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Submission + - Australia rebooting search for MH370, the missing Malaysian Airlines 777-200ER (wsj.com)

McGruber writes: The Wall Street Journal reports that two months after pausing its search for the missing Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777-200ER, the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) is ready to reboot its search. The ATSB is poised to select among bids from the world's most-advanced deep-water specialists, including offshore oil-and-gas companies, maritime research institutions and treasure hunters eager to use their technologies and experience to solve the Flight 370 riddle—and potentially raise their own profiles in the process. The ATSB is expected to choose one or more of the bidders over the next several weeks before relaunching the search with $56 million in funding in late August.

With no hard evidence of where the plane went down, the search will test the recovery industry's abilities like nothing before. In June, Australian authorities shifted the search zone for a third time—by about 600 miles to the southwest—after reanalyzing satellite transmissions. Even then, they said it was impossible to know whether the fresh search area would prove correct.

Submission + - Sony Tosses the Sony Reader on the Scrap Heap (the-digital-reader.com)

Nate the greatest writes: Sony has revealed that it had decided to follow up closing its ebook stores in the US and Europe by getting out of the consumer ebook reader market entirely. (Yes, Sony was still making ereaders.) The current model (the Sony Reader PRS-T3) will be sold until stock runs out, and Sony won't be releasing a new model.

This is a sad end for what used to be a pioneering company. This gadget maker might not have made the first ebook reader but it was the first to use the paper-like E-ink screen. Having launched the Sony Librie in 2004, Sony literally invented the modern ebook reader and it then went on to release the only 7" models to grace the market as well as the first ereader to combine a touchscreen and frontlight ( the Sony Reader PRS-700). Unfortunately Sony couldn't come up with software or an ebook retail site which matched their hardware genius, so even though Sony released amazing hardware it had been losing ground to Amazon, B&N, and other retailers ever since the Kindle launched in 2007.

Submission + - Collaboration isn't what they taught you in school (opensource.com)

jenwike writes: Throughout most of my education, I was taught that collaboration was cheating. With the exception of teacher-sanctioned group projects, I had learned that working with others to solve problems was not acceptable. So, when I got to college and the first assignment in my computer science class was to read an article about the benefits of pairwise programming and open source, I was very confused. Fast forward about nine months. I applied for a marketing internship at Red Hat and had just been offered the job. Here's what I learned about real collaboration in the workplace. (by Kristen DeMaria)

Submission + - ChickTech Brings Hundreds of Young Women to Open Source (opensource.com)

ectoman writes: Opensource.com is running an interview with Jennifer Davidson of ChickTech, a non-profit organization whose mission is to create communities of support for women and girls pursuing (or interested in pursuing) careers in tech. "In the United States, many girls are brought up to believe that 'girls can't do math' and that science and other "geeky" topics are for boys," Davidson said. "We break down that idea." Portland, OR-based ChickTech is quickly expanding throughout the United States—to cities like Corvallis and San Francisco—thanks to the "ChickTech: High School" initiative, which gathers hundreds of young women for two-day workshops featuring open source technologies. "We fill a university engineering department with 100 high school girls—more girls than many engineering departments have ever seen," Davidson said. "The participants can look around the building and see that girls from all backgrounds are just as excited about tech as they are."

Submission + - Nearly 25 years ago, IBM helped save Macintosh (computerworld.com)

dcblogs writes: Apple and IBM, which just announced partnership to bring iOS and cloud services to enterprises, have helped each other before. IBM played a key role in turning the Macintosh into a successful hardware platform at a point when it — and the company itself — were struggling. Nearly 25 years ago, IBM was a part of an alliance that gave Apple access to PowerPC chips for Macintosh systems that were competitive, if not better performing in some benchmarks, than the processors Intel was producing at the time for Windows PCs. In 1991, Apple was looking for a RISC-based processor to replace the Motorola 68K it had been using in its Macintosh line. "The PCs of the era were definitely outperforming the Macintoshes that were based on the 68K," he said. "Apple was definitely behind the power, performance curve," said Nathan Brookwood, principal analyst at Insight 64. The PowerPC processor that emerged from that earlier pairing changed that. PowerPC processors were used in Macintoshes for more than a decade, until 2006, when Apple switched to Intel chips.

Submission + - How did Red Hat kickstart a DevOps culture? (opensource.com)

ectoman writes: DevOps isn't just a development methodology. It's a shift in company culture. So how does one of the world's leading providers of open source solutions manage the transition to DevOps culture? Gene Kim, author of DevOps novel (yes, it's a thing) The Phoenix Project seeks answers to this question in a recent interview with leaders of Red Hat's new "Inception team," a band of engineers tasked with transforming the company's IT operations—what team member Bill Montgomery describes as "a team formed by pulling top contributors from intentionally diverse parts of IT."

Submission + - Three-Year Deal Nets Hulu Exclusive Rights to South Park (pcmag.com) 1

gunner_von_diamond writes: From the PC Mag Article:
If you're a fan of South Park, you better be a fan of Hulu as well. Specifically, Hulu Plus.
The creators of the funny, foul-mouthed animated TV show have signed a deal with the online streaming service. Valued at more than $80 million, the three-year deal grants Hulu exclusive rights to stream the 240+ episode back catalog of South Park in addition to all new episodes (as soon as they've aired on Comedy Central). "This is a natural partnership for us. We are excited that the entire library will be available on Hulu and that the best technology around will power South Park Digital Studios," said creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone, in a statement.

Submission + - Critical Vulnerabilities In Web-Based Password Managers Found

An anonymous reader writes: A group of researchers from University of California, Berkeley, have analyzed five popular web-based password managers and have discovered — and then responsibly reported — vulnerabilities that could allow attackers to learn a user’s credentials for arbitrary websites. The five password managers they analyzed are LastPass, RoboForm, My1Login, PasswordBox and NeedMyPassword, and they did it to evaluate their security in practice, and to provide pointers to "guide the design of current and future password managers."

Submission + - Policing of the Future is Here Today (ibtimes.co.uk)

DavidGilbert99 writes: Morgan Marquis-Boire has been working to unmask the invasive cyber-spying tools from the likes of Gamma International and Hacking Team for the last few years, but in an interview with IBTimes UK, the dreadlocked former hacker says: "This is the law enforcement of the future and actually the law enforcement of the now. [Hacking Team and Gamma International]'s customer base is expanding, this capability is something which you can see as being desirable to most law enforcement agencies."

Submission + - Red Hat Assistant General Counsel Analyses Super Court's Patent Ruling (opensource.com)

ectoman writes: Yesterday, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a groundbreaking decision concerning software patents, claiming that abstract ideas are not by themselves patentable. The ruling was a cause for celebration among those opposed to software patent abuse, like Red Hat's Vice President and Assistant General Counsel, Rob Tiller. Today, Tiller analyzes and offers some context for the Court's ruling, which "uses the traditional common law methodology of comparing one case to previous similar cases and harmonizing with those most similar."

Submission + - Open-Source Hardware for Neuroscience (ieee.org)

the_newsbeagle writes: The equipment that neuroscientists use to record brain signals is plenty expensive, with a single system costing upward of $60,000. But it turns out that it's not too complicated to build your own, for the cost of about $3000. Two MIT grad students figured out how to do just that, and are distributing both manufactured systems and their designs through their website, Open Ephys. Their goal is to launch an open-source hardware movement in neuroscience, so researchers can spend less time worrying about the gear they need and more time doing experiments.

Submission + - AMD Looking To Outsource Chip Development (itworld.com)

jfruh writes: AMD, once on the ropes in its uphill battle against Intel, is now riding high, especially after getting its chips into both the PlayStation 4 and the XBox One. But years of cost-cutting and layoff have hollowed out the company, particulary in its chipset division, and now AMD may be outsourcing chipset design to companies in Asia. Is AMD giving up one of its core competencies? As blogger Andy Patrizio puts it, "No one gets excited about new chipsets like they do over a CPU, but CPUs absolutely need chipsets to run."

Submission + - Why United States Patent Reform Has Stalled (opensource.com)

ectoman writes: Proponents of patent reform in the United States glimpsed a potential victory late last year, when the House of Representatives passed H.R. 3309, the Innovation Act, designed to significantly mitigate patent abuse. Just months ago, however, the Senate pulled consideration of the bill. And since then, patent reform has been at a standstill. In a new analysis for Opensource.com, Mark Bohannon, Vice President of Corporate affairs and Global Public Policy at Red Hat, explains three reasons why. "For this year, at least," he writes, "the prospect of addressing abusive patent litigation through Congressional action is on ice"—despite the unavoidable case for reform.

Submission + - Mozilla to sell '$25' Firefox OS smartphones in India

mrspoonsi writes: Mozilla, the organisation behind the Firefox browser, has announced it will start selling low-cost smartphones in India within the "next few months". Speaking to the Wall Street Journal, the firm's chief operating officer suggested the handsets, which will be manufactured by two Indian companies, would retail at $25 (£15). They will run Mozilla's HTML5 web-based mobile operating system, Firefox OS. The firm already sells Firefox-powered phones in Europe and Latin America.

Submission + - TweetDeck Has Been Hacked (businessinsider.com) 1

redletterdave writes: TweetDeck, Twitter’s tool for real-time tracking and engagement of posts, was found to be vulnerable to cross-site scripting (XSS), a type of computer vulnerability commonly found in web applications that allows hackers to inject script into webpages to access user accounts and important security information. As a result of the hack, a tweet with an emoticon heart is being shared more than 38,000 times — automatically.

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