EFF Asks Verizon Whether Etisalat Deserves CA Trust 135

Posted by timothy on Saturday August 14, 2010 @08:18AM from the suuuuuure-they-do dept.

Peter Eckersley writes "Today EFF published an open letter to Verizon, calling for investigation of a trusted SSL Certificate Authority. Etisalat is a majority state-owned telecom of the United Arab Emirates with operations throughout the Middle East. You may remember that last year Etisalat installed malware on its subscribers' BlackBerry phones, and was recently pivotal in the UAE's threat to disconnect BlackBerry devices altogether if Research In Motion did not provide a backdoor for BES servers' crypto. This company, which appears to be institutionally hostile to the existence and use of secure cryptosystems, is in possession of a master certificate for HTTPS, encrypted POP and IMAP, and other SSL-based security systems. Etisalat's CA certificate is not trusted directly by Mozilla and Microsoft, but was instead delegated as an Intermediate CA by Verizon. As a result, we are asking Verizon to investigate whether it is appropriate for Etisalat to continue holding this certificate, and to consider revoking it."

When Rewriting an App Actually Makes Sense 289

Posted by timothy on Saturday May 22, 2010 @08:40AM from the old-app-was-starting-to-fester dept.

vlangber writes "Joel Spolsky wrote a famous blog post back in 2000 called 'Things You Should Never Do, Part I,' where he wrote the following: '[T]he single worst strategic mistake that any software company can make: They decided to rewrite the code from scratch.' Here is a story about a software company that decided to rewrite their application from scratch, and their experiences from that process."

Sony Refuses To Sanction PS3 "Other OS" Refunds 396

Posted by Soulskill on Friday April 16, 2010 @03:34AM from the you-paid-for-what-we-say-you-paid-for dept.

Stoobalou writes "Sony says that it has no intention of reimbursing retailers if they offer users partial refunds for fat PS3s. Last week, the first PS3 user successfully secured a partial refund from Amazon UK as compensation for the removal of the ability to run Linux on the console. The user quoted European law in order to persuade the online retailer that the goods he had bought in good faith were no longer fit for his purposes because of the enforcement of firmware update 3.21, which meant that users who chose to keep the Other OS functionality would lose the ability to play the latest games or connect to the PlayStation Network."

Google Open Sources Etherpad, Piratepad Launches 126

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Saturday December 19, 2009 @03:30AM from the fair-play dept.

Thomas Nybergh writes "The Etherpad code was released by Google under the Apache license a few hours ago. Google's initial plan, after acquiring the service, was to use Etherpad's tech with its new Wave collaboration platform and to shut down the original service entirely. Soon after the Etherpad code was released, the Swedish Pirate Party launched their instance of the service at piratepad.net. An announcement, which also mentions a new Tor node, is published on the party website (Google translation). The original Etherpad service had in a short time become a killer application for collaborative work within at least the Swedish, and according to my personal experience, in the Finnish Pirate Party as well. The Etherpad open source project is available at Google Code."

Best Man Rigs Newlyweds' Bed To Tweet During Sex 272

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday December 17, 2009 @09:40PM from the nice-feed dept.

When an UK man was asked to be the best man at a friend's wedding he agreed that he would not pull any pranks before or during the ceremony. Now the groom wishes he had extended the agreement to after the blessed occasion as well. The best man snuck into the newlyweds' house while they were away on their honeymoon and placed a pressure-sensitive device under their mattress. The device now automatically tweets when the couple have sex. The updates include the length of activity and how vigorous the act was on a scale of 1-10.

Microsoft Acknowledges Theft of Code From Plurk 215

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday December 15, 2009 @07:15PM from the least-they-could-do dept.

adeelarshad82 writes with news that Microsoft has acknowledged and taken responsibility for the theft of code belonging to Plurk.com, although the company also said it was the work of a Chinese vendor. Yesterday we discussed Plurk's blog post accusing Microsoft of copying their UI and code for Microsoft's Chinese microblogging site, Juku. Microsoft has now taken the site down and indefinitely suspended Juku's beta.

Nintendo Upset Over Nokia Game Emulation Video 189

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday December 01, 2009 @02:45AM from the super-mario-takedown dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Nintendo is investigating potential copyright infringement by Nokia during some video demos of their N900 phone, which can be seen emulating Nintendo games. Nintendo spokesman Robert Saunders says: 'We take rigorous steps to protect our IP and our legal team will examine this to determine if any infringement has taken place.' In the video, Nokia says, 'Most publishers allow individual title usage, provided that the user is in possession of the original title.'"

Scientists Say a Dirty Child Is a Healthy Child 331

Posted by samzenpus on Tuesday November 24, 2009 @07:07PM from the snack-is-going-to-be-on-the-floor-today dept.

Researchers from the School of Medicine at the University of California have shown that the more germs a child is exposed to, the better their immune system in later life. Their study found that keeping a child's skin too clean impaired the skin's ability to heal itself. From the article: "'These germs are actually good for us,' said Professor Richard Gallo, who led the research. Common bacterial species, known as staphylococci, which can cause inflammation when under the skin, are 'good bacteria' when on the surface, where they can reduce inflammation."

iPhone Owners Demand To See Apple Source Code 298

Posted by kdawson on Friday November 20, 2009 @05:50PM from the you're-a-brick dept.

CWmike writes "iPhone owners charging Apple and AT&T with breaking antitrust laws asked a federal judge this week to force Apple to hand over the iPhone source code, court documents show. The lawsuit, which was filed in October 2007, accuses Apple and AT&T of violating antitrust laws, including the Sherman Act, by agreeing to a multi-year deal that locks US iPhone owners into using the mobile carrier. On Wednesday, the plaintiffs asked US District Court Judge James Ware to compel Apple to produce the source code for the iPhone 1.1.1 software, an update that Apple issued in September 2007. The update crippled iPhones that had been unlocked, or 'jailbroken,' so that they could be used with mobile providers other than AT&T. The iPhone 1.1.1 'bricked' those first-generation iPhones that had been hacked, rendering them useless and wiping all personal data from the device. The plaintiffs say that the source code is necessary to determine whether all iPhones were given the same 1.1.1 update, and whether it was designed to brick all or just some hacked iPhones."

Microsoft Tries To Censor Bing Vulnerability 275

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday November 10, 2009 @03:30AM from the don't-shout-and-wave-it-about dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft's Bing search engine has a vulnerability with its cash-back promotion, which impacts both merchants and customers. In traditional Microsoft fashion, the company has responded to the author of the breaking Bing cash-back exploit with a cease & desist letter, rather than by fixing the underlying security problem. It is possible for a malicious user to create fake Bing cash-back requests, resulting in not only fake cash-back costs for the merchant, but also blocking legitimate customers from receiving their cash-back from Bing. The original post is currently available in Bing's cache, although perhaps not for long. But no worries, the author makes it clear that the exploit should be painfully obvious to anyone who reads the Bing cash-back SDK."

Comment Re:The TX sucked (Score 1) 300

by Coke in a Can on Wednesday February 18, 2009 @11:46PM (#26912233) Attached to: Palm Pulls the Plug On Palm OS

After a year or two, the power adapter broke and I took it back to the store where I had bought an extended warranty. They offered $186 IIRC as a refund based on the age of it, saying that I should have been able to get something comparable for that much at the time, given the inevitable progression of technology. Palm, in reality, was still selling the same old TX for the same price, I think it was $300.

My issues were pretty much all software anyway. They had the capability to release software updates, but they chose to avoid releasing updates except for the daylight savings change.

Comment The TX sucked (Score 1) 300

by Coke in a Can on Thursday February 12, 2009 @03:14PM (#26831527) Attached to: Palm Pulls the Plug On Palm OS

Massively. It was good on paper but Palm never updated the software on it so the browser was piss-poor, network implementation felt last-minute, and they forgot to design the software for the hardware - mainly, the touchscreen calibration utility hadn't been updated to deal with the lower part of the screen (320x480 vs 320x320). My digitizer was a bit off, evidently, and the calibration utility should have let me correct for it, but it didn't, so it was impossible to use the onscreen keyboard. I had the choice of buying third party software to recalibrate the entire screen area, or correct for the error when typing by always tapping above the key I wanted.

I went through 3 Palm OS PDAs (m100, Sony TJ35, T|X) and I'm glad Palm is dead. Devices like the iPod touch are the new PDA.