BlackBerry Cuts 250 Workers, Calls It Efficiency

First time accepted submitter Dawn Kawamoto writes “Want to become more efficient? Try lopping off 250 workers. That’s what BlackBerry did this week — saying it was a move to become more efficient. From the article: ‘“This is part of the next stage of our turnaround plan to increase efficiencies and scale our company correctly for new opportunities in mobile computing. We will be as transparent as possible as those plans evolve, ” says Lisette Kwong, a company spokeswoman.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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BlackBerry Cuts 250 Workers, Calls It Efficiency

Rethinking the Wetsuit

symbolset writes “Apparently Australians have come up with the brilliant idea: if you don’t want to be eaten by a shark, it’s best to not go swimming in shark-infested waters in a seal costume. ‘Scientists from the University of Western Australia, with designers Shark Attack Mitigation Systems (SAMS), have unveiled two new wetsuits that they say could save lives in the water. Based on a breakthrough discovery that sharks are colour-blind, one wetsuit, labelled the “Elude, ” is designed to camouflage a swimmer or diver in the sea. At the other extreme, the “Diverter” sports bold white and dark-blue stripes, and is intended to mirror nature’s warning signs to ward off any potential shark attack.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Rethinking the Wetsuit

Network Solutions Hit With DDoS

New submitter Landy DeField was the first of many of write in about Network Solutions’ website and DNS outage: “If your website does not load this morning you need to ask yourself do we use Network Solutions? Because all of their servers are all currently down. You can confirm this by visiting http://www.isitdownrightnow.com/networksolutions.com.html.” The only solid information from Network Solutions is a post on their Facebook page: “Network Solutions is experiencing a Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attack that is impacting our customers as well as the Network Solutions site. Our technology team is working to mitigate the situation. Please check back for updates.” There have been several reports that the outage is causing hosted DNS to fail, leading to a number of unresolvable websites. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Network Solutions Hit With DDoS

Google Fixes Glass Vulnerability To Malicious QR Codes

judgecorp writes “Google has fixed a vulnerability in its Glass device, which made it possible to fool the wearable gadget into joining malicious Wi-Fi networks, through the use of fake QR codes. Google fixed the flaw fast, following a tip-off from researchers — but there are two warnings to take from this. There are other weaknesses in Glass (such as the absence of a lockscreen), and this sort of weakness will increasingly hit as the Internet of Things takes hold and the number of communicating devices multiplies.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Google Fixes Glass Vulnerability To Malicious QR Codes

Linux 3.11 Features Fall Into Place With Merge Window

hypnosec writes “The Linux 3.11 merge window is about to close, most probably this Sunday, and most of the pull requests have been merged, including feature additions and improvements to disk & file system, CPU, graphics and other hardware. Some notable merges are: LZ4 compression; Zswap for compressed swap caching; inclusion of a Lustre file-system client for the first time; Dynamic Power Management (DPM) support for R600 GPUs; KVM and Xen virtualization on 64-bit hardware (AArch64); and a new DRM (Direct Rendering Manager) driver for the Renesas R-Car SoC.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Linux 3.11 Features Fall Into Place With Merge Window

Open Source Tortilla For Tor To Be Released At Black Hat

msm1267 writes “A researcher is expected to release Tortilla, an open source tool that anonymously routes TCP and DNS traffic through Tor, at the upcoming Black Hat conference. Tortilla provides a secure, anonymous means of routing traffic through Tor regardless of client software and without the need for a VPN or secure tunnel.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Open Source Tortilla For Tor To Be Released At Black Hat

Group Chat Vulnerability Discovered in Cryptocat, Project Fixes and Apologizes

alphadogg writes “The founder of an eavesdropping-resistant instant messaging application called Cryptocat has apologized over a now-fixed bug that made some types of messages more vulnerable to snooping. Cryptocat, which runs inside a web browser, is an open-source application intended to provide users with a high degree of security by using encryption to scramble messages. But Cryptocat warns that users should still be very cautious with communications and not to trust their life with the application. The vulnerability affected group chats and not private conversations. The encryption keys used to encode those conversations were too short, which in theory made it easier for an attacker to decrypt and read conversations.” The bug report/merge request, and an analysis of the bug (although, in light of the Cryptocat’s gracious response, overly acerbic and dismissive of the project). Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Group Chat Vulnerability Discovered in Cryptocat, Project Fixes and Apologizes

Linux 3.10 Officially Released

hypnosec writes with word that “The Linux 3.10 kernel has been officially released on Sunday evening which makes the 3.10-rc7 the last release candidate of the latest kernel which yields the biggest changes in years. Linus Torvalds was thinking of releasing another rc but, went against the idea and went ahead with official Linux 3.10 commit as anticipated last week. Torvalds notes in the announcement that releases since Linux 3.9 haven’t been prone to problems and 3.10 is no different.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Linux 3.10 Officially Released

AMD/ATI Drops Windows XP Support

Billly Gates writes “The latest beta drivers for the Catalyst drivers control suite only list Vista as the lowest version they will support. We still have almost a year before Windows XP support finally ends. Will NVidia follow? So if you own a AMD system you will not receive audio, chipset, video, or any other drivers for your XP system and must upgrade or use an outdated legacy version. Looks like another death knell for this very long lasting platform.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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AMD/ATI Drops Windows XP Support

IE 11 Getting WebGL, SPDY/3, New Dev Tools

rescendent writes sends this report about new features in Internet Explorer 11: “Microsoft released Windows Server (“Blue”) to MSDN subscribers today, ahead of the BUILD conference later this week in San Francisco. The build provides us a number of clues as to what we will see in the official Windows 8.1 (Blue) preview. The server build number is 9341, the Windows 8.1 preview build will be: 6.3.9431.winmain_bluemp.130615-1214. IE11 scores 351/500 + 2 bonus point, and 25/25 for WebGL. Since this is a server build, the score may be a little higher than IE11 on Win 8.1, but this confirms WebGL for IE11. IE11 WebGL Conformance Test Results: 14,748 of 20,509 tests pass (71.9%). Many things seen in the Server 2012 R2 preview will also show up in the Windows 8.1 preview.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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IE 11 Getting WebGL, SPDY/3, New Dev Tools