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Businesses

Ask Slashdot: Facebook, Twitter For Business, Is It Worth the Privacy Trade-Off? 158

Posted by samzenpus from the give-and-take dept.
cayenne8 writes "I've been a staunch advocate of NOT joining Facebook or Twitter or the other social networks to protect my privacy and to not voluntarily give all my personal information away to corporate America, or even the Government. However, I'm beginning to look into making money through various means on the side, one of them being photography/videography. With these mediums, being seen is critically important. Having a business facing site on Facebook/Google+ and even using Twitter can be great for self promotion, and can open up your business to a huge audience. If you were to open your FB and other social network accounts with business ONLY information, and keep your personal information (name, image, etc) off the Facebook account...will this keep your personal privacy still from them, or are their algorithms good enough to piece together who you are from the business only sites? Is the payoff worth the potential trade-off for generating potential customers for your business and guiding them to your primary website?"
Android

Ouya Consoles Will Start Shipping On December 28th 121

Posted by timothy from the did-you-bet-correctly? dept.
sfcrazy writes "Ouya has stuck to its deadlines. The team has posted an update on the official blog that the units will start shipping on the scheduled date of December 28th. These units are for those developers who backed the project on Kickstarter. There is some surprise for developers with this console. 'What we didn't tell you was that the advance dev consoles you ordered are pretty special – you'll know what I mean when you open yours. They're rare drops. :P,' says the official post."
Microsoft

Microsoft Security Essentials Loses AV-Test Certificate 185

Posted by samzenpus from the is-there-extra-credit? dept.
helix2301 writes "Every two months, AV-Test takes a look at popular antivirus software and security suites and tests them in several ways. In their latest test which was performed on Windows 7 during September and October, Microsoft Security Essentials didn't pass the test to achieve certification. Although that may not sound that impressive, Microsoft's program was the only one which didn't receive AV-Test's certificate. For comparison, the other free antivirus software, including Avast, AVG and Panda Cloud did."
Canada

Canada Creates Cap On Liability For File Sharing Lawsuits 208

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the mpaa-ground-troops-reported-in-toronto dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Over the past couple of days, there have been reports about the return of file sharing lawsuits to Canada, with fears that thousands of Canadians could be targeted. While it is possible that many will receive demand letters, Michael Geist has posted a detailed primer on liability in Canada that notes that recent changes to Canadian copyright law limit liability in non-commercial cases to a maximum of $5,000 for all infringement claims. In fact, it is likely that a court would award far less — perhaps as little as $100 — if the case went to court as even the government's FAQ on the recent copyright reform bill provided assurances that Canadians 'will not face disproportionate penalties for minor infringements of copyright by distinguishing between commercial and non-commercial infringement.'"
Media

Users Abandon Ship If Online Video Quality Is Not Up To Snuff, Says Study 155

Posted by Soulskill from the make-a-resolution-for-higher-resolution dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The first large scientific study of how people respond to poor video quality on the Internet paints a picture of ever rising user expectations and the willingness to abandon ship if those expectations are not met (PDF). Some nuggets: 1) Some users are willing to wait for no more than 2 seconds for a video to start playing, with each additional second adding 6% to the abandonment rate. 2) Users with good broadband connectivity expect faster video load times and are even more impatient than ones on mobile devices. 3) Users who experience video freezing watch fewer minutes of the video than someone who does not experience freezing. If a video freezes for 1% of its total play time, 5% less of its total play time is watched, on average. 4) Users who experience failures when they try to play videos are less likely to return to the same website in the future. Big data was analyzed (260+ million minutes of video) and some cool new data analysis techniques used."
Canada

Canada's Supreme Court Tosses Viagra Patent For Vagueness 100

Posted by samzenpus from the be-specific dept.
Freshly Exhumed writes "In a 7-to-0 decision, the Supreme Court Of Canada has ruled that Pfizer Canada Inc.'s patent on well-known erectile dysfunction remedy Viagra is now invalid due to insufficient information in Pfizer's patent application. The upshot is that competitors can now manufacture cheaper, generic versions of Viagra for sale in Canada."
Power

Breakthrough Promises Smartphones that Use Half the Power 110

Posted by samzenpus from the save-the-juice dept.
Dupple writes in with news about a discovery that should extend the life of your battery in the near future. "Powering cellular base stations around the world will cost $36 billion this year—chewing through nearly 1 percent of all global electricity production. Much of this is wasted by a grossly inefficient piece of hardware: the power amplifier, a gadget that turns electricity into radio signals. The versions of amplifiers within smartphones suffer similar problems. If you've noticed your phone getting warm and rapidly draining the battery when streaming video or sending large files, blame the power amplifiers. As with the versions in base stations, these chips waste more than 65 percent of their energy—and that's why you sometimes need to charge your phone twice a day. It's currently a lab-bench technology, but if it proves itself in commercialization, which is expected to start in 2013—first targeting LTE base stations—the technology could slash base station energy use by half. Likewise, a chip-scale version of the technology, still in development, could double the battery life of smartphones."
China

Submission + - China's 2nd Stealth Fighter Takes Flight: Is it For Sale? (thediplomat.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: China's 2nd stealth jet, the J-21 or designated as the F-60, took flight recently. The jet is China's second 5th generation fighter, of a similar style to America's F-22 or F-35. While little is know of the plane there are many questions that are being asked. Could the plane be for export? Can it compete with America's best stealth fighters that have some serious mechanical and cost issues? If China can sell the plane at a cheaper price and actually make it work correctly, it could have a winner on its hands
Patents

Submission + - Cisco CEO Blasts Patent Trolls and Patent Abuse (techdirt.com)

Submitted by AlphaWolf_HK
AlphaWolf_HK writes: At the recent Gartner Symposium Expo, Cisco CEO John Chambers had a few words to say about patent trolls: "It is a mess; There are patent trolls everywhere," said Chambers, noting that patent problems impose huge costs on every company. He didn't stop there though, he also suggested that companies stop suing their peers. Speaking to the audience, he said for "his peers" in the room, "you shouldn't be suing your peers." He also adds that patent litigation slows down innovation. He recommends throwing out the whole patent system, and starting from the beginning. Cisco's official stance (outside of John Chambers) is that we are really in need of patent reform, with specific ideas at eliminating patent trolls and patent shopping.

Also of interest, is Cisco's ongoing patent war with Tivo, (who many argue is also a patent abuser) by fighting Tivo's patents with their own patents, a la Samsung vs Apple.
The Military

Submission + - Targeting the President's DNA 2

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "The Atlantic reports that experts in genetics and microbiology are convinced we may be only a few years away from the development of advanced, genetic bio-weapons able to target a single human being based on their DNA. The authors paint a scenario of the development of a virus that causes only mild flu in the general population but when the virus crosses paths with cells containing a very specific DNA sequence, the sequence would act as a molecular key to unlock secondary functions that would trigger a fast-acting neuro-destructive disease that produces memory loss and, eventually, death. The requisite equipment including gene sequencers, micro-array scanners, and mass spectrometers now cost over $1 million but on eBay, it can be had for as little as $10,000. According to Ronald Kessler, the author of the 2009 book In the President’s Secret Service, Navy stewards gather bedsheets, drinking glasses, and other objects the president has touched—they are later sanitized or destroyed—in an effort to keep would-be malefactors from obtaining his genetic material. However no amount of Secret Service vigilance can ever fully secure the president’s DNA, because an entire genetic blueprint can now be produced from the information within just a single cell. How to protect the President? The authors propose open-sourcing the president’s genetic information to a select group of security-cleared researchers who could follow in the footsteps of the computer sciences, where “red-team exercises,” are extremely common practices so a similar testing environment could be developed for biological war games. "Advances in biotechnology are radically changing the scientific landscape. We are entering a world where imagination is the only brake on biology," write the authors. "In light of this coming synbio revolution, a wider-ranging relationship between scientists and security organizations—one defined by open exchange, continual collaboration, and crowd-sourced defenses—may prove the only way to protect the president.""

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