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Submission + - Adblock Plus victorious again in court (businessinsider.com)

Submitted by Xochil
Xochil writes: Adblock Plus, which claims to be the most popular ad blocking tool, has been victorious again in court versus publishers who took out lawsuits against its owner company Eyeo demanding that users should not be allowed to legally block ads on their sites.

Submission + - How Much C++ Should You Know for an Entry-Level C++ Job? (dice.com)

Submitted by Nerval's Lobster
Nerval's Lobster writes: How much C++ do you need to know to land an entry-level job that's heavy in C++? That's a question Dice posed to several developers. While the exact topic was C++, the broader question of "How much X do you actually need to know to make money off it?" could also apply to any number of programming languages. In the case of C++, basics to know include virtual methods, virtual destructors, operator overloading, how templates work, correct syntax, the standard library, and more. Anything less, and a senior developer will likely get furious; they have a job to do, and that job isn't teaching the ins and outs of programming. With all that in mind, what's a minimum level of knowledge for a programming language for entry-level developers?

Submission + - Global business leaders say they don't know enough about technology to succeed

Submitted by Lemeowski
Lemeowski writes: New Harvard Business Review research finds that only 45% of business leaders surveyed say they personally have the technology knowledge they need to succeed in their jobs. What's more, the survey of 436 global business leaders finds that only 23% are confident their organizations have the knowledge and skills to succeed in the digital aspects of their business. The report says that given the low levels of digital knowledge and skills outside of IT "it's troubling that close to half of all respondents (49%) said their department occasionally or frequently initiaties IT projects with little or no direct involvement of IT."

Submission + - How Does the iPhone Do That: Behind the Downfall at BlackBerry

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Ian Austen has an interesting interview in the NYT with the Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff, authors of "Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry," that offers details about the emotional and business turmoil surrounding the collapse of the once-dominant smartphone maker’s fall into near market obscurity. Most interesting is Balckberry's initial reaction to the iPhone. "It was an interesting contrast to the team at Google, which was working on smartphones at the time. Google seemed to realize immediately that the world had changed and scrapped its keyboard plans. At BlackBerry, they sort of dismissed the need to do anything about it in the short term," says McNish. "One thing that they misunderstood is how the game had changed when AT&T announced its deal with Apple," added Silcoff. "BlackBerry had built its whole business model on offering carriers products that worked efficiently on their networks. The first thing Mike Lazaridis said when he saw an iPhone at home is that this will never work, the network can’t sustain it. What they misunderstood is that the consumer demand would make carriers invest in their networks."

"One of the big reveals for us in the book was the enormous power wielded by carriers in the smartphone race," says McNish. "In the wake of Apple’s ascendency, carriers have seen their clout and economic value significantly diminished as customers spend more of their smartphone money on Apple phones, apps and other content than they do on carrier bills. It is one of the greatest wealth transfers in our generation."

Submission + - Computer chips made of wood promise greener electronics

Submitted by alphadogg
alphadogg writes: U.S. and Chinese researchers have developed semiconductor chips that are nearly entirely made out of wood-derived material. Aside from being biodegradable, the chips could be produced for only a fraction of the cost of conventional semiconductors, according to the group of 17 researchers, mostly from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with others from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Submission + - Red Hat CEO Publishes Open Source Management Memoir (redhat.com)

Submitted by ectoman
ectoman writes: Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst has just published The Open Organization , a book that chronicles his tenure as leader of the world's largest open source company. The book aims to show other business leaders how open source principles like transparency, authenticity, access, and openness can enhance their organizations. It's also chock full of interesting anecdotes about daily life inside Red Hat. Whitehurst joined Red Hat in 2008 after leaving Delta Airlines, and he says his time working in open source has changed him. "I thought I knew what it took to manage people and get work done" he writes in The Open Organization. "But the techniques I had learned, the traditional beliefs I held for management and how people are taught to run companies and lead organizations, were to be challenged when I entered the world of Red Hat and open source." All proceeds from the book benefit the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Opensource.com is hosting free book club materials.

Submission + - SpaceX cleared for US military launches (bbc.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The U.S. Air Force has given private rocket company SpaceX clearance to launch military satellites into orbit. This disrupts the lock that Boeing and Lockheed Martin have had on military launches for almost a decade. SpaceX will get its first opportunity to bid for such launches in June, when the Air Force posts a contract to launch GPS satellites.

Submission + - A Ph.D thesis defense 77 years late (sciencemag.org) 1

Submitted by Taco Cowboy
Taco Cowboy writes: A story about a 102-year old lady doing her PhD thesis defense is not that common, but when the thesis defense was delayed by a whopping 77 years, that gotta raise some eyebrows

Ingeborg Syllm-Rapoport studied diphtheria at the University of Hamburg in Germany and at 1938, the 25-year old Protestant-raised, German-born Ingeborg Syllm submitted for her doctorate thesis defense

Ms. Ingeborg Syllm was denied her chance for her thesis defense because her mother was of the Jewish ancestry, making her an official 'cross-breed'

As a 'cross-breed' the Nazi regime forbidden the university from proceeding with her defense, for 'racial reasons'

She became one of the thousands of scholars and researchers banished from German academe, which at the time included many of the world’s most prestigious research institutions, on account of Jewish ancestry or opposition to Nazi policies. Many of them ended up suffering or dying in concentration camps

Rudolf Degkwitz, Syllm’s professor, was imprisoned for objecting to euthanizing children

Syllm, however, was able to reach the United States and earned her medical degree from the old Women's Medical College of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia

Eventually she married a fellow physician named Samuel Mitja Rapoport, had a family, and moved back to Germany in the 1950s, where she achieved prominence in neonatology

Syllm-Rapoport, who is now 102 years old, might have remained just a doctor (if a very accomplished one) had not the present dean of the Hamburg medical school, Uwe Koch-Gromus, heard her story from a colleague of her son, Tom Rapoport, a Harvard cell biologist

Determined to do what he could to mitigate this wrong, Koch-Gromus arranged Syllm-Rapoport’s long-delayed defense

Despite failing eyesight, she brushed up on decades of developments in diphtheria research with the help of friends and the Internet. Koch-Gromus called the 45-minute oral exam given by him and two colleagues on 13 May in her Berlin living room “a very good test. Frau Rapoport has gathered notable knowledge about what’s happened since then. Particularly given her age, she was brilliant.”


Submission + - Teen hires hacker to take down school district IT systems (thestack.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A 17-year old boy from Idaho has been accused of paying a hacker to launch DDoS attacks against his school district. The teen reportedly hired a third party to organize a week’s worth of distributed denial-of-service campaigns this month against the West Ada school district – the largest educational district in the state. The cyberattacks affected networks at all 52 schools including payroll, online textbooks, virtual teaching and standardized testing. At the time of the hacking many students were undertaking Idaho Standard Achievement Testing online. The DDoS attacks caused the school systems to lose the test and results data and students were required to re-sit their exams multiple times. According to a report by KTVB-TV News, the teen has been arrested and may face State and Federal computer crime felony charges. If the unnamed student is found guilty he is likely to have to serve up to 180 days in juvenile prison. The suspect has also been suspended from Eagle High and risks potential expulsion. The minor’s parents are being held financially responsible for the damage caused by the attacks.

Submission + - Apple design guru Jony Ive named chief design officer 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Jony Ive, Apple's senior VP of design has been promoted to the role of Chief Design Officer. Ive became Apple's chief of industrial design in 1997. Under Ive's direction, Apple's put out an impressive list of products including the iMac, iPod, and iPad. "In this new role, he will focus entirely on current design projects, new ideas and future initiatives," said chief executive Tim Cook in a memo. "Jony is one of the most talented and accomplished designers of his generation, with an astonishing 5,000 design and utility patents to his name."

Submission + - Open source pioneer Michael Tiemann on what makes open source businesses success (opensource.com)

Submitted by ectoman
ectoman writes: Opensource.com is featuring an interview with Michael Tiemann, co-founder of Cygnus Solutions and one of the world's first open source entrepreneurs. Now VP of Open Source Affairs at Red Hat, Tiemann offers an historical perspective on what makes open source businesses successful, and shares how he dealt with the open source movement's early skeptics. "A lot of the skepticism is a response to the abstract; it's a response to the unknown," Tiemann says, "And when you bring a concrete success story with just absolutely stellar credentials that doesn't just outperform the field, but embarrasses the field, then the skeptics begin to look like they're on the wrong side."

Submission + - Nasa approves 'impossible' space engine design that apparently violates the laws (independent.co.uk) 4

Submitted by sirlark
sirlark writes: In a quiet announcement that has sent shockwaves through the scientific world, Nasa has cautiously given its seal of approval to a new type of “impossible” engine that could revolutionize space travel.

In a paper published by the agency’s experimental Eagleworks Laboratories, Nasa engineers confirmed that they had produced tiny amounts of thrust from an engine without propellant – an apparent violation of the conservation of momentum; the law of physics that states that every action must have an equal and opposite reaction.

Submission + - MIT researchers can listen to your conversation by watching your potato chip bag (washingtonpost.com)

Submitted by Dthief
Dthief writes: The results are certainly impressive (and a little scary). In one example shown in a compilation video, a bag of chips is filmed from 15 feet away, through sound-proof glass. The reconstructed audio of someone reciting “Mary Had a Little Lamb” in the same room as the chips isn’t crystal clear. But the words being said are possible to decipher.

In most cases, a high-speed camera is necessary to accomplish the feat. Still, at 2,000 to 6,000 frames per second, the camera used by the researchers is nothing compared to the best available on the market, which can surpass 100,000 frames per second. And the researchers found that even cheaper cameras could be used.

Submission + - PayPal's two-factor authentication can be bypassed easily, researcher says (techienews.co.uk)

Submitted by hypnosec
hypnosec writes: PayPal’s two-factor authentication can easily be defeated and account accessed without requiring an elaborate set of steps, a security researcher has claimed while publicly disclosing the vulnerability as PayPal has failed to resolve the issue for two months now. Joshua Rogers, an Australian security researcher, discovered the vulnerability on June 5 and reported it to PayPal the same day. However, according to Rogers, PayPal hasn’t patched the vulnerability even after two months and he is disclosing the loop-hole publicly “due to the simplicity of it” and because he believes he gave “Paypal long enough to fix it.”

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

Submitted by McGruber
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.

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