Tag Archives: Technology Lab

Yahoo will purchase Tumblr for $1.1 billion according to WSJ report

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All of the Tumblr acquisition rumors this week appear to be true. According to The Wall Street Journal, Yahoo’s board of directors approved a $1.1 billion purchase of the microblogging site this week. The decision comes on the heels of Yahoo scheduling a press event for Monday in New York (Tumblr’s home base).

WSJ cites “people familiar with the matter” but their story is consistent with earlier reports. On Thursday, Adweek spoke with “multiple sources familiar with the talks” who pointed to the deal nearly being complete. And earlier that day, AllThingsD reported Yahoo was looking into such an alliance to become “cool” again “according to sources close to the situation.”

The alleged acquisition seems inline with Yahoo’s strategy under new CEO Marissa Mayer. Mayer has been with Yahoo for less than one year, but the organization has acquired several small companies under her leadership. These additions include social recommendation site Jybe, mobile news reader Summly, and mobile games developer Loki Studios.

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Why use a database instead of just saving your data to disk?

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Stack Exchange

This Q&A is part of a weekly series of posts highlighting common questions encountered by technophiles and answered by users at Stack Exchange, a free, community-powered network of 100+ Q&A sites.

Dokkat appears to think that databases are overused. “Instead of a database, I just serialize my data to JSON, saving and loading it to disk when necessary,” he writes. “All the data management is made on the program itself, which is faster AND easier than using SQL queries.” What is missing here? Why should a developer use a database when saving data to a disk might work just as well?

See the original question here.

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Mozilla delays turning on third-party cookie killer in Firefox

Tech

With Firefox 22 now in beta Mozilla has decided not to enable its new third-party cookie-blocking feature by default. The feature, aimed at preventing cross-site tracking of browser users with cookies not originating from the sites users visit, will still be available in the next Firefox release (due  in June) but will be turned off by default.

Cookies are small sets of data stored locally by the web browser, originally intended to help keep track of where a user was (his or her “state”) within a web application. They’re associated with a particular domain name and carry a set of values such as an application name, a unique identifying number or string for the user or the web session, and an expiration date. While most cookies are increasingly short-lived some can be essentially “immortal” (or last at least until a user purges them) with expiration dates far off in the future. Web sites can also query cookie data from a visiting web browser to gather analytical information about the user as well—and to target specific ads based on identity or web visit history data revealed by them.

Precision strike

In a blog post Mozilla Chief Technology Officer Brendan Eich explained the reasons for the delay in turning on the feature (a patch submitted by Stanford computer science graduate student Jonathan Meyer) by default. He said there were still issues to be resolved in how the feature avoided both “false positives,” such as blocking cookies from the companies behind sites visited by the user because they were associated with a different domain name. There’s also still an issue with “false negatives”—unwanted cookies that users pick up from sites they’ve visited that then follow them to other sites.

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Hacker serving 5-year sentence invents ATM add-on to prevent theft

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Prototype of a system for preventing ATM theft.
Reuters

A criminal serving a five-year sentence “for supplying gadgets to an organized crime gang used to conceal ATM skimmers” has invented a device that prevents ATMs from being susceptible to such thefts, Reuters reported today.

Valentin Boanta, who is six months into his sentence in a Romanian prison, developed what he calls the SRS (Secure Revolving System) which changes the way ATM machines read bank cards to prevent the operation of skimming devices that criminals hide inside ATMs.

Boanta’s arrest in 2009 spurred him to develop the anti-theft device to make amends. “When I got caught I became happy. This liberation opened the way to working for the good side,” Boanta told Reuters. “Crime was like a drug for me. After I was caught, I was happy I escaped from this adrenaline addiction. So that the other part, in which I started to develop security solutions, started to emerge.”

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Linux Mint 15 brings prettier desktop, new software and driver managers

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Cinnamon desktop on Linux Mint 15.
Linux Mint

The Linux Mint project yesterday unveiled version 15 of the increasingly popular desktop operating system, with upgrades to the MATE and Cinnamon desktop environments as well as new applications for managing software and drivers.

Code-named “Olivia,” Linux Mint 15 is based on the most recent version of Ubuntu and will be supported until January 2014. Linux Mint 15 is in the Release Candidate stage, with a final release coming later. Linux Mint also has a version based on Debian which is released on a “semi-rolling” basis while the Ubuntu-based version mirrors Ubuntu’s six-month release cycle.

“Linux Mint 15 is the most ambitious release since the start of the project,” the Mint announcement states. “MATE 1.6 is greatly improved and Cinnamon 1.8 offers a ton of new features, including a screensaver and a unified control center. The login screen can now be themed in HTML5 and two new tools, ‘Software Sources’ and ‘Driver Manager,’ make their first appearance in Linux Mint.”

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Dell first quarter profits down a whopping 79 percent

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Dell released its financial report yesterday for the first quarter of the company’s 2014 fiscal year and the overall numbers are positively dismal: a 79 percent drop in net income from the same quarter in FY13. In the first quarter last year Dell reported an overall net income (GAAP) of $635 million; this year for Q1, net income has plummeted to $130 million.

Reuters, CBS News, and tons of other sites are carrying news of the sharp decrease in earnings along with much speculation on what the report means for the company’s future. Company founder Michael Dell is engaged in a war with the company’s board of directors and other shareholders over whether or not to take the company private and how much it should cost to do so, and the latest financial statements provide ammunition to both sides in that argument.

Yahoo! Finance

If Michael Dell is able to get shareholders to accept his $24.4 billion offer to buy back the company it’s a virtual certainty that he will push the company to shed its ailing consumer PC manufacturing and sales business. The numbers do indeed show that a strategy focusing on high-end (and high-margin) enterprise services and equipment has some merit. According to the Reuters report revenue from Dell’s enterprise solutions, services, and software group actually increased by 12 percent.

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“SpecialisRevelio!” Macs use Harry Potter spell to unlock secret “backdoor”

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Aurich Lawson / Warner Bros. Entertainment

The Mac on your desk or on the cafe table next to you has a chip with secret functions that can be unlocked only by inputting a spell from the Harry Potter series. The SMC, or system management controller, is a chip used to regulate a Mac’s current and voltage, manage its light sensor, and temporarily store FileVault keys. Turns out that the SMC contains undocumented code that is invoked by entering the word “SpecialisRevelio,” the same magic words used to reveal hidden charms, hexes, or properties used by wizards in the Harry Potter series written by author J. K. Rowling.

That fun fact was presented Wednesday at the NoSuchCon security conference by veteran reverse engineer Alex Ionescu. While most details are far too technical for this article, the gist of the research is that the SMC is a chip that very few people can read but just about anyone with rudimentary technical skills can “flash” update. Besides displaying the Apple engineers’ affinity for Harry Potter, Ionescu’s tinkerings also open the door to new types of hacks. But don’t worry because they’re mostly the fodder for a hacking scene in a James Bond or Mission Impossible screenplay.

“The attacks discussed in my presentation are attacks that likely only a nation-state adversary would have the sufficient technical knowledge to implement, and they require precise knowledge of the machine that is being targeted,” Ionescu, who is chief architect at security firm CrowdStrike, wrote in an e-mail to Ars. “They are perfect, for example, at a border crossing where a rogue country may need to ‘take a quick look at your laptop’ to ‘help prevent terrorism.’ I don’t suspect most Mac users (and certainly not those that read Ars or other similar publications) would be at a high-profile enough level to warrant such level of interest from another state.”

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How Google updated Android without releasing version 4.3

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Google I/O didn’t give us the Android update we were expecting—or did it??
Andrew Cunningham

Google covered a lot of ground in its three-and-a-half-hour opening keynote at Google I/O yesterday, but one thing it didn’t announce was the oft-rumored next version of Android. However, persistent rumors insist that the elusive Android 4.3 is still coming next month—if that’s true, why not announce it at I/O in front of all of your most enthusiastic developers?

The answer is that Google did announce what amounts to a fairly substantial Android update yesterday. They simply did it without adding to the update fragmentation problems that continue to plague the platform. By focusing on these changes and not the apparently-waiting-in-the-wings update to the core software, Google is showing us one of the ways in which it’s trying to fix the update problem.

Consider the full breadth of yesterday’s Android-related improvements: you’ve got an update to the Android version of Google Maps, due this summer, that incorporates some of the features of the iOS version and the new desktop version. There’s a WebGL-capable version of Chrome for Android and an entirely new gaming API. A shotgun blast of improvements are coming to the Google Play Services APIs. And that’s to say nothing of the products that affect Google’s services across all supported platforms: Google Play Music All Access (say that five times fast), Hangouts, and Search improvements.

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