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Submission + - How do I handle a Patent Troll (google.com)

Submitted by
weiserfireman
weiserfireman writes: "We received a letter today from a company claiming they are the licensing agent for some US Patents, 7986426, 7477410, 6771381, 6185590.

They are claiming the integration of scanning and document management into our workflows violates their patents and we have to license their technology as an end user.

An example of an infringing technology is the use of an HP MFP scanner to send an email or scan a document to a network folder or Microsoft Sharepoint.

I am pretty sure that these patents could be invalidated by prior art. I've worked with document management systems since 1999. But my company is so small that a patent fight as an enduser of these technologies is not financially feasible.

I have started the process of trying to get HP's Legal Team involved, does Slashdot have any other suggestions?"
Businesses

Submission + - Dear Cisco, Please Don't Screw Up Meraki (networkcomputing.com)

Submitted by
CowboyRobot
CowboyRobot writes: "Lee Badman at NetworkComputing.com has some advice in light of Cisco paying $1.2 billion for WLAN competitor Meraki. "The problem is Cisco takes the big-network model and tries to force it into places where it doesn't fit. For instance, I would've needed at least a handful of independently configured and managed Cisco devices in a branch deployment that I run to bring up the same core functionality that Meraki delivers in a single MX appliance. Meraki has been that rare vendor that delivers the ease of use it promises, while not getting so big that it feels like developers and product managers are on a different planet from their customers. Here's hoping that all that's good with Meraki rubs off on Cisco. And regardless of how Cisco handles the Meraki integration, this acquisition validates the notion of cloud-managed networking.""
Security

Submission + - UN to Seek Internet Kill Switch Next Month (thenewamerican.com)

Submitted by
helix2301
helix2301 writes: "The United Nations and a wide swath of its autocratic member regimes were drafting a plan to give a little-known UN agency control over the online world. Among the most contentious schemes: a plot to hand the International Telecommunications Union a so-called “kill switch” for the Internet that critics say would be used to smash free speech."
Apple

Submission + - Apple's Cloud Email Censors Your Email Attachments (infoworld.com)

Submitted by squideatingdough
squideatingdough writes: Bob Cringely has an interesting post on his Infoworld blog about how certain phrases will cause Apple to not deliver your email, even when those phrases are used in attachments. I've heard of deep packet inspection, but not "deep word inspection."

Submission + - The cutting edge of short range ballistic missile defense systems (wired.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A new Israeli missile defense system can lock onto oncoming missiles, compute trajectory, and blow oncoming Hamas missiles out of the sky — all in less than 20 seconds. The operation of the system requires a high degree of tech wizardry, some attributed to video game playing. Colonel Zvika Haimovich, commander of the Israel Air Force’s Active Defense Wing has this to say about its operators:

My Iron Dome operators are all fighters, and sure, many of them probably played PlayStation and computer games in their teens before they got to my unit...Being a techie is no longer something to be ashamed of, no longer a dirty word, in the IDF. These teenagers who get drafted into the army need to be able to thrive in a technological environment"
Security

Submission + - FreeBSD Infrastructure Breached (net-security.org)

Submitted by Orome1
Orome1 writes: The FreeBSD team has announced over the weekend that two machines within the FreeBSD.org cluster have been compromised and have been consequently pulled offline for analysis. "These machines were head nodes for the legacy third-party package building infrastructure. It is believed that the compromise may have occurred as early as the 19th September 2012," they announced, and explained that it seems that the intrusion was made possible by a leak of an SSH key from a developer, and was not due to any vulnerability or code exploit within FreeBSD. They pointed out that FreeBSD's base repositories containing the kernel, system libraries, compiler, core command-line tools, and daemons were not compromised, and neither was the freebsd-update(8) binary upgrade mechanism.
Privacy

Submission + - How the SEC Almost Shut Down Wall Street (go.com)

Submitted by
concealment
concealment writes: "Computers owned by the Securities and Exchange Commission Trading and Markets division were brought by SEC staffers to a hacker convention. They contained unencrypted, step-by-step instructions to shut down our financial trading system. Essentially: A Hacker's Guide to our Financial Universe.

Sophisticated algorithms or complex malware were not required to crash the world's largest exchanges (and with them the world economy). No need for security clearance. A common thief could have hit the lottery with these babies."
Apple

Submission + - 'People overbelieved in Apple' (bgr.com)

Submitted by redkemper
redkemper writes: Wall Street is still crushing Apple. The stock is now deep in bear territory, down roughly 25% from the record high it hit just ahead of Apple’s record-breaking iPhone 5 launch in late September. Apple shares closed down more than 2% at $525.62 on Thursday, pushing Apple’s market capitalization below $500 billion for the first time since May. The company just posted a record September quarter, it’s guiding for a record holiday quarter and some analysts expect Apple’s performance to keep soaring. So what’s going on? According to one market watcher, “people overbelieved in Apple.”...

Submission + - Hostess Brands closing for good, end of the Twinkie (cnn.com)

Submitted by who_stole_my_kidneys
who_stole_my_kidneys writes: Hostess Brands — the maker of such iconic baked goods as Twinkies, Devil Dogs and Wonder Bread — announced Friday that it is asking a federal bankruptcy court for permission to close its operations, blaming a strike by bakers protesting a new contract imposed on them. "We deeply regret the necessity of today's decision, but we do not have the financial resources to weather an extended nationwide strike," said CEO Gregory Rayburn in a statement.

now what are people supposed to eat on a 8 hour raid / frag session?
Cloud

Submission + - How Obama's campaign used the cloud (networkworld.com)

Submitted by BButlerNWW
BButlerNWW writes: President Obama's re-election campaign housed more than 200 custom-built applications on Amazon’s cloud, creating a temporary IT deployment that rivals the scope and complexity of IT services at the largest enterprises. And then, after the campaign, it was basically all taken down.
"The words 'mission critical' definitely apply here," wrote AWS blogger Jeff Barr in a recap of the Obama campaign's use of the AWS cloud. "With the opportunity to lead the United States as the prize, the stakes were high."

AWS says the Obama campaign used almost every service available in its cloud, with an intense scale-up of services in the days leading up to the election. A database on Amazon's Relational Database Service (RDS) served as the primary registry for voter file information, for example. An analytics tool running on AWS's Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) service provided dynamic, real-time information on voter targets, segmenting of perspective voters and recommendations on shifting marketing dollars based on real-time feedback. A campaign call tool supported 7,000 concurrent users that placed 2 million calls on the last four days of the campaign, AWS reported. "The campaign used AWS to avoid an IT investment that would have run into the tens of millions of dollars," Barr writes. Then, after the election, the campaign backed all of the information up to AWS's Simple Storage Service (S3) and "scaled way, way down."

The news is in stark contrast to recent reports about the failure of Republic challenger Mitt Romney's analytics platform dubbed "Orca" which reportedly suffered widespread problems on Election Day.
Media

Submission + - Cybersecurity Bill Dies; Presidential Directive Lives; Press Overreacts (cio.com)

Submitted by
Curseyoukhan
Curseyoukhan writes: "The fact that the Senate bill would die had not gone unnoticed by the media, which immediately began inundating readers with calm and carefully considered reporting on the topic, like "Political Gridlock Leaves U.S. Facing Cyber Pearl Harbor." It begins with all the subtlety of a Roland "Day After Tomorrow" Emmerich movie:
"There’s almost universal agreement that the U.S. faces a catastrophic threat from cyber attacks by terrorists, hackers and spies."
This sentence makes perfect sense as long as you don’t stop to think about it. The phrase “almost universal agreement” is of course rhetorically and factually absurd. This is the United States. We can’t even almost universally agree that it’s okay to teach science in schools."
Businesses

Submission + - Late night snacks will be costing more... (foxnews.com)

Submitted by
ChemGeek4501
ChemGeek4501 writes: "It looks like late nite snacks are going to be costing more soon, if this franchise owner passes along the cost of implementing the Affordable Care Act in the US. Unfortunately, it will not only cost the consumer more per meal, but will cost many of his employees their full-time jobs in the franchises"

Submission + - Locksmith Service in Miami Florida 33124, 33125, 33126

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
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Submission + - FreeBSD update servers no longer providing updates

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Since roughly 7:00am PST on November 11th, the FreeBSD Project's servers used to provide updates to users of FreeBSD have gone silent. The servers are reachable, but no updates are being handed out.

Users have been posting repeatedly across multiple official mailing lists and forums asking why they aren't receiving updates. The situation, from a social standpoint, is chaotic.

The following update services appear to be impacted:

* csup and cvsup (for src, ports, doc, etc.)
* portsnap (for ports)
* freebsd-update (for binary updates / security updates)
* Native CVS

This issue also affects all FreeBSD cvsup, portsnap, and freebsd-update mirrors worldwide.

FreeBSD Project members have eluded to this being "maintenance", however no details other than that have been given at this time. The only known statements are as follows:

http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hubs/2012-November/002590.html
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2012-November/070581.html

If truly maintenance, this work was not announced publicly in any way (e.g. the freebsd-announce or freebsd-stable mailing lists, forums.freebsd.org, RSS/news feeds, or the FreeBSD website), and as of this writing there is still no announcement.

Those natively using SVN are not impacted. This includes all of the FreeBSD developers/committers. Commits/fixes (to FreeBSD itself) are still being made via SVN.

Ken Smith of the Primary Release Engineering Team has stated in a recent announcement (preceding 9.1-RELEASE, which is not out yet) that the aforementioned services will eventually be deprecated in favour of using SVN and portsnap exclusively:

http://www.daemonforums.org/showthread.php?t=7412

It is therefore speculated that some sort of infrastructure change may have been performed that relates to the cross-over nature of VC systems (e.g. possibly the SVN-to-CVS gateway on the back-end is broken), but as stated above there is no confirmation of that fact at present.
Microsoft

Submission + - Woz worries Microsoft is now more innovative than Apple (techcrunch.com) 1

Submitted by yvajj
yvajj writes: According to a techcrunch interview, Woz believes that Microsoft is now more innovative than Apple. Per the interview, it seems as though Apple is now just doing newer versions of the Iphone, and are potentially headed into a rut. Another gem from Woz is the fact that he treats all new hardware as something new to learn from and does not approach it with any preconceptions (irrespective of who the manufacturer is / what OS etc.). A great short interview from Woz.

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