension Developers 132

Posted by Soulskill from the got-my-mind-on-my-money dept.
trooperer writes "On Thursday, Google introduced two significant changes in the Google Chrome Extensions Gallery: a developer signup fee and a domain verification system. The signup fee is a one-time payment of $5. The announcement says its purpose is to 'create better safeguards against fraudulent extensions in the gallery and limit the activity of malicious developer accounts.' Developers who already registered with the gallery can continue to update their extensions and publish new items without paying the fee." Google also made available a developer preview for the Chrome Web Store.
Patents

Submission + - Patents Aren't Key To Success (echolinux.com) 1

Submitted by echolinux
echolinux writes: Gene Quinn over at IP Watchdog spent some time a few days back making the case for software patents. While calling open source advocates "ideological buffoons" with no business sense, Mr. Quinn points a finger at Red Hat, who he observed holds 263 US Patents and also are a successful company; ergo patents must be what made them successful. Rob Tiller, vice president and assistant general counsel at Red Hat, replied yesterday:

It is unfair, though, for him [Quinn] to suggest that this is a basic ingredient to Red Hat's success. That success rests primarily on its adoption of the power of open source – not patents. It's also unfair to discuss Red Hat's portfolio without including an explanation of Red Hat's Patent Promise in which it commits not to use its patents against open source. Red Hat has been a consistent and vigorous critic of software patents, and it is misleading to suggest otherwise.
It's funny. Laugh.

Tracking the Harm Games Do 118

Posted by Soulskill from the correlation-something-something-causation dept.
Every so often, video games are accused of causing all sorts of negative behavior in children, teens, and adults. These accusations are typically predicated on statistics that sound much more damning than they actually are. In that vein, gaming website Rock, Paper, Shotgun did their own tongue-in-cheek statistical analysis, complete with pretty charts and graphs. Quoting: "As part of my research I thought to compare the sales of each GTA game with what the divorce rate must have been when each came out. As you can see each new GTA game has been directly correlated with an increase in divorces. ... An often ignored statistic (and you have to ask why it’s being ignored by the games media, don’t you?) is the sheer volume of PC games being released. We’ve all noticed the British population is abandoning the church, turning instead toward shopping, DVDs and knife crime. But few have thought to check for a connection between PC sales and the numbers of people attending their local Church Of England church on a Sunday. When you look at the data there’s little doubt left that as the publishers continue to release more and more PC games each year, our nation’s faith is being increasingly eroded. And at what cost? If only a graph could tell us that."

Comment Re:Startrek (Score 4, Interesting) 145

by Mark_in_Brazil (#33112120) Attached to: The Great Operating System Games

Some friends and I (and lots of other 6th through 12th grade students) played that on terminals connected to our school's computer in 1980. I think the computer was a PDP-8/some letter, but I don't remember which letter. It was kept in the administrative building, while the student terminal room, which had a noisy teletype-style terminal, a newer and quieter terminal whose display was dot matrix printing, and three or four monocrome CRT terminals, was in a building with classrooms and the school library.

Trek was so popular at one point that I remember all the terminals surrounded by kids, and even the teletype-ish terminal pounding out the quadrant and sector maps. My friends and I figured out a few different ways of aiming photon torpedoes perfectly. One obvious one was a calculator with trig functions (and inverse trig functions), but at least we understood the trigonometry well enough to figure out how to use the calculator to help us kill Klingons. But I also remember three of us with protractors, rulers, and graph paper, getting the angle without using a calculator. The cool thing was when other kids saw us picking off the Klingons easily (and us celebrating each perfect shot), watched us for a while to understand how we did it, and then went off and did it themselves on other terminals. Some didn't care much about math like my friends and I did, but they cared enough about destroying Klingon ships represented by the letter K that they were willing to learn the math to do it.
Internet Explorer

Microsoft's Ad Team Trumps IE Developers' Privacy Aims 149

Posted by timothy from the sounds-like-a-movie-script dept.
phantomfive writes "The company everyone loves to hate is after your private information, as the Wall Street Journal reports. The IE8 design team had planned on adding the best privacy features available, but the advertising executives wanted to track users. From the story: 'In the end, the product planners lost a key part of the debate. The winners: executives who argued that giving automatic privacy to consumers would make it tougher for Microsoft to profit from selling online ads. Microsoft built its browser so that users must deliberately turn on privacy settings every time they start up the software.'"

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