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Submission + - Android now on over half of US smartphones (examiner.com)

Submitted by somebodee
somebodee writes: ComScore released new data today, suggesting that Android has finally taken over half of the US smartphone market. This comes from a 3.7% market share increase from the previous quarter, ending in December, 2011. Similarly, iOS's market share grew by 1.1% to 30.7%. RIM and Microsoft's market share both dropped, with RIM having the sharpest decline. RIM's market share fell by 3.7%, placing it at 12.3% of the total US market. Microsoft's smartphone market share fell by .8% to 3.9% total, and Nokia's market share for Symbian remained steady at 1.4% of the total market.
Science

Submission + - Study Aims to Read Dogs' Thoughts (techzwn.com)

Submitted by jjp9999
jjp9999 writes: A new study at Emory University is trying to figure out what dogs think. The study uses functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to scan the dogs’ brains while they’re shown different stimuli. Results from the first study will be published by the Public Library of Science, where the dogs were shown hand signals from their owners. ‘We hope this opens up a whole new door for understanding canine cognition and inter-species communication. We want to understand the dog-human relationship, from the dog's perspective,’ said Gregory Berns, director of the Emory Center for Neuropolicy and lead researcher of the dog project.
Australia

Submission + - The Lengthening Arm of Uncle Sam's 'Pirate' Justice (torrentfreak.com)

Submitted by
TheGift73
TheGift73 writes: "Figures....

File-sharing was firmly on the agenda when the head of the US Department of Homeland Security touched down in the Australian capital last week. The four new agreements – promptly signed before Secretary Janet Napolitano flew back out of Canberra – were less about sharing season two of Game of Thrones and more about sharing the private, government held information of Australian citizens with US authorities."
Censorship

Submission + - Is Facebook Blocking 'Irrelevant Or Inappropriate' Comments? 4

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Technical evangelist Robert Scoble today wanted to respond to a Facebook post by Carnegie Mellon student Max Woolf about PandoDaily but Facebook blocked him from posting his comment. The social networking giant’s algorithms detecting the comment as negative and gave the following error: "This comment seems irrelevant or inappropriate and can’t be posted. To avoid having your comments blocked, please make sure they contribute to the post in a positive way"
Android

Submission + - Android officially has over half of the US market (examiner.com)

Submitted by bobwrit
bobwrit writes: ComScore released new data today, suggesting that Android has finally taken over half of the US smartphone market. This comes from a 3.7% market share increase from the previous quarter, ending in December, 2011. Similarly, iOS's market share grew by 1.1% to 30.7%. RIM and Microsoft's market share both dropped, with RIM having the sharpest decline. RIM's market share fell by 3.7%, placing it at 12.3% of the total US market. Microsoft's smartphone market share fell by .8% to 3.9% total, and Nokia's market share for Symbian remained steady at 1.4% of the total market.
Google

Submission + - Google Apps beats Office 365 for DOI contract (techworld.com.au)

Submitted by
angry tapir
angry tapir writes: "The U.S. Department of the Interior has picked Google Apps to provide cloud-based email and collaboration applications to about 90,000 staffers, choosing Google's services over Microsoft's Office 365. Google had sued the U.S. agency in 2010, claiming its requirements for the contract tilted the scales unfairly toward Microsoft. Google eventually dropped its lawsuit last September."
Security

Submission + - BART Defends Mobile Service Shutdown (itworld.com)

Submitted by
itwbennett
itwbennett writes: "In a filing to the FCC, Grace Crunican, BART's general manager, defended last August's mobile shutdown, saying that 'a temporary disruption of cell phone service, under extreme circumstances where harm and destruction are imminent, is a necessary tool to protect passengers.' Taking the opposing position, digital rights groups, including Public Knowledge, Free Press, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Center for Democracy and Technology, told the FCC that 'wireless interruption will necessarily prohibit the communications of completely innocent parties — precisely those parties closest to the site where the emergency is located or anticipated.'"
BSD

Submission + - Bug Busters! OpenBSD 5.1 released. (openbsd.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Today the 31st release of OpenBSD has surfaced. As usual, it includes improved hardware support, OpenSSH 6.0, and over 7000 ports with major performance and stability improvements in the package build process(and some really cool stickers).
http://www.openbsd.org/51.html
Space

Submission + - Venus to Appear in Once-In-A-Lifetime Event (sciencedaily.com)

Submitted by revealingheart
revealingheart writes: ScienceDaily reports that on 5 and 6 June this year, millions of people around the world will be able to see Venus pass across the face of the Sun in what will be a once-in-a-lifetime experience. It will take Venus about six hours to complete its transit, appearing as a small black dot on the Sun's surface, in an event that will not happen again until 2117.

Transits of Venus occur only on the very rare occasions when Venus and Earth are in a line with the Sun. At other times Venus passes below or above the Sun because the two orbits are at a slight angle to each other. Transits occur in pairs separated by eight years, with the gap between pairs of transits alternating between 105.5 and 121.5 years — the last transit was in 2004.

"We are fortunate in that we are truly living in a golden period of planetary transits and it is one of which I hope astronomers can take full advantage," writes Jay M Pasachoff, an astronomer at Williams College, Massachusetts.
Encryption

Submission + - Stopping Side-Channel Attacks (phys.org)

Submitted by blinkin247
blinkin247 writes: In the last 10 years, cryptography researchers have demonstrated that even the most secure-seeming computer is shockingly vulnerable to attack. The time it takes a computer to store data in memory, fluctuations in its power consumption and even the noises it emits can betray information to a savvy assailant. Fortunately, even as they've been researching side-channel attacks, cryptographers have also been investigating ways of stopping them. Shafi Goldwasser, the RSA Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, and her former student Guy Rothblum, who's now a researcher at Microsoft Research, recently posted a long report on the website of the Electronic Colloquium on Computational Complexity, describing a general approach to mitigating side-channel attacks.
Android

Submission + - James Gosling favors Oracle, opposes Google in Android trial (wired.com)

Submitted by jmcbain
jmcbain writes: Java creator James Gosling states that Google totally slimed Sun and favors Oracle in the trial. "While I have differences with Oracle, in this case, they are in the right," he wrote on his blog. "We were all really disturbed, even [former Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz] just decided to put on a happy face and tried to turn lemons into lemonade, which annoyed a lot of folks at Sun."

Submission + - Dept of Interior chooses Google for email and collaboration services (doi.gov)

Submitted by dloolb
dloolb writes: As part of a major efficiency initiative that will leverage modern technology to save up to $500 million in taxpayer dollars by 2020, the Department of the Interior today announced a contract award for Department-wide cloud email and collaboration services using Google Apps for Government.
Blackberry

Submission + - BlackBerry 10 unveiled (theglobeandmail.com)

Submitted by arcite
arcite writes: Research in Motion Ltd's new CEO, Thorsten Heins unveiled BlackBerry 10 in Florida today. Will new features such as a virtual keyboard that learns from typing behavior to a camera that easily focuses on faces be enough to scrape back precious market share (which could possibly fall to 5%) from the likes of Apple and Android? With no physical device yet revealed and a release date ranging anywhere from August to October, it will be an uphill battle.
Java

Submission + - Cross-Platform Malware Exploits Java To Attack PCs And Macs

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Security vendors have discovered a new piece of malware that attacks both PCs and Macs. It uses the same Java security vulnerability exploited by the Flashback malware that infected hundreds of thousands of Macs. While the attack vector is the same as in Flashback, this Java applet checks which OS it is running on and downloads suitable malware for it.

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