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Government

Submission + - CIA: Five particularly timeless tips from the Simple Sabotage Field Manual (networkworld.com)

Submitted by
coondoggie
coondoggie writes: "The CIA today published a very interesting piece of its history, the once classified "Simple Sabotage Field Manual," which defines how the ordinary person could disrupt an ordinary environment, say an office "in such a way as to involve a minimum danger of injury, detection, and reprisal." The booklet was at the time of its distribution, aimed at defining ways to "sabotage the US' World War II enemies," the CIA said."
IT

Submission + - IT salaries and hiring are up - but just to 2008 levels (infoworld.com)

Submitted by
tsamsoniw
tsamsoniw writes: "A mid-year salary survey has a mix of good and bad news for IT professionals: The good news, hiring is slowly increasing as companies bring more IT operations back in house and salaries are creeping up a bit. But compensation (including benefits) are just now reaching 2008 levels — and hiring will remain soft, at least until the presidential election is over."

Submission + - Sub-microsecond photography on a tiny budget (njnoordhoek.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Conventional Xenon-based photographic flash systems produce millesecond duration light pulses, way to slow to stop even a golf ball in flight. For less than two hundred dollars in electronic parts you can build a sub-microsecond flash that is capable of topping even the fastest supersonic bullet in mid-air. Commercial systems that achieve the same start at about 5000$.
Facebook

Submission + - Facebook invests in 55-terabit intra-Asia submarine cable system (extremetech.com) 1

Submitted by
MrSeb
MrSeb writes: "Facebook has joined a consortium that will build by far the fastest intra-Asia submarine fiber optic network, the Asia Pacific Gateway (APG). Facebook is the only American company involved with the venture, which will see 10,000km (6,000 miles) of prime fiber laid between Malaysia and Japan (pictured above), with branches landing in almost every country along the way (Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, China, Taiwan, and South Korea). When the cable goes online in 2014, at a cost of around $450 million, it is slated to use 40Gbps channels, for a total capacity of 55 terabits per second, or a transfer speed of 6.9 terabytes (138 Blu-ray discs) per second. When the various routers and repeaters are upgraded to 100Gbps-per-channel, the cable will have a total capacity of well over 100Tbps. The prime reason for building the cable, other than making money, is to provide more redundancy between the US and Asia. Currently, almost every connection from Asia to the US is routed through Singapore or Japan. If there is congestion at one of these sites, or a cable is cut, then the other (highly populous) countries in south east Asia are in trouble. It is perhaps no surprise that China Telecom and China Unicom, two of the world’s largest telecoms companies, are involved in the laying of APG. Facebook's involvement is almost certainly due to the fact that the social network's growth has almost stagnated in Europe and North America, while Asia is only just starting to climb on the Facebook bandwagon."
Android

Submission + - on{X} an Easy way to Program (i-programmer.info)

Submitted by mikejuk
mikejuk writes: on{X} is a very simple rule-trigger programming tool. What is surprising about on{X} is that it is for Android and it is created by Microsoft — so it puts Android ahead of Windows Phone. As a system intended to make it easy for the non-programmer to create useful apps, it is also of value if you can program and might even encourage some to learn how.
If you don't program then its just a matter of picking a recipe and customizing it by selecting options. For example you can customize a recipe to produce:
Show me the weather forcast every day at 8:00 AM if the expected temperature is below 50F.
If you are a JavaScript programmer then it is easy to create new recipies that make use of the phone's internal sensors. . For example, you can discover the battery state, network connection, location and so on. You can't get at every sensor the phone has and some of the sensor data is prepackaged. For example, the accelerometer is provided only as the modeOfTransport trigger — walking, car etc.
This is an easy to use way of creating the sort of micro app that is just too personal and custom for a developer to bother with. It is a great idea but surely Microsoft should have done it for their own phone first?
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."
""

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