54881619
submission
alphadogg writes:
Computing pioneers with roots at Apple and IBM passed, as did brilliant young Internet innovators. A look back at those who died this past year.
54666923
submission
alphadogg writes:
Security researcher Mikko Hypponen has canceled his talk at a RSA security conference in San Francisco, reacting to a report that the security division of EMC allegedly received $10 million from the National Security Agency to use a flawed random number generator in one of its products. In an open letter http://www.f-secure.com/weblog/archives/00002651.html on Monday to EMC CEO Joseph Tucci and RSA executive chair Art Coviello, Hypponen (who is chief research officer at Finnish security company F-Secure), referred to a report by Reuters which stated that RSA accepted a random number generator from the NSA, and set it as the default option in its product BSafe, in return for the payment from the NSA.
54520929
submission
alphadogg writes:
Most webcams have a warning light that indicates when they're active, but it's possible for malware to disable this important privacy feature on older Mac computers, according to research https://jscholarship.library.jhu.edu/bitstream/handle/1774.2/36569/camera.pdf from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. JHU Assistant Research Professor Stephen Checkoway and graduate student Matthew Brocker investigated the hardware design of the first-generation iSight webcam model installed in Apple's iMac and MacBook computers released before 2008 and found that its firmware could easily be modified to disable the indicator LED.
54520785
submission
alphadogg writes:
Kill-switch technology that can render a lost or stolen smartphone useless would become mandatory in California under a new bill that will be proposed to the state legislature in January. The bill will be introduced by Senator Mark Leno, a Democrat representing San Francisco and neighboring towns, and George GascA3n, the district attorney for San Francisco. GascA3n has been spearheading a push by major law-enforcement agencies across the U.S. for more to be done to prevent smartphone theft. The proposed law could reach well beyond the borders of California. Because of the difficulty and added cost of producing handsets solely for sale in California, it could serve to make kill-switch technology a standard feature on phones sold across the U.S.
54477583
submission
alphadogg writes:
A startup plans to demonstrate next month at CES a new digital modulation scheme that promises to dramatically boost bandwidth, capacity, and range, with less power and less distortion, on both wireless and wired networks. MagnaCom, a privately held company based in Israel, now has more than 70 global patent applications, and 15 issued patents in the U.S., for what it calls and has trademarked Wave Modulation (or WAM), which is designed to replace the long-dominant quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) used in almost every wired or wireless product today on cellular, microwave radio, Wi-Fi, satellite and cable TV, and optical fiber networks. The vendor, which has released few specifics about WAM, promises extravagant benefits: up to 10 decibels of additional gain compared to the most advanced QAM schemes today; up to 50% less power; up to 400% more distance; up to 50% spectrum savings.
54474965
submission
alphadogg writes:
Fortinet, one of the biggest computer security vendors, is suing rival Sophos alleging it poached senior staff in breach of an agreement signed when a Fortinet executive jumped ship to Sophos earlier this year. At the center of the case, filed this week in federal court in San Jose, is the departure of Michael Valentine , a top sales executive at Fortinet. He left the company in February this year for a similar job at Sophos. According to Fortinet's complaint, Valentine was followed to Sophos by "numerous important Fortinet employees, including senior executives" in the two months after he left. Three left Fortinet in the same week and another followed several months later, the complaint says. Sophos could not immediately be reached for comment.
54435841
submission
alphadogg writes:
A tribute to young and old who passed in 2013 for their contributions to the worlds of technology, science and inventions — from early computer pioneers to Internet visionaries.
54400687
submission
alphadogg writes:
Engineers are putting the final touches on a network capable of handling up to 54Tbps of traffic when the Winter Olympics opens on Feb. 7 in the Russian city of Sochi. The two locations where the Olympics will take place — the Olympic village in Sochi and a tight cluster of Alpine venues in the nearby Krasnaya Polyana Mountains — are completely new construction, so this project represents a greenfield environment for Avaya, the company heading up the project. In addition to investing in a telecom infrastructure, Russia is spending billions of dollars to upgrade Sochi’s electric power grid, its transportation system and even its sewage treatment facilities.
54290781
submission
alphadogg writes:
Microsoft has joined the FIDO Alliance, an industry group attempting to craft industry standards that reduce reliance on passwords, long regarded as a weak point in Web security. Launched in July 2012, FIDO, which stands for Fast IDentity Online, is hoping its specifications for security devices and browser plugins will be widely adopted across the technology industry. FIDO envisions a software client that's installed on computers that employ public key cryptography to authenticate users. All major Web browsers will be supported.
54254781
submission
alphadogg writes:
The ITU has taken a big step in the standardization of G.fast, a broadband technology capable of achieving download speeds of up to 1Gbps over copper telephone wire. The death of copper and the ascent of fiber has long been discussed. However, the cost of rolling out fiber is still too high for many operators that instead want to upgrade their existing copper networks. So there is still a need for technologies that can complement fiber, including VDSL2 and G.fast. Higher speeds are needed for applications such as 4K streaming, IPTV, cloud-based storage, and communication via HD video, ITU said.
54024955
submission
alphadogg writes:
The U.S. Department of Defense may have found a new way to scan millions of lines of software code for vulnerabilities, by turning the practice into a set of video games and puzzles and having volunteers do the work. Having gamers identify potentially problematic chunks of code could help lower the work load of trained vulnerability analysts by "an order of magnitude or more," said John Murray, a program director in SRI International's computer science laboratory who helped create one of the games, called Xylem. DARPA has set up a site, called Verigames, http://www.verigames.com/ that offers five free games that can be played online or, in Xylem's case, on an Apple iPad.
53950859
submission
alphadogg writes:
There are currently several million smartphones certified to run on a "HotSpot 2.0" Wi-Fi network, which promises automatic Wi-Fi authentication and connection, and seamless roaming between different Wi-Fi hotspot brands, and eventually between Wi-Fi and cellular connections. In November, about 400 smartphone users finally got a chance to do so — in Beijing, China. The next big public demonstration of what’s confusingly referred to as both Hotspot 2.0 and Next Generation Hotspot will be in February: an estimated 75,000 attendees at the next Mobile World Congress in Barcelona will be able to take part.
53940455
submission
alphadogg writes:
Organizations drowning in big and small data will soon have a new way to wrangle, munge or transform it – however you want to describe the process – thanks to software from startup Trifacta that's now in beta tests. The San Francisco company, whose staff has grown from its three computer scientist founders a year ago to a robust 22 employees, Thursday announced a second round of venture funds totaling $12 million led by Greylock Partners and Accel Partners. That brings overall funding to $16.3 million. The new funds will allow Trifacta to bulk up product design, engineering, sales and marketing, and should pave the way for the company to roll out its data management technology next year. First-time CEO Joe Hellerstein says Trifacta software sits “in the lifecycle of data between the time it has landed in infrastructure – typically something like Hadoop – and the time it is consumed in business intelligence or predictive analytics tools.”
53891607
submission
alphadogg writes:
Once upon a time some Carnegie Mellon University researchers came up with a scheme http://arxiv.org/pdf/1302.5122.pdf to use stories and pictures to help users live happily ever after by creating and remembering dozens of passwords – and avoiding use of the exact same passwords for multiple sites. The trick though is that users need to repeat and practice those one-sentence stories a lot at the start so that the tales and related images stick in their heads. The photos serve as mnemonic devices to trigger memories of the stories and words that can be used to secure multiple online accounts.
53890473
submission
JG0LD writes:
Georgia Tech graduate student Doug Mackey didn’t set out to fix a potentially disastrous issue in a major government healthcare records system – originally, he’d simply meant to outline the relative vulnerability of large government computer systems in general to attacks by foreign governments, as a final project for a Master's in Information Security degree.
