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Privacy

Swarm Mobile's Offer: Free Wi-Fi In Exchange For Some Privacy 121

Posted by timothy from the tradeoffs-tradeoffs dept.
cagraham writes "Startup Swarm Mobile intends to help physical retailers counter online shopping habits by collecting data on their customer's actions. Swarm's platform integrates with store's Wifi networks in order to monitor what exactly customers are doing while shopping. In exchange for collecting analytics, shoppers get access to free internet. Swarm then send reports to the store owners, detailing how many customers checked prices online, or compared rival products on their phones. Their platform also allows stores to directly send discount codes or coupons to shopper's phones."
Network

Researcher Shows How GPUs Make Terrific Network Monitors 67

Posted by samzenpus from the keeping-an-eye-on-things dept.
alphadogg writes "A network researcher at the U.S. Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory has found a potential new use for graphics processing units — capturing data about network traffic in real time. GPU-based network monitors could be uniquely qualified to keep pace with all the traffic flowing through networks running at 10Gbps or more, said Fermilab's Wenji Wu. Wenji presented his work as part of a poster series of new research at the SC 2013 supercomputing conference this week in Denver."

Comment Amazon's competitors still leaving an open goal (Score 1) 258

by mattbee (#45251847) Attached to: Why Amazon Is Profitless Only By Choice

So here are two experiences that made me think "screw this, I wish I'd shopped at Amazon". This may just be a UK-specfic experience, but...

1) Samsung Series 9 laptop from PC World, bought from their store in April, came with Windows 8 drivers (I think) that just never worked. Mouse pointer jerking around, it blue-screened within 5 minutes on one boot out of every two. I updated its drivers through Windows, through the Samsung driver update utility ... just hopeless. I tried to use it for about a month, trying to avoid reboots, but eventually gave up and took it back to the shop. Their nice assistant agreed it looked screwed, took it back, and after two phone calls their support people said that because I hadn't made a restore disc, they couldn't / wouldn't do anything with it, and it must have been my negligence that broke it. I am taking them to court for the £900 purchase price to get a refund, after I'd bought a different model ... at Amazon.

2) Bought a £150 model helicopter for a member of staff as a leaving present from Maplin (big electronics component & gadget store), to be delivered to his house. They make a picking error and deliver a completely different, much cheaper product. I call them and say, hey, you've made a mistake would you mind delivering the correct item. No. I must go over to the recipient's house, pick the item up, drive it to the store before they will acknowledge their mistake and get me what I ordered. They generously offer a freepost address for me to send the item back, but I must be sure to go to the post office and get a certificate of dispatch! [if you've never been to England this generally involves driving into town, queuing, finding it closed for lunch etc.]

I know from for 1) Amazon would take the item back without question, and I'd be confident enough ordering a replacement on the same day, giving me what I want sooner. And for 2) again, I know they would send the right item out without question and tell me to keep the mistake, it's nor worth the restocking fees.

So whenever I hear "Amazon driving retailers out of business" what I really hear is "Amazon showing how it's done by treating customers as honest & impatient, competitors continue to fuck it up". Amazon aren't even the cheapest, or even the easiest web site to find what you want, but I do know that they care about customers getting what they want quickly, and often that's why I'll pay a bit more.

Is this unfair to ALL OTHER retailers? Am I forgetting some intangible Amazon magic here?
Android

Submission + - Deleted cloud files can be recovered from smartphones, researchers find (infoworld.com)

Submitted by
tsamsoniw
tsamsoniw writes: "Researchers from the University of Glasgow have discovered that they could fully recover images, audio files, PDFs, and Word documents deleted from Dropbox, Box, and SugarSync, using both an HTC Android smartphone and an iPhone. They created 20 different test files, including Words docs, PDFS, and JPGs, uploaded them via a PC to the various services, and synced the services with the mobile devices. They accessed and manipulated the files in varying ways (e,g accessing them online once, saving them offline), then used a forensics toolkit to attempt to reconstruct files with artifacts saved to the phone."
Advertising

Racism In Online Ad Targeting 474

Posted by Soulskill from the perhaps-profiling-is-a-better-name dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Most of us are familiar with advertisements in online web searching, and by now we've grown accustomed to scrolling past the 'sponsored' results to get to the real responses to our query. And we know the ads are context-sensitive; for example, searching for our favorite Federation Starship will bring up ads for a similarly-named car-rental agency. But now a Harvard University professor has found a more disturbing trend in those contextual ads: racism. 'Sweeney says she has evidence that black identifying names are up to 25 per cent more likely to be served with an arrest-related ad. "There is discrimination in delivery of these ads," she concludes. Sweeney gathered this evidence by collecting over 2000 names that were suggestive of race. For example, first names such as Trevon, Lakisha and Darnell suggest the owner is black while names like Laurie, Brendan and Katie suggest the owner is white. She then entered these plus surnames into Google.com and Reuters.com and examined the ads they returned. Most names generated ads for public records. However, black-identifying names turned out to be much more likely than white-identifying names to generate ads that including the word "arrest" (60 per cent versus 48 per cent).'"

Comment Re:Windows is more open (Score 3, Interesting) 162

by Jeremy Allison - Sam (#42554971) Attached to: Samba: Less Important Because Windows Is Less Important

They're not going to do that. The director of Windows server development at Microsoft even gave us a quote for the Samba 4 press release.

https://www.samba.org/samba/news/releases/4.0.0.html

For the tl;dr crowd:

"Active Directory is a mainstay of enterprise IT environments, and Microsoft is committed to support for interoperability across platforms," said Thomas Pfenning, director of development, Windows Server. "We are pleased that the documentation and interoperability labs that Microsoft has provided have been key in the development of the Samba 4.0 Active Directory functionality."

Thanks a *lot* Thomas !

Comment Re:First posting? (Score 4, Informative) 162

by Jeremy Allison - Sam (#42553629) Attached to: Samba: Less Important Because Windows Is Less Important

No, I also know when it was first widely adopted. I was around and shepherded it through that remember. It really took off around 1994 when we had very wide use on SunOS and early Solaris use.

Wider Linux use really didn't start until about until 1996 or so. I remember tridge and I being amazed that making it work on Linux became more important than making it work on SunOS/Solaris/HPUX and other commercial UNIXes.

Jeremy.

Comment Re:First posting? (Score 5, Informative) 162

by Jeremy Allison - Sam (#42551155) Attached to: Samba: Less Important Because Windows Is Less Important

No, you're getting the history the wrong way around.

Samba was started in '92. The web wasn't on most companies radar until the late 90's.

Web and database on Linux came in the door opened by file servers :-).

Our original platform was SunOS (not even Solaris). When Samba started Linux was a toy, it didn't even have networking.

Jeremy.

Comment Re:Too bad SMB is so slow (Score 5, Informative) 162

by Jeremy Allison - Sam (#42550619) Attached to: Samba: Less Important Because Windows Is Less Important

It's all in how the server is configured, and if the client will pipeline requests.

I can easily saturate a gigabit network using modern Linux CIFSFS and Samba. Ensure you turn on pthread based aio on the server, and the client now issues multiple outstanding read/write requests.

SMB2 makes this easier as it does this by default even on Windows clients. Ensuring your server has the pthread-based aio is the key though (depending on server CPU availablilty - on low end systems some OEM's get more mileage by using zero-copy sendfile/recvfile instead).

Jeremy.
Data Storage

Ask Slashdot: Keeping Your Media Library Safe From Kids? 307

Posted by timothy from the sound-of-eyes-getting-really-big dept.
Serenissima writes "I've spent many hours building my Media Library in XBMC and scraping all the DVD Covers and Fanart. And I love it, I can pull up movies on any computer or device in the house. I played a movie for my son the other day so I could get some cleaning done without him being underfoot. I noticed shortly after that the sound coming from the other room was from a different movie than I played for him. I snuck up and watched for a few minutes and saw him use a trackpad to navigate to the stop and play buttons of different movies in his folder. I know it's only a matter of time before he realizes he can see all of the movies. I don't want him to have nightmares because he saw the T-1000 stab someone in the face. The quickest solution I can think is a screen saver with a password. It's mildly inconvenient to me, but would stop him from accessing anything. However, I remember how much more I knew about computers than my parents when I was a kid, and I have a feeling he's going to surprise me one day. There's a lot of ways out there to stop it, the way we do it now is to not let him watch anything unless we're there (but there are only so many times I can watch the same kid's movie). How do YOU guys find yourself dealing with the convenience of running your own server while keeping your media safe from prying eyes?"

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