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Submission + - Russia Moves from Summer Time to Standard Time (theguardian.com)

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: Russia's legislature, often accused of metaphorically turning back the clock, has decided to do it literally – abandoning the policy of keeping the country on daylight-saving time all year. The 2011 move to impose permanent "summer time" in 2011 was one of the most memorable and least popular initiatives of Dmitry Medvedev's presidency. It forced tens of millions to travel to their jobs in pitch darkness during the winter. In the depths of December, the sun doesn't clear the horizon in Moscow until 10am. The State Duma, the lower house of parliament, voted 442-1 on Tuesday to return to standard time this autumn and stay there all year.

Submission + - Time Warner Cable customers beg regulators to block sale to Comcast (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: New York is shaping up as a major battleground for Comcast's proposed acquisition of Time Warner Cable (TWC). While the $45.2 billion merger will be scrutinized by federal officials, it also needs approval at the state level.

TWC has 2.2 million cable TV, Internet, and phone customers in 1,150 New York communities, and hundreds of them have called on the New York Public Service Commission (PSC) to block the sale to Comcast. Comcast doesn't compete against TWC for subscribers, and its territory in New York is limited but includes a VoIP phone service offered to residential and business customers in 10 communities.

Submission + - BlackBerry back in profit (net4tech.net)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Upon arrival at the controls of BlackBerry last November, CEO John Chen seemed determined to turn things around. In only four months, it has already achieved its objectives, namely reducing operational costs by 30%. To do this, he has had to continue to cut in the workforce, reduced by half in two years.

John Chen estimated that BlackBerry has 80% chance of escape, against 50% a year ago. First positive sign. Results for the first quarter of 2014 During this period, it reported net income of $ 23 million against a loss of 84 million a year ago. However, these results take into account the sale of a building complex sold 500 million. Thus excluding exceptional items, BlackBerry still recorded a loss of $ 60 million, which is still two times lower than analysts' forecasts.

Submission + - The Scary New Evidence on BPA-Free Plastics (motherjones.com) 2

Submitted by The Grim Reefer
The Grim Reefer writes: Today many plastic products, from sippy cups and blenders to Tupperware containers, are marketed as BPA-free. But CertiChem and its founder, George Bittner's findings—some of which have been confirmed by other scientists—suggest that many of these alternatives share the qualities that make BPA so potentially harmful.

Those startling results set off a bitter fight with the $375-billion-a-year plastics industry. The American Chemistry Council, which lobbies for plastics makers and has sought to refute the science linking BPA to health problems, has teamed up with Tennessee-based Eastman Chemical—the maker of Tritan, a widely used plastic marketed as being free of estrogenic activity—in a campaign to discredit Bittner and his research. The company has gone so far as to tell corporate customers that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rejected Bittner's testing methods. (It hasn't.) Eastman also sued CertiChem and its sister company, PlastiPure, to prevent them from publicizing their findings that Tritan is estrogenic, convincing a jury that its product displayed no estrogenic activity. And it launched a PR blitz touting Tritan's safety, targeting the group most vulnerable to synthetic estrogens: families with young children. "It can be difficult for consumers to tell what is really safe," the vice president of Eastman's specialty plastics division, Lucian Boldea, said in one web video, before an image of a pregnant woman flickered across the screen. With Tritan, he added, "consumers can feel confident that the material used in their products is free of estrogenic activity."

Submission + - Congressman asks NSA to provide metadata for "lost" IRS e-mails (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by mpicpp
mpicpp writes: Representative Steve Stockman (R-TX) has sent a formal letter to the National Security Agency asking it to hand over “all its metadata” on the e-mail accounts of a former division director at the Internal Revenue Service.

“Your prompt cooperation in this matter will be greatly appreciated and will help establish how IRS and other personnel violated rights protected by the First Amendment,” Stockman wrote on Friday.

The request came hours after the IRS told a congressional committee that it had “lost” all of the former IRS Exempt Organizations division director’s e-mails between January 2009 and April 2011.

The IRS has been under investigation since 2013, when the tax agency revealed that it selectively targeted political groups applying for tax-exempt status, particularly those with conservative and “Tea Party” leanings and later those with liberal and “Occupy”-related names.

Submission + - Starbucks offers workers 2 years of free college (cnn.com)

Submitted by mpicpp
mpicpp writes: Starbucks baristas working through college are about to get an extra boost from their employer.
The company announced it will offer both full- and part-time employees a generous tuition reimbursement benefit that covers two full years of classes.

The benefit is through a partnership with Arizona State University's online studies program. Employees can choose any of more than 40 undergraduate degrees, and aren't limited to only business classes.

Submission + - Time Warner Parting Itself Out

Submitted by gavron
gavron writes: We all know about TW Cable being acquired by Comcast (subject to regulatory approval) http://corporate.comcast.com/t... but news from today is that their non-cable business is being purchased by Level3 for almost 6 BILLION dollars. http://dealbook.nytimes.com/20... .

What used to be the former "largest media and distribution company ever" (AOL Time Waner) is now nothing more than a garage of pieces being parceled off to the first available bidder. This might be good for consumers, but recently Time Warner (and Comcast) won awards for consumer hatred. http://time.com/106016/comcast...

Comment Re:didn't they decline H264 on Windows a while ago (Score 1) 403

I'm too lazy to find the source right now, but my recollection was that Mozilla was first to make a stance against H.264 (in order to not partition the Linux out), prior all those stories of Google dropping support for H.264 in Chrome (which I guess they never did, after all).

Comment Re:"OpenSSL C dialect" (Score 5, Informative) 164

by ConstantineM (#47028681) Attached to: 30-Day Status Update On LibreSSL

OpenSSL has basically wrote their own version of libc, and all the functions they've introduced differ is some very subtle ways from what appears in libc used by the rest of the world.

Rest assured, OpenBSD is no stranger to portable code. Just take a look at the number of platforms they support -- http://www.openbsd.org/plat.ht....

Submission + - Bob Beck gives a 30-day status update on LibreSSL at BSDCan in Ottawa

Submitted by ConstantineM
ConstantineM writes: Bob Beck — OpenBSD, OpenSSH and LibreSSL developer and the director of Alberta-based non-profit OpenBSD Foundation — gave a talk earlier today at BSDCan 2014 in Ottawa, discussing and illustrating the OpenSSL problems that have led to the creation of a big fork of OpenSSL that is still API-compatible with the original, providing for a drop-in replacement, without the #ifdef spaghetti and without its own "OpenSSL C" dialect.

Bob is claiming that the Maryland-incorporated OpenSSL Foundation is nothing but a for-profit front for FIPS consulting gigs, and that noone at OpenSSL is actually interested in maintaining OpenSSL, but merely adding more and more features, with the existing bugs rotting in bug-tracking for a staggering 4 years (CVE-2010-5298 has been independently re-discovered by the OpenBSD team after having been quietly reported in OpenSSL's RT some 4 years prior). Bob reports that the bug-tracking system abandoned by OpenSSL has actually been very useful to the OpenBSD developers at finding and fixing even more of OpenSSL bugs in downstream LibreSSL, which still remain unfixed in upstream OpenSSL. It is revealed that a lot of crude cleaning has already been completed, and the process is still ongoing, but some new ciphers already saw their addition to LibreSSL — RFC 5639 EC Brainpool, ChaCha20, Poly1305, FRP256v1, and some derivatives based on the above, like ChaCha20-Poly1305 AEAD EVP from Adam Langley's Chromium OpenSSL patchset.

To conclude, Bob warns against portable LibreSSL knockoffs, and asks the community for Funding Commitment — Linux Foundation is turning a blind eye to LibreSSL, and instead is only committed to funding OpenSSL directly, despite the apparent lack of security-oriented direction within the OpenSSL project upstream. Funding can be directed to the OpenBSD Foundation.

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