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Submission + - Linux Smartwatch made from Toy Vortex Manipulator and Pi Zero (youtube.com)

Submitted by Jeremy Lee
Jeremy Lee writes: I'm into wearables now, and I wanted to see if a wrist-mounted Linux machine is possible yet. (Hint: yes.) As well as the physical build, I had to create a new way of controlling the pointer, using the gyroscopic heart of a quadcopter and buttons from the mouse made to endure the greatest thrashing of all time. My smartwatch can download comics from the internet over WiFi. I never know when to stop.

Submission + - Landlords, ISPs Team Up To Rip Off Tenants On Broadband (backchannel.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: Eight years ago, the FCC issued an order banning exclusive agreements between landlords and ISPs, but a loophole is being exploited, leaving many tenants in apartment buildings with only one choice of broadband service provider. The loophole works like this: Instead of having an exclusive agreement with one provider, the landlords refuse to let any other companies than their chosen providers access their properties, according to Harvard Law School professor Susan Crawford, who wrote an article about the issue.

Submission + - SPAM: United Launch Alliance planning for 1,000 people working in space by 2045

Submitted by MarkWhittington
MarkWhittington writes: Jeff Bezos, of both Amazon and Blue Origin, may ruminate about moving a lot of industry off the planet, but the United Launch Alliance, that joint venture of Lockheed Martin and Boeing, has a concrete plan to do so. ULA is working on an idea to have 1,000 people operating in Earth-moon space by 2045, less than 30 years away. The vision is based on three space vehicles that will rely on rocket fuel refined from lunar and asteroid water.
Link to Original Source

Submission + - US Efforts To Regulate Encryption Have Been Flawed, Government Report Finds (theguardian.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: U.S. Republican congressional staff said in a report released Wednesday that previous efforts to regulate privacy technology were flawed and that lawmakers need to learn more about technology before trying to regulate it. The 25-page white paper is entitled Going Dark, Going Forward: A Primer on the Encryption Debate and it does not provide any solution to the encryption fight. However, it is notable for its criticism of other lawmakers who have tried to legislate their way out of the encryption debate. It also sets a new starting point for Congress as it mulls whether to legislate on encryption during the Clinton or Trump administration. "Lawmakers need to develop a far deeper understanding of this complex issue before they attempt a legislative fix," the committee staff wrote in their report. The committee calls for more dialogue on the topic and for more interviews with experts, even though they claim to have already held more than 100 such briefings, some of which are classified. The report says in the first line that public interest in encryption has surged once it was revealed that terrorists behind the Paris and San Bernardino attacks "used encrypted communications to evade detection."

Submission + - Should software engineers be certified? 2

Submitted by mikeatTB
mikeatTB writes: While the software engineering community does not have a formal regulatory body, there is the British Computer Society, the Association for Computing Machinery, and the IEEE Computer Society. But these are not governmental organizations. We interact with digital services daily and freely divulge information to people and organizations about which we know very little, and we have no idea what they will do with that data. And legitimate websites and services can fall short of diligently protecting the data; we’ve all heard of WikiLeaks and the Panama Papers. Can we trust the people who design, operate, and maintain access to these systems? Do we need formal regulation in the software industry? Malcolm Isaacs sat down with HPE Software's Robert Youngjohns to discuss the issue. Youngjohns says we should trust but verify — by employ cutting-edge monitoring and analytics technology to protect the organization and the data. Should we go further?

Submission + - Good Cryptography Hygiene And Your Code's Success

Submitted by mikeatTB
mikeatTB writes: Cryptography is where information security lurches from the Hollywood image of spies and hackers and gets all boring and scientific. Still, plenty of developers would prefer to move cryptography concerns to the bottom of their priority list. One of the fathers of modern cryptography, Adi Shamir, recently said (and has been saying for years) that computer security isn't a solvable problem. Ignore that. Good crypto hygiene is important to your code's success. Fortunately, even if the algorithms are complex, the rules for implementation are simple. Angela Gunn shares three implementation rules to help developers.

Submission + - Is the Agile Manifesto Dead? (techbeacon.com)

Submitted by mikeatTB
mikeatTB writes: The Slashdot community dug into this pretty well when it happened, following Andy Hunt's blog post on the failings of the agile methodology. Jai Vijayan went deeper on the issue, talking to Hunt and also noting that Dave Thomas, coauthor of Hunt's The Pragmatic Programmer and one of the 17 authors of the Agile Manifesto, is as scathing as Hunt in his indictment of current agile development practices. But the big question for them and for all agile practitioners who agree is: What now? Hunt believes the time is here to fix the problem, and proposes for how the GROWS Method. Tim Ottinger, senior consultant at Industrial Logic and coauthor of Agile in a Flash: Speed-Learning Agile Software Development, says its time to revive agile by reinstating its original values. And not everyone agrees. Shaun Barker, head of engineering at blur Group PLC in the UK, says agile isn't dead; it's just misunderstood. So, is the term "agile" really dead, or is it just misunderstood?

Submission + - Think Big With Microservices: Lego-like Software Development Takes Shape (techbeacon.com)

Submitted by mikeatTB
mikeatTB writes: Ever since subroutines appeared in early attempts at computer programming, developers have tried to modularize their code. If only we could treat software as Lego blocks, the reasoning goes, we could mix and match various bits and pieces, building flexible applications by simply snapping their components together. Enter microservices. "Microservices" is among the hottest of new buzzwords. But as with so many buzzwords, people struggle to understand the value. Starting with the seminal 2014 article by James Lewis and Martin Fowler, the idea of microservices has taken on a life of its own. And like most overhyped ideas, this one has generated its fair share of confusion as well. Don't be misled by the "micro" prefix. While it's true that microservices should be small in some sense of the word, that principle should not lead you to build microservices unsuited to your needs. Remember: If the only kind of Lego block you use is the tiny, one-bump version, you won't be able to build anything interesting. But you don't want massive blocks either. In reality, you need a range of different sizes, and many of them will be small enough, but not too small. The same is true for microservices.

Submission + - Killing Off Zombie Apps: How Mobile Developers Can Help Slay Them (techbeacon.com)

Submitted by mikeatTB
mikeatTB writes: Mobile malware is a known risk, but an even greater threat is posed by apps that have been abandoned by their developers or become stale on mobile devices. The issues was highlighted recently in an Appthority threat report. Developers can play a big part in slaying the zombie apps with notifications for an app that isn't receiving support or has been removed from an app store. There is an even better way. 'Some apps will push an upgrade that states a particular application has been [sunsetted], and a user can use another application instead of it,' says Swapnil Deshmukh, a security researcher with the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP). Problem is, there's not a lot of incentive for developers to take that path, as long as an app is producing revenue for a developer. Walking dead apps can be a bigger problem when a developer is no longer active in a given app store, cutting off communications with customers. And that can open the door to new threats. Gartner security analyst Avivah Litan says, 'If users are searching for an update that has been discontinued, that would be a really easy attack vector for criminals because they know support has stopped for the application, but the users don't know that, so [the criminals] pretend they have an updated version for it.'

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