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+ - Billion Pixel Photo of Mars Snapped by Curiosity->

Submitted by astroengine
astroengine writes "If you were in any doubt as to Curiosity’s photography prowess, this panorama of Gale Crater should allay your concerns. In this billion-pixel photo from Mars, NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory snapped nearly 900 separate images that were then stitched together to create a wonderful high-definition view from the robot’s mast-mounted cameras. “It gives a sense of place and really shows off the cameras’ capabilities,” said Bob Deen of the Multi-Mission Image Processing Laboratory at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., who assembled the scene. “You can see the context and also zoom in to see very fine details.”"
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+ - 21 Financial Sites Found to Store Sensitive Data in Browser Disk Cache->

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "The LA Times mentions that after visiting well known sites such as ADP, Verizon Wireless, Scottrade, Geico, Equifax, PayPal and Allstate, sensitive data remains in the browser disk cache despite those sites using SSL. This included full credit reports, prescription history, payroll statements, partial SSNs, credit card statements, and canceled checks. Web servers are supposed to send a Cache-Control: no-store header to prevent this, but many of the sites are sending non-standard headers recognized only by Internet Explorer, and others are sending no cache headers at all. While browsers were once cautious about writing content received over SSL to the disk cache, today, most do so by default unless the server specifies otherwise."
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+ - They Deactivate Droids, Don't They?

Submitted by malachiorion
malachiorion writes "Does George Lucas hate metal people? I know, sounds like standard click-bait, but I think I present a relatively troll-free argument in the piece I wrote for Slate:

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2013/06/droids_in_star_wars_the_plight_of_the_robotic_underclass.html

We stuck to the Star Wars canon, in pointing out the relatively grim state of affairs for droid rights, and the lack of any real sympathy for their plight from the heroes, or, it would seem, George Lucas. C-3PO is more correct than he might realize, when the says that droids "seem to be made to suffer.""

+ - Microsoft Launches $100k Bug Bounty Program

Submitted by Trailrunner7
Trailrunner7 writes "After years of saying that the company didn’t need a bug bounty program, Microsoft is starting one. The company today will announce the start of a new program that will pay security researchers up to $100,000 for serious vulnerabilities and as much as $50,000 for new defensive techniques that help protect against those flaws.

Microsoft security officials say that the program has been a long time in development, and the factor that made this the right time to launch is the recent rise of vulnerability brokers. Up until quite recently, most of the researchers who found bugs in Microsoft products reported them directly to the company. That’s no longer the case.

The system that Microsoft is kicking off on June 26 will pay researchers $100,000 for a new exploit technique that is capable of bypassing the latest existing mitigations in the newest version of Windows."

+ - Crack iOS Mobile Hotspot Passwords in Less than a Minute->

Submitted by msm1267
msm1267 writes "Business travelers who tether their iPhones as mobile hotspots beware. Researchers at the University of Erlanger-Nuremberg in Germany have discovered a weakness in the way iOS generates default passwords for such connections that can leave a user’s device vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks, information leakage or abuse of the user’s Internet connection.

Andreas Kurtz, Felix Freiling and Daniel Metz published a paper that describes the inner workings of how an attacker can exploit the PSK (pre-shared key) authentication iOS uses to establish a secure WPA2 connection when using the Apple smartphone as a hotspot. The researchers said that attackers would find the least resistance attacking the PSK setup rather than trying their hand at beating the operating system’s complex programming layers."
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Google News Sci Tech: Tesla Drops on Partial Model S Recall - TheStreet.com->

From feed by feedfeeder

Tesla Drops on Partial Model S Recall
TheStreet.com
NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Tesla Motors (TSLA) shares dropped 1.96% to $101.36 after the company announced it will be recalling some versions of the popular Model S because of a faulty mounting bracket. In a note on the company's Web site, Tesla said...

and more

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+ - AR glasses let profs know if students are understanding their lectures->

Submitted by cylonlover
cylonlover writes "Despite university professors telling their students to shout out if they don’t understand what’s being said in a lecture, few students are likely to feel comfortable raising their hand in front of the class and saying “I don’t get it.” Scientists at Spain’s la Universidad Carlos III de Madrid are hoping to address that situation, with a set of augmented reality glasses that let profs see who’s “not getting it,” without those students having to say so verbally."
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+ - NSA's Role In Terror Cases Concealed From Defense Lawyers

Submitted by Rick Zeman
Rick Zeman writes ""Confidentiality is critical to national security." So wrote the Justice Department in concealing the NSA's role in two wiretap cases. However, now that the NSA is under the gun, it's apparently not, according to New York attorney Joshua Dratel: “National security is about keeping illegal conduct concealed from the American public until you’re forced to justify it because someone ratted you out" as the first he heard of the NSA's role in his client's case was "....when [FBI deputy director Sean] Joyce disclosed it on CSPAN to argue for the effectiveness of the NSA’s spying.
Dratel challenged the legality of the spying in 2011, and asked a federal judge to order the government to produce the wiretap application the FBI gave the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to justify the surveillance.
“Disclosure of the FISA applications to defense counsel – who possess the requisite security clearance – is also necessary to an accurate determination of the legality of the FISA surveillance, as otherwise the defense will be completely in the dark with respect to the basis for the FISA surveillance,” wrote Dratel.

The government fought the request in a remarkable 60-page reply, some of it redacted as classified in the public docket. The Justice Department argued that the defendants had no right to see any of the filings from the secret court, and instead the judge could review the filings alone in chambers. “Confidentiality is critical to national security,” the government wrote."

+ - Google's crazy lack of focus: Is it really serious about enterprise?->

Submitted by curtwoodward
curtwoodward writes "Driverless cars. Balloon-based wireless networks. Face-mounted computers. Gigabit broadband networks. In recent months, Google has been unveiling a series of transformative side projects that paint a picture of the search pioneer expanding far beyond an online advertising company. At the same time, Google has been trying to convince enterprise software buyers that it's finally, really, truly serious about competing with Microsoft for their business. Which version of Google's future should you believe?"
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+ - Shades of Jack Ryan: altering text in eBooks to track pirates->

Submitted by wwphx
wwphx writes "German researchers have created a new DRM feature that changes the text and punctuation of an e-book ever so slightly. Called SiDiM, which Google translates to “secure documents by individual marking,” the changes are unique to each e-book sold. These alterations serve as a digital watermark that can be used to track books that have had any other DRM layers stripped out of them before being shared online. The researchers are hoping the new DRM feature will curb digital piracy by simply making consumers paranoid that they’ll be caught if they share an e-book illicitly.

Seems like I recall reading about this in Tom Clancy's Hunt for Red October when Jack Ryan used this technique to identify someone who was leaking secrets to the Russians. It would be so very difficult for someone to write a little program that, when stripping the DRM, randomized a couple of pieces of punctuation to break the hash that the vendor is storing along with the sales record of the individual book."
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+ - Oculus Rift raises another $16 million->

Submitted by Craefter
Craefter writes "On the E3 it seems that the Oculus Rift caused a mental erection with the investors this year. Some investors (Spark Capital and Matrix Partners) were able to push $16 million in the direction of Oculus VR in the hopes for the product to hype.
This is all very nice, the HD unit looks a bit more slick than the ski goggles with the tablet glued in front of it from the first version but it would have been better if the next gen consoles would commit support for it. We all know how well the wave stick from the PS3 was adapted as an afterthought.
That said, major titles like the 9 year old Half-Life 2 and the 6 year old Team Fortress 2 are getting full support for the Oculus. I hope in the future developers would implement support for a VR headset per-default in their games and not years after the fact. A bit like the EAX standard from Soundblaster. That worked out well too."
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+ - Fanboys and trolls are the cancer killing Free Software-> 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "Martin Gräßlin, the maintainer of the KWin window manager, writes an informative blog post about his experiences with the less favorable pockets of the Free Software community:

Years ago I had a clear political opinion. I was a civil-rights activist. I appreciated freedom and anything limiting freedom was a problem to me. Freedom of speech was one of the most important rights for me. I thought that democracy has to be able to survive radical or insulting opinions. In a democracy any opinion should have a right even if it’s against democracy. I had been a member of the lawsuit against data preservation in Germany. I supported the German Pirate Party during the last election campaign because of a new censorship law. That I became a KDE developer is clearly linked to the fact that it is a free software community.

But over the last years my opinion changed. Nowadays I think that not every opinion needs to be tolerated. I find it completely acceptable to censor certain comments and encourage others to censor, too. What was able to change my opinion in such a radical way? After all I still consider civil rights as extremely important. The answer is simple: Fanboys and trolls.

"
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+ - Google Patents Image-Capturing Walking Sticks 2

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes "GeekWire reports that Google has patented an image-capturing walking stick, which can boldly go where no Google Street View Car can. The walking stick has embedded cameras and location sensors, and a switch at the bottom that causes the device to snap pictures whenever the stick hits the ground. The patent also covers using canes and crutches in a similar fashion."

+ - Microsoft to start dumping Surface RT to schools for $199->

Submitted by onyxruby
onyxruby writes "In a move that will remind many of Apple in the 80's Microsoft is going to start dumping Surface RT computers to educational institutions. In a further effort to try to gain mind share for their disastrous Surface RT platform Microsoft is giving away 10,000 Surface RT's to teachers through the ISTE (International Society for Technology in Education).

The strategy of flooding the educational market was quite successful for Apple. Unfortunately for Microsoft today's computers require management and the Surface RT presents significant management challenges in terms of the inability to join the computer to a domain or available management tools."
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