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Crime

Submission + - Apple's New iPhone is Popular -- with Crooks

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "A mini-crime wave is rolling out across the nation as crooks clamor to get their hands on the tech giant's latest gadget as Patrick May reports that the iPhone 5 has quickly become the smartphone de rigueur for thieves and robbers throughout the land who are whipping out guns and assaulting people for the mobile devices. "Then basically they do a quick turnaround and sell it on the black market somewhere in the city, where they make a profit and then go rob more people," says San Francisco police spokesman Albie Esparza. Victims are also losing iPads, MP3 players as well as Android devices said Esparza adding that through the end of August, there were 2,374 robberies, and of those 1,199 involved cellphones. "Just before the new iPhone came out, we had a record low in thefts for the year," says New York City Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly noting that so far this year 11,447 Apple products have been stolen in the Big Apple, with the highly touted release of the iPhone 5 putting the department on higher alert. "It's as if the criminals were waiting for the new version. After all, why steal an iPhone 4S when they can steal an iPhone 5?""

Submission + - DNT-by-default is the wrong choice? (ana.net)

Submitted by dgharmon
dgharmon writes: 'In May of this year, Microsoft announced that it was building “do not track” by default into its upcoming Internet browser .. Microsoft’s announcement has been uniformly met with outrage, opposition, and declarations that Microsoft’s action is wrong. The entire media ecosystem has condemned this action'

Submission + - Shakedowns to Fix Negative Online Reviews (ksl.com)

Submitted by unjedai
unjedai writes: A company is putting horrible reviews of small business online, and then offering to improve the company's reputation and take the reviews off for a fraction of the cost that a real reputation improvement company would charge. Sierra West received a call from a "reputation improvement company" telling them they had a negative review online and that the company would take the review offline if Sierra West paid $500. "Of course when someone is offering $500 the day (the bad review) goes up seemed not legitimate."

Submission + - Parallella: A Supercomputer For Everyone (kickstarter.com)

Submitted by Dade916
Dade916 writes: Making parallel computing easy to use has been described as "a problem as hard as any that computer science has faced". With such a big challenge ahead, we need to make sure that every programmer has access to cheap and open parallel hardware and development tools. Inspired by great hardware communities like Raspberry Pi and Arduino, there is a critical need for a truly open, high-performance computing platform that will close the knowledge gap in parallel programing. The goal of the Parallella project is to democratize access to parallel computing. Check http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/adapteva/parallella-a-supercomputer-for-everyone if you are interested to contribute to the project.
Books

Submission + - Amazon delays new Kindle Paperwhite orders 4-6 weeks!

Submitted by
destinyland
destinyland writes: "One day after its official release, Amazon has already sold out of the Kindle Paperwhite. Pre-orders "have far exceeded our expectations," an Amazon executive announced Monday, and new orders have now been delayed 4-6 weeks. (Amazon's also imposing a limit on new orders to two per customer.) One Kindle blogger asks whether the demand is due to positive reviews of the new Kindle with its built-in screen lighting, or if Amazon manufactured their first batch in a smaller-than-usual quantity, "to help create the perception that their new device has already become so wildly popular that it was selling out — when in fact, Amazon just hadn’t built that many of them in the first place.""
Science

Submission + - Exoplanets form never-seen-before celestial alignment (newscientist.com)

Submitted by CelestialScience
CelestialScience writes: The heavens have aligned in a way never seen before, with two exoplanets overlapping as they cross their star. Teruyuki Hirano of the University of Tokyo, Japan, and colleagues used data from the Kepler space telescope to probe KOI-94, a star seemingly orbited by four planets. It seems that one planet candidate, KOI-94.03, passed in front of the star and then the innermost candidate, KOI-94.01, passed between the two. The phenomenon is so new it doesn't yet have a name though suggestions include "planet-planet eclipse", "double transit", "syzygy" and "exosyzygy".
Google

Submission + - Google Alerts Users About New State-Sponsored Attacks (net-security.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Remember when in June Google announced its intention to start warning Gmail users that their account might be targeted by state-sponsored attackers? A clear warning above the Gmail inbox would pop up no matter what browser the users used, and it was not limited only to those whose accounts have been hijacked, but were also seen by users the Google believed might be targets. Mike Wiacek, a manager on Google’s information security team, said to the NYT that since then, Google has improved its knowledge on attack methods and the groups behind them, and has started pushing out new alerts on Tuesday — as evidenced by a slew of U.S. journalists, researchers and foreign policy experts who said they already received the warning.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Looking for tech-focused radio

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: I'm looking for a radio station (broadcast or internet, but not satellite) that focuses on tech stories, and other things interesting to nerds. Something like a cross between Slashdot and NPR, with the topics of the former, and the in depth reporting of the latter. Any suggestions? Broadcast stations would be for the Boston, MA area, but other readers might also be interested in stations elsewhere.
Data Storage

Submission + - Windows 8 Storage Pools - Is it ready?

Submitted by coreboarder
coreboarder writes: One of the most touted, and desirable, features in Windows 8 is Storage Spaces. As per Ars Technica – “With Storage Spaces, physical disks are grouped together intopools, andpoolsare then carved up intospaces, which are formatted with a regular file system and are used day-to-day just like regular disks.” In other words, awesome stuff for the home user with lots of digital items they want to keep safe.

Now some may call it a poor mans ZFS, but anything that adds a level of security to the ability to continue to access ones data is a good thing IMHO.

That said, is it really ready for primetime? Microsoft very much say so but others are not so sure. What experiences to date have the collective /. Community had?
The Internet

Submission + - IETF starts work on next-generation HTTP standard (networkworld.com)

Submitted by alphadogg
alphadogg writes: With an eye towards updating the Web to better accommodate complex and bandwidth-hungry applications, the Internet Engineering Task Force has started work on the next generation of HTTP, the underlying protocol for the Web. "It's official: We're working on HTTP/2.0," wrote IETF Hypertext Transfer Protocol working group chair Mark Nottingham, in a Twitter message late Tuesday. The group will use the IETF standard SPDY protocol as the basis for the updated protocol. Engineers at Google developed SPDY as a way to hasten the delivery of Web content over the Internet.

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