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Android

Submission + - Eric Schmidt Doesn't Think Android Is Fragmented

Submitted by adeelarshad82
adeelarshad82 writes: Eric Schmidt took issue with the idea that the Android mobile operating system is fragmented, arguing that it's a differentiation between devices rather than a fragmentation. The difference, as he explains it, is that differentiation means manufacturers have a choice, they're going to compete on their view of innovation, and try to convince consumers that their innovation is better than somebody elses whereas fragmentation is quite the opposite. Not suprisingly, company analysts beg to differ, pointing out the ever increasing incompatibilities between OS and apps across different Android devices and why they hate Android.
The Media

WikiLeaks Will Unveil Major Bank Scandal 1018

Posted by CmdrTaco from the don't-be-evil dept.
Atmanman writes "When WikiLeaks announced it was releasing 251,287 US diplomatic cables, we all thought we knew what was meant by its earlier ominous words that, 'The coming months will see a new world, where global history is redefined.' It now appears the organization is sitting on a treasure trove of information so big that it has stopped taking submissions. Among data to be released are tens of thousands of documents from a major US banking firm and material from pharmaceutical companies, finance firms and energy companies."
Linux

Submission + - cde: Making Linux Portability Easy (stanford.edu)

Submitted by ihaque
ihaque writes: A Stanford researcher, Philip Guo, has developed a tool called cde to automatically package up a Linux program and all its dependencies (including system-level libraries, fonts, etc!) so that it can be run out of the box on another Linux machine without a lot of complicated work setting up libraries and program versions or dealing with dependency version hell. He's got binaries, source code, and a screencast up. Looks to be really useful for large cluster/cloud deployments as well as program sharing. Says Guo,

CDE is a tool that automatically packages up the Code, Data, and Environment involved in running any Linux command so that it can execute identically on another computer without any installation or configuration. The only requirement is that the other computer have the same hardware architecture (e.g., x86) and major kernel version (e.g., 2.6.X) as yours. CDE allows you to easily run programs without the dependency hell that inevitably occurs when attempting to install software or libraries. You can use CDE to allow your colleagues to reproduce and build upon your computational experiments, to quickly deploy prototype software to a compute cluster, and to submit executable bug reports.
Microsoft

Microsoft's Chief Exec For Latin America Says 'Open' Means 'Incompetent' 340

Posted by timothy from the deseo-suscribirme-a-su-boletan-de-noticias dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The President of Microsoft Latin America, in criticizing the Brazilian government for its support of open source software, claimed that declaring something open is how you 'mask incompetence.' That seems especially funny coming from Microsoft, who has used 'closed' to mask incompetence for years. I thought 'open' meant that people could find and fix (or ignore) incompetence, whereas closed meant you were stuck with the incompetence."
Crime

Submission + - Burglary Ring Uses Facebook Places To Find Targets (wmur.com)

Submitted by Kilrah_il
Kilrah_il writes: A burglary ring was caught in Nashua, NH due to the vigilance of an off-duty police officer. The group is credited with 50 acts of burglaries, the targets chosen because they posted their absence from home on the Internet. "'Be careful of what you post on these social networking sites,' said Capt. Ron Dickerson. 'We know for a fact that some of these players, some of these criminals, were looking on these sites and identifying their targets through these social networking sites.'"
Well, I guess the prophecies came true.
Operating Systems

The Future of Portable Linux Distros 107

Posted by Soulskill from the a-penguin-in-every-home dept.
i_want_you_to_throw_ sends in a Tech Radar piece about the various portable Linux distributions, focusing on operating systems like Android, Chrome OS, and Ubuntu Netbook Remix. The article compares the distributions designed for similar purposes and discusses where they will likely go in the future. "As UNR is built on Ubuntu, it's highly likely that we'll see almost as many UNR respins as we have for the parent distribution. We've already seen one example in Jolicloud, and we'd put money on many community distributions, such as Linux Mint or Crunchbang offering a UNR overhaul alongside their standard desktop installations. It's also likely that Canonical will be able to forge stronger relationships with companies like Dell, which is already shipping a specific version of UNR on its Mini 9 platform. As Windows XP is phased out and the cost of bundling Windows 7 rises, manufacturers will be looking for a cheap and easily maintainable netbook OS, and UNR fits the bill admirably."
NASA

Submission + - SPAM: NASA wants your ambitious high-tech contest ideas

Submitted by
coondoggie
coondoggie writes: "NASA is looking for a few good ideas for future multi-million dollar Centennial Challenges prize competitions and this time it wants the public to provide them. The space agency's Centennial Challenges have generated some highly advanced returns in areas such as super-efficient aircraft, reusable rocket-powered vehicles, wireless power transmission, super-strength materials robotic lunar excavation and improved astronaut gloves. Centennial Challenges is NASA's program to award cash prizes to independent inventors for significant advances in technologies of interest to NASA and the nation. Prize purses in each challenge range from $400,000 to $2,000,000 with appropriated funds that NASA has received for this purpose, NASA said.

[spam URL stripped]"
Link to Original Source
Security

Submission + - Schneier: We need better un-authentication (threatpost.com)

Submitted by
Trailrunner7
Trailrunner7 writes: "Bruce Schenier writes on Threatpost.com: In computer security, a lot of effort is spent on the authentication problem. Whether it is passwords, secure tokens, secret questions, image mnemonics, or something else, engineers are continually coming up with more complicated — and hopefully more secure — ways for you to prove you are who you say you are over the Internet. This is important stuff, as anyone with an online bank account or remote corporate network knows. But a lot less thought and work have gone into the other end of the problem: how do you tell the system on the other end of the line that you are no longer there? How do you unauthenticate yourself? My home computer requires me to log out or turn my computer off when I want to unauthenticate. This works for me because I know enough to do it, but lots of people just leave their computer on and running when they walk away. As a result, many office computers are left logged in when people go to lunch, or when they go home for the night. This, obviously, is a security vulnerability."
Windows

UAC Whitelist Hole In Windows 7 496

Posted by Soulskill from the time-for-some-creative-rebranding dept.
David Gerard writes "Microsoft tried to make Vista secure with User Access Control (UAC). They relaxed it a bit in Windows 7 because it was such a pain in the backside. Unfortunately, one way they did this (the third way so far found around UAC in Windows 7) was to give certain Microsoft files the power to just ... bypass UAC. Even more unfortunately, one of the DLLs they whitelisted was RUNDLL32.EXE. The exploit is simply to copy (or inject) part of its own code into the memory of another running process and then telling that target process to run the code, using standard, non-privileged APIs such as WriteProcessMemory and CreateRemoteThread. Ars Technica writes up the issue, proclaiming Windows 7 UAC 'a broken mess; mend it or end it.'"
Security

California's Wireless Road Tolls Easily Hackable 354

Posted by timothy from the no-sir-I-was-in-seattle-at-the-time dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Nate Lawson, a researcher at RootLabs, has found a way to clone the wireless transponders used by the Bay Area FasTrak road toll system. This means you can copy the ID of another driver onto your own device and, as a result, travel for free while others foot the bill. Lawson also raises the interesting point of using the FasTrak system to create false alibis, by overwriting one's own ID onto another driver's device before committing a crime. Luckily, Lawson wasn't sued before he could reveal his research, unlike those pesky MIT students."
The Almighty Buck

Gates Foundation Vs. Openness In Research 150

Posted by kdawson from the not-far-from-the-tree dept.
An anonymous reader writes "There have been complaints within the World Health Organization of some oddly familiar-sounding tactics and attitudes by the Gates Foundation. Scientists who were once open with their research are now 'locked up in a cartel' and are financially motivated to support other scientists backed by the Foundation. Diversity of views is 'stifled,' dominance is bought, and Foundation views are pushed with 'intense and aggressive opposition.'" The article tries hard for balance. It notes that the WHO official who raised the alarm on the Gates Foundation's unintended consequences on world health research is "an openly undiplomatic official who won admiration for reorganizing the world fight against tuberculosis but was ousted from that job partly because he offended donors like the Rockefeller Foundation."

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