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Living Room / Re: Unable to compete with the Kindle, Apple wants a cut of ebook sales
« Last post by Josh on February 02, 2011, 03:46 PM »And yes, I did own and enjoyed a Sony MD player/recorder.
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in my opinion, the best example of all of this is Sony's ultra-FAIL of the minidisc.-superboyac (February 02, 2011, 10:51 AM)
Facebook finally provided a way to keep any random jerk in the café from hijacking your account. But you have to go out of your way to enable this protection, and you might have to wait. Still: Jump on this.
Facebook has at long last offered an option to use the encrypted "HTTPS" protocol, a feature it will begin rolling out today but won't finish for a "few weeks." You should check now if it's available, and sign up as soon as it is enabled for your account. The performance overhead is minor—zippy Gmail, for example, uses HTTPS for everything—and it's an important step to keep your Facebook account safe from being hijacked on an open or poorly secured wireless network.
By default, Facebook sends your access credentials in the clear, with no encryption whatsoever. Switching to HTTPS is important because a browser extension called Firesheep has made it especially easy for anyone sharing your open wireless network—at cafe or conference, for example—to sniff your credentials and freely access your account. One blogger sitting in a random New York Starbucks was able to steal 20-40 Facebook identities in half an hour. HTTPS solves this longstanding problem by encrypting your login cookies and other data; in fact the inventor of Firesheep made the software to encourage companies like Facebook to finally lock down their systems.
A California man has sued AT&T for over billing him on data charges for his iPhone, a move that could raise new questions on the carrier's billing practices. Patrick Hendricks claims that the carrier was charging him for usage even when he wasn't using any.
Hendricks uses the $15 monthly 200MB plan, and apparently became suspicious after he was charged overage fees for using 223MB worth of data across 259 data connections. His lawyers say that their research showed that AT&T was regularly over billing customers between 7 and 14 percent over actual data usage, and in some cases as much as 300 percent.
AT&T's billing errors on a customer basis may not be that large. However, apply that across all iPhone customers and it has a "huge effect" on the bottom line for the company, Hendricks' lawyers claim in the suit. "A significant portion of … data revenues were inflated by AT&T's rigged billing system for data transactions," they wrote.
According to developer Mathieulh, the official PS3 firmware v3.56 is said to contain a rootkit which allow Sony to perform remote code execution upon connection to the PlayStation network. What this means is that Sony can scan for specific files on your PS3 console—such as custom firmwares and hombrew applications—and send a report back to the company. Whether this is legal or not is yet to be determined but be careful what you put on your PS3.
Probably one of the worlds worst hackers decided to hack his way into my honeypot last week. After enjoying his failure to accomplish anything useful, I decided to youtube the whole thing.
Google has run a sting operation that it says proves Bing has been watching what people search for on Google, the sites they select from Google’s results, then uses that information to improve Bing’s own search listings. Bing doesn’t deny this.
As a result of the apparent monitoring, Bing’s relevancy is potentially improving (or getting worse) on the back of Google’s own work. Google likens it to the digital equivalent of Bing leaning over during an exam and copying off of Google’s test.
“I’ve spent my career in pursuit of a good search engine,” says Amit Singhal, a Google Fellow who oversees the search engine’s ranking algorithm. “I’ve got no problem with a competitor developing an innovative algorithm. But copying is not innovation, in my book.”
Bing doesn’t deny Google’s claim. Indeed, the statement that Stefan Weitz, director of Microsoft’s Bing search engine, emailed me yesterday as I worked on this article seems to confirm the allegation:
there's always the analogue solution - always on, instant availability, no distractions
(see attachment in previous post)-Target (January 23, 2011, 04:59 PM)
A new virus is spreading around Twitter using the Google 'goo.gl' URL shortening service, posing as anti-virus software. Affected users may see tweets with links in their timelines ending with "m28sx.html," says Graham Cruley of security firm Sophos.
Clicking on the link will take the user a page that claims the computer is infected, and attempts to trick him or her into installing the malware-infected software as well as to pay for disinfection. Once downloaded, the virus then posts a tweet under the users account with the link in an attempt to infect his or her followers.
It is not immediately clear how the malware is gaining access to Twitter's API to make these posts. Typically a user must authorize any external applications to gain access to post tweets. Cruley said he isn't sure either.
"The natural suspicion would be that their usernames and passwords have been stolen," he wrote in a blog post. "It certainly would be a sensible precaution for users who have found their Twitter accounts unexpectedly posting goo.gl links to change their passwords immediately."
Google faces a steep challenge in its defense against Oracle's lawsuit over seven Java patents and some copyrighted material. More than five months after Oracle's complaint, Google appears unable to countersue Oracle over patent infringement, while evidence is mounting that different components of the Android mobile operating system may indeed violate copyrights of Sun Microsystems, a company Oracle acquired a year ago.
I have discovered additional material that Oracle might present to the court as examples of copyright-infringing material in the Android codebase:
* Two months ago I took a close look at Exhibit J to Oracle's amended complaint, which contained a synopsis of source code shipped by Google and Sun's original Java code. I have since found six more files in an adjacent directory that show the same pattern of direct copying. All of them were apparently derived with the help of a decompiler tool. Those files form part of Froyo (Android version 2.2) as well as Gingerbread (version 2.3), unlike the file presented by Oracle.
* In addition, I have identified 37 files marked as "PROPRIETARY/CONFIDENTIAL" by Sun and a copyright notice file that says: "DO NOT DISTRIBUTE!" Those files appear to relate to the Mobile Media API of the Sun Java Wireless Toolkit. Unless Google obtained a license to that code (which is unlikely given the content and tone of those warnings), this constitutes another breach.
Interestingly, the original version of PolicyNodeImpl.java -- a redacted version of which is shown in Exhibit J to Oracle's amended complaint -- also had a "PROPRIETARY/CONFIDENTIAL" designation at the relevant time (Java version 5.0). In version 6.0 the file has a GPL 2 header. Google said in its formal response that Oracle had omitted "copyright headers". That is correct, but now that I have seen two versions of the original file, I don't think that the missing parts are favorable to Google. Actually, the opposite is true. Whether under a proprietary license or the GPL, the related code could not be legally relicensed under the Apache license by anyone other than the right holder (Oracle/Sun).