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Astronomers have discovered what they say is the most Earth-like planet yet detected — a distant, rocky world that’s similar in size to our own and exists in the Goldilocks zone where it’s not too hot and not too cold for life. "Starbucks: Opening Soon"
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So, which code-base should I be reading about to improve myself? The Beginning Is the End Is the Beginning
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A computer Trojan injects messages into Facebook to trick users into installing Android malware, researchers from ESET said Yet another reason to ignore all those annoying Facebook app invites.
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The "kill switch," a system for remotely disabling smartphones and wiping their data, will become standard in 2015, according to a pledge backed by most of the mobile world's major players. While you're at it, please also include a "bacon switch"...
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"mortality? longevity? incept dates?"
How about remote adding activated tracking so we can catch those who steal the phones in the first place?
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Generations of responsible parents have protected their children from an excess of TV-watching, realizing that spending hours and hours of the day watching telly isn't the best way for them to spend their formative years. But TV isn't what it once was, and let's face it - the coolest kids of all ages have their own tablet these days. So the "uncool" kids just have desktops?
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Computer science student is first arrest in relation to vulnerability. One down, who knows how many to go
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Looks like someone who was just fooling around to see if the bug was real, I bet a lot of people did the same without realizing they were truly doing something illegal simply in the interests of seeing if it worked. I hope he learns a lesson without it ruining his life.
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"Illegal" ? It's not that you gained access to the remote system, execing remote commands, and (optionally) profit from this. I brought down the city hall server testing the same vulnerability.
Imagine this conversation:
Client: 00 18 00 13 31 00
Server: here's my apache and PHP loader, take a handle to apache and maybe grab some url with user/pass in clear
Client: Ha?
What's next? Send a PNG with vulnerability and read memory of shell32.dll? Oh, it has been done already.
I think the term hacker is used every time one have XP installed with empty password and green grass as wallpaper.
It's not that the guy was pumping day and night fragments to the server in order to make the server bonk. Even so, it's the server's problem. At least, this is how I see things.
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But the professional criminals of NSA & Co won't be arrested...
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I hope they catch some serious flak for this one - ignoring a critical vulnerability like this for 2 years so they could exploit it put many individuals and business' data at risk.
I doubt it though, NSA/GHCQ seem to have carte blanche to do whatever they want in the interest of "National Security".
"If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough."
Alan Kay.
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Even though Google does not have a Heartbleed problem, a large number of Android users may still be at risk. And now 'reverse Heartbleed' triple-salchows itself into our hearts
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Way to work the word salchow into the conversation. 
I've heard Scott Hamilton pronounce this word a zillion times over the years as I've watched (accidentally) Olympic figure skating, but I've never known how it might be spelled.
For the disincluded :
[salchow - a jump in which the skater leaps from the back inside edge of one skate, making one full rotation of the body in the air, and lands on the back outside edge of the other skate.]
You always have nice phrase-turning here. Keep on.
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newton.saber wrote: You always have nice phrase-turning here. Keep on.
Thank you for the kind words!
TTFN - Kent
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One of the most interesting things about Microsoft’s new Cortana search assistant has just gone live for those early adopters of it: integration with Bing’s search results. Cortana, find me the URL for Google.com
update: Bother. May not be available outside the US.
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Coverity, a company specializing in software quality and security testing solutions, finds that open source programs tend to have fewer errors than proprietary programs. Not counting OpenSSL
Defect Density is a great band name idea
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Here is an interesting conundrum for Google: it has created an algorithm that’s significantly better at reading street numbers in Street View images, which helps it give you more accurate directions. At the same time, though, it turns out that this algorithm is so good, it can decipher 99 percent of CAPTCHAs (those squiggly text puzzles you often have to solve to prove you are human). So now people will post login screens to their houses to get Google to solve them?
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Kent Sharkey wrote: So now people will post login screens to their houses to get Google to solve them?
No, dude. Now people can finally replace the street number on their house with CAPTCHAs 
Soren Madsen
"When you don't know what you're doing it's best to do it quickly" - Jase #DuckDynasty
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There we go: I knew there had to be a solution.
TTFN - Kent
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More and more of the customers I have been talking to have been leveraging threat modeling as a systematic way to find design-level security and privacy weaknesses in systems they are building and operating. I wish I met those same customers
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This nasty little company is cold-calling people from a hidden caller ID and telling people that they're receiving errors from their Windows computers. Receiving errors from a Windows computers is believable, Microsoft trying to call to fix those errors is not.
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Over the last year or two we've had a few of these calls at my house.
I've never answered them but I've always wanted to lead them on and get them to scramble for information that they don't know. 
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For god's sake, only SD times could consider this news - I've been receiving calls like this for the last 5 years.
I like winding them up and pretending to go along with their instructions - but pretending that some fault with Windows is preventing me accessing the site. On one occassion I left him on the line for 15 minutes while I "checked the cables".
We may as well run up their phone bills.
"If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough."
Alan Kay.
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I have suspect SD Times is secretly being run by InfoWorld because it's easier to make themselves look good by creating an even more wretched pile of fail than to actually create content worthy of being read.
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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You could be right, but that would imply a level of cunning that I'm unconvinced either publication capable of.
I think in IT, the aphorism "Those who can't, teach" can be adapted to "Those who can't, write about it".
(Excepting the excellent staff working on this web site of course, Kent does that earn me brownie points?)
"If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough."
Alan Kay.
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