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Submission + - Big Banks Will Vie For Your Attention With Cardless ATMs and VR

tedlistens writes: In the year that bitcoin began to grow up and Apple Pay was born—and massive cyberattacks—the country’s largest financial institutions want you to imagine themselves as incubators. Three of the big banks opened up innovation labs to imagine what’s next in mobile banking; some are starting their own accelerators. Meanwhile, the latest research estimates that U.S. mobile payments, currently at $3.7 billion, will grow to $142 billion within five years. Now an industry not exactly known for speed is approaching 2015 with an ethos that sounds more Silicon Valley than Wall Street, touting visions of fridges that shop for you, Google Glass and Oculus Rifts, and the kind of futuristic security they hope will inspire consumers to trust them and their technology in the first place.
Businesses

Submission + - AT&T's Metered Billing Off By Up To 4,700% (itworld.com)

jfruhlinger writes: "Metered billing for home Internet service may be the way of the future. But shouldn't we have the right to expect that the meters will at least be accurate? As AT&T moves its DSL and fiber customers to plans where they'll have to pay for overages, some users have noticed that the company' assessment of how much data is being used can be wildly inaccurate."
Mozilla

Submission + - Mozilla Says It Erred on SSL Attack Disclosure (threatpost.com)

Trailrunner7 writes: Just days after news emerged of the attack on a registration authority in Europe tied to Comodo that caused the revocation of a number of fraudulent certificates from the major browsers, Mozilla officials have admitted that they made a mistake by not disclosing the details of the incident to its users earlier.
"In hindsight, while it was made in good faith, this was the wrong decision. We should have informed web users more quickly about the threat and the potential mitigations as well as their side-effects."

Cloud

Submission + - Xen 4.1 Hypervisor releases; (xen.org)

LarsKurth writes: "The Xen.org open source community just released a new version of the Xen Hypervisor, Xen 4.1. Feature highlights are a new prototype scheduler for latency-sensitive workloads, better support for very large systems (>255 CPUs, 1GB/2MB super page sizes), new security features, and many others. During the development cycle, the xen community closely worked with upstream Linux projects
During the development cycle of Xen 4.1, the Xen community worked closely with upstream Linux projects to ensure that Xen dom0 support and Xen guest support is available from unmodified Linux distributions. For a full list of changes, please see the release announcement."

Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft sniffs out unused wireless spectrum (networkworld.com)

alphadogg writes: Microsoft researchers have designed a scheme for measuring whether licensed radio frequencies are actually being used so unlicensed devices can use it, something that may become necessary as demand for wireless applications grows. The architecture, called SpecNet, would sense and map where spectrum is being used and more particularly where it's not — so-called white spaces, according to a paper being presented next week at the USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation in Cambridge, Mass.
Image

Oregon To Let Students Use Spell Check on State Exams 235

Starting in 2011, the Oregon Department of Education will let students spell check their work before submitting state exams. From the article: "The move is supposed to help the assessments focus less on typos and more on their writing skills. 'We are not letting a student's keyboarding skills get in the way of being able to judge their writing ability,' said state Superintendent Susan Castillo. 'As we're using technology to improve what we're doing with assessments as a nation, we believe that spell check will be one of those tools.'"
Businesses

Best IT-infrastructure For a Small Company? 600

DiniZuli writes "I've been employed by a small NGO to remake their entire IT-infrastructure from scratch. It's a small company with 20 employees. I would like to ask the /.-crowd what worked out best for you and why? I came up with a small list: Are there any must have books on building the IT infrastructure? New desktops: should it be laptops (with dockingstations), regular desktop machines or thin clients? A special brand? Servers: We need a server for authentication and user management. We also need an internal media server (we have thousands of big image and video files, and the archive grows bigger every year). Finally we would like to have our web server in house. Which hardware is good? Which setup, software and OS'es have worked the best for you? Since we are remaking everything, this list is not exhaustive, so feel free to comment on anything important not on the list."
Databases

Good IC / Electronic Component Inventory Software? 70

Smerky writes "As I've been getting more and more into hobby electronics I have been finding it difficult to keep track of all the different ICs and other electronics that I have (resistors, capacitors, etc.). What are Slashdotters' recommendations for some inventory software? Certain qualifications that I'd be looking for personally are that it has to run on Linux/OSX well or be web-based (to run well on an Apache2 server)."
Image

The White House Listed On Real Estate Website 123

Forget visiting the White House, if you have $10 million you can own it. At least that is the price for the president's home on the real estate website Redfin. From the article: "Obviously this is an error. It looks like Redfin software pulled an example listing from the website Owners.com by mistake. That example listing was the White House. We have e-mailed Redfin for comment." I know it's historic but it still looks a bit on the high side according to the comparables in the area.
Input Devices

Brain-Control Gaming Headset Launching Dec. 21 112

An anonymous reader writes "Controlling computers with our minds may sound like science fiction, but one Australian company claims to be able to let you do just that. The Emotiv device has been garnering attention at trade shows and conferences for several years, and now the company says it is set to launch the Emotiv EPOC headset on December 21. PC Authority spoke to co-founder Nam Do about the Emotiv technology and its potential as a mainstream gaming interface." One wonders what kind of adoption they expect with a $299 price tag.

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