RuggedCom to close industrial networking hardware backdoor
Canadian communications equipment specialist and Siemens affiliate RuggedCom has confirmed that its products based on the Rugged Operating System (ROS) contain an undocumented backdoor. According to RuggedCom VP of Marketing, Jim Slinowsky, versions 3.2.x and earlier of ROS allow backdoor access to the serial console, Secure Shell (SSH), web access (HTTPS), telnet and remote shell (rsh) services; ROS 3.3.x and above disabled telent and rsh. Read more...
Oracle’s ‘thrown in the towel’ on database patching, researcher claims
A security researcher today criticized Oracle for neglecting to patch its core database products, noting that the massive update slated for later Tuesday will set a record for the fewest fixes.
Alex Rothacker, director of security research of Application Security's TeamShatter vulnerability group, said that Oracle has "thrown in the towel on fixing database vulnerabilities."
"Assuming the January 2012 CPU [critical patch updates] report stays the same as the preview, they will have set a new record low of just two database fixes," said Rothacker in an email today. Read more...
Apple, Amazon and Google take lazy punters hostage
Would-be monopolists have a new tool to claim control over the unsuspecting masses: sloth.
In the offline world, big vendors must go to extensive ends to ring-fence consumers into concentrating their spend with those vendors. Think vertical integration, price fixing and other monopolistic means. But in a heavily digitised world, Apple, Google, Amazon, and others are creating de facto completely legal monopolies by making it brain-dead easy to use their products.
Is this a problem?
Google, for one, says "no". The company's plausible defense against claims that it unfairly monopolises search comes down to one sentence: consumers are always "one click away" from using a different search engine. As Wharton professor Eric Clemons argues, however, this argument isn't as airtight as Google would have us think, because Google does all sorts of things through partnerships and other means to undermine the substance of truly being "one click away" from an alternative. Read more...
Top techs preview CES 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017…
CES isn't the only game in Las Vegas this week. For the true down-and-dirty technophile, the real action is at the International Conference on Consumer Electronics (ICCE) – and The Reg got a sneek peek at the geek freak that commences while CES concludes.
The ICCE, under the umbrella of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), is a gathering of the creative minds behind the technologies behind the engineering behind the manufacturing behind the products that eventually show up on the CES show floor.
As explained by ICCE's Stuart Lipoff at a CES session on Thursday morning dedicated to this year's ICCE, what's discussed at that conference often makes its way onto the CES show floor in "three to five years", though some technologies may arrive much sooner in fast-moving fields such as smartphones.
Here are some of the topics discussed at that session, titled in true boffinary understatement, "A preview of IEEE ICCE's most interesting technologies". Some of these are currently merely researchers' lab projects, some are in product-development mode, and some are available in the marketplace, but only at prohibitive prices. Read more...
Apple co-founder Wozniak says he’ll miss Jobs
Steve Wozniak, who started Apple in a Silicon Valley garage with Steve Jobs in 1976, said he'll miss his fellow co-founder "as much as everyone."
"We've lost something we won't get back," he said in an interview with The Associated Press following Jobs' death on Wednesday.
"The way I see it, though, the way people love products he put so much into creating means he brought a lot of life to the world."
Wozniak, a high school friend of Jobs', last saw him about three months ago, shortly after Jobs emerged from a medical leave to unveil Apple Inc.'s iCloud content syncing service and the latest version of its iOS mobile software. At the time, Wozniak said, Jobs looked ill and sounded weak. Read more...
5 questions to ask before buying Microsoft licenses
Let's face it: Microsoft software licenses are expensive. And that's just the way the folks in Redmond want it. Otherwise, that $62 billion a year revenue stream might drop to a mere $52 billion.
But customers shouldn't cry for Microsoft. Instead, if they choose Microsoft products over cheaper open source alternatives, they should take a hard line in negotiations to get as much as they can for as little money as possible.
COST CONTROL: 5 tips for managing Microsoft licensing costs Read more...