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Cloud

Submission + - What It's Like to Work for a Cloud Service Provider (computerworld.com)

Submitted by Lucas123
Lucas123 writes: As enterprises increasingly consider moving their computing infrastructure to the cloud, IT professionals wonder whether they should follow the migration. Jake Robinson said he remembers the day he really understood what it means to work on "the other side of the cloud." It was Thanksgiving, a couple of years ago. A customer posted an iPhone app designed to give users access to coupons and discounts the following day, Black Friday. The retailer had vastly underestimated demand for the app, and the ASP's database crashed. A solutions architect, Robinson was called in and spent most of the holiday tuning the client's database server to handle the traffic. Computerworld spoke to a half-dozen IT professionals who worked for cloud service providers to get their their experiences.
Java

Submission + - 1 Billion at Risk from Java Vulnerability (computerworld.com)

Submitted by
jcatcw
jcatcw writes: "Just as Oracle is ramping up for the September 30 start of JavaOne 2012 in San Francisco, researchers from the Polish firm Security Explorations disclosed yet another critical Java vulnerability that might "spoil the taste of Larry Ellison's morning ... Java." According to Security Explorations researcher Adam Gowdiak, who sent the email to the Full Disclosure Seclist, this Java exploit affects one billion users of Oracle Java SE software, Java 5, 6 and 7. It could be exploited by apps on Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera and Safari. Wow, thanks a lot Oracle."
Security

Submission + - ToorCamp: Adventures in an American hacker camp (computerworld.com)

Submitted by jcatcw
jcatcw writes: While a tech camping event might sound like an oxymoron, hackers, makers, breakers and shakers assembled at the northwestern tip of the USA for ToorCamp and dispelled the notion that all hackers avoid sunshine and the great outdoors. As you would expect from a hacker conference, there were workshops like the one for lock picking and a plethora of presentations from “hacking computers to brain hacking, from brewing soda to fighting robots, from civil rights to lightning guns.” Then unique aspects of this cool hacker camp get more bizarre . . like the laser that was so bright it required FAA clearance to deploy it, the ShadyTel community 'payphone,' the Temple of Robotron, an RFID implantation station, bike jousting, dancing robots and of course campfires. Need an even stranger adventure that's also in the ToorCon family of hacking conferences? There's the upcoming WorldToor, the first ever hacker conference in Antarctica.

Submission + - Booted from airplane for wearing anti-TSA T-shirt (rt.com)

Submitted by Cigarra
Cigarra writes: PhD student Arijit learned the hard way that in Brave New America you can't mock TSA's Security Theater and go on about your business. According to a recolection in RT.com:

After being vigorously screened and questioned multiple times, Arijit says he was finally given permission, once more, to board his plane. The pilot of the aircraft, however, had had enough of the whole ordeal and asked the Delta supervisor to relay the message that, due to the discomfort the shirt had caused, neither Arijit nor his wife would be allowed to board the aircraft.

Just how much humiliation is the general American public willing to tolerate in the name of 'security'?
Security

Submission + - FEMA trains for zero day attack on US infrastructure by 'The Void' hacktivists (computerworld.com)

Submitted by jcatcw
jcatcw writes: “A network of hacktivists known as The Void today threatened to unleash, and I’m quoting here, ‘a global day of extreme action against U.S. interests and organizations, both private and government-related’.” From here, the cybersecurity nightmare begins because fictitious hacktivists from The Void have a zero day and have threatened to attack America’s critical infrastructure. Don’t panic. This is a test. This is only a test in a FEMA cybersecurity exercise. The scenario in the National Level Exercise (NLE) comes along with three videos where Jeanne Meserve, a previous real-life CNN Homeland Security reporter, plays a fictional reporter for VNN News Network who starts off with, “Our lead story in business today is a cybersecurity scare of potentially global proportions.”
Privacy

Submission + - Newt Gingrich loves spam (computerworld.com) 1

Submitted by
richi
richi writes: "Newt Gingrich's Newt 2012 organization is aiding and abetting spammers. Hard to believe, I know, but it turns out his organization is offering targeted email addresses to spammers.

Now that Newt Gingrich has conceded defeat... ahem, sorry, suspended his campaign, Newt 2012 is thought to be at least $4,300,000 in the hole. So, in a bizarre twist of moral logic, it's selling its email lists to spammers."

Submission + - Why Tech Vendors Fund Patent 'Trolls' (computerworld.com)

Submitted by Lucas123
Lucas123 writes: Major tech vendors are funding patent trolls, companies that derive the bulk of their income, if not all of it, from licensing huge libraries of patents they hold as well as by suing companies that use their patents without permission, according to an investigation by Computerworld. Tech companies — including Apple and Micron — have railed against patent 'nuisance' lawsuits, only to fund or otherwise support some of the patent trolls. Because of patent trolls, more politely called mass patent aggregators, patent litigation has in part increased by more than 230% over the past 20 years. 'Most of the major tech companies are backing a troll in some way, probably financially,' says Thomas Ewing, an attorney who has authored reports on what he calls 'patent privateering'.

Submission + - User Poll Shows Tablets, eReaders Top Tech Gift Gu (computerworld.com)

Submitted by Lucas123
Lucas123 writes: Every year, Computerworld polls its readers on what types of tech gear they want to give and/or receive for the holidays. While the top five categories they chose are pretty much the same as in 2010 — tablets, e-readers, smartphones, laptops and HDTVs — the products themselves have changed significantly. For example, Android powerhouses such as the Samsung Galaxy Nexus phone and the Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime tablet are strong contenders this year while in years past Apple's iPhone 4S and iPad 2 topped the lists.
Android

Submission + - Researchers Say Carrier IQ Not Logging Data, Texts (threatpost.com)

Submitted by Trailrunner7
Trailrunner7 writes: Security researchers who have investigated the inner workings of the Carrier IQ software and its capabilities say that the application has some powerful, and potentially worrisome capabilities, but that as it's currently deployed by carriers it doesn't have the ability to record SMS messages, phone calls or keystrokes. However, the researchers note that there is still potential for abuse of the information that's being gathered, whether by the carriers themselves or third parties who can access the data legitimately or through a compromise of a device.

Jon Oberheide, a security researcher who has done a lot of work on Android devices, also analyzed several versions of the Carrier IQ software and found that the software has the ability to record some information, but that doesn't mean that it's actually doing so. That part is up to each individual carrier. However, he says that the ability to collect that data is a dangerous thing.

"There is a lot of capability to collect sensitive data, which is dangerous in any scenario," Oberheide said in an interview. "It's up to the carriers to use the software as they choose, but you could sort of put some blame on Carrier IQ. But they put it on the carriers."
Apple

Submission + - An Interview With Jobs During Exile From Apple (digg.com)

Submitted by Lucas123
Lucas123 writes: As part of a computer industry oral history project, in 1995 Computerworld performed an extensive interview with Steve Jobs, then head of NeXT Computer. Jobs talked openly about his life and work during from his early years — when he says he's sure that except for a few key adults 'I would absolutely have ended up in jail' — to how he felt about Apple in the mid-'90s — 'The Macintosh will die in another few years [under John Sculley]' — to his predictions about the Internet.
Security

Submission + - After Six Days of Outages, BofA Claims It Hasn't B (computerworld.com)

Submitted by Lucas123
Lucas123 writes: After six days of spotty service and outages with its online and mobile sites, Bank of America today said it has not been the victim of a denial of service attack, hacking or malware. Yet, the bank has set up a new homepage that it says will help customers navigate to the proper online service. Internet monitoring service Keynote said the outage is unprecedented in banking. 'I don't think we've seen as significant and as long an outage with any bank. And I've been with Keynote for 16 years now,' said Shawn White, vice president of operations for web monitoring service Keynote Systems. In the meantime, a BofA spokeswoman continued to devulge what might be happening, saying 'We're not going to get into the technical details. We're not going to comment on the technicalities of what we do.' Speculation among experts has been that the site is under attack.
Security

Submission + - 34 reasons we're losing the cyber war (computerworld.com)

Submitted by jcatcw
jcatcw writes: Did you catch the recent show "Code Wars: America's Cyber Threat" on CNBC? If not, don't bother. Sadly, the show did nothing to educate viewers about Defensive Computing. But why are the bad guys winning? Here, in no particular order, are the top 34 reasons we're losing the war. For example: 1) The game is rigged; 3) There's no Internet User Guide; 6) SSL is a sham; 8) Public Wi-Fi; 14) Programming is still an art and one best done by the fewest possible people; 29) Google.

Submission + - Cooling Computers by Erasing Data (sciencedaily.com)

Submitted by
lee1
lee1 writes: "A fundamental result of information theory and thermodynamics is that computation generates heat, as your knees may have noticed. Further, it has been proven that, in a classical computer, deleting data necessarily produces a small amount of waste heat. A new theoretical result shows that in a quantum computer deleting data actually cools the device under the right circumstances. The result can be checked by experiment and has possible practical applications; it leads as well to a new understanding of entropy in thermodynamics and information theory."
Mars

Submission + - Multicellular life found at 3.6km under the crust (newscientist.com) 2

Submitted by FatLittleMonkey
FatLittleMonkey writes: Researchers from Princeton University have discovered nematodes at depth of up to 3.6km in three gold mines in South Africa, likely feeding on the radiation-consuming bacteria also discovered by the same team. Carbon dating their environment confirms that the 500 micrometres long critters have been there for at least 3000 years and are not a recent contaminant. The finding means that unexpectedly complex ecosystems occur deep underground, increasing the chance that complex life may have survived on Mars according to Carl Pilcher, director of NASA's Astrobiology Institute, "The significance was that you could imagine an ecosystem existing in the subsurface of a planet that didn't have a photosynthetic biosphere, like Mars," he says.

Until now, it was thought such an ecosystem could be made of bacteria only. But Onstott's new findings have completely changed that. "These nematodes are grazing on microbes. So now you could imagine that if animal life had ever developed on a planet, and the surface of that planet became lifeless," Pilcher explains, "you could imagine that animals could coexist with microbial ecosystems all powered by radioactivity."
Cloud

Submission + - A parody of 'Joni Mitchell cloud' computing (networkworld.com)

Submitted by netbuzz
netbuzz writes: “We’re not building some generic Joni Mitchell cloud,” sniffs the university CTO in an interview with Network World. Get it? Joni Mitchell cloud? No wimpy ‘60s folk music cloud for these guys. The song being referenced – Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now,” recorded in 1969 – practically cries out for parody these days. And Bruce Kerr, an attorney at Oracle, has stepped up to the plate to deliver the goods.

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