Brown Dog snuffles the 99 percent

Posted on October 8, 2014 by - News

cover-image-530x360A team of boffins is developing a search engine which can find all the data on the world wide web which cannot be seen by search bots.

The engine, dubbed Brown Dog, searches the web for uncurated data and makes it accessible to scientists.

Kenton McHenry, who along with Jong Lee lead the Image and Spatial Data Analysis division at the National Center for Supercomputing Application (NCSA) said that the information age has made it easy for anyone to create and share vast amounts of digital data, including unstructured collections of images, video and audio as well as documents and spreadsheets.

But the ability to search and use the contents of digital data has become exponentially more difficult because digital data is often trapped in outdated, difficult-to-read file formats and because metadata–the critical data about the data, such as when and how and by whom it was produced–is nonexistent.

McHenry and his team at NCSA have been given a $10 million, five year award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to manage and make sense of vast amounts of digital scientific data that is currently trapped in outdated file formats.

So far they have come up with a Data Access Proxy (DAP) which transforms unreadable files into readable ones by linking together a series of computing and translational operations behind the scenes.

Similar to an internet gateway, the configuration of the Data Access Proxy would be entered into a user’s machine settings and then forgotten. Data requests over HTTP would first be examined by the proxy to determine if the native file format is readable on the client device. If not, the DAP would be called in the background to convert the file into the best possible format readable by the client machine.

The second tool, the Data Tilling Service (DTS), lets individuals search collections of data, possibly using an existing file to discover other similar files in the data.

Once the machine and browser settings are configured, a search field will be appended to the browser where example files can be dropped in by the user. Doing so triggers the DTS to search the contents of all the files on a given site that are similar to the one provided by the user.

While browsing an online image collection, a user could drop an image of three people into the search field, and the DTS would return images in the collection that also contain three people. If the DTS encounters a file format it is unable to parse, it will use the Data Access Proxy to make the file accessible.

The Data Tilling Service will also perform general indexing of the data and extract and append metadata to files to give users a sense of the type of data they are encountering.

McHenry said the two services are like the Domain Name Service (DNS) in that they can translate inaccessible uncurated data into information.

According to IDC, a research firm, up to 90 percent of big data is “dark,” meaning the contents of such files cannot be easily accessed.

Brown Dog is not only useful for searching the Deep Web, it could one day be used to help individuals manage their ever-growing collections of photos, videos and unstructured/uncurated data on the Web.

Infosys accused of being anti-American

Posted on October 8, 2014 by - News

Ashoka's Queen - Wikimedia CommonsA US court will hear how the Indian outsourcing outfit Infosys is alleged to have adopted racist policies against Americans.

The case, filed in a federal court in Wisconsin, is from four IT workers around the country who are suing the company for “ongoing national origin and race discrimination”.

The court documents include an account by Samuel Marrero, who worked as a recruiter in Infosys’s talent acquisition unit from 2011 until May 2013.

According to him recruiters were encouraged to focus their efforts on Indian candidates and “stick to the talent we’re used to”,

Marrero asked if the company only wanted Indian talent and was told by managers “Yes. They know our style and culture”.

The Infosys officials are identified in the lawsuit, one with the title of “senior vice president and global head,” the other as a “global enterprise officer lead.”

Marrero said that he “frequently complained” to higher-ups at Infosys during these weekly calls that many of the highly qualified American candidates they had presented were being rejected in favour of Indians.

As a result 90 percent of Infosys’ workforce is South Asian, and the high percentage is intentional.

In about October 2012, in response to one of these complaints, Infosys’ global enterprise lead allegedly said, “Americans don’t know shit”.

Adobe spies on Epub users

Posted on October 8, 2014 by - News

indians-010aAdobe has been spying on users  of Digital Editions 4, the newest version of its Epub app.

For some reason Adobe’s Epub app, seemed to be sending an lot of data to Adobe’s servers and hacker mates of the Digital Reader  have confirmed that Adobe is tracking users in the app and uploading the data to their servers.

Benjamin Daniel Mussler, the security researcher who found the security hole on Amazon.com, has also confirmed it to be true.

Adobe is gathering data on the ebooks that have been opened, which pages users read, and in what order. However, it gets worse. All of the data, including the title, publisher, and other metadata for the book is being sent to Adobe’s server in clear text to allow any spook, Chinese hacker, private eye, to hack into the stream and read it.

Just when you think Adobe could not be dumber, the outfit is not just tracking what users are doing in its own app; it is also scanning your computer and gathering the metadata from all of the ebooks sitting on your hard drive too. Once it has read every ebook it uploads that data to Adobe’s servers too.

Nate Hoffelder  the hack who found the breach described it as a “privacy and security breach so big that [he is] still trying to wrap my head around the technical aspects, much less the legal aspects.”

To be fair this kind of mistake is common as lots have been caught sending data in clear text, and others have been caught scraping data without permission. LG was caught in a very similar privacy violation last November when one of their Smart TVs was shown to be uploading metadata from a user’s private files to LG’s servers in clear text.

It is probably not deliberate, just what security experts technically call “bloody stupid”.

The  software has violated so many privacy laws in the US, goodness knows how many it will have broken in a civilised country like Germany where privacy is taken more seriously. The Frankfurt Book Fair is coming up later this week. Adobe will be exhibiting at the trade show so we guess that the Germans will be interrogating a few executive – that ways to make you talk, apparently.

 

Apple’s bendy turkey now faces hair-gate

Posted on October 8, 2014 by - News

appleIt looks like Apple’s reputation for design success is hair today, gone tomorrow.

Already the iPhone 6 range has had to deal with the fact that its aluminium frame can be bent but now has to deal with the fact that its design pulls out the hair on your head and beard.

Twitter users have made #hairgate a rising social media trend.

The problem happens where the aluminium meets the glass which has a space which is ideal for catching hair and pulling it out.  If only there was a company which was famous for its design which did not make such basic mistakes.

Apparently Apple fanboys are divided as to whether treat #beardgate as a separate trend, or simply as a subset of #hairgate. Other Applefans cannot grow a beard and don’t care.

Apple has been refusing to comment about it. However, if its press office had been required to handle the Black Death it would have waited six months before claiming that it only affected a small number of people.

Apple’s silence is fuelling a range of gags. The Twitter account of the Atlanta International Fashion Week speculating that it may be an elaborate plot against hipsters for whom facial hair has become de rigeur. Another user tweeted: “Congrats, Apple, for finally getting hipsters to shave”.

Gillette posted: “Your phone may be smarter than ever, but leave the shaving to the experts.”

The tame Apple press is rushing to quote the standard Apple fanboys in denial posts instead.

“I have iPhone 6. Doesn’t bend and doesn’t snag hair. Who thinks up these things? Apple haters? Competitors?” tweeted John Wooten.

After all, who wants to be the idiot who spent a fortune on a phone so poorly designed it bends and rips your hair out. Only a complete moron would do that – so it is better to pretend you bought a great product, claim it is perfect and people will not laugh at you.

Apple’s design for an iWatch was also mocked by Swiss Watch Makers which said that it looked like it had been designed by a first year design student.

Samsung, Microsoft argue over the best city in the world

Posted on October 8, 2014 by - News

Times_Square,_New_York_City_(HDR)Microsoft and Samsung cannot agree on the best city in the world to hatch out peace. Samsung thinks that Hong Kong is the best while Microsoft believes that it should be New York.

Samsung has started an arbitration proceeding in Hong Kong against Microsoft as the Seattle behemoth attempts to give it a Chinese burn over smartphone patent royalties.

The arbitration was disclosed in a court filing as part of a federal lawsuit Microsoft filed in August in New York accusing Samsung of refusing to make royalty payments to Microsoft after the software company announced its intention to acquire Nokia’s handset business.

Samsung specifically wanted the Hong Kong office of the International Court of Arbitration of the International Chamber of Commerce. It is not clear why Hong Kong was chosen – perhaps it was the good shopping, better access to Dim Sung, pork in a bun and the students revolting.

The arbitration was started under the terms of a business collaboration agreement “to resolve a dispute concerning the calculation of success credits under that agreement,” Samsung said.

Jennifer Crider, a spokeswoman for Microsoft, said the companies’ contract provided that the “appropriate venue to interpret the business collaboration agreement is New York”. After all, if they could make an arbitration there, they could make it anywhere and they could go all through the night because the city never sleeps.

The arbitration came just days after Microsoft filed an amended complaint in its New York lawsuit asking the court to rule that it did not breach a business collaboration agreement with Samsung.

Microsoft in the complaint also wants Samsung to pay $6.9 million interest on more than $1 billion in royalty payments which it delayed in protest of the Nokia deal.

Microsoft claims Google Android mobile system uses some of its technology, and most hardware makers, including Samsung, have agreed to pay patent royalties on Android handsets.

Motorola Google  said no and has been in litigation against Microsoft since 2010.

Infected ATMs discovered

Posted on October 7, 2014 by - News

pesetaMalware illegally installed in automatic teller machines (ATMs) is costing millions of dollars with INTERPOL involved in a fight to stem the thefts.

Kaspersky Labs said the Tyupkin malware works when crooks have physical access to the ATMs and use a bootable CD to install it.  The infected ATM runs on an infinite loop waiting for a command and runs only on specific times on Sunday and Monday nights.  Then the crooks strike, taking cash from infected machines without needing to use credit cards.

Kaspersky said the malware – Backdoor.MSIL.Tyupkin – has been detected on ATMs in Europe, Latin America and Asia.

The anti-virus company said that banks need to look at the physical security of ATMs and invest in good quality security systems.

They also need to replace master keys and locks on the top of ATMs and get rid of the default settings.  An alarm should also be installed because Kaspersky discovered the gangsters only infected ATMs with no security alarm.  The default BIOS passwords should be changed and the ATMs need to have up to date antivirus software installed.

Computers help to fight AIDS

Posted on October 7, 2014 by - News

HIVScientists at the University of Southern Denmark (SDU) say they have developed a method that uses the power of computers to find new compounds to fight the AIDS virus.

The problem is that drugs that have managed to kill HIV are becoming ineffective because the virus is becoming resistant to them.

The researchers say they have a method to speed up development work in the search for new compounds to fight HIV.  They claim that can increase speed by an order of several hundred percent.

The new mthods use quantum mechanics and molecular mechanics using significantly more powerful computers to hunt for the “needle in the haystack”.

Vasanthanathan Poongavanam and Jacob Kongsted at SDU screened half a million compounds and narrowed down 25 for further investigation.  Of those, 14 inhibit the HIV virus’s ability to reproduce.

* The image illustrates HIV virus – purple balls – entering a host cell.  Once they’ve entered they deliver viral RNA – the purple capsule.  The container carries enzymes needed for viral self replication and the compounds discovered are used to inhibit the enzymes.

Spam drowns business mail

Posted on October 7, 2014 by - News

Penny Blacks - Wikimedia CommonsA survey showed that 69 percent of organisations polled report that day to day business operations are severely disrupted by spam related incidents.

GFI Software commissioned the independent report that surveyed 200 IT decision makers.

Thirty six percent of the respondents said they have been affected up to three times in a year, meaning expense if PCs and servers need to be cleaned or re-installed after malware has been opened and executed by people.

Some respondents – 15 percent – said tthey had major spam related IT failures over 10 times in the last year.

The most common types of spam is phishing – 49 percent of respondents said it was the most prevalent type of spam.

Banking spam from real companies is the second biggest problem at 44 percent.

Third was dating site spam. 34 percent of respondents said it was their main worry.

And 56 percent surveyed said they’d notice a rise in spam levels over the past year.

Sergio Galindo, general manager at GFI software said crooks are using spam more and more to throw malware into the workplace for malicious reasons, to hold companies to ransom or to steal information that can be used for fraud.

HP divides but will it conquer?

Posted on October 7, 2014 by - News

Meg WhitmanThe decision by HP to split itself into two companies has the whiff of desperation about it.

One wing will sell printer ink and PCs, while the other will position itself selling into the enterprises with services and hardware.

Meg Whitman said that the move is intended to give both wings flexibility in the different marketplaces they represent but the end result is more likely to be confusion than clarity.

And it is worth contrasting Hewlett Packard with Dell. The latter has managed to re-engineer its entire business over the last five years and be successful in selling into services, into software and for the PCs that have brought it smelling of success. It uses its different services and products to leverage its sales. And it doesn’t  panic, Captain Whitman.

The devil is in the HP detail.

The newly spring Hewlett-Packard Enterprise and HP Inc could well end up competing with each other but that isn’t the least of their problems.  The move will mean a big shift in its relationship with its partners – some of which sell the entire range of HP kit and services through distribution. Those details will take quite some disentangling.

HP is in the fourth year of its five year plan but this looks a bit of its plan that wasn’t originally part of its five year plan.

Whitman said that by moving one HP to two HPs it will be in a better position to compete, support its customers and partners and also bring in extra cash for its shareholders.  That’s what she hopes.

HP one and HP two hope to complete the separation by the end of its financial year 2015.  Whitman will serve on the boards of HP one and HP two. That will be jolly interesting when the two companies finally get their infrastructure act together.

The official release doesn’t say how HP one and HP two will share their technology, and employees – who have since big restructures over the last three years – just exactly feel about all or any of this.

Wall Street seems to like it – HP’s share price rose as the news was confirmed yesterday.

US government can post your snaps on Facebook

Posted on October 7, 2014 by - News

thumb-mark-zuckerberg-facebook-pro-4566The US government claims it has the right to steal your photos and pretend to be you on social networking sites so that it can trick your friends into admitting illegal acts.

The Justice Department is claiming that a federal agent had the right to impersonate a young woman online by creating a Facebook page in her name without her knowledge. The agent managed to do this by stealing pictures from the woman’s seized mobile and sticking racy pictures of her and even one of her young son and niece to a fake social media account.

The woman, Sondra Arquiett, who then went by the name Sondra Prince, discovered that the spooks had stolen her ID in 2010 when a friend asked about the pictures she was posting on her Facebook page. There were risqué pictures of her posing on the hood of a BMW with her legs spread, and others with her in her underwear.

The account was actually set up by US Drug Enforcement Administration special agent Timothy Sinnigen who had arrested Arquiett, alleging she was part of a drug ring. A judge decided that that the single mom was a bit player who accepted responsibility and sentenced her to probation.

While she was awaiting trial, Sinnigen created the fake Facebook page using Arquiett’s real name, posted photos from her seized cell phone, and communicated with at least one wanted fugitive — all without her knowledge.

Facebook’s “Community Standards” say that “Claiming to be another person, creating a false presence for an organisation, or creating multiple accounts undermines community and violates Facebook’s terms” and there there is no exception for cops and spooks.

The bogus Facebook page is still there though.

The DEA’s actions might never have come to light if Arquiett, now 28, hadn’t sued Sinnigen, accusing him in federal district court in Syracuse, New York, of violating her privacy and placing her in danger.

The government’s response said that: “Defendants admit that Plaintiff did not give express permission for the use of photographs contained on her phone on an undercover Facebook page, but state the Plaintiff implicitly consented by granting access to the information stored in her mobile and by consenting to the use of that information to aid in an ongoing criminal investigations.”

In other words the US government can come into your house take your photographs and post them online if it thinks it can use them to arrest your friends.  When Arquiett gave permission for the FBI to look at her phone she cannot have imagined that she would have consented to her data being used in like that, but apparently the US Justice department thinks it is OK.

One in three jobs replaced by IT by 2025

Posted on October 7, 2014 by - News

rewardposterCrystal ball readers at analyst outfit Gartner have seen a future where robots and drones replace  a third of all workers by 2025.

At the start of its major US conference, the Symposium/ITxpo Gartner’s research director Peter Sondergaard predicted a future where a drone may be your eyes and ears.

In five years, drones will be a standard part of operations in many industries, used in agriculture, geographical surveys and oil and gas pipeline inspections, he said.

He also predicted a rise in the a “super class” of technologies that perform a wide variety of work, both the physical and the intellectual kind, said Sondergaard.

Machines, for instance, have been grading multiple choice for years, but now they are grading essays and unstructured text.

This cognitive capability in software will extend to other areas, including financial analysis, medical diagnostics and data analytic jobs of all sorts, Sondergaard said.

Gartner predicts one in three jobs will be converted to software, robots and smart machines by 2025. The new digital businesses require less labour and machines will be make sense of data faster than humans.

 

Samsung blue over low profits

Posted on October 7, 2014 by - News

samsung-hqDepending on smartphones appears to have cost Samsung – the company is headed for its first annual earnings drop since 2011.

The company has revealed its July-September profit would be the lowest in more than three years and the short-term prospects for smartphones were uncertain.

Samsung is finding that its market share is falling thanks to the rise of Chinese rivals like Lenovo and Xiaomi.

Samsung said in a regulatory filing on Tuesday that operating profit for the third quarter likely fell 59.7 percent to $3.8 billion which was lower than the cocaine nose jobs of Wall Street predicted.

This would mark the South Korean giant’s weakest quarterly profit since the second quarter of 2011 and the fourth consecutive quarter of earnings declines on a yearly basis.

Samsung said that although “uncertainty” persisted in the mobile business, which accounted for nearly 70 percent of its 2013 operating profit, it “cautiously expects” higher shipments of new smartphones and strong seasonal demand for TV products.

Operating margin for the smartphone business fell substantially in the quarter due to higher marketing expenditure and sharply lower average selling prices, as the proportion of shipments for high-end devices fell and prices for older models dropped, Samsung said.

The belief amongst analysts is that Samsung will be back with stronger volumes once it revamped its product lineup.  The outfit released its Galaxy Note 4 in recent months, featuring metal frames which will fix the accusation that its use of plastic had harmed sales.

Samsung also aims to launch more cost-competitive devices in the mid-to-low end segments. Analysts expect these products to appear by the end of October.

It is widely expected that Samsung would release a new mid-tier product late this month valued at between $300 and $400. The new device would use similar components to the flagship Galaxy S5 smartphone which is priced at about $500.

Samsung’s chip division is doing well. Samsung is the world’s top memory chipmaker and the returns from its memory business in the third quarter improved sequentially due to strong seasonal demand.

Poettering attacks Linux’s “you know who”

Posted on October 7, 2014 by - News

lennartpoettering-620x411The open source movement fails to attract new members because its existing membership base is populated by a******** with few social skills led by Linus Torvalds who sets a poor example, according to a Linux expert.

Lennart Poettering,  a Red Hat engineer and one of the creators of the controversial systemd system, penned a rant on his bog which was worthy of Linus Torvalds and ironically blamed Torvalds for a lot of the problems.

“Open Source community is full of a******s, and I probably more than most others am one of their most favourite targets. I get hate mail for hacking on Open Source. People have started multiple ‘petitions’ on petition web sites, asking me to stop working (google for it). Recently, people started collecting Bitcoins to hire a hitman for me (this really happened!). Just the other day, some idiot posted a ‘song’ on YouTube, a creepy work, filled with expletives about me and suggestions of violence. People post websites about boycotting my projects, containing pretty personal attacks,” he steamed.

Systemd was adopted by most major Linux distributions, including Debian, Fedora, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), and Ubuntu, but there is still a lot of hate against it.

Poettering blames a lot of the nutcase problems on a circle that plays a major role in kernel development, and first and foremost Linus Torvalds himself.

“Torvalds is considered a role model, but he is quite a bad one. If he posts words like “[specific folks] …should be retroactively aborted. Who the f*ck does idiotic things like that? How did they not die as babies, considering that they were likely too stupid to find a tit to suck on?” (google for it), then that’s certainly bad,” steamed Poettering.

Poettering said he finds it “particularly appalling” that Torvalds regularly defends this approach and advertises this as an efficient way to run a community. He said that it was not just Torvalds, but a certain group of people around him who use the exact same style, some of which semi-publicly dream up the best ways to kill Poettering.

All this means that if anyone is going to get interested in Linux they are going to need a thick skin to deal with the high A*rsehole count in the community.  He thinks most normal humans can’t be bothered.

 

 

 

EU might suspend data agreements with the US

Posted on October 7, 2014 by - News

Russia-State-Cultural-Ideological-Policy-Weapon-West-US-Europe-Bodhita-NewsThe EU Justice Commissioner  is considering suspending a commercial data-sharing agreement between the European Union and the United States if Washington  doesn’t stop spying.

Vera Jourova said in written answers to EU lawmakers that the so-called Safe Harbour agreement allowing companies to transfer personal data to the United States could be suspended if negotiations between Brussels and Washington go nowhere.

Jourova said that suspension was an option on the table for me, but we are not yet there.

Under the EU’s strict data protection laws, companies may only transfer personal data outside the 28-member bloc if a country is deemed to have adequate safeguards for that data. Only a handful of countries worldwide meet the required standards and the US is not one of them.

In 2000 the EU adopted a Safe Harbour agreement under which US companies certify themselves that they meet the EU’s data privacy standards.

However the agreement was rendered a joke after last year’s revelations about mass US surveillance programs involving EU citizens which showed that  US technology companies were just handing over data to spooks.

And if negotiations with the US are tough now, it is expected that things will get worse when Jan Philipp Albrecht of the Greens group takes over  in November as the new Justice Commissioner. The Greens have no love of the US’s spying antics.

More than 3,246 companies were certified under Safe Harbour, including Google and Facebook.

The Commission announced a review of Safe Harbour in November last year after former U.S. National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden revealed details of Washington’s eavesdropping on Europeans’ phone calls, including those of German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

The Commission gave Washington a 13-point list of issues to address before it would put forward a revised data sharing agreement. One of them was that the US would use the national security prerogative to access Europeans’ data only when strictly necessary and in response to a specific threat.

Apparently this is causing a problem because the US sees everyone as a threat, even loyal allies.

Jourova asked for more time to continue working in a constructive spirit with the United States building on the progress made so far. Theoretically, the Commission could roll over and allow the US to have its wicked way with Europe, but it is likely that the European Parliament would throw its toys out of the pram if it did so. Most feel that the Commission is a US lapdog and it is about time it gave the land of the Free a Chinese burn until it stops being such an international douche.

HP notebook sales decline

Posted on October 7, 2014 by - News

notebooksJust a day after HP decided to split itself in half, a report suggests that it is the only of the top five brands to see a decline in notebook shipments in September.

Data published by Digitimes Research said that, over all, the top five vendors showed growth of 19 percent last month. Asustek managed to grow its shipments by 70 percent compared to the same month in 2013 and Lenovo managed 40 percent growth.

There are some sea changes in the market in any case, said the research arm.   Samsung and Toshiba have decided to retreat from some segments of the market. Samsung, for example, has given up the ghost on Chromebook sales in Europe.

Toshiba has exited several markets including South Krea, China and Russia.

The report said that adoption of Windows 8 has been pretty patchy, but Windows 10, due to arrrive in the second half of next year, might well give Microsoft a boost on the upgrade front. People can move from Windows 8 to Windows 10 without paying any more and that’s a tacit admission that it thinks it was a flop too.