Ask Slashdot: Open-Source Forensic Surveillance Analysis Software?

McBooCZech writes “I am trying to set up a surveillance system. It is not intended to build a real-time on-line surveillance system to watch a wall of monitors on a 24/7 basis. The main scope is to record video (24/7) from the fixed cameras around our facility and when needed, get back to pre-recorded video and check it for particular event(s). Of course, it is possible to use a human to fast forward through video using a DVR-type FF function for short video sequences. Unfortunately, for long sequences (one week), it is not acceptable solution. I was searching online the whole weekend for the open source software for analysis of pre-recorded video in order to retrieve events and data from recorded video but had no luck. So I ask you, Slashdotters: Can you provide some suggestions for forensic software to analyze/find specific events in pre-recorded video? Some examples of events: ‘human entering restricted zone,’ ‘movement in the restricted zone,’ ‘light in the restricted zone.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Ask Slashdot: Open-Source Forensic Surveillance Analysis Software?

Full-Fledged Windows Apps Could Be Coming Soon To Your Android Phone

If you’ve ever messed around with Linux, you’re probably familiar with a little program called ” Wine ,” WINdows Emulator/Wine Is Not an Emulator. With its magic, you can run Windows applications on your Linux box (as well as other operating systems), and soon, Wine could be running them on your Android phone as well . More »

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Full-Fledged Windows Apps Could Be Coming Soon To Your Android Phone

Magnetic Transistor Could Cut Power Consumption and Make Chips Reprogrammable

ananyo writes “Transistors, the simple switches at the heart of all modern electronics, generally use a tiny voltage to toggle between ‘on’ and ‘off.’ The voltage approach is highly reliable and easy to miniaturize, but has its disadvantages. First, keeping the voltage on requires power, which drives up the energy consumption of the microchip. Second, transistors must be hard-wired into the chips and can’t be reconfigured, which means computers need dedicated circuitry for all their functions. Now, researchers have made a type of transistor that can be switched with magnetism. The device could cut the power consumption of computers, cell phones and other electronics — and allow chips themselves to be ‘reprogrammed” (abstract).” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Magnetic Transistor Could Cut Power Consumption and Make Chips Reprogrammable

Mozilla To Enable Click-To-Play For All Firefox Plugins By Default

An anonymous reader writes “Mozilla on Tuesday announced a massive change to the way it loads third-party plugins in Firefox. The company plans to enable Click to Play for all versions of all plugins, except the latest release of Flash. This essentially means Firefox will soon only load third-party plugins when users click to interact with the plugin. Currently, Firefox automatically loads any plugin requested by a website, unless Mozilla has blocked it for security reasons (such as for old versions of Java, Silverlight, and Flash).” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Mozilla To Enable Click-To-Play For All Firefox Plugins By Default

Office 2013: Microsoft Cloud Era Begins In Earnest

snydeq writes “Microsoft’s release of Office 2013 represents the latest in a series of makeover moves, this time aimed at shifting use of its bedrock productivity suite to the cloud. Early hands-on testing suggests Office 2013 is the ‘best Office yet,’ bringing excellent cloud features and pay-as-you-go pricing to Office. But Microsoft’s new vision for remaining nimble in the cloud era comes with some questions, such as what happens when your subscription expires, not to mention some gray areas around inevitable employee use of Office 2013 Home Premium in business settings.” Zordak points to coverage of the new Office model at CNN Money, and says “More interesting than the article itself is the comments. The article closes by asking ‘Will you [pay up]?’ The consensus in the comments is a resounding ‘NO,’ with frequent mentions of the suitability of OpenOffice for home productivity.” Also at SlashCloud. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Office 2013: Microsoft Cloud Era Begins In Earnest

Pod2g Confirms IOS 6, IOS 6.1 Beta 4 Untethered Jailbreak

hypnosec writes “Well known iOS security researcher Pod2g has confirmed that a working untethered iOS 6 jailbreak is ready and would be released as soon as iOS 6.1 GM is released. In an interview with iDigitalTimes, the security researcher has revealed that they are already in possession of a functional untethered iOS 6 and iOS 6.1 beta 4 jailbreak and majority of the work has been done by @planetbeing and @pimskeks. “6.0 is jailbroken, 6.1 beta 4 also. Now we are waiting 6.1 to confirm and release,” said the researcher. He said that the jailbreak would have been possible without him as he came into the iOS 6 jailbreak scene at a later stage and provided pointers that pushed the other researchers to the maximum.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Pod2g Confirms IOS 6, IOS 6.1 Beta 4 Untethered Jailbreak

With MS Research Help, UN Attempts To Model All of Earth’s Ecosystems

An anonymous reader writes “Microsoft Research and UN scientists have teamed up to build the first general-purpose computer model of whole ecosystems across the entire world. The project was detailed in a recent Nature article [note: yet another expensively paywalled original article] titled ‘Ecosystems: Time to model all life on Earth.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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With MS Research Help, UN Attempts To Model All of Earth’s Ecosystems

Credit Card Swipe Fees Begin Sunday In USA

An anonymous reader writes “A speedbump on the road to a cash-free economy will go into effect Sunday in the USA, as retailers in 40 states will have the option of passing along a surcharge to customers who pay with credit cards. The so-called swipe fees arose from the settlement of a seven-year lawsuit filed by retailers against Visa, Mastercard, and big banks, who collect an electronic processing fee averaging 1.5 to 3 percent on transactions involving credit cards. The banks naturally have opposed the consumer surcharges, preferring that the extra costs to be passed along in the form of higher prices. Consumers in ten states (California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Kansas, Maine, Massachusetts, New York, Oklahoma, Texas) won’t be affected, since laws in those states forbid the practice (it seems that gasoline station owners here in Massachusetts got a different memo, though). Also, the surcharges won’t be collected for debit or prepaid cards.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Credit Card Swipe Fees Begin Sunday In USA

ITU Approves H.264 Video Standard Successor H.265

An anonymous reader writes “The H.265 codec standard, the successor of H.264, has been approved, promising support for 8k UHD and lower bandwidth, but the patent issues plaguing H.264 remain.” Here’s the announcement from the ITU. From the article: “Patents remain an important issue as it was with H.264, Google proposing WebM, a new codec standard based on VP8, back in 2010, one that would be royalties free. They also included it in Chrome, with the intent to replace H.264, but this attempt never materialized. Mozilla and Opera also included WebM in their browsers with the same purpose, but they never discarded H.264 because most of the video out there is coded with it. MPEG LA, the owner of a patent pool covering H.264, promised that H.264 internet videos delivered for free will be forever royalty free, but who knows what will happen with H.265? Will they request royalties for free content or not? It remains to be seen. In the meantime, H.264 remains the only codec with wide adoption, and H.265 will probably follow on its steps.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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ITU Approves H.264 Video Standard Successor H.265

BitTorrent Launches Dropbox Alternative

redletterdave writes “On Friday morning, BitTorrent launched the alpha test of a new, free public service called BitTorrent Sync, which allows users to securely back up and sync files over the Web using BitTorrent’s platform. Unlike competing services such as Box or Dropbox, BitTorrent Sync doesn’t store files on remote servers (which means that no third party has access to one’s files), and also has no storage limits other than what your devices can hold.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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BitTorrent Launches Dropbox Alternative