Showing headlines posted by BernardSwiss

But it gets worse. Filippo Valsorda has shown that you didn't even need to crack Komodia's weak password to launch a man-in-the-middle attack, but its SSL validation is broken, such that even if Komodia's proxy client sees an invalid certificate, it just makes it valid. Seriously.

The list of software known to use the same HTTPS-breaking technology recently found preinstalled on Lenovo laptops has risen dramatically with the discovery of at least 12 new titles, including one that's categorized as a malicious trojan by a major antivirus provider...

... Web searches for many of these titles uncover forum posts in which computer users complain that some of these applications are hard to remove once they're installed. Richard noted that he was unable to find documentation from any of the publishers explaining what effect Komodia software had on end-user PCs such as its ability to sniff passwords and other sensitive data from encrypted Web sessions.

After a few hours of work alongside an electrical engineering buddy this week, my home garden drip system became powered by a Raspberry Pi. I can control the entire thing locally from my iPhone and, to be frank, it’s pretty flippin’ cool.

For some background, I’m a very lazy gardener. When my wife and I bought our house in 2012, our horticultural mission was Hippocratic (do no harm). In other words, we wanted—at the very least—to not kill the plants we inherited from the previous owners.

"That adds up to 1,963 first-time developers over the course of about fifteen months," the report states. "Remember that 4,171 developers overall contributed to the kernel during this time; one can thus conclude that nearly half of them were contributing for the first time. Many of those developers will get their particular fix merged and never be seen again, but others will become permanent members of the kernel development community."

Piles of digitised material – from blogs, tweets, pictures and videos, to official documents such as court rulings and emails – may be lost forever because the programs needed to view them will become defunct, Google’s vice-president has warned.

Humanity’s first steps into the digital world could be lost to future historians, Vint Cerf told the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual meeting in San Jose, California, warning that we faced a “forgotten generation, or even a forgotten century” through what he called “bit rot”, where old computer files become useless junk.

Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) lawyer Daniel Nazer's Sisyphean task is right in his job title: he's the Mark Cuban Chair to Eliminate Stupid Patents.

So when Nazer says he's seen one of the all-time dumbest patents, that's saying a lot. Yesterday, Nazer and his fellow EFF lawyer Vera Ranieri filed court papers seeking to invalidate a patent on photo competitions. US Patent No. 8,209,618, owned by a little-known video website called Garfum.com, was used to sue four small photo websites last September that dared to ask people about their favorite photos.

I recently started using a text editor called Vim. For the uninitiated, Vim is a lightweight text editor often used for writing code that it comes pre-loaded on some if not all remote servers. Since it’s designed to be used without a mouse, there are tons of keyboard shortcuts to learn. This part isn’t a huge deal—for now just know that Vim is a text editor, like Notepad or Sublime Text or Word.

Last year, we wrote about Rep. Blake Farenthold introducing a small, but important piece of copyright legislation, the You Own Devices Act (YODA), which just says that if you buy some piece of computerized equipment, you can sell it with any included software, without having to get permission from the software provider. As we noted, the reality is that this is just making it clear that the first sale doctrine applies to computer equipment too -- which shouldn't need a new law, but some tech companies (especially in the networking space) feel otherwise.

Back in 2013, the Supreme Court did the right thing and finally rejected the concept of gene patents, despite years of the USPTO granting such patents. As the court noted, allowing gene patents created a perverse situation in which a single company could have the exclusive right to isolate a person's own genes -- and that's just not right.

As patent reform moved into the political spotlight during the last Congress, one patent that kept coming up was the "online shopping cart." It seemed to resonate as a technology that clearly shouldn't have been patented.

As noted, I had no idea that this happened, because I don't own an iPhone. There is one slight functional reason for this: users may have to pay for SMS messages, but not for iMessages, and thus it could have an impact on a bill. But here's the more interesting tidbit, which is the crux of Ford's article: lots of people absolutely hate those green bubbles...

Ford, then goes into a really interesting discussion on the nature of product management and design choices -- the kind of thing that Apple doesn't do on a whim -- to get to the real point: Apple is likely choosing harsh, ugly green bubbles on purpose. As a petty way to put down Android users:

The clearest example of what a joke the 301 process is came two years ago, when CCIA tried to use the "process" behind the list to get Germany put on the list for attacking fair use. That actually seemed like a perfectly good use of the list, as Germany was trying to force search engines (mainly Google) to pay up for posting snippets of news and linking to them (a plan that it has continued to push). Here was a clear case of abusing copyright law to harm an American company. And the USTR totally ignored it. Because the Special 301 process is not about saner intellectual property laws. It's about making intellectual property maximalists happy. That's why some of those maximalists have even used the process to get countries declared naughty for merely using open source software.

Samsung has been doing a great job this week illustrating why consumers should want their televisions to be as dumb as technologically possible.

... an interesting example of how sometimes very subtle product decisions in technology influence the way culture works. Apple uses a soothing, on-brand blue for messages in its own texting platform, and a green akin to that of the Android robot logo for people tweeting from outside its ecosystem (as people have pointed out on Twitter, iPhone texts were default green in days before iMessage—but it was shaded and more pleasant to the eye; somewhere along the line things got flat and mean).

There are all sorts of reasons for them to use different colors. (iMessage texts are seen as data, not charged on a per-text basis, and so the different colors allow people to register how much a given conversation will cost—useful!). However, one result of that decision is that a goofy class war is playing out over digital bubble colors. Their decision has observable social consequences.

sciamiko points us to an interesting study done by Stuart Graham, who was the first chief economist of the US Patent Office... looking at whether or not inventors choose to reveal the "secrets" of their invention prior to actually getting the patent. Graham and his co-author, Deepak Hegde, examined what happened after the American Inventors Protection Act (AIPA) went into effect in 2000.

A few weeks ago, someone reported this to us at Medium: “I just started an article in Polish. I can type in every letter, except ?. When I press the key for ?, the letter just doesn’t appear. It only happens on Medium.”

This was odd. We don’t really special-case any language in any way, and even if we did… out of 32 Polish characters, why would this random one be the only one causing problems?

Turns out, it wasn’t so random. This is a story of how four incidental ingredients spanning decades (if not centuries) came together to cause the most curious of bugs, and how we fixed it.

A few days ago I thought I’d never run something different than Mac OS X on my MacBook, but then I remembered how great Ubuntu ran some years ago on my old laptop. Apart from that my development environment was easily adoptable to Ubuntu and I really love customising stuff, so I made the switch to Ubuntu. That’s how it starts…

Cyanogen takes the Android source code and modifies it, adding more features and porting it to other devices. It has also started supplying Android builds directly to OEMs (like the OnePlus One), which ship the software on devices instead of stock Android. Last week during a talk in San Francisco, Cyanogen's CEO said the company's goal was to "take Android away from Google." It wants to replace the Google Play ecosystem with apps of its own, the same way that Amazon uses the Android Open Source Project for its Kindle Fire products but adds its own app and content stores.

The molecular diagnostics company that had won patents of two human genes that were invalidated by a landmark Supreme Court ruling has decided to abandon separate patent litigation surrounding how scientists study those genes.

Traditionally, as a console gets older, the console maker adds new features and compatible apps for users to download. Sony is taking the opposite tack with the PlayStation Vita in the coming months, though, planning to disable a few apps and features that have worked on the system since launch.