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Submission + - Bin Laden death-detecting analytics service signs partnership with Twitter (arstechnica.com)

An anonymous reader writes: A Twitter analytics company that said it detected Osama bin Laden's death before it was reported by the news media has signed a partnership with Twitter, and is expanding the availability of its service for notifying financial firms and government clients of highly unusual events.

The company, Dataminr, described its technology at the Twitter Devnest conference last May, shortly after its service used Twitter data to report bin Laden's death to its clients before the story hit major media outlets. Today, Dataminr is announcing a partnership with Twitter allowing it greater access to tweets and their metadata, and is expanding availability of the service.

Crime

Submission + - Fraudsters Scammed iTunes, Amazon For £500,000 Royalties (techweekeurope.co.uk)

judgecorp writes: "A British gang has been convicted of massive fraud on Amazon and iTunes. The group uploaded music (apparently their own) and then downloaded it repeatedly with stolen credit cards, generating £500,000 for themselves in royalties. The cost to Apple and Amazon is likely to be up to £1 million. Eleven people have now been jailed for the scam."
Botnet

Submission + - Zeus bringing botnots to the masses (arstechnica.com)

ryanmcdonough writes: "ArsTechnica has a report detailing the arrival of a new Zeus bot-net based around P2P control, meaning that a take down of C&C servers will no longer affect the survival of the bot-net.

Though researchers do say this won't affect long term efforts to take down bot-nets, rather, a bump in the road."

Security

Submission + - Disaster strikes Norwegian government web portal (icrontic.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Altinn.no is a web service run by the Norwegian government, on which citizens can find, fill out and deliver forms electronically. Every year Norwegian citizens can also log in to check their tax results.
This year as every year, the site was unable to cope with the traffic generated from everyone wanting to check their taxes at the same time. New this year however was that once people were finally able to log in, a significant amount of people were loggen in as someone else.
Users then had access to all financial data of this unfortunate person over two years back in time, in addition to the financial information of his wife and the company he worked for. Altinn shut down some 15 minutes later, and has been down since.

Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft Bans Internal Purchases of Mac and iPad (tekgoblin.com) 1

tekgoblin writes: "A Microsoft internal email has surfaced which shows that Microsoft will not be allowing their Marketing and Sales groups to purchase the Apple iPad and Mac. SMSG short for Microsoft’s Sales, Marketing, Services, IT, & Operations Group may be putting a policy in place that will block employees from using internal funds to purchase Apple products.
The change makes sense to not allow internal Microsoft funds to be used on competitor products, but why the change now?"

Apple

Submission + - New iPad Hotter Than Ever... Literally (theregister.co.uk)

sl4shd0rk writes: The Apple forums continue to accumulate reports of the new ipad suffering from uncomfortable heat issues. Consumer reports measured the temperature at 116 Deg. Farenheit (because we do that here). While not quite the temperature of thermite it's hotter than it's predecessors. Apple has issued a statement on the problem, however it only tends to make one believe the welts left behind are actually a feature.

Submission + - America: Iran Can't Control The Internet Only We Can (muktware.com) 1

sfcrazy writes: The same country which is preaching Iran for free flow of information is planning to pass a dangerous cybersecurity legislation which threatens civil liberties of its own citizens. The US government is helping the American companies to take more and more control away from people. The Cybersecurity bill seems an attept to repackages SOPA and PIPA and get it passed in the name of national security.
Linux

Submission + - Why Linux Can't "Sell" on the Desktop (lockergnome.com) 1

VoyagerRadio writes: "Recently I found myself struggling with a question I should easily have been able to answer: Why would anyone want to use Linux as their everyday desktop (or laptop) operating system? It’s a fair question, and asked often of Linux, but I'm finding it to be a question I can no longer answer with the conviction necessary to “sell” the platform. In fact, I kind of feel like a car salesman who realizes he no longer believes in the product he’s been pitching. It's not that I don't find Linux worthy; I simply don't understand how it's every going to succeed on the desktop with voluntary marketing efforts. What do Linux users need to do to replicate the marketing efforts of Apple and Microsoft and other corporate operating system vendors? To me, it seems you don’t sell Linux at all because there isn’t supposed to be one dominant distribution that stands out from the rest. Without a specific product to put on the shelf to sell, what in the world do you focus your efforts on selling? An idea?"
AI

Submission + - Clever Clues Clobber Crossword Computer

Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Steve Lohr reports that an impressive crossword-solving computer program called Dr Fill matched its digital wits against 600 of the nation's best human crossword-solvers finishing only 141st at the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament in New York. "I wish it had done better,” says Dr. Matthew Ginsberg, the creator of Dr. Fill and an expert in artificial intelligence. Dr. Fill typically thrives on conventional crosswords, even ones with arcane clues and answers and solved one of the most difficult puzzles at the tournament perfectly. But the computer does poorly with clever clues based on puns or humor because humans and machines solve the crosswords very differently. Humans recognize patterns based on accumulated knowledge and experience, while computers make endless calculations to determine the most statistically probable answer so the computer program is literal minded, and tends to struggle on puzzles with humor, and puzzles with unusual themes or letter arrangements. Take this clue from a 2010 puzzle in The Times: Apollo 11 and 12 (180 degrees). The answer is SNOISSIWNOOW, seemingly gibberish. A clever human could eventually figure out that those letters when rotated 180 degrees spell MOON MISSIONS. Humans get the joke, while a literal-minded computer does not. “Occasionally, Dr. Fill just doesn’t get it,” says Ginsberg. “That’s my nightmare.”"

Comment Re:Great timing (Score 3, Informative) 314

"toll quality" basically means that whatever path your voice takes thru operator's network, QoS, CoS or whatever the service management method applied to your frames, package, signal etc. the end result would be identical to the performance of a legacy twisted pair cable that phone systems used to be built on. A toll quality connection as a general rule:

1) Would not require any specific equipment other than a native phone device (assuming that PRI ports are native to the phone system, which is a subject of never ending discussions amongst some old farts like me around here...)

2) Would not cause any digital disturbance to voice quality like packet loss, jitter etc.

Comment Re:Great timing (Score 1) 314

This reminded me a story from ten years ago:

A world famous telecommunications equipment provider (a company from North America with a rhyming name :) ) claimed to our management suits that their products are five nines, including maintenance window (!). Naturally after a short while in our (non North American) local conditions they started to pop like corn in a hot oven. Their explanation was (and this was somehow implied in colored pieces of papers they provided to upper echelons of our management) that their power bus (provided that supplies connected to different fuses, preferably of different phases of line) is five nines, thus the box is always online, regardless of the status of CPU :) We started to change CPUs, then supplies of boxes started to pop as well. The new explanation was although it was the recommended practice to connect PSs to different phases, the actual frequency shift in our local conditions (50 Hz 220 V) was far above the conditions in their R&D environment (60 Hz 110 V), thus our local level of variations has a greater absolute value than expected. Shocking, mentally and physically as 90 V respective voltage to the real ground manifested on chassis :)

What I am trying to tell, as an old fart, is that redundancy starts at the bare metal level. Any design on an upper level must be supported by the hardware. Also it is important to know what is being made redundant. You can have multiple Internet connections but if your UPS is not redundant and is located near brown water facilities, you can find yourself in deep shit...

Comment Re:Great timing (Score 1) 314

Even our crappy (pseudo-)government run telco offers 1-N real-time backup for E1 trunks, they even provide geographical redundancy (with no surcharge), if you are willing to distribute your ingress... All CLECs on the other hand are offering SIP trunks, with all the bells and balls attached... Albeit it is a crappy service in general, we prefer incumbent operator's E1 based service, because they know what "toll quality" really means... Moral of the story, if a telco cannot offer redundant E1 or SIP trunks you need to consider changing operator, before starting to think about servers...

Comment Re:Way to go....... (Score 4, Insightful) 314

Then neither you are not working with web developers who change their mind daily about basic system design nor you are working in an environment where uptime is not a concern nor you have very expensive load balance boxen that protects you from mundane facts of life. Either way, you are a very lucky person... OTOH we, of lesser levels of humanity, are grateful for one more tool that would make our lives easier.
Data Storage

Submission + - Femtolaser-switched magnetic storage (extremetech.com)

MrSeb writes: "Hold onto your hats: Scientists at the University of York, England have completely rewritten the rules of magnetic storage. Instead of switching a magnetic region using a magnetic field (like a hard drive head), the researchers have managed to switch a ferrimagnetic nanoisland using a 60-femtosecond laser. Storing magnetic data using lasers is up to 1,000 times faster than writing to a conventional hard drive (we're talking about gigabytes or terabytes per second) — and the ferrimagnetic nanoislands that store the data are capable of storage densities that are some 15 times greater than existing hard drive platters. Unfortunately the York scientists only detailed writing data with lasers; there's no word on how to read it."

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