CmdrTaco - Slashdot User

Submission + - Facebook Says That Google Plus Has No Users (digitizor.com)

Submitted by

dkd903

on Wednesday August 17, 2011 @10:11AM

dkd903 writes: "Sean Ryan, Director of Games partnership at Facebook says "Google has emulated aspects of our system, which is what they have the right to do. We just need to be better. Google is at 5% because they don't have any users.""

Submission + - USPTO issues patent #8,000,000. (uspto.gov)

Submitted by toybuilder on Wednesday August 17, 2011 @08:14AM

toybuilder writes: It took nearly 80 years for the first 1 million patents to issue in the U.S.

On Tuesday, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office issued its eighth-million patent. This most recent 1 million patents took only about 5 years.

Submission + - GPGPU Bitcoin mining trojan (theregister.co.uk)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 17, 2011 @07:56AM

An anonymous reader writes: Security researchers have unearthed a piece of malware that mints a digital currency known as Bitcoins by harnessing the immense power of an infected machine's graphical processing units.

According to new research from antivirus provider Symantec, Trojan.Badminer uses GPUs to generate virtual coins through a practice known as minting. That's the term for solving difficult cryptographic proof-of-work problems and being rewarded with 50 Bitcoins for each per correct block.

Submission + - Fluidinfo.com is like a Wikipedia for databases (blogspot.com)

Submitted by Slags on Monday August 15, 2011 @12:11PM

Slags writes: The idea behind Fluidinfo is that read-only information is just not as useful as on the Web as openly writable information. Metadata is used routinely in the real world from name tags to post-it notes but it is much harder to apply metadata to information on the Internet. That is where Fluidinfo comes along. When information needs to be stored about an object the Fluidinfo database is queried. If the object exists in Fluidinfo, the information is appended to the object. If the object does not exist then it will be created and stored.

EDIT: Resubmission because there was no text in the first post.
http://slashdot.org/submission/1756838/Fluidinfocom-is-like-a-Wikipedia-for-databases

Submission + - Did Google Buy Motorola For The Patents? (itworld.com)

Submitted by

jfruhlinger

on Monday August 15, 2011 @11:44AM

jfruhlinger writes: "Google's $12.5 billion won't just be netting Motorola Mobility's suite of Android-based phones and tablets. They'll also be getting more than 14,000 wireless technology patents — important ammo in the escalating war with Apple and Microsoft."

Submission + - Questions for Bre Pettis, MakerBot Co-Founder (txchnologist.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 15, 2011 @10:42AM

An anonymous reader writes: Bre Pettis is so busy right now he should print a replica of himself. Pettis is a co-founder of the Brooklyn-based consumer 3D printing wunderkind MakerBot. He's also one of the de facto spokesmen for "Maker" culture, whose acolytes design and print objects then post the results online. Pettis dreams of a rapidly prototyped utopia filled with objects custom made by people.He is also an entrepreneur who must deal with the vagaries of supply chains and the demands of his customer base. Txchnologist talked with him last week.

Submission + - US and UK zombies demand top dollar (networkworld.com)

Submitted by

coondoggie

on Monday August 15, 2011 @10:04AM

coondoggie writes: "Denizens of the malware underworld who sell access to compromised computers do so at varying rates depending on where the machines are located, researchers told the Usenix Security Symposium this week. The researchers followed what they called the pay-per-install (PPI) industry, which obtains infected machines from which malware can be launched and sells access to these machines to parties looking for someplace to execute malicious code. Sometimes the PPI sellers hire middlemen to supply the compromised machines, and the PPI dealer retails them."

Submission + - Google to acquire Motorola Mobility for $12.5 bill (bgr.com)

Submitted by zacharye on Monday August 15, 2011 @07:51AM

zacharye writes: Google and Motorola Mobility have announced an agreement whereby Google will acquire Motorola for $12.5 billion. The acquisition price equates to $40 per share of Motorola stock, or a premium of 63% over Friday’s closing price. The move is considered to be an effort that will better-align Google to compete with Apple’s iPhone, which currently owns two-thirds of profits among the world’s top-8 smartphone vendors...

Submission + - Prior Art Can Make Apple's iPad Design Invalid (muktware.com)

Submitted by sfcrazy on Monday August 15, 2011 @07:49AM

sfcrazy writes: The heart of the issue is the 'generic/broad' design of a tablet that Apple got approved as EC community design. One may wonder how such a generic design, which cover an entire range of product and overlaps with other already existing products be patented to one single company?

I lot of bloggers like Ken Hess and Apple fans are defending Apple. Ken has defended Apple for patenting the iPad design. The question is how unique is the iPad's design, are there prior arts?

Muktware has gather prior art examples which may make the iPad design patent invalid.

Submission + - The FCC Says ISPs Aren't Hitting Advertised Speeds (hothardware.com)

Submitted by

MojoKid

on Monday August 15, 2011 @07:39AM

MojoKid writes: "The Federal Communications Commission has released the results of a year-long scientific study it conducted with regard to the upload and download speeds of thirteen American Internet service providers. Most of the ISPs hit 90 percent of their advertised upload speeds. Of the 13 providers tested, only four (or less than a third) averaged at or even above their advertised download speeds (Charter, Comcast, Cox, and Verizon Fiber). The tests were performed by a private firm that has run similar tests in the U.K. It measured performance at 6,800 "representative homes" nationally in March."

Submission + - NASA Opens New Office for Deep Space Missions. (space.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 13, 2011 @11:59PM

An anonymous reader writes: NASA has been tasked with landing astronauts on a space rock by 2025, and on the Red Planet by the mid 2030s. To reach those goals, the United States must develop a new heavy-lift rocket capable of traveling that far, and a capsule to bring people safely there and back again.

Submission + - DARPA lost second Mach 22 vehicle (darpa.mil) 1

Submitted by arisvega on Friday August 12, 2011 @07:54AM

arisvega writes: DARPA attempted to fly the fastest aircraft ever built; the Agency’s Falcon Hypersonic Technology Vehicle 2 (HTV-2) is designed to fly anywhere in the world in less than 60 minutes. This capability requires an aircraft that can fly at 13,000 mph (~21000kph), while experiencing temperatures in excess of 3500F (~2000C). Program manager Air Force Maj. Chris Schulz does not see it as a failure; “We know how to boost the aircraft to near space. We know how to insert the aircraft into atmospheric hypersonic flight. We do not yet know how to achieve the desired control during the aerodynamic phase of flight. It’s vexing; I’m confident there is a solution. We have to find it.”

Submission + - 33% of Drug-Related Searches Lead to Fake Pharma (threatpost.com)

Submitted by Trailrunner7 on Thursday August 11, 2011 @11:02AM

Trailrunner7 writes: Researchers at the University of Cambridge will present evidence of what they say is widespread manipulation of search results that direct unwitting Web surfers to dodgy and illicit online pharmacy sites.

The research, which will be presented at the 20th USENIX Security Symposium in San Francisco, is the culmination of a nine month survey of Web search results for 218 drug-related queries. Fully one third of the search results collected in the survey was found to point back to one of 7,000 infected hosts, which in turn redirected visitors to just a few hundred pharmacy Web sites, according to a post by Tyler Moore, a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Research on Computation and Society (CRCS) at Harvard University on the Cambridge University blog Light Blue Touchpaper.

Submission + - Cameron Threatens To Shut Down UK Social Networks (thinq.co.uk)

Submitted by Stoobalou on Thursday August 11, 2011 @09:10AM

Stoobalou writes: In a move worthy of China's communist regime, UK PM David Cameron wants to shut down social networks whenever civil unrest rears its head in Britain's towns and cities.

Speaking in the House of Commons, Cameron said, "Everyone watching these horrific actions will be struck by how they were, organised via social media.

"Free flow of information can be used for good. But it can also be used for ill. So we are working with the police, the intelligence services and industry to look at whether it would be right to stop people communicating via these websites and services when we know they are plotting violence, disorder and criminality."

Submission + - Fake Names On Social Networks: A Fake Problem (discovery.com)

Submitted by disco_tracy on Thursday August 11, 2011 @08:57AM

disco_tracy writes: The leading social networks demand that members use their real names, and they're not afraid to evict violators. Many Facebook users have quietly complied, despite the problems that rule creates for political dissidents, stalking survivors and others. Much of this discussion has centered around people in physical or financial danger of having their identities revealed. But there are broader reasons for social networks to stop pushing real-name policies.

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