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Submission + - Former CEO Fiorina announces bid for White House (reuters.com)

Submitted by seven of five
seven of five writes: "Former Hewlett-Packard Co Chief Executive Carly Fiorina announced on Monday she is running for president, becoming the only woman in the pack of Republican candidates for the White House in 2016.

Once one of the most powerful women in the American corporate world, Fiorina announced her bid on ABC News' "Good Morning America" show.

"Yes, I am running for president. I think I'm the best person for the job because I understand how the economy actually works. I understand the world, who's in it, how the world works," she said.

Fiorina registers near the bottom of polls of the dozen or so Republican hopefuls and has never held public office.

But she has already attracted warm receptions at events in the early voting state of Iowa where she is positioning herself as a conservative, pro-business Republican highly critical of Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.

Fiorina was forced by HP to resign in 2005 as the tech company struggled to digest Compaq after a $19 billion merger."

Cue all HP employees, current and former, who have nothing but love for Carly F.

Submission + - SurveyMonkey's CEO dies while vacationing with wife Susan Sanberg (nytimes.com)

Submitted by McGruber
McGruber writes: Dave Goldberg, the chief executive of SurveyMonkey (https://www.surveymonkey.com) and spouse of Facebook COO Sheryl K. Sandberg, died on Friday night. He was 47.

“We are heartbroken by this news,” Facebook said in a statement. Mark Zuckerberg, a friend of the family, said that Mr. Goldberg died while on vacation abroad with Ms. Sandberg.

Goldberg built Surveymonkey into a provider of web surveys on almost every topic imaginable, with 500 employees and 25 million surveys created. News reports said it was valued at nearly $2 billion when it raised a round of funding last year.

Submission + - Microsoft's AI Insults People By Telling Them How Old They Are (i-programmer.info)

Submitted by mikejuk
mikejuk writes: A Microsoft Research project that lets users upload photos and estimates their age and gender has attracted more attention than expected — not all of it complimentary.
The How-Old.net site demonstrates of some of the capabilities of the Face API included in Microsoft's Project Oxford that was announced at Build.
It may have been expected to be a source of amusement but instead it backfired when people started to upload their own photos and discovered just how wrong its estimates could be. It demonstrates not only that machine learning has a long way to go before it's good at estimating age, but also that machine learning may not be the most politically correct way to go about answering the question "How Old Do I look". It might be better to employ and algorithm that built in all the rules of how to make a polite answer to that request — such as always knock a decade off the age of anyone over 28.
Perhaps this particular neural network needs to learn some social skills before pronouncing how old people look.
However it is capable of telling some truths — a photo of Barak Obama in 2005 gives an estimated age of 46, close to his real age of 44, but just 9 years later in 2014 the age guessing robot places him at 65. It seems that Mr President aged 20 years in less than 10 years of office.
Any one want to be President?

Comment Limited user privilege escalation? Tell me how. (Score 1) 137

"You have to consider local, internal attacks..."

If you know of an attack that works against a Windows XP limited user, please mention it. It is likely it could be fixed without Microsoft's support.

"XP is dead. It's lifespan is over."

Software doesn't die. Are you saying that, after literally thousands of bug fixes, Microsoft had still not fixed all the vulnerabilities in Windows XP? That's certainly possible; Microsoft makes more money if there are vulnerabilities, since people pay full price for the next version of the operating sytstem.

"we had major difficulty getting drivers for things as simple as SATA controllers for it"

SATA add-on cards.

"If you have ANY significant number of XP machines, it's time to pay the pittance that an entirely new machine would cost"

That's not the problem. The real cost is in all the configuration and teaching people to use new computers. There are programs, lots of them, that don't run on Windows 7.

"And Windows 10 is expected to be free..."

I'm guessing that Windows 10 will be "free" because it will force a lock-in to Microsoft's methods.

"If you have a "network", especially a business one, of any description, you are negligent in sticking on XP now."

What is particularly vulnerable about XP on a network? We use a software firewall on each computer, Windows 7 or XP, and everyone operates as a limited user.

"You can't secure XP. ... there's no real thing as a limited user in XP because it's basically a cinch to demonstrate privilege escalation using any number of pieces of bog-standard software on XP..."

Look at this video of a "privilege escalation": Windows XP local privilege escalation. It's total nonsense. One of the comments: "When you try this without administrator rights you get an error: Access is denied."

Submission + - NSA Reform Bill Backed by Both Parties Set to Pass House of Representatives

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: The NYT reports that after more than a decade of wrenching national debate over the intrusiveness of government intelligence agencies, a bipartisan wave of support has gathered to sharply limit the federal government’s sweeps of phone and Internet records. A bill that would overhaul the Patriot Act and curtail the metadata surveillance exposed by Edward J. Snowden overwhelmingly passed the House Judiciary Committee by a vote of a 25-2 vote and is heading to almost certain passage in the House of Representatives while an identical bill in the Senate — introduced with the support of five Republicans — is gaining support over the objection of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell who is facing the prospect of his first policy defeat since ascending this year to majority leader. "The bill ends bulk collection, it ends secret law,” says Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, the original author of the Patriot Act who has now helped author the Freedom Act. “It increases the transparency of our intelligence community and it does all this without compromising national security.”

The Patriot Act is up for its first reauthorization since the revelations about bulk data collection. The impending June 1 deadline for reauthorization, coupled with an increase of support among members of both parties, pressure from technology companies and a push from the White House have combined to make changes to the provisions more likely. The Snowden disclosures, along with data breaches at Sony Pictures, Target and the insurance giant Anthem, have unsettled voters and empowered those in Congress arguing for greater civil liberties protection — who a few years ago “could have met in a couple of phone booths,” says Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon. The Freedom Act very nearly passed both chambers of Congress last year, but it failed to garner the 60 votes to break a filibuster in the Senate. It fell short by two votes.

However some say the bill doesn't go far enough. The bill leaves intact surveillance programs conducted by the Drug Enforcement Agency and levies high penalties against those offering “material support” to terrorists. It also renews the expiring parts of the Patriot Act through 2019. "This bill would make only incremental improvements, and at least one provision – the material-support provision – would represent a significant step backwards,” says American Civil Liberties Union Deputy Legal Director Jameel Jaffer. “The disclosures of the last two years make clear that we need wholesale reform.”

Submission + - American Psychological Association hit with new torture allegations (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Did the American Psychological Association (APA) collude with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to enable the torture of detainees in the War on Terror? The answer won't be known until June, when an independent investigation is due to conclude. But at least one thing was made clear today in a report from an independent group of psychologists based on e-mail exchanges between APA and CIA officials from 2003 to 2006: The world's largest professional organization for psychologists has maintained a surprisingly cozy relationship with the defense and intelligence community.

Submission + - Nuclear waste: Bury nuclear waste down a very deep hole, say scientists (sciencedaily.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Scientists at the University of Sheffield calculate that all of the UK's high level nuclear waste from spent fuel reprocessing could be disposed of in just six boreholes 5km deep, fitting within a site no larger than a football pitch.

The concept — called deep borehole disposal — has been developed primarily in the UK but is likely to see its first field trials in the USA next year. If the trials are successful, the USA hopes to dispose of its 'hottest' and most radioactive waste — left over from plutonium production and currently stored at Hanford in Washington State — in a deep borehole.

Comment In many situations, Windows XP is secure. (Score -1) 137

There is a conflict of interest. Microsoft makes more money if its software is considered insecure. Microsoft effectively has a monopoly, but it was somehow decided by the U.S. government that Microsoft's monopoly was not covered by U.S. laws against monopoly.

There are many situations in which Windows XP is secure. For example, XP is secure when run on a network that is solely internal, and every computer on that network is run as a limited user. Businesses doing the same work every day don't need new hardware or software if the equipment they have now is serving them well.

Software doesn't have a "lifespan". It works the same as it always did, with the same hardware.

See my article, Microsoft Windows XP "end of life": Conflict of interest.

Submission + - Internet Explorer's Successor, Project Spartan, Is Called Microsoft Edge

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: At its Build 2015 developer conference today, Microsoft announced Project Spartan will be called Microsoft Edge. Joe Belfiore, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of the operating systems group, announced the news on stage, adding that Edge will have support for extensions. Edge is Microsoft’s new browser shipping on all Windows 10 devices (PCs, tablets, smartphones, and so on). Belfiore explained the name as referring to “being on the edge of consuming and creating.”

Submission + - How one tweet wiped $8bn off Twitter's value

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Someone mistakenly published earnings information on a Nasdaq-run investor relations page for Twitter before the company officially released the news and it sent the stock into a tailspin. Initially the earnings statement went unnoticed, but soon a Tweet with the results got a lot of attention. The stock lost more than $8 billion at one point as news spread. "We asked the New York Stock Exchange to halt trading once we discovered our Q1 numbers were out, and we published our results as soon as possible thereafter," said Twitter's senior director for investor relations, Krista Bessinger. "Selerity, who provided the initial tweets with our results, informed us that earnings release was available on our Investor Relations site before the close of market. Nasdaq hosts and manages our IR website, and we explicitly instructed them not to release our results until after the market close and only upon our specific instructions, which is consistent with prior quarters. We are continuing to investigate with them exactly what occurred."

Submission + - Windows XP support deal not renewed by government, leaves PCs open to attack (v3.co.uk)

Submitted by girlmad
girlmad writes: The government's one-year £5.5m Windows XP support deal with Microsoft has not been extended, sources have told V3, despite thousands of computers across Whitehall still running the ancient software, leaving them wide open to cyber attacks. It's still unclear when all government machines will be migrated to a newer OS.

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