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Linux Business

Linux May Succeed Windows XP As OS of Choice For ATMs 367

Posted by Soulskill from the cash-from-a-penguin dept.
Dega704 sends this news from ComputerWorld: "Some financial services companies are looking to migrate their ATM fleets from Windows to Linux in a bid to have better control over hardware and software upgrade cycles. Pushing them in that direction apparently is Microsoft's decision to end support for Windows XP on April 8, said David Tente, executive director, USA, of the ATM Industry Association. 'There is some heartburn in the industry' over Microsoft's end-of-support decision, Tente said. ATM operators would like to be able to synchronize their hardware and software upgrade cycles. But that's hard to do with Microsoft dictating the software upgrade timetable. As a result, 'some are looking at the possibility of using a non-Microsoft operating system to synch up their hardware and software upgrades,' Tente said."
Bitcoin

Bitcoin's Software Gets Security Fixes, New Features 173

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the don't-modify-that-transaction dept.
itwbennett (1594911) writes "The software driving Bitcoin's network was upgraded Wednesday, with security fixes addressing a problem that defunct bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox blamed for losing nearly half a billion dollars worth of bitcoins. The latest version of bitcoin's software, 0.9.0, contains more than a half dozen fixes for transaction malleability, according to the release notes for the software. Bitcoin Core also contains a new feature for payment requests. Previously, merchants couldn't attach a note describing an invoice, and people also could not supply a refund address to a merchant. The latest version automatically supplies a refund address." This wouldn't have prevented the Mt. Gox implosion since they weren't using the reference implementation. The foundation also renamed the software to "Bitcoin Core" to avoid confusion between Bitcoin-the-network and Bitcoin-the-reference-implementation,
Software

A Call For Rollbacks To Previous Versions of Software 199

Posted by timothy from the forced-upgrades-are-a-pox-on-the-world dept.
colinneagle writes "In a blog post, Andy Patrizio laments the trend — made more common in the mobile world — of companies pushing software updates ahead without the ability to roll back to previous versions in the event that the user simply doesn't like it. iOS 7.1, for example, has reportedly been killing some users' battery power, and users of the iTunes library app TuneUp will remember how the much-maligned version 3.0 effectively killed the company behind it (new owners have since taken over TuneUp and plans to bring back the older version).

The ability to undo a problematic install should be mandatory, but in too many instances it is not. That's because software developers are always operating under the assumption that the latest version is the greatest version, when it may not be. This is especially true in the smartphone and tablet world. There is no rollback to be had for anything in the iOS and Android worlds. Until the day comes when software developers start releasing perfectly functioning, error-free code, we need the ability to go backwards with all software."
Data Storage

How Data Storage Has Grown In the Past 60 Years 100

Posted by timothy from the megaleaps-and-gigabounds dept.
Lucas123 writes "Imagine that in 1952, an IBM RAMAC 350 disk drive would have been able to hold only one .MP3 song. Today, a 4TB 3.5-in desktop drive (soon to be 5TB) can hold 760,000 songs. As much data as the digital age creates (2.16 Zettabytes and growing), data storage technology has always found a way to keep up. It is the fastest growing semiconductor technology there is. Consider a microSD card that in 2005 could store 128MB of capacity. Last month, SanDisk launched a 128GB microSD card — 1,000 times the storage in under a decade. While planar NAND flash is running up against a capacity wall, technology such as 3D NAND and Resistive Random Access Memory (RRAM) hold the promise of quadrupling of solid state capacity. Here are some photos of what was and what is in data storage."
Privacy

Eric Schmidt, Jared Cohen Say Google Data Now Protected From Gov't Spying 155

Posted by timothy from the now-how-to-effectively-test? dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Google's Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen were [part of a] wide-ranging session at SXSW today and they revealed that Google's data is now safely protected from the prying eyes of government organizations. In the last few days Google upgraded its security measure following revelations that Britain's GCHQ had intercepted data being transmitted between Google datacenters, Schmidt said that his company's upgrades following the incident left him 'pretty sure that information within Google is now safe from any government's prying eyes.'"
KDE

KDE Releases Calligra Suite 2.8 35

Posted by timothy from the consistently-impressive dept.
It's not just graphics app Krita: user KDE Community writes "The Calligra team is proud and pleased to announce the release of version 2.8 of the Calligra Suite, Calligra Active and the Calligra Office Engine. Major new features in this release are comments support in Author and Words, improved Pivot tables in Sheets, improved stability and the ability to open hyperlinks in Kexi. Flow introduces SVG based stencils and as usual there are many new features in Krita including touch screens support and a wraparound painting mode for the creation of textures and tiles." KDE has also just announced the first beta of its Applications and Platform 4.13.
Software

New Mozilla Encoder Improves JPEG Compression 155

Posted by timothy from the 6-percent's-a-lot dept.
jlp2097 writes "As reported by Heise, Mozilla has introduced a new JPEG encoder (German [Google-translated to English]) called mozjpeg. Mozjpeg promises to be a 'production-quality JPEG encoder that improves compression while maintaining compatibility with the vast majority of deployed decoders.' The Mozilla Research blog states that Mozjpeg is based on libjpeg-turbo with functionality added from jpgcrush. They claim an average of 2-6% of additional compression for files encoded with libjpeg and 10% additional compression for a sample of 1500 jpegs from Wikipedia — while maintaining the same image quality."
Upgrades

Microsoft's Attempt To Convert Users From Windows XP Backfires 860

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the get-your-free-upgrade-to-ubuntu dept.
MojoKid writes "Microsoft has been loudly and insistently banging a drum: All support and service for Windows XP and Office 2003 shuts down on April 8. In early February, faced with a slight uptick in users on the decrepit operating system the month before, Microsoft hit on an idea: Why not recruit tech-savvy friends and family to tell old holdouts to get off XP? The response ... was a torrent of abuse from Windows 8 users who aren't exactly thrilled with the operating system. Microsoft has come under serious fire for some significant missteps in this process, including a total lack of actual upgrade options. What Microsoft calls an upgrade involves completely wiping the PC and reinstalling a fresh OS copy on it — or ideally, buying a new device. Microsoft has misjudged how strong its relationship is with consumers and failed to acknowledge its own shortcomings. Not providing an upgrade utility is one example — but so is the general lack of attractive upgrade prices or even the most basic understanding of why users haven't upgraded. Microsoft's right to kill XP is unquestioned, but the company appears to have no insight into why its customers continue to use the OS. "
PHP

The New PHP 254

Posted by Soulskill from the less-filling-tastes-great dept.
An anonymous reader writes "This article at O'Reilly Programming suggests that PHP, a language known as much for its weaknesses as its strengths, has made steady progress over the past few years in fixing its problems. From the article: 'A few years ago, PHP had several large frameworks (e.g. CakePHP, CodeIgniter, and so on). Each framework was an island and provided its own implementation of features commonly found in other frameworks. Unfortunately, these insular implementations were likely not compatible with each other and forced developers to lock themselves in with a specific framework for a given project. Today the story is different. The new PHP community uses package management and component libraries to mix and match the best available tools. ... There are also exciting things happening with PHP under the hood, too. The PHP Zend Engine recently introduced memory usage optimizations. The memory usage in PHP 5.5 is far less than earlier versions.'"
Data Storage

Intel's New Desktop SSD Is an Overclocked Server Drive 111

Posted by samzenpus from the new-kid-in-class dept.
crookedvulture writes "Most of Intel's recent desktop SSDs have followed a familiar formula. Combine off-the-shelf controller with next-gen NAND and firmware tweaks. Rinse. Repeat. The new 730 Series is different, though. It's based on Intel's latest datacenter SSD, which combines a proprietary controller with high-endurance NAND. In the 730 Series, these chips are clocked much higher than their usual speeds. The drive is fully validated to run at the boosted frequencies, and it's rated to endure at least 70GB of writes per day over five years. As one might expect, though, this hot-clocked server SSD is rather pricey for a desktop model. It's slated to sell for around $1/GB, which is close to double the cost of more affordable options. And the 730 Series isn't always faster than its cheaper competition. Although the drive boasts exceptional throughput with random I/O, its sequential transfer rates are nothing special."
OS X

Apple Drops Snow Leopard Security Updates, Doesn't Tell Anyone 241

Posted by timothy from the they'll-figure-it-out-soon-enough dept.
Freshly Exhumed writes "As Apple issued an update for Mavericks, Mountain Lion, and Lion yesterday, Snow Leopard users have not seen a security update since September, 2013. This would not be noteworthy if Apple, like a host of other major software vendors, would clearly spell out its OS support policies and warn users of such changes, but they have not. Thus, the approximately 20% of Mac users still running Snow Leopard now find themselves in a very vulnerable state without the latest security updates."
Windows

Microsoft Confirms Windows 8.1 Spring Update, To Focus On Non-touch Devices 172

Posted by timothy from the iteration-station dept.
SmartAboutThings writes "At a special event at the Mobile World Congress, Microsoft has announced the 'spring' update for Windows 8.1. Joe Belfiore, who is the head of platform at Microsoft for smartphones, tablets and desktop devices, said the Windows 8.1 update will come with improvements for non-touch devices. Belfiore also said the update will focus on bringing back some of the 'old' features to Windows 8.1, such as the much-hyped start button, but this won't have a negative impact on the touch experience."
Chrome

Chrome 33 Nixes Option To Fall Back To Old 'New Tab' Page 125

Posted by timothy from the put-it-on-my-ta-hey-waittaminute dept.
An anonymous reader writes "On Friday, Chrome 33 was shipped out the everyone on the stable channel. Among other things, it removes the developer flag to disable the "Instant Extended API", which powers an updated New Tab page. The new New Tab page receieved a large amount of backlash from users, particularly due to strange behavior when Google wasn't set as the default search engine. It also moves the apps section to a separate page and puts the button to reopen recently closed tabs in the Chrome menu. With the option to disable this change removed, there has been tremendous backlash on Google Chrome's official forum. The official suggestion from Google as well as OMG! Chrome is to try some New Tab page changing extensions, such as Replace New Tab, Modern New Tab Page, or iChrome."
Security

Apple Fixes Dangerous SSL Authentication Flaw In iOS 101

Posted by timothy from the are-you-telling-us-the-whole-story? dept.
wiredmikey writes "Users of iOS devices will find themselves with a new software update to install, thanks to a certificate validation flaw in the mobile popular OS. While Apple provides very little information when disclosing security issues, the company said that an attacker with a 'privileged network position could capture or modify data in sessions protected by SSL/TLS.' 'While this flaw itself does not allow an attacker to compromise a vulnerable device, it is still a very serious threat to the privacy of users as it can be exploited through Man-in-the-Middle attack,' VUPEN's Chaouki Bekrar told SecurityWeek. For example, when connecting to an untrusted WiFi network, attackers could spy on user connections to websites and services that are supposed to be using encrypted communications, Bekrar said. Users should update their iOS devices to iOS 7.0.6 as soon as possible." Adds reader Trailrunner7: "The wording of the description is interesting, as it suggests that the proper certificate-validation checks were in place at some point in iOS but were later removed somehow. The effect of an exploit against this vulnerability would be for an attacker with a man-in-the-middle position on the victim's network would be able to read supposedly secure communications. It's not clear when the vulnerability was introduced, but the CVE entry for the bug was reserved on Jan. 8."
Media

ISP Fights Causing Netflix Packet Drops 289

Posted by Soulskill from the never-attribute-to-malice... dept.
An anonymous reader writes "We've been hearing more and more reports of ISPs throttling Netflix and other high-bandwidth services lately. The ISPs have denied it, and even Netflix itself seems to believe them. If that's the case, what's going on? Well, according to this article, the blame still lies with the ISPs. While they may not be explicitly throttling connection speeds, they're refusing to upgrade network connections as they demand more money from content distributors. For example, Netflix pays Cogent to distribute their internet traffic. Cogent has an agreement with Verizon to exchange traffic — which works fine until the massive amount of traffic from Netflix makes it a lopsided arrangement. Verizon wants more money from Cogent, and one of their negotiating tactics is simply to stop upgrading their infrastructure so that service degrades. 'There are about 11 Cogent/Verizon peering connections in major cities around the country. When peering partners aren't fighting, they typically upgrade the connections (or "ports") when they're about 50 percent full, Cogent says. ... With Cogent and Verizon fighting, the upgrades are happening at a glacial pace, according to Schaeffer. "Once a port hits about 85 percent throughput, you're going to begin to start to drop packets," he said. "Clearly when a port is at 120 or 130 percent [as the Cogent/Verizon ones are] the packet loss is material."'"
Software

Why Your Phone Gets OTA Updates But Your Car Doesn't 305

Posted by timothy from the 5g-at-95-mph dept.
New submitter kjbullis writes with this snippet from Technology Review: "When Toyota recalled over two million cars last week because of flaws with antilock braking systems and other problems, the fix was simple — a few software updates .The implementation of that fix is far from simple. Every one of those cars has to be taken into a dealership to have the new software installed, an expensive process that can take months. Cars that haven't been fixed could, in some cases, suddenly stall and crash. There is an alternative — the same sort of remote software updates used for PCs and smart phones. Indeed, one automaker, Tesla Motors, already provides what it calls 'over-the-air updates,' which allowed it to execute a recent software fix without requiring anybody to bring in their cars. But other automakers are dragging their feet, both because they're worried about security and because they might face resistance from dealers."
Chrome

Background Javascript Compilation Boosts Chrome Performance 136

Posted by timothy from the processing-processing-processing dept.
kc123 writes "The latest version of Chrome includes improvements in JavaScript compilation, according to the Chromium blog. Historically, Chrome compiled JavaScript on the main thread, where it could interfere with the performance of the JavaScript application. For large pieces of code this could become a nuisance, and in complex applications like games it could even lead to stuttering and dropped frames. In the latest Chrome Beta they've enabled concurrent compilation, which offloads a large part of the optimizing compilation phase to a background thread. The result is that JavaScript applications remain responsive and performance gets a boost."
Businesses

Death Hovers Politely For Americans' Swipe-and-Sign Credit Cards 731

Posted by timothy from the upgrade-your-skimmers dept.
schwit1 writes "U.S. banks and merchants are shifting to a more secure way of authorizing credit card transactions in which customers will enter a personal identification number (PIN) at checkout instead of signing a receipt. The US is the last major market in the world using the signature system, which is part of the reason why a disproportionate amount of credit card fraud happens here. The change is especially relevant given the massive fraud perpetrated against customers of Target in the fall. During a Congressional hearing last week, Target CFO John Mulligan said the company is accelerating the $100 million effort to switch to the so-called "chip and pin" system. The change won't happen all at once. Banks must issue cards with microprocessors and merchants need the right equipment to process the chip and PIN transactions, which is likely to happen gradually. But Visa, American Express, and MasterCard have announced that banks and merchants that have not adopted the technology for face-to-face transactions by October 2015 will be liable for fraudulent purchases. That's a strong incentive to get up to date. The new system will also prepare merchants and banks to transition to contactless payments in the near future."
GNU is Not Unix

GNU Hurd Gets Improvements: User-Space Driver Support and More 163

Posted by samzenpus from the now-even-better dept.
jones_supa writes "At FOSDEM 2014 some recent developments of GNU Hurd were discussed (PDF slides). In the name of freedom, GNU Hurd has now the ability to run device drivers from user-space via the project's DDE layer. Among the mentioned use-cases for the GNU Hurd DDE are allowing VPN traffic to just one application, mounting one's own files, redirecting a user's audio, and more flexible hardware support. You can also run Linux kernel drivers in Hurd's user-space. Hurd developers also have working IDE support, X.Org / graphics support, an AHCI driver for Serial ATA, and a Xen PV DomU. Besides the 64-bit support not being in a usable state, USB and sound support is still missing. As some other good news for GNU Hurd, around 79% of the Debian archive is now building for GNU Hurd, including the Xfce desktop (GNOME and KDE soon) and Firefox web browser."

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