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Submission + - Samsung Smart TV is recording your private conversations (thestack.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Samsung’s privacy policy includes details that its Smart TV voice recognition feature may pick up on personal conversations and transmit private communications to third parties. Buried in the privacy policy related to the smart television, Samsung advises users to be aware that any snippets of conversation might be captured by the software which allows them to control their television sets with a series of commands.Questions have been raised about who these third parties could be, what the information is used for, and how the data is being transmitted – with potentially unencrypted voice clips left exposed to hackers.

Submission + - The bizarre and complex story of a failed Wikipedia software extension

Submitted by metasonix
metasonix writes: Originally developed by Wikia coders, "Liquid Threads" was intended to be a better comment system for use on MediaWiki talkpages. When applied to Wikipedia, then each Wikipedia talkpage or noticeboard would become something resembling a more modernized bulletin board, hopefully easier to use.

Unfortunately, the project was renamed "Flow" and taken over by the Wikimedia Foundation's developers. And as documented in this very long Wikipediocracy post, the result was "less than optimal". After seven years and millions of dollars spent, even WMF Director Lila Tretikov admits "As such it is not ready for “prime time” for us."

Thus, like almost every other large software project undertaken by the WMF in recent years (for example), "Flow" didn't flow, it crashed and burned. Remember this story the next time Wikipedia runs more fundraising banners on its articles; now you have some idea of where the money actually goes.

Submission + - Xfce Getting A New Version Soon

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: It looks like the release of Xfce 4.12 is finally about to materialize. It has been about two and half years since the last stable release. There is now a concerted effort underway to ship a new release of this lightweight GTK+2 desktop environment out around the end of February or early March. "As we have discussed the status and progress of core components with many of you individually, we feel confident that the state of Xfce is good enough to polish some final edges and push more translations until then.", wrote Simon Steinbeiß on the xfce4-dev mailing list. The official list of showstopper bugs does not look too bad either. However, looking at the long time between releases certainly makes one think if the project could have use for some extra resources.

Submission + - Google Quietly Unveils Android 5.1 Lollipop

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Google today announced that Android One, the company’s standard for bringing smartphones to the developing world, is coming to Indonesia later this month. This makes Indonesia the fifth country to roll out Android One, in addition to India, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka. Yet the bigger news is that these latest devices are shipping with Android 5.1 Lollipop. Before today, the latest known version of Google’s mobile operating system was Android 5.0 Lollipop, which debuted in November 2014.

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