News aggregator
Fossil Fuel Subsidies Dwarf Support For Renewables
TravisTR sends word of research from Bloomberg New Energy Finance which found that direct subsidies for renewable energy from governments worldwide totaled $43-46 billion in 2009, an amount vastly outstripped by the $557 billion in fossil fuel subsidies during 2008.
"The BNEF preliminary analysis suggests the US is the top country, as measured in dollars deployed, in providing direct subsidies for clean energy with an estimated $18.2bn spent in total in 2009. Approximately 40% of this went toward supporting the US biofuels sector with the rest going towards renewables. The federal stimulus program played a key role; its Treasury Department grant program alone provided $3.8bn in support for clean energy projects. China, the world leader in new wind installations in 2009 with 14GW, provided approximately $2bn in direct subsidies, according to the preliminary analysis. This figure is deceptive, however, as much crucial support for clean energy in the country comes in form of low-interest loans from state-owned banks. State-run power generators and grid companies have also been strongly encouraged by the government to tap their balance sheets in support of renewables."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Categories: Syndicated News
Microsoft To Issue Emergency Fix For Windows<nobr> <wbr></nobr>.LNK Flaw
Trailrunner7 writes "Microsoft will issue an out-of-band patch on Monday for a critical vulnerability in all of the current versions of Windows. The company didn't identify which flaw it will be patching, but the description of the vulnerability is a close match to the LNK flaw that attackers have been exploiting for several weeks now, most notably with the Stuxnet malware. The advance notification from Microsoft on Friday said that the company is patching a critical vulnerability that is being actively exploited in the wild and affects all supported Windows platforms. The LNK flaw in the Windows shell was first identified earlier this month when researchers discovered the Stuxnet worm spreading from infected USB drives to PCs. Stuxnet has turned out to be a rather interesting piece of malware as it not only uses the LNK zero day vulnerability to spread, but it had components that were signed using a legitimate digital certificate belonging to Realtek, a Taiwanese hardware manufacturer."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Categories: Syndicated News
Disney throws $763m at social gaming
Getting animated about Facebook
Disney has thrown over three quarters of a billion dollars to bring it up to Goliath status in the online gaming world, acquiring two and a half year old Playdom, which offers games for social networks – the new buzzword in gaming that has all the VCs on the planet hopping onto investments.…
Categories: Syndicated News
UK Government Rejects Calls To Upgrade From IE6
pcardno writes "The UK government has responded to a petition encouraging government departments to move away from IE6 that had over 6,000 signatories. Their response seems to be that a fully patched IE6 is perfectly safe as long as firewalls and malware scanning tools are in place, and that mandating an upgrade away from IE6 will be too expensive. The second part is fair enough in this age of austerity (I'd rather have my taxes spent on schools and hospitals than software upgrade testing at the moment), but the whole reaction will be a disappointment to the petitioners."
Update: 07/31 11:43 GMT by S : Dan Frydman, the man who launched the petition, has posted a response to the government's decision.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Categories: Syndicated News
SaaS and Cloud Stocks: Up 8% So Far In 2010
The VAR Guy has applied some polish to the SaaS 20 Stock Index, which tracks trends across SaaS and cloud computing stocks. From January 2010 through the end of July 2010, the SaaS 20 Stock Index has risen nearly 8 percent, despite a 1 percent drop for the week ending July 30, 2010. Plus, some new companies are in the index. Here’s a look at the latest SaaS 20 Stock Index winners, losers and cloud computing updates.
For July 30, 2010, the index’s biggest one-week winners were:
- Vocus Inc. (VOCS), up 7.81 percent: The company’s sales are rising but so are losses, according to financial results announced July 23.
- Savvis (SVVS), up 6.91 percent: The company’s shares rose after Savvis Q2 sales topped analysts expectations.
- Terremark Worldwide (TMRK), up 6.52 percent: The company is expected to announce quarterly results on Aug. 4.
For July 30, 2010, the index’s biggest one-week losers were:
- SuccessFactors (SFSF), down 10.92%: The company’s Q2 loss widened, hurt by stock options and higher operating expenses.
- ConstantContact (CTCT), down 9.82%: The company reported 37 percent revenue growth for its quarter ended June 30, 2010. But apparently, investors were hoping for even better performance.
- Taleo (TLEO), down 6.96%: The company’s CFO is leaving amid a $1.4 million quarterly loss — though quarterly revenue rose to $56.3 million, up form $49.1 million in the corresponding quarter last year.
For January 2010 through July 30, 2010, the index’s biggest winners were:
- VMware (VMW), up 82.94%
- NaviSite (NAVI), up 43%
- SalesForce.com (CRM), up 34.13%
- Intuit (INTU), up 29.35%
For January 2010 through July 30, 2010, the Index’s biggest losers were:
- Google Inc. (GOOG), down 21.80%
- Equinix (EQIX), down 11.91%
- Rackspace Hosting (RAX), down 10.31%
- Vocus Inc. (VOCS), down 9.50%
The VAR Guy also made some adjustments to the SaaS 20 Stock Index today. Among the updates:
- Companies removed from the SaaS 20 Stock Index include Dell, EMC, Ingram Micro, Salary.com and Websense. Most of the dropped companies have limited SaaS efforts, or SaaS and cloud computing don’t yet dominate their businesses.
- Companies added to the SaaS 20 Stock Index include Equinix, NaviSite, Savvis, Terremark Worldwide and VMware. Generally speaking, the companies added have well-known cloud or managed services efforts, plus VMware virtualization is a foundation for many SaaS and cloud platforms.
That’s all for this week. The VAR Guy will be back on Aug. 6 with more SaaS 20 Stock Index weekly analysis.
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Read More About This TopicCategories: Syndicated News
The Canadian Who Holds the Key To the Internet
drbutts writes "The Toronto Star has an interesting story on how they are securing DNS: 'It's housed in two high-security facilities separated by the North American landmass. The one authenticated map of the Internet. Were it to be lost — either through a catastrophic physical or cyber attack — it could be recreated by seven individuals spread around the globe. One of them is Ottawa's Norm Ritchie. Ritchie was recently chosen to hold one of seven smartcards that can rebuild the root key that underpins this system' called DNSSEC (Domain Name System Security Extensions). In essence, these seven can rebuild the architecture that allows users to know for certain where they are and where they are going when navigating the Web."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Categories: Syndicated News
Social-engineering contest reveals secret BP info
Hacking human gullibility at Defcon
Defcon A hacker competition that challenges contestants to trick employees of large companies into divulging potentially sensitive information aims to show how human gullibility is the biggest security vulnerability of all. During its first day at the Defcon hacker contest in Las Vegas, it had clearly achieved its goal.…
Categories: Syndicated News
US Ability To Identify Source of Nuclear Weapons Decays
Hugh Pickens writes "The NY Times covers a report released by the National Research Council, which says the ability of the US to identify the source of a nuclear weapon used in a terrorist attack is fragile and eroding. The goals of the highly specialized detective work, known as nuclear attribution, is to clarify options for retaliation and to deter terrorists by letting them know that nuclear devices have fingerprints that atomic specialists can find and trace. 'Although US nuclear forensics capabilities are substantial and can be improved, right now they are fragile, under-resourced and, in some respects, deteriorating,' the report warns. 'Without strong leadership, careful planning and additional funds, these capabilities will decline.' The report calls on the federal government to take steps to strengthen its forensic capabilities and argues for the necessity of better planning, more robust budgets, clearer lines of authority and more realistic exercises."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Categories: Syndicated News
New PS3 Firmware Causing HDD Upgrade Problems?
Channard writes "While there have been occasional reports of previous PS3 firmware upgrades causing system crashes and so forth, Sony's new firmware upgrade for the system, 3.41, is apparently stopping PS3 owners from upgrading their hard disks. This problem has been encountered by many users on Sony's forums and occurs when you try to put a new hard disk into a PS3 that already has the firmware upgrade installed. The general course of action for upgrading a PS3's drive is that you download the latest PS3 firmware onto a memory stick and, after swapping the hard drive in the PS3, plug the stick in, allowing the PS3 to properly prepare the disk for use. But as of upgrade 3.41, the PS3 fails to recognize the firmware on the stick, complaining that it can't proceed until you insert the correct firmware. Repeating the process and re-downloading the firmware does not fix the problem, as I can confirm, having encountered the problem myself. Users can put the old hard disk back in, provided they've not reformatted it for some other purpose, so all is not lost. Sony have apparently told gaming website CVG that 'The information available to our Consumer Services Department does not suggest that this is a problem PlayStation owners are likely to experience when upgrading the HDD with 3.41 update.' This seems to fly in the face of the currently available information — although whether or not this statement was issued by Kevin Butler is unclear. Either way, PS3 owners encountering this problem will likely have to wait a few days for a fix and use their old HDDs for now."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Categories: Syndicated News
FCC Gives Thumbs-Up To First LTE Phone
eagledck tips news that the FCC has "finally approved the first 4G Long Term Evolution (LTE) phone for sale in the US." The Samsung device will use MetroPCS as a carrier, but tech specs, software details and a launch timetable are still uncertain. Meanwhile, Verizon is ramping up testing of their own LTE infrastructure, hoping to launch in 25 to 30 markets by the end of the year. An anonymous reader notes that LTE rollouts could be hampered by a confused and conflicted patent situation. "It is impossible to know where all the patents are but we have identified more than 60 companies holding essential patents. It is a very large landscape and fragmented. If there was one major patent pool and a handful of individual companies to deal with, that would be possible. But signing license deals with 40 plus [entities] is not. A unified patent pool is best," said a representative for one of three patent pool organizations trying to accomplish that.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Categories: Syndicated News
DefCon Contest Rattles FBI's Nerves
snydeq writes "A DefCon contest that invites contestants to trick employees at 30 US corporations into revealing not-so-sensitive data has rattled nerves at the FBI. Chris Hadnagy, who is organizing the contest, also noted concerns from the financial industry, which fears hackers will target personal information. The contest will run for three days, with participants attempting to unearth data from an undisclosed list of about 30 US companies. The contest will take place in a room in the Riviera hotel in Las Vegas furnished with a soundproof booth and a speaker, so an audience can hear the contestants call companies and try to weasel out what data they can get from unwitting employees."
The group organizing the contest has established a strict set of rules to ensure participants don't violate any laws. Update: 07/31 04:45 GMT by S : PCWorld has coverage of one of the day's more successful attacks.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Categories: Syndicated News
How Should a Non-Techie Learn Programming?
CurtMonash writes "Nontechnical people — for example marketers or small business owners — increasingly get the feeling they should know more about technology. And they're right. If you can throw up a small website or do some real number-crunching, chances are those skills will help you feed your family. But how should they get started? I started a thread with the question on DBMS2, and some consistent themes emerged, including: Learn HTML + CSS early on; Learn a bit of SQL, but you needn't make that your focus; Have your first real programming language be one of the modern ones, such as PHP or Python; MySQL is a good vehicle to learn SQL; It's a great idea to start with a project you actually want to accomplish, and that can be done by modifying a starter set of sample code (e.g., a WordPress blog); Microsoft's technology stack is an interesting alternative to some of the other technology ideas. A variety of books and websites were suggested, most notably MIT's Scratch. But, frankly, it would really help to get more suggestions for sites and books that help one get started with HTML/CSS, or with MySQL, or with PHP. And so, techie studs and studdettes, I ask you — how should a non-techie go about learning some basic technological skills?"
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Categories: Syndicated News
Novell upgrades Mono Tools for Visual Studio
Novell this week unveiled Mono Tools for Visual Studio 2.0, which enables development of Microsoft .Net applications for Linux, Unix, and Mac OS X from within Microsoft's Visual Studio IDE.
Categories: Syndicated News
Novell upgrades Mono Tools for Visual Studio
Novell this week unveiled Mono Tools for Visual Studio 2.0, which enables development of Microsoft .Net applications for Linux, Unix, and Mac OS X from within Microsoft's Visual Studio IDE.
Categories: Syndicated News
Justice Department Joins Fraud Lawsuit Against Oracle
suraj.sun writes with news that the US Department of Justice has joined a lawsuit alleging Oracle of overcharging the federal government for its software products. Quoting:
"In a nutshell, the lawsuit argues that Oracle's government customers — a wide array of agencies, including the State Department, the Energy Department, and the Justice Department itself — got deals 'far inferior' to those the enterprise software giant gave to its commercial clients. The allegations stem from a software deal between Oracle and the federal General Services Administration that the Justice Department says involved 'hundreds of millions of dollars in sales' and that ran from 1998 to 2006. Under the contract, Oracle was required to inform the GSA when commercial discounts improved and to offer those same discounts to government buyers. Oracle misrepresented its true commercial sales practices and thus defrauded the US, the lawsuit contends.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Categories: Syndicated News
ISC Offers Response Policy Zones For DNS
penciling_in writes "ISC has made the announcement that they have developed a technology that will allow 'cooperating good guys' to provide and consume reputation information about domains names. The release of the technology, called Response Policy Zones (DNS RPZ), was announced at DEFCON. Paul Vixie explains: 'Every day lots of new names are added to the global DNS, and most of them belong to scammers, spammers, e-criminals, and speculators. The DNS industry has a lot of highly capable and competitive registrars and registries who have made it possible to reserve or create a new name in just seconds, and to create millions of them per day. ... If your recursive DNS server has a policy rule which forbids certain domain names from being resolvable, then they will not resolve. And, it's possible to either create and maintain these rules locally, or, import them from a reputation provider. ISC is not in the business of identifying good domains or bad domains. We will not be publishing any reputation data. But, we do publish technical information about protocols and formats, and we do publish source code. So our role in DNS RPZ will be to define 'the spec' whereby cooperating producers and consumers can exchange reputation data, and to publish a version of BIND that can subscribe to such reputation data feeds. This means we will create a market for DNS reputation but we will not participate directly in that market.'"
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Categories: Syndicated News
Microsoft schedules emergency Windows patch for Monday
Microsoft today said it will issue an emergency patch for the critical Windows shortcut bug on Monday, August 2.
The company said it is satisfied with the quality of the "out-of-band" update -- Microsoft's term for a patch that falls outside the usual monthly delivery schedule -- but also acknowledged that it has tracked an upswing in attacks.
Categories: Syndicated News
Microsoft schedules emergency Windows patch for Monday
Microsoft today said it will issue an emergency patch for the critical Windows shortcut bug on Monday, August 2.
The company said it is satisfied with the quality of the "out-of-band" update -- Microsoft's term for a patch that falls outside the usual monthly delivery schedule -- but also acknowledged that it has tracked an upswing in attacks.
Categories: Syndicated News
Samsung wins FCC approval for first LTE phone
Samsung appears to have won the race to be the first device manufacturer to gain approval from the Federal Communications Commission for a phone based on the 4G LTE standard.
Categories: Syndicated News
Samsung wins FCC approval for first LTE phone
Samsung appears to have won the race to be the first device manufacturer to gain approval from the Federal Communications Commission for a phone based on the 4G LTE standard.
Categories: Syndicated News