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Cellphones

Microsoft Should Dump Middlemen, Build Own Phones 262

Posted by CmdrTaco from the i'll-do-it-myself dept.
suraj.sun writes "Microsoft has a long and illustrious history of operating system sales. The model has served the company well on the PC, but if it wants to make money in the phone market, it needs to start thinking like a consumer electronics company and start making its own phones."

Comment AVG has fixed the false positive (Score 1) 4

by phaedo00 (#32913200) Attached to: Arstechnica.com infected by malware?
Just to keep this updated, we're pretty sure this is a false-positive. AVG pushed an update yesterday which caused this to crop up on a ton of sites, including Amazon. We've compared hashes of the version of site.min.js being served on our site (the file AVG is complaining about) to a local, freshly compiled version and they match exactly, so there's no "infection" or corruption of our JavaScript taking place. I'll try to keep this updated as we hear more. We made a little post about it on the site here: http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2010/07/a-recent-avg-update-is.ars?comments=1#comments-bar Update: I've also been told that AVG pushed an update which fixes this false positive.

Comment Can you help me? (Score 1) 4

by phaedo00 (#32908764) Attached to: Arstechnica.com infected by malware?
Hey guys this is Clint from Ars. JSBiff, I think you also emailed in but you didn't put in a valid email so I couldn't see what the deal is. Can you guys give me any more pertinent information on the false-positives AVG and this "Malwarebytes" are throwing? There's no malicious JavaScript on the site, so the only possibility is that your anti-virus programs are flipping out over some kind of ad-code. If you could email me at civis@arstechnica.com or clint@arstechnica.com and give me all the information your application is reporting, I can start figuring out what's going on. Thanks!

Submission + - Judge rejects SCO's motion for a new trial (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A judge has rejected SCO's motion for a new trial in the company's dispute over UNIX intellectual property ownership. The ruling validates a verdict that was issued in April by a jury which determined that Novell, and not SCO, is the rightful owner of the UNIX SVRX copyrights. This means that SCO cannot continue to pursue its litigation against IBM and other Linux users. "There was substantial evidence that Novell made an intentional decision to retain ownership of the copyrights," the Judge wrote in his decision. "The Court finds that the verdict is not clearly, decidedly, or overwhelmingly against the weight of the evidence. Therefore, SCO is not entitled to a new trial."
Music

Submission + - EU may force iTunes Store to accept returns

Submitted by Sweet Harmony
Sweet Harmony writes: The European Union may require online music stores to accept returns, according to Ars Technica. A review of European consumer protection laws has highlighted online sales of 'digital content services' as an area where existing consumer protection laws need to be harmonized. 'The EC would like to standardize cooling offer periods along with other aspects of the EU's consumer protection laws. One of the issues being considered is whether the rules on consumer sales should apply to "digital content services" like music.'
Google

Submission + - Google accused of benefitting from piracy

Submitted by Clant
Clant writes: Google has been accused of benefiting from certain piracy websites because of the Adsense program, according to reports. Several major media companies have called on Google to properly screen their AdSense partners and stop supporting sites that are benefitting from piracy. From the article, "Legal filings show that Google worked with EasyDownloadCenter.com and TheDownloadPlace.com from 2003 to 2005, generating more than $1.1 million in revenue for the sites through the AdSense program. Google reportedly noticed the amount of traffic and advertising served by the two websites and assigned them an account representative to help optimize their efforts." Is this a new ploy to attack sites that are friendly to piracy?
OS X

Submission + - The state of virtualizing OS X

Submitted by seriouslywtf
seriouslywtf writes: There's been a lot of speculation about whether people will eventually be able to run Mac OS X in a virtual machine, either on the Mac or under Windows. Well, it seems that both Parallels and VMWare have definitively told Ars Technica that until Apple explicitly gives them the thumbs up, they're not going to be enabling users to virtualize OS X even though it may be possible to do so. From the first article, Parallels said:

"We won't enable this kind of functionality until Apple gives their blessing for a few reasons," Rudolph told Ars. "First, we're concerned about our users — we are never going to encourage illegal activity that could open our users up to compromised machines or any sort of legal action. This is the same reason why we always insist on using a fully-licensed, genuine copy of Windows in a virtual machine — it's safer, more stable, fully supported, and completely legal."
And VMWare added:

"We're very interested in running Mac OS X in a virtual machine because it opens up a ton of interesting use cases, but until Apple changes its licensing policy, we prefer to not speculate about running Mac OS X in a virtualized environment," Krishnamurti added.
Hardware

Navy Gets 8-Megajoule Rail Gun Working 650

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the high-flyers dept.
prototypo writes "The Free Lance-Star newspaper is reporting that the Navy Surface Warfare Center in Dahlgren, Virginia has successfully demonstrated an 8-megajoule electromagnetic rail gun. A 32-megajoule version is due to be tested in June. A 64-megajoule version is anticipated to extend the range of naval gunfire (currently about 15 nautical miles for a 5-inch naval gun) to more than 200 nautical miles by 2020. The projectiles are small, but go so fast that have enough kinetic punch to replace a Tomahawk missile at a fraction of the cost. In the final version, they will apex at 95 miles altitude, well into space. These systems were initially part of Reagan's SDI program ("Star Wars"). An interesting tidbit in the article is that the rail gun is only expected to fire ten times or less per day, presumably because of the amount of electricity needed. I guess we now need a warp core to power them."

Comment Updated information from Sunbelt (Score 4, Interesting) 143

by phaedo00 (#13259880) Attached to: Spyware Based ID Theft Ring Uncovered

Hi, I'm the author of the Ars article and the submitter of this story, Alex from sunbelt got back to me with a bit more information:

Basically, it went like this:

Patrick Jordan, our CoolWebSearch expert, was doing research on a CWS exploit. During the course of the research, he disovered that a) the machine he was testing became a spam zombie and b) it send a call back to a remote server. He traced back the remote server and found what you have heard about.

The scale is unimaginable. There are thousands of machines pinging back in a day. There is a keylogger file that grows and grows, and then is zipped off and then the cycle continues again.

It is sophisticated. There are nifty little PHP scripts that help the criminals get reports. There is a special upload area.

It's really quite sucktastic.

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