76765109
submission
itwbennett writes:
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has jumped through all the necessary hoops to become a certificate authority and soon will begin offering trusted SSL certificates to the public, for free. The official certificate authority is called Let's Encrypt and it just issued its first certificate 10 days ago, but it has not yet been added as a trusted authority. Let's Encrypt has set a public availability date of November 14th 2015, at which time their root certificate will have been cross-signed and the general public will be able to obtain free, trusted certificates.
76718745
submission
jfruh writes:
IBM's Jeopardy-winning supercomputer Watson is now suite of cloud-based services that developers can use to add cognitive capabilities to applications, and one of its powers is visual analysis. Visual Insights analyzes images and videos posted to services like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, then looks for patterns and trends in what people have been posting. Watson turns what it gleans into structured data, making it easier to load into a database and act upon — which is clearly appealing to marketers and just as clearly carries disturbing privacy implications.
76717119
submission
itwbennett writes:
Researchers have been demonstrating attacks against printers for years. Now, Hewlett-Packard has started building defenses directly into its printers' firmware instead of just patching individual vulnerabilities. The company's new M506, M527 and M577 series of LaserJet Enterprise printers, set to go on sale in October and November, will have built-in detection for unauthorized BIOS and firmware modifications.
76634351
submission
itwbennett writes:
Exploit acquisition company Zerodium has $3 million to buy iOS jailbreaks. 'Eligible submissions must include a full chain of unknown, unpublished, and unreported vulnerabilities/exploits (aka zero-days) which are combined to bypass all iOS 9 exploit mitigations including: ASLR, sandboxes, rootless, code signing, and boot chain,' Zerodium said on its iOS 9 Bug Bounty page
76630313
submission
itwbennett writes:
John Ribeiro reports that 'the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee has dropped a provision that would have required Internet companies to report on vaguely-defined terrorist activity on their platforms.' The draft legislation, which was unanimously passed by the Committee in July, was widely derided by the tech industry for its technical difficulty and by users for invasion of privacy.
76596879
submission
itwbennett writes:
On Friday, embattled HP was hit with a new lawsuit filed by the state of Michigan over a 10-year-old, $49 million project that called for HP to replace a legacy mainframe-based system built in the 1960s. Through the suit filed in Kent County Circuit Court, the state seeks $11 million in damages along with attorney's fees and the funds needed to rebid and reprocure the contract.
76578881
submission
jfruh writes:
Nigel Wilson of Nottingham was quite a drone enthusiast: he flew a drone over a Champions League soccer match low enough to startle police horses, and at other times flew drones over iPro Stadium in Derby, the Emirates Stadium in north London, and near the Houses of Parliament, Buckingham Palace, the HMS Belfast and the Shard tower in London. He's been convicted under the Air Navigation Order 2009 and fined £1,800.
76460781
submission
itwbennett writes:
In June of this year, Intel announced a processor branded as Broadwell-C. Now, the company has confirmed that the part was cancelled but would not give an official reason. Why did Intel kill the Broadwell-C? ITworld's Andy Patrizio speculates that it's a 'combination of increased cost, lower yield and potential product cannibalization' — cannibalization of the company's newly-launched Skylake processor, which the Broadwell-C outperformed.
76429567
submission
jfruh writes:
Many starry-eyed startups sincerely believe that their brilliant idea will be the next Facebook and build massive scalability into their apps from the get go. But often launching a new app ready to support tens of thousands of users isn't worth it, as it imposes hardware costs and extended development cycles on systems when they should be at their most nimble and easy to change.
76403935
submission
itwbennett writes:
After just under 8 years at Canonical where he was Community Manager of Ubuntu, Jono Bacon left in search of a new challenge. Now, a year and a half into his tenure at the XPRIZE Foundation as Senior Director of Community, Bacon reflects on the changing nature of community and how he is working to bring the 'anybody can play a role in a bigger picture' aspect of open source to 'solve the grand challenges facing humanity.'
76390121
submission
jfruh writes:
Harm de Vries, a post-doctoral researcher at the Université de Montréal, is trying to build an algorithm that will sort through pictures on Tinder and OKCupid and pick out women he'll find attractive. His program, built using deep learning techniques, has about a 68 percent success rate, which isn't that bad. (A human friend to whom de Vries described his preferences managed 76 percent.)
76323195
submission
jfruh writes:
Facebook's focus on mobile is helping it rack up user gains in Africa, where its user base has grown by 20 percent in the last year alone, almost entirely due to people accessing the service on their phones. The company still has a long way to go, though: only about 12 percent of Africans have Facebook accounts, and they're concentrated in the relatively prosperous countries of South Africa, Kenya, and Nigeria.
76323105
submission
jfruh writes:
One of the aspects of the space age that sci-fi writers of the '50s couldn't predict was how much of our space activities are conducted by unmanned satellites rather than human beings. Now, DARPA wants to take that one step further, by building a robot satellite to fix other satellites. The inititative is being headed by former Space Shuttle commander Pamela Meloy.
76211895
submission
jfruh writes:
The latest attack vector hackers are taking advantage of: Google's Webmaster tools, which allow domain owners to index new pages for searching and react quickly to Google-detected malware. It's that last capability that hackers are after, tweaking things to keep infected sites under their control longer.
76208431
submission
itwbennett writes:
The TSA's master luggage keys are designed to enable security officers to inspect luggage without having to cut off any locks. But now that detailed blueprints of those master keys were posted to GitHub this week anyone with a 3D printer can make their own.
