95734965
submission
Bismillah writes:
School admins are reporting that thousands of managed Chromebooks have suddenly forgotten their WiFi passwords and SSIDs, and can't connect to networks. The cause of the problem is unclear, but it may be related to an earlier Google service outage.
80657967
submission
Bismillah writes:
The recent 13-microsecond timing anomaly was caused by a satellite failure triggering a "software issue", the USAF 50th Space Wing has confirmed. Such an error is large enough to cause navigation errors of up to 4 km. Luckily, no issues with GPS guided munition were reported.
73915729
submission
AlbanX writes:
Australian telco Optus has been nabbed passing over its customers's mobile phone numbers to third-party websites without their knowledge.
The practice, known as HTTP header enrichment, aims to streamline the process of direct billing for customers, but they're not happy.
72100335
submission
Bismillah writes:
The Open Source Geospatial Foundation is outraged over mapping giant ESRI's latest move which entails vendor lock-in for light detection and ranging (LiDAR) data through its proprietary Optimised LAS format. ESRI is the dominant company in the geospatial data arena, with its ArcGIS mapping platform boasting with over a million users and 350,000 customers.
70372195
submission
Bismillah writes:
Researchers in Zürich have found a way to turn DNA into "synthetic fossils" with glass, making it more durable, and to read data encoded in it with error correction. The result could pave the way for DNA storage that survives over a million years in cold temperatures.
65921549
submission
AlbanX writes:
The Australian Government has introduced a bill that would require telecommunications carriers and service providers to retain the non-content data of Australian citizens for two years of it can be accessed — without a warrant- by local law enforcement agencies.
Despite tabling the draft legislation into parliament, the bill doesn't actually specify the types of data the Government wants retained. The proposal has received a huge amount of criticism from the telco industry, other members of parliament and privacy groups.
65454811
submission
AlbanX writes:
Google researchers have discovered a vulnerability in a version of the SSL (secure sockets layer) web encryption protocol which allows attackers to break its cryptographic security.
The 'POODLE' attack allows attackers to steal secure HTTP cookies or other bearertokens. CDN provider CloudFlare has already disabled SSL 3.0 by default across its network, and Google said it hopes to do the same in the coming months.
63425979
submission
Bismillah writes:
Yahoo is working on an easy to use PGP for email, the company's chief information security officer Alex Stamos said at Black Hat 2014. This could lead to some interesting standoffs with governments and law enforcement wanting to read people's messages.
63417511
submission
sciencehabit writes:
Even when the sea looks clean, its surface can be flecked with tiny fragments of paint and fiberglass. That’s the finding from a study that looked for plastic pollution in the uppermost millimeter of ocean. The microscopic fragments come from the decks and hulls of boats, and they could pose a threat to tiny creatures called zooplankton, which are an important part of the marine food web.
62507663
submission
Bismillah writes:
Russian security researchers have spotted a new malware named Mayhem that has spread to 1,400 or so Linux and FreeBSD servers around the world, and continues to look for new machines to infect. And, it doesn't need root to operate.
57163745
submission
Bismillah writes:
Vodafone Foundation's Mini Instant Network cellular access site is deployable in ten minutes and can be carried on as hand luggage on commercial airliners. It's only 2G but hey...
54650691
submission
Bismillah writes:
Evad3rs' new iOS 7 jailbreak featured a Chinese app store that sold pirated software, and which was pulled from Evasi0n7 soon after launch.
Latest rumours say that the exploit used for Evasi0n7 was stolen by a certain person, offered up for sale, so the Evad3rs did a deal with TaiG instead. Jay "Saurik" Freeman of Cydia meanwhile isn't happy about the whole thing, saying he was given no time to test Evasi0n7.
51837667
submission
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes:
No one wants to buy a stolen bike but if you see a bike you're interested in on Craigslist or at a flea market, there isn't a good way to know if it's stolen. Now Kickstarter has an interesting project that is looking for funding to expand a searchable database that will help users protect their bikes by permanently saving the bike's serial number. "We regularly saw people trying to sell stolen bikes, and would search for the bikes online—but it was too difficult to find definitive information about them because too few people save their serial numbers," says Seth Herr, founder of the Bike Index and lead developer of the project. Herr envisions Bike Index as a way to solve the “awareness problem” — awareness of existing registries and of a bike’s identifying information. “A common problem when people get their bikes stolen is that it’s like the first time the owner thinks about ‘What was my serial number?’ and other details that are important in recovering a stolen bike," says Marcus Moore. If every bike shop integrated Bike Index registration at the point of sale, that would make it easy for victims of bike theft to accurately report a stolen bike, and for bike purchasers to verify that they aren’t buying stolen goods. The Project plans to collaborate with Bryan Hance, the founder of stolenbikeregistry.com, one of the Internet's first-ever registries to track stolen bikes which already has almost 20,000 bicycles in their registry. "The biking community can smell authenticity," says Hance. "They know when someone's trying to sell them something, and they know when someone is honestly, genuinely interested in trying to tackle the problem. That's the sense I get from Seth and Bike Index. It's obvious he knows what he's doing."
51058027
submission
littlekorea writes:
The world's largest web-scale users of MySQL have committed to one further upgrade to the Oracle-controlled database — but Facebook and Twitter are also eyeing off more open options from MariaDB and cheaper options from the NoSQL community. Who will pay for MySQL enterprise licenses into the future?
