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Submission + - Enterprise Mobile App Development (livejournal.com)

Submitted by AppsDevelopment
AppsDevelopment writes: Today smart phones outsell PC's and mobile computers are spreading faster than any other consumer technology in history. It has revolutionized the way we do business, travel, shop and communicate with the world. So, why not introduce one in organization? Building an effective mobile application for workforce helps entrepreneurs meet the high standard of work efficiency and time.

IOS Mobile App Development has scoped larger opportunities for both entrepreneurs and users. Be it for Entertainment & informative activities like mobile games, or educational apps, the iOS App Developers are very vigilant in developing the mobile apps. Companies like Openwave Computing LLC, NYC take a strategic approach to their mobile projects and create a comprehensive one at an affordable price.

Submission + - Antivirus vendor Avast suffers embarrassing forum hack

Submitted by oyenamit
oyenamit writes: In what might turn out to be an egg on the face scenario, antivirus company Avast announced that their community forums have been hacked and have been taken down. Avast CEO Vince Steckler has blogged that the attack affected less than 400,000 of Avast's 200 million forum users and that it is not yet known how the attacker breached the forum. Vince goes on to warn that "even though the passwords were hashed, it could be possible for a sophisticated thief to derive many of the passwords".

While the attack affected only the community forum and the payment, license related data was not compromised, it serves as a good wake-up call for everyone that very little out there is truly secure.
User Journal

Journal Journal: Using Amazon WorkSpaces from Linux using rdesktop

Journal by kriston

The Amazon WorkSpaces product is an interesting and affordable desktop-as-a-service from Amazon. For a flat, monthly rate, you get the equivalent performance of an m3.medium EC2 instance for far less cost but also with somewhat less configuration flexibility. The compelling feature of Amazon WorkSpaces is supposed to be close integration with your own Active Directory with Group Policies. For me, the more compelling feature is the high-performance, proprietary Teradici PCoIP protocol used

Submission + - 50 years later, MIT looks back at AI and networking pioneer Project MAC

Submitted by v3rgEz
v3rgEz writes: Fifty years ago, a major project that ultimately seeded much of today’s computer technology was created at MIT: Project MAC, and the Multics operating system initiative within the project. Daniel Dern interviews some of the key figures involved in the pioneering project, looking at how one laboratory helped spawn Ethernet, AI, and dozens of tech companies and other innovations that took ideas from the lab to the personal computer.

Submission + - Apps on your Android phone can take photos without you knowing 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A researcher has demonstrated that it's possible for malicious attackers to create an Android app that will surreptitiously take pictures and upload them to a remote server without the user being aware of or noticing it. There are many apps on Play Store that aim at taking pictures without any visual indication but all of them require app activity to be visible and phone screen to be on. But he managed to create an app that does so without displaying any notification, without the presence of the app being visible (i.e. on the list of installed applications), and even without the screen being on.

Submission + - With Firmware Update, LG Links Smart TV Features To Viewer Monitoring (securityledger.com)

Submitted by chicksdaddy
chicksdaddy writes: Can electronics giant LG force owners of its Smart TVs to agree to have their viewing habits monitored or lose access to the smart features they've already paid for?

That's the question being raised by LG customers and privacy advocates after firmware updates to some LG SmartTVs removed a check box opt-in that allowed TV owners to consent to have their viewing behavior monitored by LG. In its place, LG has asked users to consent to a slew of intrusive monitoring activities as part of lengthy new Terms of Service Agreement and Privacy Statement, or see many of the 'smart' features on their sets disabled.

Among other things, LG is asking for access to customers’ “viewing information”- interactions with program content, including live TV, movies and video on demand. That might include the programs you watch, the terms you use to search for content and actions taken while viewing.

Some LG SmartTV owners are crying foul (http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140511/17430627199/lg-will-take-smart-out-your-smart-tv-if-you-dont-agree-to-share-your-viewing-search-data-with-third-parties.shtml). They include Jason Huntley (aka @DoctorBeet), a UK-based IT specialist who, in November, blew the whistle on LG's practice of collecting user viewing data without their consent. (http://doctorbeet.blogspot.com/2013/11/lg-smart-tvs-logging-usb-filenames-and.html) Huntley said he views the new privacy policy as a way for LG to get legal cover for the same kinds of omnibus customer monitoring they attempted earlier – though without notice and consent. “If you read the documents, they’ve covered themselves for all the activity that was going on before. But now they’re allowed to do it legally.”

It is unclear whether the firmware updates affect LG customers in the U.S. or just the EU. If they do, privacy experts say they may run afoul of US consumer protection laws. “My initial reaction is that this is an appalling practice,” Corryne McSherry, the Intellectual Property Director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), told The Security Ledger.(https://securityledger.com/2014/05/bad-actor-with-update-lg-says-no-monitoring-no-smart-tv/) “Customers want and deserve to be able to retain a modicum of privacy in their media choices, and they shouldn’t have to waive that right in order for their TV (or any other device) to keep working as expected.”

Submission + - 50 Years (And Then Some) Of Computer Science At MIT (itworld.com)

Submitted by jfruh
jfruh writes: In 1964, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology launched Project Mathematics and Computation, the forerunner of its modern Computer Science department. But even before then, MIT researchers had chalked up several milestones in the embryonic field, from the invention of core memory to the first shooter video game. All in all, MIT faculty, students, and graduates have shaped the world of high tech as we know it, laying the foundation for the Internet and many of the programs we use on a daily basis today.

Submission + - The Flaw Lurking In Every Deep Neural Net (i-programmer.info)

Submitted by mikejuk
mikejuk writes: A recent paper "Intriguing properties of neural networks" by Christian Szegedy, Wojciech Zaremba, Ilya Sutskever, Joan Bruna, Dumitru Erhan, Ian Goodfellow and Rob Fergus, http://cs.nyu.edu/~zaremba/doc...
a team that includes authors from Google's deep learning research project outlines two pieces of news about the way neural networks behave that run counter to what we believed — and one of them is frankly astonishing.
Every deep neural network has "blind spots" in the sense that there are inputs that are very close to correctly classified examples that are misclassified.
To quote the paper:
"For all the networks we studied, for each sample, we always manage to generate very close, visually indistinguishable, adversarial examples that are misclassified by the original network."
To be clear, the adversarial examples looked to a human like the original, but the network misclassified them. You can have two photos that look not only like a cat but the same cat, indeed the same photo, to a human, but the machine gets one right and the other wrong.
What is even more shocking is that the adversarial examples seem to have some sort of universality. That is a large fraction were misclassified by different network architectures trained on the same data and by networks trained on a different data set.
You might be thinking "so what if a cat photo that is clearly a photo a cat is recognized as a dog?" If you change the situation just a little and ask what does it matter if a self-driving car that uses a deep neural network misclassifies a view of a pedestrian standing in front of the car as a clear road?
There is also the philosophical question raised by these blind spots. If a deep neural network is biologically inspired we can ask the question, does the same result apply to biological networks.
Put more bluntly "does the human brain have similar built-in errors?" If it doesn't, how is it so different from the neural networks that are trying to mimic it? In short, what is the brain's secret that makes it stable and continuous?
Until we find out more you cannot rely on a neural network in any safety critical system..

Submission + - Google Glass and the future of wearable gaming (redbull.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Google Glass is now becoming more widely available, but developers are only just starting to tap into the augmented reality specs' potential for gaming. A new report looks at some of the early experiments with the tech — leading the charge is indie developer Mind Pirate, the first studio to release a mobile game simultaneously on iPhone and Google Glass — will others get on board though? Will the explosion in popularity of virtual reality headsets help or hinder it? It's still a wild wild west.

The potential of wearables will only be realised through thoughtful integration of hardware and software” says Mind Pirate CEO Shawn Hardin. Right now, “much of the mature infrastructure of the mobile arena” is missing in the world of wearables. The “myriad of unique sensor and hardware configurations atop increasingly diverse operating systems” makes it particularly difficult for developers to get started."

Submission + - Become a Linux Kernel Hacker And Write Your Own Module

Submitted by M-Saunders
M-Saunders writes: It might sound daunting, but kernel hacking isn't a mysterious black art reserved for the geekiest of programmers. With a bit of background knowledge, anyone with a grounding in C can implement a new kernel module and understand how the kernel works internally. Linux Voice explains how to write a module that creates a new device node, /dev/reverse, that reverses a string when it's written to it. Sure, it's not the most practical example in the world, but it's a good starting point for your own projects, and gives you an insight into how it all fits together.

Submission + - iPhone and iPad Users Held to Ransom by Hacker in Australia (ibtimes.co.uk)

Submitted by DavidGilbert99
DavidGilbert99 writes: Multiple iPhone/iPad/Mac users in Australia are reporting their devices being remotely locked and a ransom demand being made to get them unlocked again. However unlike PC ransomware, the vector of attack here seems to be Apple's iCloud service with the attacker getting to a database of username/password credentials associated with the accounts. It is unclear if the database was one of Apple's or the hacker is simply using the fact that people reuse the same password for multiple accounts and is using data stolen from another source. Apple is yet to respond, but there has already been one report of the issue affecting a user in the UK.

Submission + - Long but brilliant explanation of why Snowden did right 1

Submitted by Bruce66423
Bruce66423 writes: http://www.theguardian.com/tec...
Gives a very full exposition of the mess that we are in and the need for real change. An interesting revelation — at least for me — Obama had indicated his intention to filibuster the law that protected telecoms from the consequences of their failure to resist NSA snooping. Then suddenly he voted in favour, after he was all but the Democratic candidate for President. The only question — how did they get to him...

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