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Submission + - Government Spyware Vendor Left Customer, Victim Data Online for Everyone to See (vice.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Germany-based spyware startup Wolf Intelligence left its own data, including surveillance target’s information, passports scans of its founder and family, and recordings of meetings , in an open server and public Google Drive folder.

Submission + - SIM Card Forces All of Your Mobile Data Through Tor (vice.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: [O]ne UK grassroots internet service provider is currently testing a data only SIM card that blocks any non-Tor traffic from leaving the phone at all, potentially providing a more robust way to use Tor while on the go. “This is about sticking a middle finger up to mobile filtering, mass surveillance,” Gareth Llewelyn, founder of Brass Horn Communications, told Motherboard in an online chat. Brass Horn is a non-profit internet service provider with a focus on privacy and anti-surveillance services. Tor is a piece of software and a related network run by volunteers. When someone runs Tor on their computer or phone, it routes their traffic through multiple servers before reaching its final destination, such as a website. That way, the website owner can’t tell who is visiting; only that someone is connecting from Tor. The most common way people access Tor is with the Tor Browser Bundle on desktop, or with the Orbot app on Android.

But, in some cases, neither of these totally guarantee that all of your device’s traffic will be routed through Tor. If you’re using the Tor Browser Bundle on a laptop, and then go to use another piece of software, that app is probably not going to use Tor. The same might stand for Orbot running on older iterations of Android. Nathan Freitas, from The Guardian Project which maintains Orbot, said with newer versions of Android, you can lock down device traffic to only work if a specific VPN is activated, including Orbot’s. This SIM card, however, is supposed to provide a more restricted solution in the event that other approaches don’t quite work.

Submission + - What happens to your digital inheritance?

Submitted by ron-l-j
ron-l-j writes: The last few months a digital inheritance idea has been floating around in my head, and I am sure the thought has crossed your mind as well.With Google talking about the inactive account program it made me wonder, will my children get my iTunes, and amazon movies? I have plenty of mp4 movies on my server that will just set itself to admin with no password after I do not log in within a 6 month time frame.

  But what about the millions of dollars spent on digital content?
We all know your favorite DVD will become scratched, and will be worthless after a few years. But the possibility of your purchases lasting a long time is more relevant today with more reliable storage. Will it be the case of my boring 2D movies being laughed at by my kids and their 3D holographic displays? I do have a collection of written material, photos, home video, and a database I would like my descendants to have access to.

I can see the lawyers now grabbing for a fee, and the government digging in to tax your digital life in an inheritance tax.

Comment mucho strange (Score 1) 76

by d_beep (#29239023) Attached to: Oracle To Sell Sun's Hardware Business To HP?

This is mucho strange. Why would HP want to support a competing platform when it can just sit back and watch it die. Perhaps to get to Sun customer base, or to get hold of hardware patents etc. If so will SPARC come with Solaris ? HPUX for SPARC ?

As per Wikipedia the latest PA-RISC processor was released in 2005 ?. thatâ(TM)s like 400 years ago.....
hmm interesting rumor.
The Almighty Buck

Critic of Software Patents Wins Nobel Prize in Economics 235

Posted by Zonk from the wise-man-in-multiple-ways dept.
doom writes "You've probably already heard that the Nobel Prize for Economics was given to three gents who were working on advances in mechanism design theory. What you may not have heard is what one of those recipients was using that theory to study: 'One recent subject of Professor Maskin's wide-ranging research has been on the value of software patents. He determined that software was a market where innovations tended to be sequential, in that they were built closely on the work of predecessors, and innovators could take many different paths to the same goal. In such markets, he said, patents might serve as a wall that inhibited innovation rather than stimulating progress.' Here's one of Maskin's papers on the subject: Sequential Innovation, Patents, limitation (pdf).
Music

Jobs to Labels- Lose the DRM & We'll Talk Price 459

Posted by CmdrTaco from the ten-bucks-a-gig dept.
eldavojohn writes "Apple CEO Steve Jobs has been talking smack about DRM and has recently issued a verbal offer to major music lables stating that if they are willing to lose the DRM, he'd be willing to raise his 99 cent price for those iTunes songs. These tracks (such as the recent EMI deal) would also have better sound quality & cost about 30 cents more."
Supercomputing

Submission + - The Ability to "controllably Couple qubits"

Submitted by Timogen
Timogen writes: While large-scale quantum computers remain in the domain of science fiction, a joint team from Japan announced Thursday that it has been able to take a small but crucial step in pursuit of this advanced goal. http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2007 /05/quantumcoupling NEC, the Institute of Physical and Chemical Research, or RIKEN, and the Japan Science and Technology Agency, published a paper in the May 4 issue of the journal Science, outlining the ability to "controllably couple qubits." In classical computer science, bits — or binary digits — hold data encoded as ones and zeros. In quantum computing, data is measured in qubits, or quantum bits. As such, a qubit can have three possible states — one, zero or a "superposition" of one and zero. This unique property theoretically makes quantum computing able to solve large-scale calculations that would dwarf today's supercomputers. But qubits in isolation are not very useful. It's only when they can be connected to one another that large-scale processing becomes possible.

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If you teach your children to like computers and to know how to gamble then they'll always be interested in something and won't come to no real harm.

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