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Windows

Submission + - Where are the Windows ARM tablets? (extremetech.com)

Submitted by
MrSeb
MrSeb writes: "Late yesterday, Intel took to the stage at Computex in Taiwan and announced its next steps towards mobile domination. To help with the development of touch-enabled tablets and ultrabooks, Intel is investing in factories that specialize in 13-inch-and-larger touchscreens. At one point, Tom Kilroy, Intel’s vice president of sales and marketing, pulled back a curtain to reveal 50 new ultrabooks. The Big Reveal, though, is that there are 20 Atom-powered (Clover Trail) Windows 8 tablets in the works, many of which will be released in conjunction with Windows 8 this fall. On the other side of the fence, there is just one ARM-powered Windows 8 (RT) tablet at Computex: the 10.1-inch, Tegra 3-powered, dockable Asus 600. If you include a Windows RT prototype shown off by Toshiba and a Snapdragon S4-powered reference tablet from Qualcomm, that brings the total up to 3 ARM-powered Windows 8 tablets — a far cry from the huge number of product wins that Intel is touting. Where are the Windows ARM tablets? Where are the Samsung, Dell, and HP Windows RT devices? If they’re not showing off Windows RT tablets at Computex, then they’re probably waiting for CES — which isn’t until January 2013. By that point, Intel and its trusty OEMs will have enjoyed massive x86 tablet sales from Black Friday and Christmas. Does Windows RT stand a chance?"

Submission + - When is it right to enforce a software patent?

Submitted by cadeon
cadeon writes: I work for a small company with a workforce management software product. We brought a fairly unique approach to market in 2004, and have developed the idea continuously since then. Our first of three patents was awarded in 2007.

At the moment we have exactly one customer. And while I can't blame our lack of commercial success on our ideas being copied — "No one ever got fired for buying $established_product" — I find myself wondering if it's time to try and enforce our patents.

Would doing so make us a patent troll, or is this the situation patents were created to help solve? If this isn't the right situation, what is?
Google

Submission + - Hackers Exploit Google Two-Factor Authentication Weakness (securityweek.com)

Submitted by wiredmikey
wiredmikey writes: Late last week, news broke that web security and performance startup CloudFlare was attacked, resulting in a hacker being able to successfully redirect web traffic of one of the company’s largest clients, 4Chan.org. While CloudFlare was the victim in this attack, the methods used, along with a flaw in Google’s platform, potentially exposed a large number of Google Apps for Business customers.

It turns out, the attackers utilized some crafty social engineering to gain access to CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince's voicemail and gain access to his Gmail account. From there, the attackers exploited a weakness in Google's Two-Factor authentication security which essentially disabled the service and let the attacker in and to access CloudFlare.Com email. (His personal email was listed as an account recovery)

Once the attacker obtained access to CloudFlare email accounts, he/she able to access a password reset. After likely searching for “4Chan” the attacker was able to quickly do a password reset and gain access to 4Chan’s CloudFlare account. From there, the attacker was able to temporarily redirect traffic from 4Chan.org to the attacker’s handle on Twitter.

Late Sunday, and into Monday, Google confirmed with that an authentication flaw did exist related to its two-factor authentication process that was used in the attack.

“We fixed a flaw that, under very specific conditions, existed in the account recovery process for Google Apps for Business customers,” a Google spokesperson told SecurityWeek. “If an administrator account that was configured to send password reset instructions to a registered secondary email address was successfully recovered, 2-step verification would have been disabled in the process. This could have led to abuse if their secondary email account was compromised through some other means.”

While an authentication flaw, social engineering, and questionable account recovery methods all played a part in the attack, CloudFlare admits, in Prince’s own words, that they “did some dumb things” which enabled the attacker to login and modify some customer records to redirect traffic, leading to the attack’s success.

“One dumb thing that we did early on,” Prince said, “was that in order to make sure that emails we sent to customers were performing correctly and that nobody was abusing our email sending process, some administrators within CloudFlare were BCC’d on transactional emails that were sent to customer accounts.”

This incent leaves us with some important considerations, especially for users that have a phone number associated with a Google account. For many, it's important to realize that your Google account may only be as secure as your four-digital voicemail PIN, so even with these recent kinks, adding two-factor authentication is a good idea for an additional layer of security.

Submission + - VA Governor Wants Military Drones for Police (wtop.com) 1

Submitted by Screen404-O
Screen404-O writes: During radio interview ( http://wtop.com/120/2882193/Gov-Drones-over-Va-great-cites-battlefield-success ) VA Governor suggest that "Police drones flying over Virginia would be "great" and "the right thing to do" for the same reasons they are so effective in a battlefield environment,..."

Is this the next step toward militarizing our law enforcement with the ever present "eye in the sky"? What are the privacy implications?
Google

Submission + - Sergey Brin Demos Google Glasses Prototype (hothardware.com)

Submitted by
MojoKid
MojoKid writes: "Folks have been clamoring for more on Google's Project Glass and Sergey Brin--one of the co-founders of Google is now burying himself in the R&D department associated with its development. Recently Brin appeared on “The Gavin Newsom Show” on The Current with the prototype glasses perched on his face. The visit was actually a bit awkward as you can see in the video, as it’s a lot of Brin and Newsom describing what they’re seeing via the glasses with no visual for the audience. However, Brin dropped a bomb when he stated that he’d like to have the glasses out as early as next year."
Businesses

Submission + - Apple Fires Back At DoJ Over eBook Price Fixing (cnn.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: CNN takes a look at Apple's response to the Department of Justice's investigation into eBook price fixing. The filing 'cuts the government's case to shreds' while at the same time not bothering to defend the five publishers also under investigation. Apple said, 'The Government starts from the false premise (PDF) that an eBooks "market" was characterized by "robust price competition" prior to Apple's entry. This ignores a simple and incontrovertible fact: before 2010, there was no real competition, there was only Amazon. At the time Apple entered the market, Amazon sold nearly nine out of every ten eBooks, and its power over price and product selection was nearly absolute.'
Censorship

Submission + - Internet Defense League - Bat Signal for the Internet (i-programmer.info)

Submitted by mikejuk
mikejuk writes: Following the successful defence of the Internet agains SOPA website owners are being invited to sign up to a project that will enable them to participate in future protest campaigns. The banner logo for the "bat-signal" site is a cat a reference to Ethan Zuckerman's cute cat theory of digital activism The idea is that sites would respond to the call to "defend the Internet" by joining a group blackout or getting users to sign petitions.
Politics

Submission + - Santorum suspends campaign, clearing Romney's path (cnn.com) 1

Submitted by
bobwrit
bobwrit writes: "From the Article:
"
Conservative challenger Rick Santorum announced Tuesday that he is suspending his Republican presidential campaign after a weekend of "prayer and thought," effectively ceding the GOP nomination to front-runner Mitt Romney.

Santorum made his announcement after the weekend hospitalization of his 3-year-old daughter Isabella, and in the face of tightening poll numbers in Pennsylvania — the state he represented as a U.S. senator — ahead of the April 24 primary.

"Ladies and gentlemen, we made the decision to get into this race around our kitchen table, against all the odds," Santorum told a news conference, flanked by emotional family members. "We made a decision over the weekend that while the presidential race for us is over, and I will suspend my campaign effective today, we are not done fighting."
""

Submission + - Self-sculpting sand algorithms can allow spontaneous formation of tools (mit.edu)

Submitted by parallel_prankster
parallel_prankster writes: Researchers in MIT are developing tiny robots that can assemble themselves into products and then disassemble when no longer needed. "A heap of smart sand would be analogous to the rough block of stone that a sculptor begins with. The individual grains would pass messages back and forth and selectively attach to each other to form a three-dimensional object; the grains not necessary to build that object would simply fall away. When the object had served its purpose, it would be returned to the heap. Its constituent grains would detach from each other, becoming free to participate in the formation of a new shape." To attach to each other, to communicate and to share power, the cubes use 'electropermanent magnets,' materials whose magnetism can be switched on and off with jolts of electricity. Another discussion for this paper can be read here
Android

Submission + - New Android Malware Found in Alternative Markets Uses Root Exploit (threatpost.com)

Submitted by Trailrunner7
Trailrunner7 writes: Alternative mobile app markets have become a great place to find new games, utilities and other apps. But mostly they're great if you're looking for the latest stealthy Android malware. The newest example is a piece of malware called TGLoader that is showing up in repackaged legitimate apps and has the ability to get root privileges on victims' phones and also cost them quite a bit of money by sending SMS messages to premium-rate numbers.

The TGLoader malware has appeared in some alternative Android app markets recently, and researchers at North Carolina State University discovered and analyzed it, finding it has a wide range of capabilities. The malware uses the "exploid" root exploit to get root privileges on compromised phones, and from there it starts installing a variety of apps and Android code that are designed to perform a long list of malicious actions.

Submission + - First $1 Billion Open Source Company (fool.com)

Submitted by
head_dunce
head_dunce writes: "According to this article "Red Hat will announce that it has officially crossed the billion dollar line in when it releases its Q4 and fiscal year earnings statements on March 28th." I just hope they are right with their prediction, because the rest of the article really doesn't have a clue what Red Hat really does. — Anyway, congrats to the guys at Red Hat!"
Businesses

Submission + - Boosting Your Pay Without Becoming A Manager (itworld.com) 1

Submitted by
jfruh
jfruh writes: "Most geeks who enjoy the technical parts of their jobs harbor at least a certain amount of resentment against their pointy-haired bosses — but most also assume that in order to climb up the corporate ladder and boost their salaries, they'll ultimately need to become managers themselves. While it is difficult to match the salaries of management-track workers, it is possible, and the key is being the best techie you can be."
EU

Submission + - Spiral Signals Promise 'Infinite' Bandwidth (techweekeurope.co.uk)

Submitted by
judgecorp
judgecorp writes: "Swedish and Italian researchers have sent two signals simultaneously on the same radio wavelength, distinguished only by the orbital angular momentum of the photons. The technique could in principle allow "an infinite number of channels in a given fixed bandwidth" the scientists say, potentially allows more capacity in Wi-Fi 3G and other radio systems"
Government

Submission + - Election hacked, drunken robot elected to school board (next .. POTUS?) (theregister.co.uk)

Submitted by mr crypto
mr crypto writes: In 2010 the Washington DC election board announced it had set up an e-voting system for absentee ballots and was planning to use it in an election. However, to test the system, it invited the security community and members of the public to try and hack it three weeks before the election.

"It was too good an opportunity to pass up," explained Professor Alex Halderman from the University of Michigan. "How often do you get the chance to hack a government network without the possibility of going to jail?"

With the help of two graduate students, Halderman started to examine the software. Despite it being a relatively clean Ruby on Rails build, they spotted a shell injection vulnerability within a few hours

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