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Cellphones

Submission + - Carriers Back Off On Mobile Payment Network (computerworld.com)

Submitted by
CWmike
CWmike writes: "Isis, a consortium comprised of AT&T, Verizon Wireless and T-Mobile USA, is said to have decided to back off plans for a new, separate mobile payment network and will instead work within traditional systems that include major credit card processors such as Visa and MasterCard for mobile transactions, according to unnamed sources in a WSJ story. The carriers will still move ahead with a pilot test planned for 2012 in Salt Lake City of a system using near field communication (NFC) technology inside smartphones. Isis' change in direction is an acknowledgement that setting up a mobile payment system is much more challenging than putting NFC chips in smartphones and installing NFC reader terminals, at least in the U.S., analysts have said."
Technology

Submission + - Intel Designs Faster, 3D Transistor (nytimes.com)

Submitted by
lee1
lee1 writes: "Intel has found a way to keep on the Moore's Law track by making smaller, faster and lower-power computer chips by building 3D transistors. They are already manufacturing microprocessors using this new design, called a FINFET (for fin field-effect transistor), which incorporates a small pillar, or fin, of silicon that sticks up above the surface of the chip. Intel said that it expected to be able to make chips that run as much as 37 percent faster in low-voltage applications and use as much as 50 percent less power. Products based on the new technology may appear some time later this year."

Submission + - 1st International Flight for Solar-powered Plane (gizmag.com)

Submitted by Zothecula
Zothecula writes: Solar Impulse is on standby for its first international flight this week. Brussels has been chosen as the destination for the first venture outside Swiss borders, which follows the solar powered aircraft's maiden flight and first overnight flight last year and will mark another important step towards the goal of flying around the world in 2012.
IOS

Submission + - iOS fix for tracking issue just two weeks away (edibleapple.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Apple last week officially addressed the controversy surrounding the consolidated.db file found in iOS 4. Now BGR relays that they've obtained an early build of iOS 4.3.3 — an iOS update set to fix many of the bugs Apple acknowledged with its current implementation of the consolidated.db file.

Submission + - How to monitor your Internet data transfer amounts 1

Submitted by Vrtigo1
Vrtigo1 writes: With many ISPs either already using bandwidth caps or talking about them, I was wondering how other Slashdot readers are keeping tabs on how much data is being transferred through their home Internet connections. None of the consumer routers I've used seem to make this information easily accessible. I'd like some way to see exactly how much data has been sent and received by the WAN port facing my ISP's modem so I can compare the numbers I get with the numbers they give me. I don't want to pay for their modem firmware updates and other network management traffic, so I'd like to see how the two numbers line up.
Microsoft

Submission + - 25% Of Users Now On Windows 7 (techspot.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: By the end of 2010, Windows 7 had grabbed 20 percent of the market. At the end of April 2011, Microsoft can already say that Windows 7 has passed the 25 percent mark, according to Net Applications. In other words, the latest and greatest operating system from Redmond is now installed on one in four computers.
Books

Submission + - Book Review: Apache JMeter

Submitted by
MassDosage
MassDosage writes: "Apache JMeter written by Emily H. Halili is very much an introductory guide to using Apache’s open source JMeter testing tool. Unfortunately a book that should have been good fodder to wet the appetites of testers is spoiled by shoddy editing, poor writing and very little content that isn’t already included in JMeter’s own user manual.

I am one of those (fairly) rare software developers with a genuine interest in testing and first tried using JMeter many years ago after its initial release as a tool primarily focused on testing the Apache Tomcat web/application server. It was a bit rough around the edges and poorly documented in those days so I was looking forward to a book that would re-familiarise me with JMeter in its current form. This book clearly targets itself at the testing community and doesn’t require any programming (or even much testing) knowledge.

Apache JMeter starts off with a not particularly convincing overview of why one would want to automate testing and goes off on a tangent trying to prove the monetary savings this leads too. Any testing will depend very much on the type of software being tested, the skills of the tester, technology stack in use etc. so trying to come up with a general formula proving that testing will save money is probably impossible and pointless. It would have been far more useful to include some practical examples where testing saved time, effort, caught bugs early etc. A very brief history of JMeter is provided as well as an overview of its GUI and the the various elements available. For those who haven’t used it before — JMeter acts as a client which sends requests to the application being tested and can then act on the responses returned. Overall this isn’t the smoothest of introductions with lots of grammatical errors, fragmented text and repeated concepts, which doesn’t bode well for the rest of the book.

Installing and setting up JMeter is covered next and this is straightforward and simple. A good overview of what a JMeter test plan consists of is provided and this covers controlling how many simultaneous users a test will use, what logic and timing will be used to issue requests, the type of requests (e.g. HTTP for web sites, FTP for file retrieval etc.), various configuration options, how to assert the contents of responses and so on. The book is a bit dated and the version of JMeter I was using didn’t always match up with the text and diagrams but most of the differences were self explanatory so this wasn’t really an issue.

The chapter on load and performance testing is the best on offer and provides sensible guidelines on this type of testing. These include tips such as ensuring network bandwidth between the machines under test, running the tests on physically separate machines from the software being tested, running tests for long periods of time and what to monitor. This is mainly common sense but it’s good to see them summarised and the book would have benefited from more sections that appear to be informed by the author’s practical experiences as a tester. The example given in the book is the load testing of a web site over HTTP and it’s left up to the reader to translate the various types of request being made to an example website of their own. The screen shots of setting the various GUI values are clear and useful. Remote testing (i.e. not using a single JMeter GUI but multiple command-line instances of JMeter) is mentioned but sadly not covered which is a shame as any serious load or stress testing usually requires this. Using JMeter as a proxy to quickly generate a test plan by recording HTTP requests from a browser is both neat and useful and explained well.

JMeter is not just limited to load testing but can also be used to do simple functional tests as it can inspect the values returned by requests and perform assertions on these responses (e.g. checking that the returned HTML contains some text). Unfortunately functional testing is covered very poorly with far too little detail and no explanation of how to run the examples yourself. The author should have stuck to one simple use case (ideally that the reader could follow along with) which would show how to add one’s own custom values to requests and to assert the results returned. In the end I could figure it out for myself, but I’d expect a book to guide me through this.

Advanced features are up next and the reader is pointed towards the sample code included with the book (a .rar file inside a .zip file, why?) but absolutely no explanation is given as to what one should actually do with the bunch of PHP and SQL files included in it. Using regular expressions and configuring JMeter to run tests using loops is covered but this doesn’t make much sense as there is no context for the example used in setting this all up. Fortunately the sections on using JMeter to test a database and an FTP server are introduced with clear setup steps that are easy to follow. I wouldn’t classify most of this material as advanced, it just gives the reader the knowledge that JMeter can be used to test more than just HTTP sites and provides a few very simple examples which they can build on.

Finally the book wraps up by stressing once again that it’s just an introduction to JMeter and a concluding table clearly showing that more is not covered than actually covered. The appendices consist of definitions of nearly every JMeter element that can be accessed in the GUI (a good quick reference), some pointers to material for readers interested in learning more, and a glossary of testing terms, the vast majority of which are never used in the book itself. Unfortunately the latter is yet more evidence of the biggest weakness of this book — the appalling editing that doesn’t even remove sentences which are completely incorrect. “You can too contribute.” (the closing sentence of Chapter 1) is just one of many examples of poor writing that somehow survived into print.

On the whole the book does give one an overview of how to get started with JMeter and the section on load testing a website is a useful introduction to various JMeter concepts. This is the only printed book on the topic out there so if you learn best reading from print then you don’t have many options. This is a shame as a niche topic like this could do with an interesting, well-informed and authoritative guide. For everyone else I would suggest reading the User Manual on the JMeter website as it covers all the material here (and much more) and is far more readable.

Full disclosure: I was given a copy of this book free of charge by the publisher for review purposes. They placed no restrictions on what I could say and left me to be as critical as I wanted so the above review is my own honest opinion."
Android

Submission + - Google Sued For Tracking Users' :Locations (ibtimes.com)

Submitted by RedEaredSlider
RedEaredSlider writes: Two Android phone users are suing Google for $50 million in the wake of revelations that their phones might be tracking their locations.

The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan on April 27, is seeking class-action status.

The plaintiffs, Julie Brown and Kayla Molaski, are residents of Oakland County. The two say in the suit that Google's privacy policy did not say that the phones broadcast their location information. Further, they say Google knew that most users would not understand that the privacy policy wouldn't allow for Google to track users' locations.
IT

Submission + - The Features That Make Each Web Browser Unique (infoworld.com)

Submitted by
snydeq
snydeq writes: "InfoWorld's Peter Wayner offers a look at 13 promising features unique to one browser. From Chrome's support for SPDY, to IE9's emphasis on energy efficiency, to Firefox Sync, browser vendors are working hard to establish any edge that might attract more users to their stack of code. And while speed and HTML5 compatability remain key in the battle of the Web browsers, unique features often point the way forward. 'Given the pace of browser updates these days, don't be surprised to find the best of the bunch being copied by competitors soon,' Wayner writes. 'After all, yesterday's browser bells and whistles are today's must-have features.'"
Security

Submission + - China's Cyber Offense Hides Porous Defenses (threatpost.com)

Submitted by Trailrunner7
Trailrunner7 writes: Contrary to the image of China as a nearly invincible cyber powerhouse, security researcher Dillon Beresford says in an interview with Threatpost, that the fast-growing nation suffers from woeful cyber security practices at home that leave, literally, thousands of networks and databases vulnerable to even trivial, remote attacks. Beresford, who publicized holes in domestic Chinese SCADA systems in September, 2010, said the country's aggressive cyber offense abroad, he said, is in stark contrast to an almost total lack of basic cyber defense at home that has left both classified and unclassified government networks vulnerable to attack and compromise. That should give the Chinese government pause as it ponders the consequences of a global campaign of cyber espionage, and create an opportunity for the U.S. and China to de-escalate what he sees as a growing cyber arms race. Beresford has publicized holes in recent weeks highlighting insecure mail servers and databases he has uncovered.
Sony

Submission + - Sony Online Entertainment Services Taken Down (gamepolitics.com)

Submitted by nam37
nam37 writes: Sony Online Entertainment's various services seem to be down and a message on the official site does not give much information on the particulars. According to a short post on the site, the services were taken down after an investigation revealed a deeper "intrusion" than expected at first. This is the first we have heard that Sony's MMORPG arm had some sort of security breach. This could be part of Sony's plans to beef up security for the PlayStation Network, but this message seems to indicate that something more serious going on.
Firefox

Submission + - Inside Mozilla's new JavaScript JIT compiler (infoq.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: IonMonkey is the name of Mozilla’s new JavaScript JIT compiler, which aims to enable many new optimizations in the SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine. InfoQ had a small Q&A with Lead Developer David Anderson, about this new development that could bring significant improvements in products that use the SpiderMonkey engine like Firefox, Thunderbird, Adobe Acrobat, MongoDB and more.

This new JIT infrastructure, will feature SSA compiler intermediate representations which will facilitate advanced optimizations such as type specialization, function inlining, linear-scan register allocation, dead-code elimination, and loop-invariant code motion.
Technology

Submission + - Supercharging touchscreen interaction, with Ringbo (elektor.in)

Submitted by
Elektor_India
Elektor_India writes: "Without a doubt, touchscreen technology has brought a whole new level of interaction with our devices. Israel's Efrat Barit and Saar Shai, however, believe that the functionality of touch-enabled devices could be greatly enhanced with the development of their Ringbow concept. Worn on the index finger, the ring-like device can be programmed to add extra capabilities to existing actions, activate entirely new touch options, or liberate the user's hands from the surface of the display for Kinect-like, spatial control over touchscreen device operation."
News

Submission + - Bin Laden's Death Being Used to Spread Malware (securityweek.com)

Submitted by wiredmikey
wiredmikey writes: Today, we have another major news event for cybercriminals to take advantage of. Following the successful operation by U.S. forces to kill Osama bin Laden, Internet users are searching in the masses for any details about the incident they can find. Cybercriminals know this and have already been at work to "poison" common search results hoping to gain access to people's computers and infect them with malware.

Links are already beginning to spread across Facebook, similar to what happened following news of the recent earthquake in Japan. Users should be cautious of spam containing links to photos, videos and other information that sounds remarkably interesting on Bin Laden’s death. Users also need to be cautious of Tweets through Twitter, and Facebook posts, as cybercriminals gear up to attract unsuspecting users to spread malware. [More]

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