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Living Room / Re: Tech News Weekly: Edition 45-09
« on: November 08, 2009, 04:48 AM »
You just beat me, was about to msg you the URL for the news, and to say how much I LOVE that acronym!!!!
Ehtyar.
Ehtyar.
Hi all. Enjoy :) As usual, you can find last week's news here. |
Though jailbreaking an iPhone certainly opens up opportunities to add functionality that Apple doesn't approve of, it can also make an iPhone less secure. Several Dutch iPhone users found that out the hard way after a hacker attacked a number of vulnerable phones on T-mobile Netherlands and tried to extort €5 from them.
It appears one enterprising Dutch hacker used port scanning to identify jailbroken iPhones on T-mobile Netherlands with SSH running. Enabling SSH is a common procedure for jailbroken iPhones, allowing a user to log in via Terminal and run standard UNIX commands. Unfortunately, iPhones all have a default root password that many forget to change after jailbreaking, leaving their phone as vulnerable as a Lamborghini parked on a public street with the windows down, the doors unlocked, and the keys in the ignition.
The more Google products you use, the more data it collects about everything you do online—your search history, your emails, the blogs and news sites you read, which videos you watch on YouTube, your news alerts, tasks ,and even shopping lists. For some of these, you need to explicitly grant Google permission to keep track of data associated with your profile.
But it’s hard to keep up with everything Google is tracking.
So now the company is launching a Google Dashboard, which will give you a high-level summary of everything Google knows about you by virtue of the Google products you use. This might include how many emails are in your inbox, recent subject lines, which YouTube video you’ve watched lately (yes, all of them), appointments on your calendar, and more.
When the news broke earlier this week that the so-famous-you've-never-heard-of-it BlueBeat.com was both streaming and selling The Beatles remasters—and for 25¢ a track—we speculated that an entertainingly weird legal theory was at the root of this behavior.
We just had no idea how weird it was.
WE MUST be mad. Telstra is obliged under the universal service obligation to offer telephone customers a basic telephony service for $30 a month. The Rudd Government wants to replace this with a new service - the national broadband network - which on the most favourable assumptions will cost customers $60 to $70 a month for a basic telephone service.
And to ensure customers will take up the new service, the Telstra copper wires that enable the $30 a month service will be ripped up.
This is called levelling the playing field for fair competition. But this is not the end of the gouging of Australian telephone users.
"Transport Layer Security (TLS, RFC 5246 and previous, including SSL v3 and previous) is subject to a number of serious man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks related to renegotiation. In general, these problems allow an MITM to inject an arbitrary amount of chosen plaintext into the beginning of the application protocol stream, leading to a variety of abuse possibilities. In particular, practical attacks against HTTPS client certificate authentication have been demonstrated against recent versions of both Microsoft IIS and Apache httpd on a variety of platforms and in conjunction with a variety of client applications. Cases not involving client certificates have been demonstrated as well. Although this research has focused on the implications specifically for HTTP as the application protocol, the research is ongoing and many of these attacks are expected to generalize well to other protocols layered on TLS.
There are three general attacks against HTTPS discussed here, each with slightly different characteristics, all of which yield the same result: the attacker is able to execute an HTTP transaction of his choice, authenticated by a legitimate user (the victim of the MITM attack). Some attacks result in the attacker-supplied request generating a response document which is then presented to the client without any certificate warning or other indication to the user. Other techniques allow the attacker to forward or re-purpose client certificate authentication credentials."
Efforts to bring advanced typography to the Web have reached an important milestone. Type designers Tal Leming and Erik van Blokland, who had been working to developing the .webfont format, combined forces with Mozilla's Jonathan Kew, who had been working independently on a similar format. The result of the collaboration is called Web Open Font Format (WOFF), and it has the backing of a wide array of type designers and type foundries. Mozilla will also include support for it in Firefox 3.6.
WOFF combines the work of Leming and Blokland had done on embedding a variety of useful font metadata with the font resource compression that Kew had developed. The end result is a format that includes optimized compression that reduces the download time needed to load font resources while incorporating information about the font's origin and licensing. The format doesn't include any encryption or DRM, so it should be universally accepted by browser vendors—this should also qualify it for adoption by the W3C.
With the newest DNA sequencing technology starting to reach the market, we're seeing a bit of a bifurcation. Some of the methods can do long reads, covering hundreds of bases, and provide data that's appropriate for assembling a genome that's never been sequenced before. Others produce lots of shorter reads, which can only be aligned to a genome that we know the sequence of already. What good is repeating a completed genome? Potentially quite a lot, if that genome happens to be human and, more particularly, yours, since it can provide information on medically relevant issues like disease risks and drug efficacy. The goal here is to make this so cheap that sequencing a person's genome could be routine.
A big step in that direction may have been taken by a company called Complete Genomics, which describes the methods it used to sequence three human genomes in a paper that will be released by Science today. The system described in the paper combines some clever variants of well known molecular biology techniques to read massive amounts of DNA fragments that are, in total, about 65 bases long. But, because the materials used for the reactions are so common, even the enzymes can be purchased cheaply. That allows Complete Genomics to bring an entire human genome in while spending less than $5,000 on materials. All that, plus an error rate of less than one base in 100,000.
Hi all. Enjoy :) As usual, you can find last week's news here. |
A pair of German physicists claim to have broken the speed of light - an achievement that would undermine our entire understanding of space and time.
According to Einstein's special theory of relativity, it would require an infinite amount of energy to propel an object at more than 186,000 miles per second.
The police and intelligence services are calling on the Government to drop plans to disconnect persistent internet pirates because they fear that this would make it harder to track criminals online.
Lord Mandelson, the Business Secretary, has vowed to use the Government’s forthcoming Digital Economy Bill to introduce new measures to fight illegal file-sharing of music and films. He has also proposed that persistent pirates should have their internet connections suspended temporarily.
Xerox researchers have invented a kind of ink that can conduct electricity and be used to put electronic circuits on top of plastics, film, and textiles. That means in the coming years we’ll be able to wear or bend our electronics. You could even print out your electronic gadget on plastic sheets, as if you were printing a document.
Silicon chips have long been too expensive or heavy to use in devices that are extremely lightweight. The Xerox team solved this fundamental problem with lighter materials, and it plans to sell the new materials to other businesses that could make wearable electronics.
Initial reports said that hundreds of thousands of people watched YouTube’s Live U2 concert on Sunday night. Then reports yesterday raised the estimate to 2.5 million. Double that, and then double it again. 10 million is the real number of live streams that YouTube did that night, according to Variety.
That’s massive, and it’s obviously the biggest live streaming event YouTube has ever done. But even more impressive is just how smoothly it went. I watched about half of the two and a half hour show, and if there were any interruptions, I didn’t see any. I didn’t even see any hiccups, it was that good. I had the show running full screen on my desktop computer, and it was pretty great picture quality for live streaming video.
Sussex Police said the 6in to 8in cable was cut and removed from the area near Drusilla's roundabout in Alfriston in the early hours of Wednesday.
BT said telephone services to up 800 homes and businesses in Berwick were restored on Thursday evening.
The estimated cost of repairing and replacing the cable was £45,000.
Before now, typing http://clinteckergoatbonedbyhisnewbicycle.كوم into a Web browser and actually arriving at a working domain was impossible. But thanks to a vote by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) Friday morning, it could become a reality sometime in 2010. The organization approved the "Internationalized Domain Name Fast Track Process," allowing a plethora of non-Latin characters to be used in domain name extensions and opening more doors to Internet users who don't speak Western languages.
The Fast Track Process, which begins in November, will enable countries to apply for new domain name extensions (such as .com or .net) in their own national language. This means that full domains will soon be available in Chinese, Korean, Arabic, Hindi, and more. Previously, ICANN allowed the registration of domain names with non-Latin characters—so, for example, http://clintecker他的新自行车骨骼山羊.com—but the extension had to remain in Latin characters. Now, instead of being limited to the Latin alphabet, domain extensions will utilize some 100,000 new characters.
Google on Wednesday announced the beta release of a GPS navigation application for Android 2.0 devices.
The application is part of Google Maps for mobile. Android version 2.0 will appear on the upcoming Droid handset from Motorola and Verizon, and other manufacturers also plan to release handsets carrying the updated, Google-backed mobile OS.