An anonymous reader writes: The newest version of the Unicode standard adds 7, 716 new characters to the existing 21, 499 – that’s more than 35% growth! Most of them are Chinese, Japan and Korean ideographs, but among those changes Unicode adds support for new languages like Ik, used in Uganda. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Unicode Consortium Releases Unicode 8.0.0
An anonymous reader writes: In late 2004, weeks before Tony Blair’s Freedom of Information (FOI) act first came into force, Downing Street adopted a policy of automatically deleting emails more than three months old (paywalled). The IT decision has resulted in a “dysfunctional” system according to former cabinet officials, with Downing Street workers struggling to agree on the details of meetings in the absence of a correspondence chain. It is still possible to preserve an email by dragging it to local storage, but the relevance of mails may not be apparent at the time that the worker must make the decision to do so. Former special adviser to Nick Clegg Sean Kemp said: “Some people delete their emails on an almost daily basis, others just try to avoid putting anything potentially interesting in an email in the first place.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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British Government Instituted 3-Month Deletion Policy, Apparently To Evade FOIA
An anonymous reader writes: Since 2005, Monster cables have been licensed under Apple’s “Made For iDevice” program, which lets cable manufacturers put a logo on their product signifying they work with Apple products. Now, Apple has revoked that certification. In January of this year, Monster sued Beats, accusing its founders of fraud. Beats was acquired by Apple in 2014, and Monster is accusing Apple of bullying them by terminating the licensing deal. Monster’s general counsel said the move would “significantly disrupt Monster’s business and that the two companies had worked well for years, with Monster paying Apple more than $12 million in licensing fees since 2008.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Apple De-Certifies Monster Cables After Lawsuit Against Beats
An anonymous reader notes a report from El Reg on a major cross-app resource vulnerability in iOS and Mac OS X. Researchers say it’s possible to break app sandboxes, bypass App Store security checks, and crack the Apple keychain. The researchers wrote, “specifically, we found that the inter-app interaction services, including the keychain and WebSocket on OS X and URL Scheme on OS X and iOS, can all be exploited by [malware] to steal such confidential information as the passwords for iCloud, email and bank, and the secret token of Evernote. Further, the design of the App sandbox on OS X was found to be vulnerable, exposing an app’s private directory to the sandboxed malware that hijacks its Apple Bundle ID. As a result, sensitive user data, like the notes and user contacts under Evernote and photos under WeChat, have all been disclosed. Fundamentally, these problems are caused by the lack of app-to-app and app-to-OS authentications.” Their full academic paper (PDF) is available online, as are a series of video demos. They withheld publication for six months at Apple’s request, but haven’t heard anything further about a fix. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Researchers Find Major Keychain Vulnerability in iOS and OS X
An anonymous reader writes: Trustwave released a new report which reveals the top cybercrime, data breach and security threat trends. According to their findings, attackers receive an estimated 1, 425 percent return on investment for exploit kit and ransomware schemes ($84, 100 net revenue for each $5, 900 investment). Retail was the most compromised industry making up 43 percent of investigations followed by food and beverage (13 percent) and hospitality (12 percent). Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Malware Attacks Give Criminals 1,425% Return On Investment
An anonymous reader writes with news that the Kodi media player (formerly XBMC) has had its app pulled from the Amazon app store after Amazon decided that it facilitates piracy. Amazon said, “Any facilitation of piracy or illegal downloads is not allowed in our program, ” and directed the development team not to resubmit the app. The team was surprised to hear this, since Kodi itself does not download or link to any infringing content. It does support addons, and some users have created addons to support pirated content, but the Kodi developers are fighting that behavior. XBMC Foundation board member Nathan Betzen said it’s absurd that “Amazon won’t let us into their appstore, but they have no problem selling the boxes that are pushing the reason they won’t let us into their app store.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Amazon Pulls Kodi Media Player From App Store Over Piracy Claims
Frosty P writes: BMI claims Amici III in Linden, New York didn’t have a license when it played four tunes in its eatery one night last year, including the beloved “Bennie and the Jets” and “Brown Sugar, ” winning $24, 000 earlier this year, and over $8, 200 in attorney’s fees. Giovanni Lavorato, who has been in business for 25 years, says the disc DJ brought into the eatery paid a fee to play tunes. “It’s ridiculous for me to pay somebody also, ” he said. “This is not a nightclub. This is not a disco joint . . . How many times do they want to get paid for the stupid music?” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Restaurateur Loses Copyright Suit To BMI
An anonymous reader writes: Phil Plait reports on new research into exoplanets that came to an unexpected and non-obvious conclusion. Throughout the galaxy, astronomers have been finding exoplanets they call “warm Neptunes” — bodies about the size of Neptune, but which orbit their parent star more closely than Mercury orbits the Sun. When astronomers looked at spectra for these planets, they found something surprising: no methane signature (PDF). Methane is made of carbon and hydrogen, and it’s generally assumed that most large, gaseous planets will have a lot of hydrogen. But this class of exoplanet, being significantly smaller than, say, Jupiter, may not have the mass (and thus the gravity) to hold on to its hydrogen when it’s heated by the close proximity to the star. The result is that the atmosphere may be largely made up of helium instead. If so, the planet would look oddly colorless to our eyes, very unlike the planets in our solar system. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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‘Warm Neptune’ Exoplanets May Have Lots of Helium
An anonymous reader writes: Starbreeze Studios has taken wraps off of StarVR, a new VR headset with dual displays comprising a 210 degree horizontal field of view with a total resolution of 5120×1440. The headset’s origins come from InfinitEye, a company working on a super-wide dual-display headset back in 2013 (http://bit.ly/1JNjqRy), which went into stealth mode for quite some time before being reborn as StarVR in partnership with Starbreeze Studios (http://bit.ly/1QwB0Nx). The studio is the developer behind the Payday franchise, Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, and now ‘Overkill’s The Walking Dead’, which will have a VR component utilizing the new headset. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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210 Degree VR Headset With 5K Display Revealed By ‘Payday’ Developer Starbreeze
New submitter garyisabusyguy writes with word that, according to London’s Sunday Times, “Russia and China have cracked the top-secret cache of files stolen by the fugitive US whistleblower Edward Snowden, forcing MI6 to pull agents out of live operations in hostile countries, according to senior officials in Downing Street, the Home Office and the security services, ” and suggests this non-paywalled Reuters version, too. “MI6 has decided that it is too dangerous to operate in Russia or China, ” writes the submitter. “This removes intelligence capabilities that have existed throughout the Cold War, and which may have helped to prevent a ‘hot’ nuclear war. Have the actions of Snowden, and, apparently, the use of weak encryption, made the world less safe?” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Report: Russia and China Crack Encrypted Snowden Files