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Android

+ - Research Shows Half of All Androids Contain Known Vulnerabilities->

Submitted by Trailrunner7
Trailrunner7 (1100399) writes "About half of all Android phones contain at least one vulnerability that could be used to take control of the device, according to new research. Duo Security, which launched a free vulnerability scanning app for Android this summer, said their preliminary data from users shows a huge number of the devices are vulnerable to at least one of the known Android flaws.

The X-Ray app from Duo scans Android devices for a set of known vulnerabilities in a variety of the Android releases. Many of them are flaws that attackers have used in the last few months. The main issue with Android security and patches is that each carrier is responsible for pushing out new versions of the operating system to its users and they all do it on random timelines. There's no set interval for updates and users don't have to upgrade, so there's a good chance that many users are running older, vulnerable versions of Android at any given time."
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Red Hat Software

+ - Twin Peaks v Red Hat - got them by the balls!->

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "When we were little we were taught to always look both ways before crossing the street. The same lesson should be learned by companies that make software but choose to assert their patent(s) against others. Any time you make a claim of patent infringement and you are a producer you face the possibility of counterclaims unrelated to your patents, and those claims are not limited to patent infringement claims. This is a lesson now being learned by Twin Peaks Software in what may be the most important GPL enforcement action to date. Twin Peaks, having sued Red Hat and Red Hat subsidiary Gluster for patent infringement, now faces a counterclaim for copyright infringement for including critical GPL code in its products while failing to comply with the GPL. If Red Hat is successful on that claim and obtains a permanent injunction, which it is requesting, Twin Peaks could be out of business."
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Science

+ - Opening Soon: The North-West Passage->

Submitted by
DevotedSkeptic
DevotedSkeptic writes "Every time a new sea ice extent record is broken, the same question comes up: how long until it’s gone? That is, how long will it be before the Arctic Ocean is functionally ice-free in the summer, legitimately opening the once-fabled Northwest Passage?

The fact is, we don’t know. Climate models continue to underestimate the rate of sea ice loss we’re observing, leaving researchers to hazard less scientific guesses. Many estimate that day will come around 2030, but some others push it out to 2070. Regardless, Arctic sea ice is changing—and fast. The prospects of open shipping routes and newly-accessible resources have corporations chomping at the bit and governments racing to prepare the way. Three (open access) articles in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists describe the outlook for a changing Arctic from the perspectives of the US, Russia, and Canada. There will be some disagreements, but all parties have at least one view in common—things will get complicated.

The Three big issues that will appear when the Polar Ice Cap fully melts in the summer are: Shipping, Mineral Rights, and Defense and Management.

Shipping brings fuel and tankers into as well as ice breakers if the Arctic becomes a shipping route. Not to mention search and rescue facilities and safe harbors.

With an estimated 30 percent of the worlds's undeveloped natural gas and 13 percent of undeveloped oil resources there will be mineral rights disputes over these resources.

Defense of a North shore that previously could remain undefended (except for listening posts etc) may require Canada to step up it's presence along it's north coast."
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Intel

+ - Intel says Clover Trail won't work with Linux->

Submitted by girlmad
girlmad (2404748) writes "Intel's Clover Trail Atom processor can be seen in various non-descript laptops around IDF and the firm provided a lot of architectural details on the chip, confirming details such as dual-core and a number of power states. However Intel said Clover Trail "is a Windows 8 chip" and that "the chip cannot run Linux".

While Intel's claim that Clover Trail won't run Linux is not quite true — after all it is an x86 instruction set so there is no major reason why the Linux kernel and userland will not run — given that the firm will not support it, device makers are unlikely to produce Linux Clover Trail devices for their own support reasons."
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+ - Patent troll sues X-Plane-> 2

Submitted by symbolset
symbolset (646467) writes "X-plane is a cross-platform flight simulator app, notably the only serious one that supports Mac OSX and Linux. It's under threat by an NPE (Non Practicing Entity), Uniloc, suing for things X-Plane has done for decades. X-plane cannot afford to defend this suit, so if somebody doesn't step up and defend them then we lose X-plane forever."
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+ - There's enough wind energy to power Earth 200x over->

Submitted by
notscientific
notscientific writes "Renewable sources of energy are obviously a hit but they have as yet failed to live up to the hype. A new study in Nature Climate Change shows however that there is more than enough power to be harnessed from the wind to sustain Earth's entire population... x200! To generate energy from the wind, we may however need to set up wind farms at altitudes of 200-20,000 metres. To be fair, the study is purely theoretical and does not look at the feasibility of such potential wind farms. Regardless, the paper does provide a major boost to backers of wind-generated energy. Because science has confirmed that the sky's the limit."
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The Courts

+ - Dutch court rules hyperlinks illegal

Submitted by
Ubi_NL
Ubi_NL writes "In today's ruling of Playboy (via publisher Sanoma) vs Dutch blog Geenstijl, the court ruled that hyperlinking to copyrighted material was itself infringement of copyright. The court ordered the blog to remove all links to the infringing links (court ruling in dutch). How this ruling fits into the supreme court ruling that hyperlinks cannot by themselves infringe copyright is still to be discussed, possibly in an appeal. An interesting detail of the case is that the anonymous source that pointed Geenstijl to the images did this from an IP address within the Sanoma organisation..."

Comment: Re:Try to get First Post on Slashdot (Score 2) 515

by bdsesq (#40574467) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Old Dogs vs. New Technology?

What will really happen is that after a while they will bring all the problems to you.
"He can solve it. Why should I do the work?"
Be careful what you wish for. And don't resent them for doing it.

I just retired after 40 years of being like you.
It never gets old. But you do!

Live long and prosper.

The superior man understands what is right; the inferior man understands what will sell. -- Confucius

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