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Government

The Groups Behind Making Distributed Solar Power Harder To Adopt 374

Posted by Soulskill from the sunsetting-the-sun dept.
Lucas123 writes: Distributed rooftop solar is a threat not only to fossil fuel power generation, but also to the profits of monopolistic model of utilities. While the overall amount of electrical capacity represented by distributed solar power remains miniscule for now, it's quickly becoming one of leading sources of new energy deployment. As adoption grows, fossil fuel interests and utilities are succeeding in pushing anti-net metering legislation, which places surcharges on customers who deploy rooftop solar power and sell unused power back to their utility through the power grid. Other state legislation is aimed at reducing tax credits for households or businesses installing solar or allows utilities to buy back unused power at a reduced rate, while reselling it at the full retail price.
Patents

Jury Tells Apple To Pay $532.9 Million In Patent Suit 186

Posted by Soulskill from the or-remit-821,110-iphones dept.
An anonymous reader writes: Smartflash LLC has won a patent lawsuit against Apple over DRM and technology relating to the storage of downloaded songs, games, and videos on iTunes. Apple must now pay $532.9 million in damages. An Apple spokesperson did not hesitate to imply Smartflash is a patent troll: "Smartflash makes no products, has no employees, creates no jobs, has no U.S. presence, and is exploiting our patent system to seek royalties for technology Apple invented. We refused to pay off this company for the ideas our employees spent years innovating and unfortunately we have been left with no choice but to take this fight up through the court system." The trial happened in the same court that decided Apple owed VirnetX $368 million over FaceTime-related patents back in 2012.

Comment Re:Wikipedia page (Score 1) 105

by Carewolf (#49107467) Attached to: "Exploding Kittens" Blows Up Kickstarter Records

So a still fictional game get's to have its own Wikipedia page but the Nim programming language, in development and publicly available for years, only got to have a page a few days ago and is still under threat of deletion from rabid mods. WP truly has a fucked up sense of priority.

That is because this game doesn't have similar similar competing project with dedicated editors deleting references to competing projects, which is the primary cause of all deletion of IT projects on Wikipedia.

Comment Re:Isn't the difference (Score 1) 252

by Carewolf (#49101031) Attached to: No Tech Bubble Here, Says CNN: "This Time It's Different."

Analytics gathers data for google, they don't "sell" it. No one is sold personal info from Google, all they get to do is tell Google who they want to target and Google decides who gets to see it. The advertiser doesn't know things like your name, phone number, etc until you give it to them.

They sell it, but like all of these services, they sell it aggregated depersonalized, but that makes them no different from the rest of the companies doing this.

Comment Re:Reality Flip Switch (Score 1) 252

by Carewolf (#49100365) Attached to: No Tech Bubble Here, Says CNN: "This Time It's Different."

Was the Fed flooding the market with cash in 2007-08? I think it was the private banks that were creating liquidity (money) with those weird investment vehicles and loans. What the Fed failed at was not withdrawing money from the economy and running up interest rates to cool things down, but nobody wants an economic party pooper and they would have been savagely criticized for ending the good times.

Yes, and they still are. The interest rate is below inflation which means it is profitable for banks to loan money backed in random crap, because random crap appreciates at the rate of inflation. That is what subprime morgages was, and what is still happening because they are still allowed to loan under inflation.

Submission + - Lenovo pre-installs malware injecting ads and spoofing SSL certs (ibtimes.co.uk)

Submitted by janoc
janoc writes: Lenovo is pre-installing adware/malware called Superfish on their laptops which serves ads for products you may be browsing/shopping for, "but cheaper". Unfortunately it also breaks into SSL sessions by installing a false root certificate, allowing for potential snooping on secure sessions.

Comment Re:someone explain for the ignorant (Score 1) 449

by Carewolf (#49085539) Attached to: Credit Card Fraud Could Peak In 2015 As the US Moves To EMV

Chip & PIN is a liability shift. You're expected to protect your PIN, so if your account is compromised, you're assumed to be at fault.

Britain has had a lot of trouble with this.

That is not how it works, but banks can tell if a withdrawal was done with correct PIN or with an old PINless fallback. If it was done with PIN, you will have a maximum personal liability of around 500EUR they won't cover, but they still cover the rest.

Submission + - Lenovo Accused of Pushing Self-signed MITM Proxy (zdnet.com) 2

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: More OEM crapware coming at you. Chinese hardware manufacturer Lenovo has come under fire for allegedly shipping consumer Windows laptops with software that hijacks secure website connections, as well as inserting ads into search results. The software is called "Superfish" and it installs its own self-signed root certificate authority. Superfish comes with Lenovo consumer products only, and is a technology that helps users "find and discover products visually". The technology instantly analyzes images on the web and presents identical and similar product offers. Google's Chris Palmer has been analyzing the issue on a Yoga 2 laptop. He has confirmed with one other affected user that the certificates used share the same key, which leaves any impacted Lenovo user vulnerable to an attack from anyone able to extract the certificate's private key, with the user left without any warning or notice of such an attack. Superfish can be uninstalled, but it reportedly leaves the root certificate authority behind. On a new laptop, the software can be disabled simply by not accepting the Terms of User and Privacy Policy on initial setup.

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