Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Crime

Submission + - Senators Want DUI Checkpoint Apps Pulled

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "PC Magazine reports that four US senators have written a letter urging Apple, Google, and RIM to remove apps that provide users with information about DUI checkpoints. "With more than 10,000 Americans dying in drunk-driving crashes every year, providing access to applications that alert users to DUI checkpoints is harmful to public safety," says the letter signed by Senators Harry Reid, Chuck Schumer, Frank Lautenberg, and Mark Udall. A search in the Android Market pulled up four apps: Checkpoint Wingman and Checkpoint Wingman Lit which posts user-uploaded DUI checkpoints and sends alerts to your phone when you're close to a checkpoint; PhantomALERT which provides data on speed traps, red light cameras, speed cameras, school zones, DUI checkpoints, and dangerous intersections; and Mr. DUI which posts information about DUI checkpoints, speed traps, and red light cameras, and also supports user submissions and alerts. Similar apps are available for the iPhone and RIM. Apple released a set of App Store guidelines in September that spells out what apps are and are not allowed to do. Included on that list of "don'ts" are "apps that encourage excessive consumption of alcohol or illegal substances, or encourage minors to consume alcohol or smoke cigarettes.""

Submission + - NetFlix outage

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: As of a bit after 7 pm EDT, the NetFlix site started to experience problems, going from being completely unreachable to intermittent responses, and back down to being unreachable. Given the outage pattern, it is likely that an outage on a limited number of servers caused a cascading outage when the remainder of the servers could not handle the combined load. No information seems to be available at this point concerning the expected duration of the outage.

Submission + - Slashdot Poll 6

Submitted by kramer2718
kramer2718 writes: The Most Evil Technology Company
* Microsoft
* Apple
* Google
* Oracle
* Adobe
* Intel
* I, for one, welcome our new corporate overlords

Submission + - Internet Explorer will survive and Firefox won't (zdnet.com) 1

Submitted by rudy_wayne
rudy_wayne writes: There is an interesting (and probably controversial) piece on on Why Internet Explorer will survive and Firefox won't

"It’s tempting to look at Microsoft’s history with Internet Explorer and assume that they are just incapable of working at the speed of the Internet. But take a closer look at the development process for IE 9 and there’s a different story to tell. Microsoft is playing the same game as Google. Mozilla is stuck in 2005. And that’s why the core of Internet Explorer will still be around in five years when Firefox will have, at best, a loyal cult following."

"At last year’s MIX conference, Microsoft talked about its new app platform: write code once, target for multiple platforms. That’s the same space that Google is playing in. Google has an entire family of apps that are designed to work exclusively in a browser."

"So where does that leave Firefox? It doesn’t have an app ecosystem or a loyal core of developers. Extensions? Those were worth bragging about in 2005, but in 2012 the story is apps. Businesses and consumers will want to use the same browser that powers their installed apps. In the PC space, that means Google or Microsoft. It doesn’t leave room for a third player."
Games

Submission + - BatteryTech Eases Mobile Game Porting Efforts (batterypoweredgames.com)

Submitted by rbgrn
rbgrn writes: A new product on the market by popular Android game development group, Battery Powered Games, provides analternative for porting existing games to the iPhone and Android mobile platforms. BatteryTech is a mobile platform abstraction framework. In layman's terms — it handles all of the details of Windows, Mac, Android and iPhone so that developers can port just once — using BatteryTech — and build out to all other platforms from there. BatteryTech isn't just for porting. Several new games are currently in development and the first few should be hitting the markets soon. Special "indie" licensing is also available, offering up a low-cost alternative to integrating with the larger game engines.
Firefox

Submission + - Firefox 4: 3 Hours, 1M Downloads (computerworld.com)

Submitted by
CWmike
CWmike writes: "Firefox 4 got off to a strong start today, with 1 million copies of the new browser downloaded in the first three hours. If it keeps up the early pace, Firefox 4 will easily beat Microsoft's claim that users downloaded 2.4 million copies of its Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) in the first 24 hours of availability last week. Mozilla has posted a real-time download calculator on its site. Although Firefox 4's out-of-the-gate download tally was impressive, Mozilla executive Mike Beltzner said that it was behind the launch numbers of Firefox 3.6, which shipped in January 2010. During the first three hours, downloads averaged between 5,000 and 6,000 copies per minute, less than half the 12,000-per-minute pace of the previous version."

Submission + - GLOBE at Night Aims to Map Global Light Pollution (globeatnight.org) 1

Submitted by Kilrah_il
Kilrah_il writes: Light pollution is a big problem this days, affecting not only astronomers and wild life, but also everyone else because of wasted energy. GLOBE at Night aims to raise awareness by urging people to go outside and find out how much light pollution there is in their area. "The campaign is easy and fun to do. First, you match the appearance of the constellation Orion in the first campaign (and Leo or Crux in the second campaign) with simple star maps of progressively fainter stars found. Then you submit your measurements, including the date, time, and location of your comparison. After all the campaign’s observations are submitted, the project’s organizers release a map of light-pollution levels worldwide."
AMD

Submission + - Intel processor launch 10-core Xeon in half 2011 (blogspot.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The recognized provider of chips, Intel has recently announced that the 10-core "Westmere-EX "Xeon is available before the end of the first half of 2011.

The chip will be the next successor to the fastest server processor from Intel, the Nehalem-EX which has eight cores, and was published in 2010.

Intel will use 32nm process technology to construct the 10-core "Westmere-EX" Xeon processor. It should be noted that the current chip Nehalem-EX is designed with the processing of 45-nm technology.

A spokesman for the chip manufacturer, said the next target high-end servers in data centers, large databases and other application needs.

The spokesman also said the systems Westmere EX chips is two socket supports up to 2 TB memory. new technologies help users update the server processors.

Meanwhile, Intel's main rival Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) is preparing a new Bulldozer architecture-based 16-core (code-named Interlagos) start in the third quarter of this year.
Science

Submission + - US takes tiny steps to help big rare earth problem (networkworld.com)

Submitted by
coondoggie
coondoggie writes: "Sometimes when you are so far behind in a particular game of strategy, it's ok to fallback, regroup and slowly reevaluate your plan of attack.
That's about where the US is right now — in the regrouping phase, as the Department of Energy today sent about its second Request For Information plea to help it assess the rare earth materials world and develop some sort of plan of attack by the end of the year. The crux of the situation: China controls some 97% of the world's rare earth materials — and currently sells them for $44,361 a ton — almost double 2010 prices , according to the Wall Street Journal."
Businesses

Submission + - Companies accused of spectrum hoarding (cio.com.au)

Submitted by
angry tapir
angry tapir writes: "The National Association of Broadcasters, asked by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission and some lawmakers to give up television spectrum for mobile data uses, has fired back by accusing several other companies of hoarding the spectrum they hold. In recent weeks, the NAB has gone on the offensive by suggesting that several spectrum holders, including Verizon Communications, AT&T and Time Warner Cable, have not developed the spectrum they already have."
Security

Submission + - Why isn't more of the Web using HTTPS? (arstechnica.com) 1

Submitted by
JDRucker
JDRucker writes: "You wouldn't write your username and passwords on a postcard and mail it for the world to see, so why are you doing it online? Every time you log in to Twitter, Facebook or any other service that uses a plain HTTP connection that's essentially what you're doing."
Android

Submission + - Motorola Sholes Bootloader Unlocked (droid-life.com)

Submitted by teh31337one
teh31337one writes: Motorola's locked bootloader for their sholes-family devices (Droid OG, Milestone, DroidX, Droid 2 etc, not Atrix 4G) has finally been cracked.

@nenolod explains on his website: The Motorola(r) sholes platform uses a trusted bootloader environment. Signatures are stored as part of the CDT stored on the NAND flash. mbmloader verifies the signature on mbm before passing control. mbm verifies all other signatures before allowing the device to boot.

There is a vulnerability in the way that Motorola generated the signatures on the sections stored in the CDT. This vulnerability is very simple. Like on the PlayStation 3, Motorola forgot to add a random value to the signature in order to mask the private key. This allowed the private key and initialization vector to be cracked.

This comes at the time when HTC are also stepping up their attempts at locking down their phones. The recently released LTE flagship — ThunderBolt is their most locked-down phone to date... They made signed images, a signed kernel, and a signed recovery. They also locked the memory.
Google

Submission + - Google Accuses China of Interfering with Gmail 2

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "The Guardian reports that Google has accused the Chinese government of interfering with Gmail. According to the search giant, Chinese customers and advertisers have increasingly been complaining about their Gmail service in the past month and attempts by users to send messages, mark messages as unread and use other services have generated problems for Gmail customers. The announcement follows a blog posting from Google on 11 March in which the firm said it had "noticed some highly targeted and apparently politically motivated attacks against our users. We believe activists may have been a specific target." The search firm is not commenting further on this latest attack, but technology experts said it seemed to show an increasingly high degree of sophistication. "In the wake of what is happening in the Middle East I don't think China wants to be seen making heavy-handed attacks on the internet, that would draw too much attention," says one internet executive who wished to remain anonymous adding making it look like a fault in Google's system was extremely difficult to do and the fact that these attacks appear to come and go makes the attack look "semi-industrial and very, very sophisticated.""

Slashdot Top Deals

Our OS who art in CPU, UNIX be thy name. Thy programs run, thy syscalls done, In kernel as it is in user!

Close