JetLib News

snydeq writes “InfoWorld’s Galen Gruman reports on the future of mobile security — one that will see a significant rise in exploits as valuable information increasingly migrates to mobile devices. To date, sandboxing and code-signing have helped make mobile OSes relatively secure, when compared with their desktop brethren. But as devices store more valuable information than email, they will become more enticing to hackers currently breaking into Windows PCs. And the biggest bulls-eye appears to be on Android, in large part because its architecture is most like that of the desktop PC but also because there are so many variants in use — too many for Google or the carriers to patch securely. And as the PDF-jailbreak vulnerability showed, sandboxing has its limits when it comes to securing the browser — the most likely point of entry for exploits not due to the rise of extensions, helper objects, and plug-ins on the mobile Web.”

Source: Your Smartphone Is Safer Than Your PC — For Now

suraj.sun writes with this snippet from CNET:
“The EPA and Department of Transportation on Monday proposed a fuel economy label overhaul to reflect how electric and alternative fuel vehicles stack up against gasoline passenger vehicles. … The changed label, mandated by the 2007 energy law, includes the same information on city and highway miles per gallon and estimated driving costs based on 15,000 miles a year now available. But the new labels add more comparative information, rating cars on mileage, greenhouse gas contribution, and other air pollutants from tailpipe emissions. That means that consumers can look at a label to see how one vehicle compares to all available vehicles, rather than only cars in a specific class. One label proposes grades, ranging from an A-plus to a D. There are no failing grades, since vehicles need to comply with the Clean Air Act.”

Source: EPA Proposes Grading System For Car Fuel Economy

KwahAG writes “Colin Watson, one of the Ubuntu developers, published in his blog information about Windows applications making GRUB 2 unbootable. Users of dual-boot Windows/Linux installations may face the problem, which boils down to particular Windows applications (Colin does not name them, but users point at least to HP ProtectTools, PC Angel, Adobe Flexnet) blindly overwriting hard disk content between the MBR and the first partition destroying information already stored there, in this particular case — the ‘core image’ of GRUB 2 (GRand Unified Bootloader) making the system unbootable.”

Source: Some Windows Apps Make GRUB 2 Unbootable

Google took its two newest steps on the march toward world domination this week, first rolling out a feature that lets people make free phone calls from Gmail, and then introducing real-time searching of fast-updating information, like tweets.

The first initiative is off to a hot start. Gmail users placed more than a million phone calls through Google on the service’s first day Wednesday.

Calling from within Gmail, by contrast, requires nothing more than installing a small plug-in program (available for Windows XP or newer, Mac OS X 10.4 or newer and some versions of Linux) and logging into Gmail. Click the “Call phone” link to the left of your inbox, type in a number, click the big blue “Call” button and things proceed as if you had just finished spinning a Bell System phone’s rotary dial [Washington Post].

And more importantly, the phone service is free as long as you dial within the United States or Canada (it costs a few cents per minute to dial elsewhere). Google hasn’t said whether the service will remain that way (though they did promise not to record or listen to phone conversations).

With its new Realtime Search, the search engine giant is trying to keep pace with the blistering rate that information moves on networks like Twitter.

Conventional search engines, such as Google’s, aren’t very good at capturing down-to-the-second postings on such sites. Google and other search engines “know these are the sources people are going to” and they want to keep them on their pages longer, said Larry Cornett, a former executive overseeing Yahoo’s search engine and now product-strategy consultant at Brilliant FORGE. The challenge for Google and others it to organize the real-time information so it’s more relevant to users, rather than just a blast of messages “without meaning on top of it,” he said [Wall Street Journal].

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Image: Flickr/ Manfrys

Source: Google’s Latest Moves: Free Phone Calls & Real-Time Search

bswooden writes “Some rather important departments (DMV, Social Services, Taxation) in the state of Virginia are currently without access to documents and information as a technology meltdown has caused much of their infrastructure to be offline for over 24 hours now. State CIO Sam Nixon said, ‘A failure occurred in one memory card in what is known as a “storage area network,” or SAN, at Virginia’s Information Technologies Agency (VITA) suburban Richmond computing center, one of several data storage systems across Virginia.’ How does the IT for some of the largest departments in a state come to a screeching halt over a single memory card? Oh, and also, the state is paying Northrup Grumman $2.4 billion over 10 years to manage the state’s IT infrastructure.”
Reader miller60 adds, “Virginia’s IT systems drew scrutiny last fall when state agencies reported rolling outages due to the lack of network redundancy.”

Source: State of Virginia Technology Centers Down

adeelarshad82 writes “The rumors are now reality, Samsung showed the world its first glimpse of the Samsung Galaxy Tab, the company’s new 7-inch tablet. Samsung Mobile will release more information about the Galaxy Tab on September 2 in advance of IFA Berlin 2010. Tab will run on Android 2.2 and feature full Web-browsing and video calling. The information given by the company implied that the Galaxy Tab will sport an HD screen for video, Flash support, support for e-books, possible GPS navigation, and PC linking.”

Source: Samsung Galaxy Tablet Coming In September

An anonymous reader writes “Employees openly admit they would take company data, including customer data and product plans, when leaving a job. In response to a recent survey, 49% of US workers and 52% of British workers admitted they would take some form of company property with them when leaving a position: 29% (US) and 23% (UK) would take customer data, including contact information; 23% (US) and 22% (UK) would take electronic files; 15% (US) and 17% (UK) would take product information, including designs and plans; and 13% (US) and 22% (UK) would take small office supplies.”

Source: Employees Would Steal Data When Leaving a Job

CeruleanDragon writes
“This excerpt sums up Dave Pell’s article at NPR pretty well: ‘Google’s Eric Schmidt recently stated that every two days we create as much information as we did from the beginning of civilization through 2003. Perhaps the sheer bulk of data makes it easier to suppress that information which we find overly unpleasant. Who’s got time for a victim in Afghanistan or end-of-life issues with all these Tweets coming in?’ It’s a valid point. If it’s not Tweets or Facebook posts, it’s lengthy forum arguments or reading news articles from the time you walk in the door at work until you’re ready for bed at night, and realizing you didn’t actually accomplish anything else. Sometimes too much information can get in the way of living and can bury otherwise important things.”

Source: Having Too Much Information Can Narrow Your Focus

An anonymous reader writes “Americans feel most vulnerable about the loss or theft of their personal or financial information, according to a national survey. 54% of Americans said the prospect of losing this data “extremely concerned” them. Losing personal or financial information ranked similar to concern over job loss and not being able to provide healthcare for their family. In terms of specific risks within the online threat landscape, identity theft ranked as the chief fear. Nearly a third of Americans reported identity theft as their greatest concern to personal safety and security on the Internet. The fear of someone hacking into their financial information or accounts ranked a close second, with a quarter of Americans listing it as their greatest worry.”

Source: Loss of Personal Info As Stressful As Losing a Job

An anonymous reader writes “Why can some people sleep through anything? According to this article in Wired Science, some lucky people have an extra helping of a certain kind of brain static that essentially blocks out noise and other stimuli. These ‘sleep spindles’ can be detected via EEG, and show up as brief bursts of high-frequency brain waves; some people naturally produce more than others. The researchers say these spindles are produced by the thalamus, the brain region that acts as a waystation for sensory information. If the thalamus is busy producing sleep spindles, sensory information can’t make it through the thalamus to the cortex, the perceptive part of the brain.”

Source: The Brain’s Secret For Sleeping Like a Log