61534615
submission
itwbennett writes:
Four years after a string of suicides brought unwanted attention to his company, Foxconn Technology Group's CEO said none of the deaths had to do with poor working conditions at its factories. 'It wasn't because the workers were tired,' Terry Gou said on Wednesday at the company's annual shareholders' meeting. 'Some of it was because the work is monotonous, but 90 percent of it had to do with personal relationships or because of family disputes.'
61525913
submission
jfruh writes:
Not everyone in the tech world is a flashy app-builder or a hip kid with a pile of VC money. I talked to a group of IT workers who agreed with the self-description of being "invisible" to bring stories to light of what their work lives are like — the joys and frustrations that are ultimately much more representative of what a career is like in this field than whatever Mark Zuckerberg is up to.
61525825
submission
itwbennett writes:
A group of researchers from Google, the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and the University of Nebraska undertook a study of over 26 million builds by 18,000 Google engineers from November 2012 through July 2013 to better understand what causes software builds to fail and, by extension, to improve developer productivity. And, while Google isn't representative of every developer everywhere, there are a few findings that stand out: Build frequency and developer (in)experience don't affect failure rates, most build errors are dependency-related, and C++ generates more build errors than Java (but they’re easier to fix).
61525807
submission
jfruh writes:
Intel is developing a series of robot kits for hobbyists, ranging from 'Jimmy', a $1,500 'social robot,' to a more robust $16,000 model. The robots are powered by Intel x86 chips, are programmable, and can have exoskeletons parts produced at home by 3-D printers.
61483137
submission
jfruh writes:
Code-hosting and project management services provider Code Spaces boasted that its customers' data was safe because its hosting services had full redundancy, high availability, and performed real-time backups to multiple off-site locations. But once hackers managed to get access to Code Spaces' Amazon Web Services, it took them only a few hours to wipe out customer data permanently. The result is a cautionary tale about cloud storage and believeing promises.
61483011
submission
jfruh writes:
Many people assume that the long hours of working as the founder of a tech startup will hurt your family life. But what about those who make entrepreneurship part of that family life? Like Gabe Lozano, who at 14 saw his father's struggle to get a company off the ground and knew he wanted to be an entrepreneur too? Or the mother-daughter team of Susan Elliott and Elizabeth Niedringhaus, who started the managed services provider SSE? Sometimes the family that builds a company together stays together.
61476119
submission
itwbennett writes:
A browser add-on, dubbed 'Privacy Icons', from Disconnect and TRUSTe analyzes websites' privacy policies, and breaks them down into nine categories, including location tracking, do-not-track browser request compliance and data retention policies. The pay-what-you-want software is available now for recent versions of Chrome, Firefox and Opera.
61461737
submission
jfruh writes:
Congressional Democrats in the United States have proposed regulations to impose net neutrality on the U.S. internet. Republicans have a different take: they'd prefer that net neutrality be enforced by the Department of Justice's antitrust division. They argue that the DoJ has power under existing antitrust law to file lawsuits against network providers who their power to stifle Internet traffic, and that new laws and regulations will just make it harder to do business.
61461513
submission
jfruh writes:
AMD has always had a cozy relationship with performance hackers and hobbyists who want to get the most out of their chips. Now it looks like the company is going further in that direction, teasing a new CPU that is unlocked for overclocking and comes with a liquid cooling system.
61445777
submission
itwbennett writes:
Police in Dallas are scrambling after difficulties using a new records management system caused more than 20 jail inmates, including a number of people charged with violent crimes, to be set free. The prisoners were able to get out of jail because police officers struggling to learn the new system didn't file cases on them within three days, as required by law.
61369855
submission
itwbennett writes:
ICANN CEO Fadi Chehadé hopes to make progress on preparations to take over running the world's central DNS servers from the U.S. government's National Telecommunications and Information Agency when the organization meets in London next week. 'I think this is a meeting where the ICANN community has to deal with the fact, the good fact, that its relationship with the U.S. government, which characterized its birth, its existence and growth, has now run its course,' Chehadé said.
61364315
submission
jfruh writes:
Creators of compilers are in an arms race to improve performance. But according to a presentantation at this week's annual USENIX conference, those performance boosts can undermine your code's security. For instance, a compiler might find a subroutine that checks a huge bound of memory beyond what's allocated to the program, decide it's an error, and eliminate it from the compiled machine code — even though it's a necessary defense against buffer overflow attacks.
61364003
submission
jfruh writes:
When the U.S. government shut down the Silk Road marketplace, they seized its assets, including roughly $18 million in bitcoin, and despite the government's ambivalence about the cryptocurrency, they plan to auction the bitcoin off to the highest bidder, as they do with most criminal assets. Ironically, considering many bitcoin users' intense desire for privacy, the U.S. Marshall service accidentally revealed the complete list of potential bidders by sending a message to everyone on the list and putting their addresses in the CC field instead of the BCC field.
61362815
submission
itwbennett writes:
A proposed $324.5 million settlement of claims that Silicon Valley companies including Google and Apple suppressed worker wages by agreeing not to hire each others' employees may not be high enough, a judge signaled on Thursday. Judge Lucy Koh didn't say whether she would approve the settlement, but she did say in court that she was worried about whether that amount was fair to the roughly 64,000 technology workers represented in the case. Throughout Thursday's hearing, she questioned not just the amount but the logic behind the settlement as presented by lawyers for both the plaintiffs and the defendants.
61336701
submission
itwbennett writes:
The computerized trading platform for currencies owned by Australian company Alice is too abstract to be patented, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously, in Alice v. CLS Bank, released Thursday. The Alice patent at the heart of the case was to safeguard financial transactions against the risk that a party in the deal would renege. It was essentially a computerized version of what is known as 'intermediated settlement,' Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the majority. 'Merely requiring generic computer implementation fails to transform that abstract idea into a patent-eligible invention,' he added. The ruling isn't a direct assault on software patents, as some critics had hoped. But it should make it more difficult to get weak patents approved, said Julie Samuels, executive director of tech entrepreneur trade group Engine Advocacy and a long-time critic of software patents.
