Showing headlines posted by bob

Brightest Flashlight Free, available in the Google Play store, has been downloaded over 50 million times, but a complaint from the FTC reveals that the seemingly innocent app transmits “precise location” data to third-party advertisers alongside a unique device identifier.

  These are my reflections on CityCamp Minnesota 2013, which occurred at St. Thomas in Minneapolis on November 9, 2013.  What was it, and what worked well? CityCamp MN 2013, hosted by Open Twin Cities and E-Democracy.org, was an event for civic hackers, open data nerds and advocates, and social justice-minded individuals in the region. Saturday was an open space technology-style unconference event. It was brilliantly planned. While I’ve never been to an unconference before, I was impressed by the way it generally fostered a sense of community, conversation, and connection. This stands in opposition to most conferences I attend (and that is a pretty decent number), which primarily serve to foster a few connections in the hallways between tedious and oftentimes irrelevant-to-me presentations.

Matthew Garrett has written an insightful blog post about security issues pertaining to the Linux kernel's kexec functionality that could defeat any security benefits provided by Secure Boot. Using kexec could even allow you to boot a Windows kernel...

In an interview with Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin, VentureBeat got a bird’s-eye view of the future of the open-source operating system for 2014. We also addressed the controversial issues of government spying and “backdoors” -- those nefarious windows into our personal online lives that the public recently discovered in most of the services we use every day.

After Amazon tipped plans to build delivery drones, hacker Samy Kamkar unveiled a SkyJack drone designed to hijack them with an AR.Drone and a Raspberry Pi. When Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos went on 60 Minutes last Sunday to show a prototype of a drone Amazon plans to use for a new Prime Air delivery service, […]

Researchers have uncovered a database where over two million stolen login credentials are being stored. Facebook, Twitter, Google and Yahoo accounts are in the mix.

Vincent Hardy is Adobe's Director of Engineering for the Web Platform. He uses CSS to power projects that improve open standards for the web. He says there's nothing he hates about CSS—though the lack of variables and scoping bugged him for a long time—and is particularly enamored with the way CSS has organically developed into a robust technology. Sun Microsystems is where Vincent Hardy got his start in web standards and open source. In this interview, he tells me what lessons he learned there and how open standards are growing at Adobe.

The multiple monitor experience on Linux traditionally was very arcane and difficult; it would involve editing text configuration errors, trial-and-error, picking the right Linux GPU driver, and various other steps to get a working multi-monitor desktop. Since then there's been RandR 1.2+ and major improvements to all of the important Linux desktop graphics drivers -- both open and closed-source. How is the Linux multi-monitor now when using a modern distribution and the latest graphics cards that can drive four monitors simultaneously? Let's find out! Up for testing today are NVIDIA and AMD graphics cards using both the open and closed-source drivers while using DVI, DisplayPort, and HDMI displays.

Over 280 attendees representing 177 mentoring organizations gathered for a two-day, code-munity extravaganza celebrating the conclusion of Google Summer of Code with the annual Mentor Summit held at Google in Mountain View, California.

Companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon are collecting enormous amounts of information all day, every day. They use powerful supercomputers to analyze this data. Many people use this to better market products to consumers, for instance. But, how can big data do more? We see companies and inventors coming out with ideas for improving healthcare, for one, by tracking human biometrics. I think we can take it to the next level and make more wide-scale improvements to our health and our lives.

Vuzix has begun shipping an Android-based eyewear computer to developers, and is now taking pre-orders from the general public. The $1,000 Vuzix M100 device is equipped with a 1GHz, dual-core processor and a 16:9, WQVGA display, and offers WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS, sensors, a five-megapixel camera, and voice and gesture recognition. Vuzix announced the M100 in […]

A man from Wisconsin was sentenced for participating in a DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attack by hacker group Anonymous on a Kansas company. Rosol, who pleaded guilty to one misdemeanor count of accessing a protected computer, was sentenced to two years of federal probation and ordered to pay US$183,000 in restitution, the Department of Justice said in a statement.

One night, after reading the Who’s Hiring Freelance thread on HackerNews, I decided there had to be a more efficient way to match programmers with freelance jobs. While sites like oDesk and eLance are general-purpose marketplaces for freelance workers, they seem to have more of an emphasis on price than quality. On the other hand, sites like TopTal and ooomf vet freelance programmers that apply to join the site by screening the candidates. So, while I’m sure they have a pool of excellent programmers for hire, they require applicants to spend time on a process that may or may not yield work opportunities, even if they get accepted. So, I started CodeDoor, a platform

This is a condensed version of the blog post: A tale of two expanding clouds: Amazon and OpenStack. ere about the OpenStack Summit in Hong Kong. Comments welcome.

InfiniSQL is a massively scalable relational database system (RDBMS), composed entirely from scratch (not built upon some other technology). There is reproducible benchmark data described on InfiniSQL's blog proving that it can perform over 500,000 complex, multi-node transactions per second with over 100,000 simultaneous transactions—all on only 12 small server nodes. The limitation of 12 nodes was budgetary: this is an open source project entirely funded out of pocket, and not part of an institution. If I had access to more servers, I'm positive that scalability would grow much higher. But those kinds of details are on the blog. The bottomline is that this is a very high performance system, and in its infancy.

With patent reform legislation moving forward, an impressive group of law professors weighed in last week in favor of reform. The group submitted a letter to Congress that effectively demonstrates the seriousness of the problem of patent assertion entities (PAEs) and supports pending legislation. This issue is timely, because the Innovation Act (HR 3309) was approved by the House Judiciary Committee on November 20 with a strong majority (33-5) in favor. There is a good chance that the full House will take up the bill this week.

At the request of many Phoronix readers, here are some new battery power usage benchmarks on every recent Linux kernel release from Linux 3.7.0 to Linux 3.13 Git. Has an Intel "Ivy Bridge" Ultrabook's power consumption changed much due to the continuous kernel churn? Here's the answer...

Yesterday I ended up buying a new Intel ultrabook for Linux testing at Phoronix. Here's the hardware that will soon be featured in some new Linux benchmarks, plus my reasoning for going with this ultrabook and other thoughts on some of the laptops/ultrabooks this holiday season...

As an educator, you don't expect violence in school or prepare yourself for the inevitability of it. Even violence like suicide is far from your mind. Teachers are not prepared for that. Neither are they trained to handle behaviors that can lead to horrific violence: murder as well as fighting, bullying, sexual assualt and harassment, and alcohol and drug use. Despite the heartbreak of violence among youth in school, there is something educators, teachers and administrators alike can do. Self-control and attentional skills can be taught to youth who are exhibiting these riskly behaviors, that cause damage in and of themselves, and can lead to even worse violence.

According to revelations about the QUANTUM program, the NSA can “shoot” (their words) an exploit at any target it desires as his or her traffic passes across the backbone. It appears that the NSA and GCHQ were the first to turn the internet backbone into a weapon; absent Snowdens of their own, other countries may do the same and then say, “It wasn’t us. And even if it was, you started it.”