52501631
submission
angry tapir writes:
Two privacy-focused email providers have launched the Dark Mail Alliance, a project to engineer an email system with robust defenses against spying. Silent Circle and Lavabit abruptly halted their encrypted email services in August, saying they could no longer guarantee email would remain private after court actions against Lavabit, reportedly an email provider for NSA leaker Edward Snowden.
52436079
submission
angry tapir writes:
Dell will give its first public demonstration of a 64-bit ARM server this week, the latest step in an industrywide effort to build servers based on low-power chips like those used in smartphones. Dell will show a server based on a 64-bit ARM processor from AppliedMicro running the Fedora version of Linux and hooked up to a storage system from PMC-Sierra, Dell said.
52267593
submission
angry tapir writes:
The Internet – or at least its namespace – just got bigger. Four new top-level domains have been added to the Internet's root zone. The four new gTLDs all use non-Latin scripts: "web " in Arabic, "online" in Cyrillic, "sale" in Cyrillic, and "game" in Chinese. In total, the generic top-level domain process run by ICANN will result in expansion of top-level domains from 22 to up to 1400.
52225893
submission
angry tapir writes:
A U.S. appeals court has ruled that police must obtain a warrant prior to using a GPS device to track a vehicle, deciding on an unaddressed issue in an earlier Supreme Court order. The decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit is considered a victory by privacy groups as a number of courts in the country grapple with the legal and privacy implications of using mobile phone location information and GPS in investigations by law enforcement.
52179671
submission
angry tapir writes:
In the office, people still prefer Microsoft Office. Yes, despite threats from rivals that are open source, cheaper, fully cloud-based or more mobile-friendly, Microsoft Office's desktop suite reigns over the workplace productivity software kingdom. That's the conclusion Forrester Research reached after recently polling enterprise IT professionals with decision-making power over their company's choice of office software suites.
52175961
submission
angry tapir writes:
The European Parliament's civil liberties committee voted Monday night to allow profiling of "pseudonymous" data, but digital rights groups say that safeguards to protect data are not sufficient. The committee vote was on the latest amendments to the proposed E.U. Data Protection Regulation, which was put forward by Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding in 2012 and has provoked some of the heaviest lobbying seen in Brussels in years. The text voted on Monday had been through almost 4,000 amendments.
52059273
submission
angry tapir writes:
Mining small details from Facebook has become even easier with Graph Search, the site's new search engine that returns personalized results from natural-language queries. Graph Search granularly mines Facebook's vast user data: where people have visited, what they like and if they share those same preferences with their friends. "FBStalker" is a Python script debuted at the Hack in the Box security conference in Kuala Lumpur. In its current form, FBStalker runs in the Chrome browser on OS X, entering queries into Facebook's Graph Search and pulling data. Even if a person's profile is locked down to strangers, their friends' open profiles can be examined, giving an indication, for example, who the person may be close with. FBStalker uses Graph Search to find photos in which two people are tagged in, comments on profiles and more.
51940181
submission
angry tapir writes:
Australian startup Flirtey from March next year will offer parcel delivery for Australian businesses using automated aerial drones. From March, a partnership with a textook rental company will see drones delivering books to students.It will be the first use of fully automated commercial drones in the world, the companies said. Delivery by drone will be free for the receiver and will send parcels directly to an outdoor location of the user’s choice, with the drone’s GPS coordinates provided to the user through a smartphone app.
51804353
submission
angry tapir writes:
Seven top European Union judges have ruled that a leading Internet news website is legally responsible for offensive views posted by readers in the site's comments section. The European Court of Human Rights found that Estonian courts were within their rights to fine Delfi, one of the country's largest news websites, for comments made anonymously about a news article, according to a judgment.
51549807
submission
angry tapir writes:
arkOS is a Linux distribution that runs on the Raspberry Pi. It's an initiative of the CitizenWeb Project, which promotes decentralisation and democratisation of the Internet. arkOS is aiming to aid this effort by making it super-simple for people to host their own email, blogs, storage and other services from their own home, instead of relying on cloud services run by third parties. I had a chat to the founder of CitizenWeb about the project.
51500087
submission
angry tapir writes:
Software company Atlassian has launched a new platform — MakeaDiff — to make it easier for developers to contribute their skills to non-profits. Charities can post technical projects on the site, which will then be broken down into tasks that developers can take on. The results of the projects will be open sourced, letting other organisations take advantage of any software produced. I had a chat to the people who built the new platform about its goals.
51463327
submission
angry tapir writes:
A Japanese start-up says it has finessed a technology that could finally make consumer-grade fuel cells a reality. If successful, the company, Aquafairy, would create a business where many much larger companies have failed. Prototypes of the company's hydrogen fuel cell technology are on show this week at the Ceatec exhibition in Japan where the company's president, Mike Aizawa, said he hopes the first products will be on sale next year.
51407001
submission
angry tapir writes:
The cybercriminals behind ZeroAccess, one of the largest botnets in existence, have lost access to more than a quarter of the infected machines they controlled because of an operation executed by security researchers from Symantec. According to Symantec, the ZeroAccess botnet consists of more than 1.9 million infected computers and is used primarily to perform click fraud and Bitcoin mining in order to generate revenues estimated at tens of millions of dollars per year.
51369207
submission
angry tapir writes:
Google faces financial sanctions in France after failing to comply with an order to alter how it stores and shares user data to conform to the nation's privacy laws. The enforcement follows an analysis led by European data protection authorities of a new privacy policy that Google enacted in 2012. France's privacy watchdog, the Commission Nationale de L'Informatique et des Libertes, in June ordered Google to comply with French data protection laws within three months. But Google had not changed its policies to comply with French laws by a deadline last week.
51183829
submission
angry tapir writes:
Last year Adam Dunkels, the creator of the open source Contiki operating system, launched a startup to build tools for the 'Internet of Things'. This week his company, Thingsquare, is releasing an evaluation kit that lets people test drive their IoT system. I caught up with him to talk about Thingsquare's plans and the hype around the IoT.
