PleaseDontBeTaken - Slashdot User

Submission + - Privacy alert: your laptop or phone battery could track you online (betanews.com)

Submitted by Mark Wilson on Monday August 03, 2015 @12:57PM

Mark Wilson writes: Is the battery in your smartphone being used to track your online activities? It might seem unlikely, but it's not quite as farfetched as you might first think. This is not a case of malware or hacking, but a built-in component of the HTML5 specification.

Originally designed to help reduce power consumption, the Battery Status API makes it possible for websites and apps to monitor the battery level of laptops, tablets, and phones. A paper published by a team of security researchers suggests that this represents a huge privacy risk. Using little more than the amount of power remaining in your battery, it is possible for people to be identified and tracked online.

As reported by The Guardian, a paper entitled The Leaking Battery by Belgian and French privacy and security experts say that the API can be used in device fingerprinting.

Apple Planning To Build Private Restaurant 234

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday April 26, 2012 @08:24PM from the i-lunch-break dept.

First time accepted submitter a90Tj2P7 writes "Apple is building a 21,468 square foot private restaurant in Cupertino so employees can talk shop over lunch without being overheard. Apple's director of real estate facilities, Dan Wisenhunt, stated that: 'We like to provide a level of security so that people and employees can feel comfortable talking about their business, their research and whatever project they're engineering without fear of competition sort of overhearing their conversations.'"

Comment In my experience .... (Score 1) 991

by PleaseDontBeTaken on Wednesday April 16, 2008 @08:41PM (#23098326) Attached to: For CS Majors, How Important Is the "Where?"

At an ivy-league, I did not enter in CS but two years through changed my major to CS. It was highly theory-driven on the CS side and didn't really teach languages except for the opening "write a functional lisp interpreter in C" class. Then another class in the line would assume you knew C++ so you just had to learn it. Those were the bad old days of C++ with no STL in sight. But everyone got good at writing the String class....

I already knew I would never pursue a direct CS job - what I used to call "writing the spell checker for Word 6.0." But the in-major friends of mine who did want positions at the major software firms of the time (Microsoft, Oracle) had no problems getting them and for that matter succeeding at them.

In my job I've had to pick up a few language and learn them in order to accomplish some higher business purpose. The basic-ingredients focus on data structures, design patterns, discrete automata, and efficiency have always been there and given me a good framework to map any language I was working in to my knowledge base or any task onto my ability base.

Obviously you would get all that and more at MIT / Caltech as well. My point is that the cs/engineering program at a decent "liberal arts" school can give you what you need in many cases. Especially for "true" computer science, the required resources are quite easy for any top-ranked school/program to provide, even if it only brings forth 12 grads. If you asked the same question with respect to advanced materials or electrical engineering, then the required resources for a full program with grad-level options while in undergrad are an order of magnitude greater and might lead to a more careful consideration of the specific program.

The l.a. schools I am thinking of pull way ahead in terms of facilities, breadth of non-technical programs, girls (if you like that kind of thing), and recruiting/career path into non-technical jobs. The stereotyping of grads of tech schools that works for them in many cases in getting technical first-of-career jobs works against them in many cases in non-technical fields. And one of the best thing to do with college is keep your options open to you can change your mind.

Vista vs. Cairo - A Microsoft History Lesson 194

Posted by CmdrTaco on Sunday December 17, 2006 @11:44AM from the something-to-read dept.

avocade writes "Here is a nice history lesson by (the unfortunately infamous) Daniel Eran, arguing why the Longhorn/Vista road is very similar to the NT/Cairo road that Microsoft took in the 90's, effectively trying their best to discourage competition in the marketplace."

Google Launches Trends 168

Posted by CowboyNeal on Saturday August 26, 2006 @11:43AM from the what's-hip-with-the-kids-these-days dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Google started to offer a new Trends service that allows viewing search term request statistics split up by geographical locations and languages. In short one can use Google trends to figure out what's hot and what's not and perhaps even find cyclic patterns to pick best time to advertise. From my poking around Google trends I have noticed that there appears to be a general declining bias for most search terms that either has to do with the declining popularity of Google (i.e. less folks were using Google for the past two years) or with the declining amount of searches in general (which is highly unlikely)."

NPR Looks to Technological Singularity 484

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Sunday July 23, 2006 @05:36PM from the science-driven-by-science-fiction dept.

Rick Kleffel writes to tell us that NPR is featuring a piece with both Vernor Vinge and Cory Doctorow looking at the possibility of the "technological singularity" in the near future. Wikipedia defines a technological singularity as a "hypothetical "event horizon" in the predictability of human technological development. Past this event horizon, following the creation of strong artificial intelligence or the amplification of human intelligence, existing models of the future cease to give reliable or accurate answers. Futurists predict that after the Singularity, posthumans and/or strong AI will replace humans as the dominating force in science and technology, rendering human-specific social models obsolete."

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