A deep dive into Mozilla’s Boot to Gecko project
Imagine, if you would, a mobile environment in which you had complete control over how every little thing you see looks and acts. Mozilla’s Boot to Gecko (B2G) project is a mobile operating system that uses the web as your delivery mechanism for everything. As it stands right now, the B2G project is very much pre-alpha, but after spending some time with the OS on the Samsung Galaxy S2 it is clear that Mozilla plans to deliver a whole new experience to users. Read more...
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...
Three incredible new smartphone accessories that are under $30
There is so much that can be done with our smartphones now that we basically never put them down. If we’re not checking in to something or watching a video, we’re surfing the web and/or making phone calls. So in between all that hard work we do with them, why not have a little fun as well? Welcome to the wonderful world of smartphone toys.
We’ve already spent hundreds of dollars on these devices after all, so I went in search of some things under $30 that are cool for just about any phone. Read more...
You are naked on the Internet
Unless you’re Ted Kaczynski circa 1985, living deep in the woods of Montana far from one of the roving homeless 4G connections we so conveniently enjoy here at South by Southwest Interactive in Austin, your illusion of privacy is a sad, pathetic, ridiculous joke.
Providing a much-needed wake-up call to those of you who think your spouse or partner will never know about your dalliances at the local hot-sheets motel (as long as you protect your password), “Sex, Dating, and Privacy Online Post-Weinergate” described the myriad ways in which every step you take, every move you make, is online and searchable.
You don’t have to be a prominent politician sexting pics of your junk to be vulnerable to the brave new world of naked data, panel members said. You may have heard that Facebook and dating-site messages are commonly subpoenaed by divorce lawyers. Read more...
Yahoo, Facebook in intellectual property dispute
Yahoo is threatening action unless Facebook licenses some of its technologies, as other web and technology companies are said to have done.
The move by Yahoo puts it in conflict with Facebook with which the company has a beneficial relationship, particularly in the area of integration of Yahoo News with Facebook.
Traffic to the mobile Yahoo News web app from Facebook Mobile has increased three-and-a-half times since Feb. 14 to 1.6 million visitors a day, according to a post last week on Facebook's developer blog.
In an e-mailed statement, Yahoo said, "Yahoo! has a responsibility to its shareholders, employees and other stakeholders to protect its intellectual property. We have invested substantial resources into these innovations. Recognizing that, other major web and technology companies have already licensed some of these technologies. We must insist that Facebook either enter into a licensing agreement or we will be compelled to move forward unilaterally to protect our rights." Read more...
Google adds Do Not Track button to Chrome
Google's Chrome browser has added a Do Not Track option that will prevent websites using your browser history to target ads at you.
Pioneered by Mozilla Firefox, the Do Not Track convention adds a field in the HTTP header of each web page instructing websites not to take info about you from your browser. Commonly used to prevent overly personal targeted ads, Do Not Track also stops web visitors having their data picked through by websites' social features and analytics engines. Microsoft claims that Internet Explorer doesn't track its users and Do not Track is an option in Safari. Read more...
Alcatel-Lucent integrates Wi-Fi with mobile networks
Alcatel-Lucent is integrating Wi-Fi with mobile networks with its lightRadio architecture, allowing users to move seamlessly between the two networks and authenticate using the SIM card, the company said on Tuesday.
As mobile data demands have increased, mobile operators have increasingly turned to Wi-Fi as a means to handle growing traffic volumes. It has now come to the point where many operators no longer have a choice, but have to use Wi-Fi, according to Parker Moss, vice president of Wireless Marketing at Alcatel-Lucent.
Wi-Fi is already used by many operators, but a new specification called Hotspot 2.0 -- which is being developed by the Wi-Fi Alliance -- aims to take the use of technology to the next level. Alcatel-Lucent's implementation is called lightRadio Wi-Fi, and it allows users to authenticate using the SIM card on their smartphones and move between two networks without interruptions, according to Moss. Read more...
Google’s punishment of Chrome drops browser’s share, says metrics firm
The browser world turned upside down last month as Internet Explorer's share jumped by its largest-ever increase and Chrome posted its biggest one-month loss, a Web metrics company said today.
Net Applications, which measures browser usage by collating data from some 40,000 sites, attributed the turnabout to Google's self-imposed punishment last month when it downgraded Chrome's search ranking.
Google demoted the PageRank -- the rating Google assigns based on how many other sites link to a URL -- for Chrome's download site after it admitted a marketing campaign had violated the company's own rules against paid links. Read more...
What Facebook’s IPO means for users
Facebook's decision to become a public company is seen as a bellwether for Web 2.0 stock offerings, but what will it mean for the social networking giant's 800 million users, and for the companies that build third-party apps for the site?
Facebook filed for its initial public offering (IPO) Wednesday afternoon, a move expected to raise it between $5 billion and $10 billion. But it also means Facebook will come under greater public scrutiny, and it's likely to face intense pressure from investors to keep growing its business each quarter.
Clues about HP’s Gen8 servers leaked
Hewlett-Packard has let slip some details on its website about its upcoming Proliant Gen8 servers ahead of their official launch.
The pages list basic details of single- and dual-socket BL, ML and DL Gen8 servers, which will be based on Intel's upcoming Xeon E5 processors.
One system, the single-socket ProLiant BL460c, is a small-form-factor server based on Intel's E5-2650L processor.
Some servers will have HP's latest networking, I/O, storage and management capabilities, according to results that show up during a search of HP's website. The pages the results are supposed to lead to have been removed from the site. Read more...
Drive-by-download attack exploits critical vulnerability in Windows Media Player
Security researchers from antivirus vendor Trend Micro have come across a Web-based attack that exploits a known vulnerability in Windows Media Player.
"Earlier today, we encountered a malware that exploits a recently (and publicly) disclosed vulnerability, the MIDI Remote Code Execution Vulnerability (CVE-2012-0003)," Trend Micro threat response engineer Roland Dela Paz said in a blog post on Thursday.
The security flaw can be exploited by tricking the victim into opening a specially crafted MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) file in Windows Media Player.
Microsoft released a security fix for it on Jan. 10, as part of its monthly patch cycle. "An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could take complete control of an affected system," the company said at the time. Read more...
Accused Kelihos botnet maker worked for two security firms
A Russian man who was accused Monday by Microsoft of creating the Kelihos botnet worked for a pair of security-related firms from 2005 to 2011, according to evidence on the Web.
In an amended complaint filed yesterday in federal court, Microsoft identified the man as Andrey Sabelnikov of St. Petersburg.
According to his LinkedIn profile, Sabelnikov worked for two Russian companies that specialize in security, including the antivirus firm Agnitum, for the last six years.
Agnitum, which is based in St. Petersburg, develops and sells a Windows antivirus product called OutPost Antivirus Pro as well as a personal firewall for Windows PCs. A company spokesman confirmed today that Sabelnikov worked for the firm from September 2005 until November 2008. Read more...
Facebook, MySpace, Twitter expose Google’s ‘evil’
A gang of engineers from Facebook, MySpace and Twitter has released a new bookmarklet designed to expose how Google’s People & Pages service favours the ad giant’s own Google+ results at the expense of the rest of the web.
The Focus On the User group posted a video explaining how the Don’t Be Evil tool works - a reference to Google's old motto.
Once dragged onto a user’s bookmarks bar, it functions as a kind of search bar for the social web, unlike People & Pages, which as part of Google’s Search Plus Your World service only returns results from Google+. Read more...
Amazon Web Services launches managed database service
Amazon Web Services on Wednesday launched a managed NoSQL database service that lets users easily launch a database and scale it up or down as needed.
The service meets the needs of web companies that are collecting, storing and processing an increasing amount of data. Without such a scalable database, AWS users would sometimes spend weeks forecasting and preparing their databases to perform during heavy usage periods, the company said. That's because traditional databases were not designed to scale quickly.
"Managing and scaling databases has always been the Achilles heal of web apps," said Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon. To scale, companies could either buy bigger hardware or split databases across servers, he said. "Both approaches are increasingly complicated and expensive," he said. "Plus, there's a real shortage of technical people who have the specialized skills to do this." Read more...
Tech giants back standard for cloud portability
Among the allures of cloud computing is the promise of easily and seamlessly moving services from one cloud to another. Realizing that kind of portability, however, is difficult. Every cloud service has its own distinct requirements, such as security, governance, and compliance, as well its constituent parts, including Web server, database, storage, and networking requirements.
In an effort to make cloud service more portable, a group of tech giants that includes IBM, Cisco, EMC, CA, SAP, and Red Hat today unveiled the first draft of open interoperability specification called TOSCA (Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications). Capgemini, Citrix, NetApp, PwC, Software AG, Virtunomic, and WSO2, among others, are also contributors.
TOSCA aims to let companies create interoperable descriptions -- in a sense, templates -- of their application and infrastructure services, the relationships between the parts of the service, and the operational behavior of the services. The open nature of the standard is intended to ensure service interoperability, regardless of supplier, provider, or host technology. Read more...