Tag: reprints

Opera claims former employee gave stolen trade secrets to Mozilla

Opera has been busy repositioning itself as a middleware player for the mobile Web recently, but that isn’t stopping the company from defending its investment in browser technology. The company has filed a 20 million Kronor ($3.4 million) lawsuit against a former employee and consultant, claiming that he stole company secrets and incorporated them into a mobile browser for Mozilla. According to a report by Norwegian IT site Digi.no , Opera has filed suit against Trond Werner Hansen, a Norwegian musician and designer who worked for Opera from 1999 to 2006 as a user interface designer and developer before  leaving to pursue his music career . Hansen also worked for Opera as an outside consultant from 2009 to 2010. Last year, Hansen was involved with the development of the Mozilla prototype “Junior” browser for Apple iOS . Hansen and Alex Limi —former Firefox UI head and now manager of Mozilla’s product design strategy—demonstrated the browser prototype in a video on Air Mozilla last June. Hansen said in the video, “I spent almost seven years trying to simplify Opera and didn’t really succeed. Simplification of something that already exists is really hard. That’s way beyond product design issues—it’s company issues. I feel like we failed in making something really easy.” Limi credited Hansen with the invention of a number of Mozilla UI features, including the browser search—”the source of all our revenue,” Limi said—and the “speed dial” feature that allows users to pick frequently visited pages from a new browser tab. “Pretty much everything he’s invented, they’re now in all browsers,” Limi continued. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Opera claims former employee gave stolen trade secrets to Mozilla

Google didn’t comply with Argentina’s request to remove NSFW video of president

In a newly released dataset covering the second half of 2012, Google reports a record amount of total government requests worldwide to remove content from the company’s sites and services. As usual, under the “ Notes ” section, Google provides some potentially humorous insight  on why governments want certain content to be removed. Google noted wryly: “We received a request [from Argentina] to remove a YouTube video that allegedly defames the [Argentine] President by depicting her in a compromising position. We age-restricted the video in accordance with YouTube’s Community Guidelines.” It didn’t take us long to find the video in question, by the Miami-based Argentine-Venezuelan rock band The Rockadictos. The band’s September 2012 music video (genuinely NSFW) depicts a CGI version of the Argentine president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, engaging in lewd behavior. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Google didn’t comply with Argentina’s request to remove NSFW video of president

Ubuntu 13.04 boosts graphics performance to prepare for phones, tablets

Ubuntu 13.04. The stable release of Ubuntu 13.04 became available for download today, with Canonical promising performance and graphical improvements to help prepare the operating system for convergence across PCs, phones, and tablets. “Performance on lightweight systems was a core focus for this cycle, as a prelude to Ubuntu’s release on a range of mobile form factors,” Canonical said in an announcement today. “As a result 13.04 delivers significantly faster response times in casual use, and a reduced memory footprint that benefits all users.” Named “Raring Ringtail,”—the prelude to Saucy Salamander —Ubuntu 13.04 is the midway point in the OS’ two-year development cycle. Ubuntu 12.04, the more stable, Long Term Support edition that is supported for five years, was released one year ago. Security updates are only promised for 9 months for interim releases like 13.04. Support windows for interim releases were recently cut from 18 months to 9 months to reduce the number of versions Ubuntu developers must support and let them focus on bigger and better things. Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Ubuntu 13.04 boosts graphics performance to prepare for phones, tablets

Apple supercharges R&D with extra $500 million spent in last six months

Apple product sales are flattening out a bit compared to last year, save for iPads. Casey Johnston Apple boosted its research and development spending by 33 percent in the second quarter of 2013 compared to the same period last year, according to a quarterly report filed with the Securities Exchange Commission. If the rate of spending continues, Apple could drop over $4 billion on R&D this fiscal year. During the quarter ending March 30, 2013, Apple spent $1.119 billion on R&D, compared to $841 million from a year ago. In the first six months of its fiscal year, Apple has spent $2.129 billion total on R&D, while it spent only $1.599 billion last year. Apple stated that the spending for the quarter was up 33 percent due to “an increase in headcount” and “expanded R&D activities.” The statement went on to say that the “focused investments” in R&D are “directly related to timely development of new and enhanced products that are central to the Company’s core business strategy. As such, the Company expects to make further investments in R&D to remain competitive.” Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Apple supercharges R&D with extra $500 million spent in last six months

BitTorrent Sync creates private, peer-to-peer Dropbox, no cloud required

BitTorrent today released folder syncing software that replicates files across multiple computers using the same peer-to-peer file sharing technology that powers BitTorrent clients. The free BitTorrent Sync application is labeled as being in the alpha stage, so it’s not necessarily ready for prime-time, but it is publicly available for download and working as advertised on my home network. BitTorrent, Inc. (yes, there is a legitimate company behind BitTorrent ) took to its blog to announce  the move from a pre-alpha, private program to the publicly available alpha. Additions since the private alpha include one-way synchronization, one-time secrets for sharing files with a friend or colleague, and the ability to exclude specific files and directories. Read 13 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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BitTorrent Sync creates private, peer-to-peer Dropbox, no cloud required

Japanese police ask ISPs to start blocking Tor

Erich Ferdinand Authorities in Japan are so worried about their inability to tackle cybercrime that they are asking the country’s ISPs to block the use of Tor . According to The Mainichi , the National Police Agency (NPA, a bit like the Japanese FBI) is going to urge ISPs to block customers if they are found to have “abused” Tor online. Since Tor anonymizes traffic, that can be read as a presumption of guilt on anyone who anonymizes their Web activity. The Japanese police have had a torrid time of late when it comes to cybercrime. Late last year a hacker by the name of Demon Killer began posting death threats on public message boards after remotely taking control of computers across the country. The police arrested the four people whose IP addresses had been used and reportedly “extracted” a confession, but they were forced into a humiliating apology when the hacker kept posting messages while the suspects were in custody. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Japanese police ask ISPs to start blocking Tor

Former Hostgator employee arrested, charged with rooting 2,700 servers

Aurich Lawson A former employee of Hostgator has been arrested and charged with installing a backdoor that gave him almost unfettered control over more than 2,700 servers belonging to the widely used Web hosting provider. Eric Gunnar Gisse, 29, of San Antonio, Texas, was charged with felony breach of computer security by the district attorney’s office of Harris County in Texas, according to court documents. He worked as a medium-level administrator from September 2011 until he was terminated on February 15, 2012, according to prosecutors and a company executive. A day after his dismissal, Hostgator officials discovered a backdoor application that allowed Gisse to log in to servers from remote locations, including a computer located at the Hetzner Data Center in Nuremberg, Germany. He took pains to disguise his malware as a widely used Unix administration tool to prevent his superiors from discovering the backdoor process, prosecutors said. “The process was named ‘pcre’, a common system file, in order to disguise the true purpose of the process which would grant an attacker unauthorized access into Hostgator’s computer network,” a Houston Police Department investigator and the document’s “affiant,” Gordon M. Garrett, wrote in an affidavit. “Complainant told affiant he searched Hostgator’s computer network and found the unauthorized ‘pcre’ process installed on 2723 different Hostgator servers within the computer network.” Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Former Hostgator employee arrested, charged with rooting 2,700 servers

Bitfloor, number four Bitcoin-based exchange, shuts down for good

On Wednesday evening, Bitfloor , the number four Bitcoin-based exchange (behind Mt. Gox, BTC-E, and Bitstamp) announced that it is closing its doors “indefinitely.” “Unfortunately, our US bank account is scheduled to be closed and we can no longer provide the same level of [US dollar] deposits and withdrawals as we have in the past,” wrote Roman Shtylman , the exchange’s founder. “As such, I have made the decision to halt operations and return all funds. Over the next days we will be working with all clients to ensure that everyone receives their funds. Please be patient as we process your request.” Ars reached out to Shtylman to find out more details, but he did not immediately respond. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Bitfloor, number four Bitcoin-based exchange, shuts down for good

Google to acquire Provo, Utah’s fiber, transform it into Google Fiber

Less than 10 days after announcing that Austin will be Google Fiber’s second city (Kansas City, KS and MO, and surrounding small towns  qualified as Google’s first), the company announced suddenly that Provo, Utah will become the “third Google Fiber City.” Interestingly, Google isn’t laying its own fiber this time, but rather purchasing an existing network. “In order to bring Fiber to Provo, we’ve signed an agreement to purchase iProvo, an existing fiber-optic network owned by the city,” the company wrote in a blog post . “As a part of the acquisition, we would commit to upgrade the network to gigabit technology and finish network construction so that every home along the existing iProvo network would have the opportunity to connect to Google Fiber. Our agreement with Provo isn’t approved yet—it’s pending a vote by the City Council scheduled for next Tuesday, April 23. We intend to begin the network upgrades as soon as the closing conditions are satisfied and the deal is closed.” Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Google to acquire Provo, Utah’s fiber, transform it into Google Fiber

ColdFusion hack used to steal hosting provider’s customer data

A vulnerability in the ColdFusion Web server platform, reported by Adobe less than a week ago, has apparently been in the wild for almost a month and has allowed the hacking of at least one company website, exposing customer data. Yesterday, it was revealed that the virtual server hosting company Linode had been the victim of a multi-day breach that allowed hackers to gain access to customer records. The breach was made possible by a vulnerability in Adobe’s ColdFusion server platform that could, according to Adobe, “be exploited to impersonate an authenticated user.” A patch had been issued for the vulnerability on April 9  and was rated as priority “2” and “important.” Those ratings placed it at a step down from the most critical, indicating that there were no known exploits at the time the patch was issued but that data was at risk. Adobe credited “an anonymous security researcher,” with discovering the vulnerability. But according to IRC conversation  including one of the alleged hackers of the site, Linode’s site had been compromised for weeks before its discovery. That revelation leaves open the possibility that other ColdFusion sites have been compromised as hackers sought out targets to use the exploit on. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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ColdFusion hack used to steal hosting provider’s customer data