IT-Code-News: IT News HeadLines (Slashdot Stories) 04/01/2011

Wednesday, January 5, 2011

IT News HeadLines (Slashdot Stories) 04/01/2011

Mobile Users More Vulnerable To Phishing Attacks
Orome1 writes "Trusteer recently gained access to the log files of several web servers that were hosting phishing websites. Analyzing these log files provided visibility into how many users accessed the websites, when they visited them, whether they submitted their login information, and what devices they used to access the website. As soon as a phishing website is broadcast through fraudulent email messages the first systems to visit it are typically mobile devices. Most fraudulent emails call for immediate action. For example, they usually claim that suspicious activity has been detected in the user's account and that immediate action is required. Most victims who fall for this ploy will visit the phishing site quickly."

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NASA Names Best & Worst Sci-Fi Movies of All Time
mvar writes "Working through the year-end best/worst movie lists can be a feat of Olympic proportions, but there's one list which is so damn cool you'll definitely want to give it a whirl. NASA and the Science and Entertainment Exchange have compiled a list of the 'least plausible science fiction movies ever made,' and they ranked the disastrous (in more ways than one) 2012 as the most 'absurd' sci-fi flick of all time."

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Google's Next Challenge, Spam Results
krou writes "The Guardian's tech blog is running an interesting piece on Google's next big challenge, which is dealing with the spammers it helped create. 'Google is the 900-pound gorilla of search, with around 90% of the market (excluding China and Russia), and there's an entire industry which has grown up specifically around tickling the gorilla to make it happy and enrich the ticklers.' They quote Paul Kedrosky who notes that 'Google has become a snake that too readily consumes its own keyword tail. Identify some words that show up in profitable searches — from appliances, to mesothelioma suits, to kayak lessons — churn out content cheaply and regularly, and you're done. On the web, no-one knows you're a content-grinder.' Whether searching for reviews, products, businesses, or even conducting academic research, scraper sites are ranking higher than original content. The article speculates that Google may try fix the problem but, from Google's perspective, most of these type of sites use AdSense ads, and generate revenue for Google (89% of clicks come from the first page of results), so Google may not have an incentive to change things too much. Alternatively, people could stop using Google, 'because its search is damn well broken... The question is whether it would be visible enough — that is, whether enough people would do it — that it would show up on Google's radar and be made a priority.'"

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Oversupply Sends DRAM Prices To One-year Low
alphadogg writes "DRAM chip prices reached a one-year low on Tuesday and approached their cheapest ever due to a post-holiday oversupply. The cheap memory chips are pushing PC prices lower too, a Taiwan-based trading platform said. Prices for commodity 1-Gbit DDR3 DRAM chips dropped to an average of $0.84 per unit from historic highs around $2.80 in April and May last year, said Ivan Lin, publicist and editor with DRAMeXchange. Prices hit a record low of $0.81 per chip in March 2009, according to the exchange's daily surveys."

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BT Content Connect May Impact Net Neutrality
a Flatbed Darkly writes "BT's Content Connect, a service which many have accused of threatening net neutrality, has apparently launched, although it is unknown whether or not any ISPs have bought or are planning to buy it yet; BT has denied the allegations, from Open Rights Group among others, that this, despite certainly being an anti-competitive service, does not create a two-tier internet. From the article: ""Contrary to recent reports in the media, BT's Content Connect service will not create a two-tier internet, but will simply offer service providers the option of differentiating their broadband offering through enhanced content delivery," a BT spokeswoman said.""

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Police Can Search Cell Phones Without Warrants
Hugh Pickens writes "The California Supreme Court has ruled 5 to 2 to allow police to search arrestees' cell phones without a warrant, saying defendants lose their privacy rights for any items they're carrying when taken into custody. Under US Supreme Court precedents, 'this loss of privacy allows police not only to seize anything of importance they find on the arrestee's body... but also to open and examine what they find,' the state court said. The dissenting justices said those rulings shouldn't be extended to modern cell phones that can store huge amounts of data and that the decision allows police 'to rummage at leisure through the wealth of personal and business information that can be carried on a mobile phone or handheld computer merely because the device was taken from an arrestee's person.' Interestingly enough, the Ohio Supreme Court reached an opposite conclusion in a December 2009 ruling that police had violated drug defendants' rights by searching their cell phones after their arrests. The Ohio-California split could prompt the US Supreme Court to take up the issue, says California Deputy Attorney General Victoria Wilson, who represented the prosecution in the case."

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The Challenge In Delivering Open Source GPU Drivers
yuhong writes "After the recent Intel Sandy Bridge launch left Linux users having to build the latest source from Git repositories in order to have full support for the integrated graphics, Phoronix looked at the problems involved in delivering new graphics drivers for Linux."

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Apache Subversion To WANdisco, Inc: Get Real.
kfogel writes "The Apache Subversion project has just had to remind one of its corporate contributors about the rules of the road. WANdisco, Inc was putting out some very odd press releases and blog posts, implying (among other things) that their company was in some sort of steering position in the open source project. Oops — that's not the Apache Way. The Apache Software Foundation has reminded them of how things work. Meanwhile, one of the founding developers of Subversion, Ben Collins-Sussman, has posted a considerably more caustic take on WANdisco's behavior."

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How To Make a Good Gaming Sequel
Kantor48 writes "In today's world of unimproved gaming sequels and saturated franchises, Arthur Kabrick looks at the best and worst sequels in recent history, and compares the changes they've made to the formulae of their franchises. By doing this, he comes up with a list of lessons that any game developer creating a sequel should follow, if at all possible, to ensure that the new game is a step up, rather than a step sideways or, as in some cases, a step down. The criteria include ensuring the game does not spend too much time in development, updating technology, and trying not to change the development team, as well as being wary of changing the basic formula so much that fans of the franchise are alienated."

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Apple Passes $300B Market Cap, 2nd In the World
An anonymous reader writes "In May, Apple surpassed Microsoft in market capitalization to become the second largest company (by that measure) in the world. Today, with its shares riding high, Apple passed $300 billion in market cap, entering a club of two along with the still-gigantic ExxonMobile. And investors' targets could bring Apple beyond where Exxon is now (though Exxon continues to soar as well). Perhaps Wall Street is catching on that, despite the discontinuation of their underused Xserve, Apple is in fact becoming one of the key tech providers to enterprise, a position that even a year ago seemed laughable. If you consider the iPad to be a PC (which enterprise increasingly is), then suddenly you realize that Apple is expected to climb to 12% market share in 2011. Plus, of course, they have those little things called iPods, and iTunes..."

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Kinect Creators To Make PC Controller
Hugh Pickens writes "PrimeSense, the privately held Israeli company that licensed core Kinect technology to Microsoft, is teaming up with PC and peripheral maker Asus to create a similar device for the PC that can be used for browsing multimedia content and accessing the Internet and social networks — basically, the main things consumers use their PCs for. Last month, a Korean game developer claimed that Microsoft was working on a version of Kinect for the PC, but Microsoft hasn't confirmed any such plans."

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Interactive, Emotion-Detecting Robot Developed
cylonlover writes "A team of Cambridge University researchers have now developed a system that can not only detect a user's emotional state, but can also make expressive responses of its own. Using a robotic likeness of the godfather of the programmable computer, Charles Babbage, the team has hooked the system up to a driving simulator and created a computerized driving companion and navigator that reacts to the driver in much the same way as a human passenger."

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French Use Space Tech To Find Parking Spots
itwbennett writes "Using technology developed by French space agency CNES (Centre Nationale d'Etudes Spatiales) to explore the planet Venus, drivers in the city of Toulouse are discovering something much more down-to-earth: vacant parking spots. The system is based on 3,000 sensors buried just under the pavement that detect changes in the electromagnetic environment around them and communicate the results via coaxial cable to a server, which makes the information available in real time to drivers' smartphones."

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Windows 7 Trumps Vista By Reaching 20% Share
CWmike writes "Windows 7 cracked the 20% share mark last month, a milestone the problem-plagued Vista never reached, Web measurement vendor Net Application said over the weekend. Gregg Keizer reports that Windows 7's online usage share reached 20.9% in December, up 1.2 percentage points from the month before. Windows Vista, meanwhile, fell by half a point to 12.1%, its lowest share since July 2008. Vista peaked at 18.8% in October 2009, the same month that Microsoft launched Windows 7. The other standout finding: XP is projected to still account for 13% when it's retired in 2014." An anonymous reader adds news that Google's Chrome browser is nearing 10% market share.

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Radiation Detection Goes Digital
RedEaredSlider writes "In science fiction, explorers wave around a single device and pick up many kinds of radiation — think of the tricorders on Star Trek or Dr. Who's sonic screwdriver. A professor at Oregon State University is bringing that a bit closer to reality, though in this case it's for finding radioactive material. It's a radiation spectrometer, and it works on a very old principle: particles and photons that hit certain materials will make them emit flashes of light. But for decades, radiation spectrometers had been limited to detecting only one kind of radiation at a time. David Hamby, an OSU professor of health physics, felt that there was a need for a device that could see at least two kinds of radiation, as well as be smaller than the models currently available."

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How a Guy Found 4 New Planets Without a Telescope
An anonymous reader writes "Peter Jalowiczor is a gas worker from South Yorkshire, England. He's also the discoverer of four giant exoplanets, according to the University of California's Lick-Carnegie Planet Search Team. But he's not an astronomer and he doesn't even have a telescope. '...in 2005, astronomers at the university released millions of space measurements collected over several decades and asked enthusiasts to make of them what they would. ... From March 2007 Peter, 45, spent entire nights reading the data, working the figures, creating graphs. ... He then sent discrepancies he discovered back to the scientists in California where they were further analyzed to see if the quirks were caused by the existence of an exoplanet.'"

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NJ Server Farms Remake the US Financial Markets
1sockchuck writes "The engine of Wall Street has shifted from the stock exchange floor to data centers in New Jersey, where computer-driven trading now accounts for 56 percent of all trading activity, according to the New York Times. 'While this Tron landscape is dominated by the titans of Wall Street, it affects nearly everyone who owns shares of stock or mutual funds, or who has a stake in a pension fund or works for a public company,' the Times writes. 'For better or for worse, part of your wealth, your livelihood, is throbbing through these wires.' There are also photos of the data centers powering the high-speed trading operations, while 60 Minutes has video of a huge new 'liquidity center' run by the NYSE."

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Why Digital Newsstands Stink
An anonymous reader writes "As Google prepares to compete with Apple in the digital newsstand business, both companies seem to be glossing over the fact that consumer demand for digital magazines is dropping. 'Wired's collapse from 100,000 iPad copies in June to 23,000 in November was most dramatic, but the story is not much different at Glamour, Vanity Fair, GQ or Men's Health.' Meanwhile, issues of subscriber privacy continue to crop up — Google has reportedly told publishers it will supply certain information about subscribers, and it's not clear whether users will have the ability to opt-out. And according to the Wall Street Journal, 'Apple is planning to share more data about who downloads a publisher's app, information publishers can use for marketing purposes.'"

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Using Technology To Enforce Good Behavior
Ismellpoop writes "With the new year upon us and resolutions being made to change unwanted behavior, many tools are now available to help people stay in line, such as a GPS-enabled app that locks down texting once a car gets rolling and a program that cuts off credit-card spending. Another device monitors your workout and offers real-time voice feedback. Have we entered an era in which electronics serve as mother, cop and coach because we can't manage our own desires?"

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PS3 Root Key Found
An anonymous reader writes "The PlayStation 3 'root key' used for code signing has been found by GeoHot. This enables running homebrew without the need for psjailbreak-style USB-devices, and also provides hope for those at firmware version 3.55 that currently cannot be downgraded. The key also cannot be changed without hardware modifications. Oops."

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Groklaw — Don't Go Home, Go Big
jfruhlinger writes "You may have caught PJ's Christmas Day post on Groklaw, expressing her anger and frustration that, after she helped save Novell's Unix patents from SCO's clutches, Novell turned around and sold many of those patents to an open source-unfriendly coalition. She's feeling at a crossroads and wondering what Groklaw should become. Brian Proffitt has a suggestion: a bigger, more community-oriented site."

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Researchers Claim 1,000 Core Chip Created
eldavojohn writes "Remember a few months ago when the feasibility was discussed of a thousand core processor? By using FPGAs, Glasgow University researchers have claimed a proof of concept 1,000 core chip that they demonstrated running an MPEG algorithm at a speed of 5Gbps. From one of the researchers, 'This is very early proof-of-concept work where we're trying to demonstrate a convenient way to program FPGAs so that their potential to provide very fast processing power could be used much more widely in future computing and electronics. While many existing technologies currently make use of FPGAs, including plasma and LCD televisions and computer network routers, their use in standard desk-top computers is limited. However, we are already seeing some microchips which combine traditional CPUs with FPGA chips being announced by developers, including Intel and ARM. I believe these kinds of processors will only become more common and help to speed up computers even further over the next few years.'"

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Goldman Invests $450m In Facebook
An anonymous reader writes "The news that Goldman has taken a stake in Facebook, the white-hot social networking giant, has tongues wagging from Wall Street to Silicon Valley. As first reported by DealBook, Goldman has invested $450 million in a deal that values Facebook at $50 billion. As part of the deal, Goldman is looking to raise as much as $1.5 billion from its wealthy clients to invest in Facebook alongside the firm."

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Does Windows Phone 7 Have a Data Transmission Bug?
blarkon writes "Microsoft commentator and Windows Phone 7 Expert Paul Thurrott has reported a serious bug that indicates Windows Phone 7 is uploading up to 50 MB of unidentified data every day. The phone operating system apparently ignores Wi-Fi connections for sending this data, leading some Windows Phone 7 owners hitting their 2 GB plan data limit while doing little more than checking email and social networking sites. Thurrott has written a book on Windows Phone 7 and is unlikely to be making such a claim unless it has some substance. At the moment no one knows what this data contains or where it is going, though Thurrott suspects it may be related to the Windows Phone Marketplace"

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MS Asks Google To Delay Fuzzer Tool
eldavojohn writes "Polish Google security white hat Michal Zalewski has announced concerns that one of a hundred vulnerabilities his fuzzer tool found in IE is well known to third party hackers in China. His simple explanation provides an interesting counter argument to Microsoft's usual request that security problems not be released until they can slowly investigate them. From the article, 'Microsoft asked Zalewski to delay cross_fuzz's release, but he declined, in part because of his fear the IE vulnerability was already being explored by Chinese hackers, but also because the company's security experts had not responded to information he provided.' You can read about and download cross_fuzz for your own use."

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