Bismillah - Slashdot User

Submission + - Royalty charges almost on par with component costs for smartphones: study (itnews.com.au)

Submitted by Bismillah on Thursday May 29, 2014 @05:12PM

Bismillah writes: An interesting study by WilmerHale lawyers and Intel's assistant general counsel Ann Armstrong looked into how much royalty payments and demands actually amount to per device, and found the cost so high it threatens industry profitability and competitiveness.

Submission + - China looks to Linux as Windows alternative

Submitted by Bismillah on Tuesday May 27, 2014 @02:21AM

Bismillah writes: Once again, after the Red Flag Linux effort that petered out this year, China is ogling the Penguin to sort out its pressing Windows XP issue. The Windows 8 ban by China's government procurement agency and promises of official support may help.

Submission + - Patent Troll Reform Dies in the Senate (washingtonpost.com)

Submitted by VT-802-Software on Thursday May 22, 2014 @03:18PM

VT-802-Software writes: A bipartisan proposal to curb patent trolls was shelved by the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) Wednesday....

"Supporters of the compromise accuse trial lawyers, universities, pharmaceutical companies and biotech companies for foiling the plan at the eleventh hour."

Submission + - Aussie cops arrest two Anons (itnews.com.au)

Submitted by Bismillah on Thursday May 22, 2014 @01:46AM

Bismillah writes: Australian Federal Police say they have arrested and charged one of the people behind the 2012 attack on MelbourneIT that saw 40GB of data taken by exploiting a backup server running a vulnerable version of Adobe ColdFusion.

The AFP says they also arrested an eighteen year old Penrith, New South Wales, resident for hacking.

Submission + - Federal car fleet to become test bed for high-tech safety gear (networkworld.com)

Submitted by coondoggie on Wednesday May 14, 2014 @02:45PM

coondoggie writes: Future autos leased by the federal government will be equipped with some advanced high-tech safety technology in an effort to test the equipment in real-life situations. The General Services Administration (GSA) and the Department of Transportation's National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) said they would team up on the program to further develop high-tech driver and vehicle safety technology.

Submission + - British government willing to block EU net neutrality deal (buzzfeed.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 14, 2014 @09:01AM

An anonymous reader writes: The British government has said it will block the EU's recently signed net neutrality deal if it stops it censoring the internet. The European Parliament passed net neutrality legislation last month, but member state governments have to sign off the plan before it can become law.

Submission + - New Zealand spy agency to vet network builds, provider staff. (itnews.com.au)

Submitted by Bismillah on Monday May 12, 2014 @05:11PM

Bismillah writes: The new Telecommunications (Interception Capability and Security) Act of 2013 is in effect in New Zealand and brings in several drastic changes for ISPs, telcos and service providers.

One of the country's spy agencies, the GCSB, gets to decide on network equipment procurement and design decisions, plus operators have to register with the police and obtain security clearance for some staff.

Somewhat illogically, the NZ government pushed through the law combining mandated communications interception capabilities for law enforcement, with undefined network security requirements as decided by the GCSB.

All network operators are subject to the new law, including local providers as well as the likes of Facebook, Google, Microsoft, who have opposed it, saying the new statutes clash with overseas privacy legislation.

Submission + - OpenSSH no longer has to depend on OpenSSL (gmane.org)

Submitted by ConstantineM on Wednesday April 30, 2014 @12:51PM

ConstantineM writes: What has been planned for a long time now, prior to the infamous heartbleed fiasco of OpenSSL (which does not affect SSH at all), is now officially a reality — with the help of some recently adopted crypto from DJ Bernstein, OpenSSH now finally has a compile-time option to no longer depend on OpenSSL — `make OPENSSL=no` has now been introduced for a reduced configuration OpenSSH to be built without OpenSSL, which would leave you with no legacy SSH-1 baggage at all, and on the SSH-2 front with only AES-CTR and chacha20+poly1305 ciphers, ECDH/curve25519 key exchange and Ed25519 public keys.

Submission + - Critical Infrastructure Initiative panic reaction to Heartbleed: ESR (itnews.com.au)

Submitted by Bismillah on Sunday April 27, 2014 @06:27PM

Bismillah writes: "They have backers with money, but no plan and no staff. We need to work out a way to either merge or not to step on each other," ESR believes.

ICEI being the Internet Civil Engineering Institute [site locked currently] that Eric S Raymond and others were about to launch soon, but then Heartbleed came along.

Submission + - Next-Gen Intel "Alpine Ridge" Thunderbolt Controller Detailed (techpowerup.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 21, 2014 @11:12AM

An anonymous reader writes: The controller leverages PCI-Express gen 3.0 to double bandwidth of the interface. It will launch around the same time as Intel's next-generation Core "Skylake" processors (some time in 2015), and in a typical implementation, will be wired to the CPU's root-complex, and not that of the PCH. With PCIe 3.0 x4 or PCIe 3.0 x2 links at its disposal, the controller can push data at a staggering 40 Gbps. The link can also ferry DisplayPort, HDMI 2.0, and USB 3.0 data through its link layer. That bandwidth should enable you to plug in up to two Ultra HD displays, apart from your storage array.

Submission + - OpenSSL bug allows attackers to read memory in 64k chunks (itnews.com.au)

Submitted by Bismillah on Monday April 07, 2014 @06:48PM

Bismillah writes: A potentially very serious bug in OpenSSL 1.0.1 and 1.0.2 beta has been discovered that can leak just about any information, from keys to content.

Better yet, it appears to have been introduced in 2011, and known since March 2012.

Submission + - Teenage hacker generates fake boarding passes with Apple Passbook (itnews.com.au)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 03, 2014 @10:37PM

An anonymous reader writes: Teenage hacker claims to have developed a method to score free flights across Europe by generating fake boarding passes designed for Apple's Passbook app.

Submission + - AWS admits it scans Android apps to find secret keys (itnews.com.au)

Submitted by AlbanX on Monday March 31, 2014 @11:40PM

AlbanX writes: Amazon Web Services admitted it decompiles Android apps to find out if its secret keys have been accidentally hard-coded within.

An Android app developer was contacted by AWS and told his credentials had been found within an app he developed. He was asked to remove them and use temporary creds within apps in the future.

Submission + - Routing and DNS security ignored by ISPs

Submitted by Bismillah on Wednesday March 19, 2014 @01:15AM

Bismillah writes: The re-routing of Google's public DNS servers last weekend was yet another example of how easy it is to "steal the Internet" by abusing today's trust-based networks.

Problem is, ISPs don't seem to care about that, or securing DNS which is another attack vector that doesn't require compromising endusers' systems.

Why isn't more done to secure routing and DNS then?

Submission + - Aussie A-G wants enforced decryption of govt intercepted user data

Submitted by Bismillah on Sunday March 16, 2014 @07:58PM

Bismillah writes: If Attorney-General Brandis gets his way in the process of revising Australia's Telecommunications Interception Act, users and providers of VPNs and other encrypted services will by law be required to decrypt government intercepted data. Because, "sophisticated criminals and terrorists."

Across the Tasman, New Zealand already has a similar law, the Telecommunications Interception and Computer Security Act. Apparently, large Internet service providers such as Microsoft and Facebook won't be exempt from the TICSA and must facilitate interception of traffic.

Slashdot Top Deals