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Google

Submission + - Logitech Revue Google TV root process available (reviewhorizon.com)

Submitted by soricon
soricon writes: The proof that everything can be rooted these days is enforced again by the new root process revealed by the smart people behind GTVHacker. While the process is certainly not for the faint of heart because it requires soldering skills, the end result is a complete access to Logitech Revue file system and allows side loading Android apps to the box.

In order to gain root access, you’ll need physical access to Revue’s UART1 port – something like the service serial / USB port for firmware updates on some TV sets. Once you create your own serial interface, you can connect to it, start a terminal and happily write scripts. All this process is possible because fortunately Logitech did not disable their UART ports and root shell is accessible in recovery mode. You can bet though that for the next generation of boxes, this back-door will be closed.

The only tools required are a USB->TTL or similar board like an Arduino in tristate mode, a 1 to 2 GB USB memory stick, wires and of course, basic soldering skills.

Currently GTVHacker team is able to have ADBD Running for adb access, can create custom boot logos and Flash Plugin Update to allow previously blocked content providers.
Books

Submission + - The Continued Censorship of Huckleberry Finn (salon.com) 2

Submitted by eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes: Over a hundred years after the death of its author, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn will be released in a censored format removing two derogatory racial slurs: "injun" and "nigger." The former appears some 219 times in the original novel but both will be replaced by the word "slave." An Alabama publisher named NewSouth Books will be editing and censoring the book so that schools and parents might provide their children the ability to study the classic without fear of properly addressing the torturous history of racism and slavery in The United States of America. The Forbes Blog speculates that e-readers could provide us this service automatically. Salon admirably provides point versus counterpoint while the internet at large is in an uproar over this seemingly large acceptance of censorship as necessary even on books a hundred years old. The legendary Samuel Langhorne Clemens himself once wrote "the difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter" and now his own writing shall test the truth in that today.
Security

Submission + - PHP floating point bug crashes servers (networkworld.com)

Submitted by alphadogg
alphadogg writes: A newly unearthed bug in certain versions of the PHP scripting language could crash servers when the software is given the task of converting a large floating point number, raising the possibility that the glitch could be exploited by hackers.

The bug will cause the PHP processing software to enter an infinite loop when it tries to convert the series of digits "2.2250738585072011e-308" from the string format into the floating point format.

At least one PHP user has commented http://www.exploringbinary.com/php-hangs-on-numeric-value-2-2250738585072011e-308/ that a malicious user could crash a server running PHP by feeding this digit to the PHP processor through the language's get function.

The bug only seems to affect version 5.2 and 5.3 of the language, and only when they are run on Intel 32-bit CPUs that use the x87 instruction set.

Computer scientist Rick Regan http://www.exploringbinary.com/php-hangs-on-numeric-value-2-2250738585072011e-308/ first reported the bug on Monday, and the PHP development team issued patches the following day.
Patents

Submission + - Zynga and Blizzard Sued Over Game Patent (gamasutra.com)

Submitted by eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes: Thinking about developing a game involving a "database driven online distributed tournament system"? Well, you had better talk to Walker Digital or risk a lawsuit because Walker Digital claims to have patented that "invention" back in 2002. The patent in question has resulted in some legal matters for the makers of "Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 1 and 2, Call of Duty: Black Ops, Call of Duty: World at War, Blur, Wolfenstein, DJ Hero 2, Golden Eye 007, World of Warcraft and its expansions, Mafia Wars, and many others." Walker Digital (parent company of Priceline.com) said it's not sure how much damages are going to be and requested that through discovery in the court. If you think Walker Digital is not a patent troll, check out their lawsuit from two months ago against Facebook for using privacy controls Walker Digital claims to have patented. It would seem that any online competitive game that uses a database to select and reward contestants in a tournament could potentially fall under this patent — of course those with deepest coffers will be cherry picked first.
Space

Submission + - Andromeda Galaxy seen in a New Light (wordpress.com)

Submitted by davecl
davecl writes: The European Space Agency has released new images of our nearest neighbour galaxy, the Andromeda Galaxy or M31, in both the far-infrared from Herschel and in X-rays from XMM. The Herschel images show regions where stars are forming and where starlight is hidden by dust while the X-Ray data reveals the cinders left when stars have died. Combined with existing optical data these images give us a picture of Andromeda as an active, evolving galaxy, where the action moves from pace to place over cosmic time. More information available from the Herschel mission blog (which I run) and form the BBC.

Comment Re:Go is not a game (Score 1) 175

by Scryer (#34740100) Attached to: Microsoft Research Takes On <em>Go</em>

I saw this played at the University of Wisconsin in 1970 - Paul Purdom was on one side, but I forget the other player - maybe Ralph London? It was called Go-spiel (by analogy with Kriegspiel), and required a referee to tell the players whether their proposed move was legal, using his master board between the two players with screens to keep them from seeing the other boards.

The one game I saw played didn't have nearly the depth and interest of Kriegspiel, which I played and refereed often in the years before that at the RAND Corporation. Perhaps 9x9 Go-spiel would have worked out better.
Microsoft

Submission + - Security researcher finds hundreds of browser bugs

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: PC Magazine reports on a very understated late night post to the full-disclosure mailing list, in which security researcher Michael Zalewski shared a fuzzing tool reportedly capable of identifying over a hundred browser bugs. Some of these bugs, he says, may be already known third parties in China. The report also includes an account of how browser vendors fared fixing these flaws so far. Not surprisingly, Microsoft's response timeline appears damn depressing.
Google

Submission + - Android Text Messages Intermittently Going Astray

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Reports from Engadget and others suggest that Tiger Woods and Brett Favre might want to avoid Android for the time being. Engadget reports that Android's default text messaging app still has horrible text messaging bugs that can that intermittently send texts to the wrong person. 'This is ticking me off like no other technology glitch that I experienced in recent years,' reads one unhappy camper's post on a lengthy Help Forum thread opened on March 16th. 'If a bank deposited my paycheck into another person's account I wouldn't stress so much cause I can always get the money back. How the hell do you take words back? 'Oh sorry boss you had to find out that I think you're an idiot, can I still keep my job, please please please?'' Over at Google Code, Issue 9392 — SMS are intermittently sent to wrong and seemingly random contact — carries a priority of 'Medium,' even though it has 600+ comments and has been starred by 3,600+ people.
Science

Submission + - Is Something Wrong with the Scientific Method? 6

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "Jonah Lehrer has an interesting article in the New Yorker reporting that all sorts of well-established, multiply confirmed findings in science have started to look increasingly uncertain as they cannot be replicated. This phenomenon doesn’t yet have an official name, but it’s occurring across a wide range of fields, from psychology to ecology and in the field of medicine, the phenomenon seems extremely widespread, affecting not only antipsychotics but also therapies ranging from cardiac stents to Vitamin E and antidepressants. “One of my mentors told me that my real mistake was trying to replicate my work," says researcher Jonathon Schooler. "He told me doing that was just setting myself up for disappointment.” For many scientists, the effect is especially troubling because of what it exposes about the scientific process. "If replication is what separates the rigor of science from the squishiness of pseudoscience, where do we put all these rigorously validated findings that can no longer be proved?" writes Lehrer. "Which results should we believe?" Francis Bacon, the early-modern philosopher and pioneer of the scientific method, once declared that experiments were essential, because they allowed us to “put nature to the question" but it now appears that nature often gives us different answers. According to John Ioannidis, author of “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False," the main problem is that too many researchers engage in what he calls “significance chasing,” or finding ways to interpret the data so that it passes the statistical test of significance—the ninety-five-per-cent boundary invented by Ronald Fisher. "The scientists are so eager to pass this magical test that they start playing around with the numbers, trying to find anything that seems worthy,”"
Wireless Networking

Submission + - News Key Recovery Attacks on RC4/WEP (events.ccc.de)

Submitted by
yuhong
yuhong writes: "From the abstract: "In this paper, we present several weaknesses in the stream cipher RC4. First, we present a technique to automatically reveal linear correlations in the PRGA of RC4. With this method, 48 new exploitable correlations have been discovered. Then we bind these new biases in the PRGA with known KSA weaknesses to provide practical key recovery attacks. Henceforth, we apply a similar technique on RC4 as a black box, i.e. the secret key words as input and the keystream words as output. Our objective is to exhaustively find linear correlations between these elements. Thanks to this technique, 9 new exploitable correlations have been revealed. Finally, we exploit these weaknesses on RC4 to some practical examples, such as the WEP protocol. We show that these correlations lead to a key recovery attack on WEP with only 9,800 encrypted packets (less than 20 seconds), instead of 24,200 for the best previous attack.""
Crime

Submission + - Four IT Consultants Charged with $80MM NYC Rip-Off

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: It's I-told-you-so time for Slashdot commenter frnic, who smelled a crime last March after reading that New York City had dropped $722 million on its still-under-development CityTime Attendance System. Nine months later, US Attorney Preet Bharara charged "four consultants to the New York City Office of Payroll Administration...for operating a fraudulent scheme that led to the misappropriation of more than $80 million in New York City funds allocated for an information technology project known as 'CityTime.'" Three of the four consultants were also charged — along with a consultant's wife and mother — with using a network of friends-and-family shell corporations to launder the proceeds of the fraud. Dept. of Investigations Commissioner Rose Gill Hearn called it a shame that 'supposed experts hired and paid well to protect the city's interests were exposed as the fox guarding the hen house.'
IBM

Submission + - IBM Files The Patent Troll Patent (conceivablytech.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: What a way to end the year! It's all or nothing over at IBM as the company goes for the gold and files the patent troll patent. Forget the Hyperlink patent or the POS shutdown patent, IBM wants the patent patent. Its idea is centered around an approach to manage patents from inventor training to filing and protection strategies, including competitive monitoring. At least in theory, IBM could get approval to own the idea how to manage patents and make a business out of IP. The next time you file a patent, you may want to contact them as you may need a license to file for filing.
Science

Submission + - North magnetic pole racing toward Siberia (scientificamerican.com)

Submitted by RogerRoast
RogerRoast writes: The north magnetic pole (NMP) drifts from year to year. The NMP, also known as the dip pole, is the point on Earth where the planet's magnetic field points straight down into the ground. Scottish explorer James Clark Ross first located the NMP in 1831 on the Boothia Peninsula in what is now northern Canada, and with the planting of a flag claimed it for Great Britain.

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