Der japanische Technologiekonzern Fujitsu mit Sitz in Tokio will sein Hauptwerk zur Chipproduktion veräussern. Das Werk in der japanischen Präfektur Mie im Westen Japans soll an Taiwan Semiconductor (TSMC) verkauft werden, wie mit der Angelegenheit vertraute Personen gegenüber der Nachrichtenagentur Reuters mitteilten.
Taiwans Advanced Semiconductor Engineering (ASE), das weltweit zweigrösste Mikrochip Assembly und Testunternehmen, hat seine Zahlen zum zweiten Quartal (per 30. Juni 2012) mitgeteilt. Demnach musste das Unternehmen einen Umsatz- und Gewinnrückgang hinnehmen und verfehlt die Analystenprognosen.
Ein achteckiges iPhone und ein iPad mit Standfuss: Im Rahmen des am Montag in den USA beginnenden Patentprozesses zwischen Apple und Samsung sind nun zahlreiche Entwürfe von Apple an die Öffentlichkeit gelangt.
Der Streit um Mobilfunk-Patente ist um ein Kapitel reicher. Am Freitag bestätigte das Landgericht Mannheim, dass Android-Smartphones von Motorola ein Patent von Microsoft verletzen. Bei der Auseinandersetzung geht es um das Dateisystem FAT. Bislang weigert sich Motorola dafür eine Lizenzgebühr zu berappen.
Anonymous plant für morgen, Samstag, einen europaweiten Protesttag gegen das EU-Sicherheitsprojekt INDECT. Bei INDECT (Intelligentes Informationssystem zur Unterstützung von Überwachung, Suche und Erfassung für die Sicherheit von Bürgern in städtischer Umgebung) handelt es sich um ein mit knapp elf Millionen Euro gefördertes Forschungsprojekt, das auf eine Automatisierung von Überwachungsmaßnahmen abzielt.
Der Netzwerk-Ausrüster Nokia Siemens Networks schließt fünf kleinere Service-Einrichtungen in Ostdeutschland. Betroffen seien Cottbus, Chemnitz, Dresden, Erfurt und Halle, wie eine Sprecherin am Freitag bestätigte.
Die Aussichten für das Schweizer Wirtschaftswachstum sind überraschend positiv. Das Konjunkturbarometer der Konjunkturforschungsstelle KOF der ETH Zürich ist im Juli weiter gestiegen und erreichte 1,43 Punkte.
Das rasante Absatz nach seinen Galaxy-Smartphones hat dem südkoreanischen Elektrikkonzern Samsung einen Rekordgewinn beschert. Der operative Gewinn stieg im zweiten Quartal auf 6,72 Billionen Won (4,8 Milliarden Euro), wie der Konzern am Freitag mitteilte.
Im laufenden Jahr werden Verbraucher weltweit total 2,1 Billionen US-Dollar für digitale Informations- und Unterhaltungsprodukte sowie Services ausgeben. Dies prognostieren die Marktforscher von Gartner in einer aktuellen Studie.
Die Experten der G Data Security Labs haben einen neuen Android-Schädling entdeckt, der unbemerkt vom Smartphone- oder Tablet- Besitzer kostenpflichtige Apps herunterladen soll. Der Schädling befindet sich demnach in gefälschten GO Weather, Travel Sky oder E-Strong File Explorer Apps und wird über diverse chinesische Webseiten und Drittanbieter App-Marktplätze verbreitet.
geek writes "According to Marco Arment, the creator of Instapaper, Apple may be in trouble with developers. According to Arment, the new sandboxing guidelines from Apple are pushing developers away in droves. 'I've lost all confidence that the apps I buy in the App Store today will still be there next month or next year. The advantages of buying from the App Store are mostly gone now. My confidence in the App Store, as a customer, has evaporated. Next time I buy an app that’s available both in and out of the Store, I’ll probably choose to buy it directly from the vendor. And nearly everyone who’s been burned by sandboxing exclusions — not just the affected apps’ developers, but all of their customers — will make the same choice with their future purchases. To most of these customers, the App Store is no longer a reliable place to buy software.' Arment also comments on the 'our way or the highway' attitude Apple often takes in these situations and how it may be backfiring this time around."
As part of a KDE-wide effort to prepare for Qt 5/QtQuick2, and a push to improve the window manager, KWin now sports QML decoration support. Currently, the C++ API for decorators is "...not very Qt like and requires a strong understanding of how the window decoration in KWin works ... [and] seems to be too difficult to be used." This complexity increases maintenance burden: "In 4.9 we ship four window decorations: the Aurorae theme engine, Oxygen, Plastik, b2 and Laptop. Together they are 10 kSLOC of C++ code and 1 kSLOC QML code (Aurorae). Before Aurorae got ported to QML the size of the decorations was 13 kSLOC. Overall that is about 10 per cent of the KWin source base, which is rather large." Basing his work on the QML version of the Aurorae engine, Martin Gräßlin set out to port Plastik to QML (the C++ version has already bitrotted, and was slated for removal): "After one and a half days of work I’m proud to say that writing decorations in QML is possible. ... In the current state the decoration consists of 370 lines of QML code and I expect to need an additional 100 lines to finish the buttons (they are already functional, that is the close button closes the window) and add some of the configuration options. The same API in C++ consists of 1500 lines of code. So we do not only get fewer lines of code but also a more readable and easier to maintain codebase. For something like a window decoration a declarative approach is much better suited than the imperative C++ way of painting elements."
On July 18 we ran Part One of a video conversation (really audio with slides) between Slashdot editor Rob "samzenpus" Rozeboom and Mike Mearls, Senior Manager for the Dungeons and Dragons Design Team. This is the rest of that interview.
On Tuesday, Microsoft signed a patent cross-license agreement with Amdocs Software Systems. They specifically noted in their press release that the agreement covered Amdocs' use of 'Linux-based servers in its data centers,' and noted that Amdocs paid them money for the privilege. In light of the current state of mobile device licensing, with Microsoft getting a cut from most Android device sales, should data centers operators worry about having to pay Microsoft for their use of Linux servers? From the article: "To date, Linux advocates have been hypersensitive to any move Microsoft has made against the open-source OS—which, to be fair, Microsoft has seen as a threat since its inception. It's certainly possible that Amdocs approached Microsoft for a patent cross-license for its own purposes; but if that's the case, Amdocs would likely have disclosed that fact. Amdocs representatives declined to comment on the deal, and the arrangement has been completely ignored on the Amdocs Website. ... The question, though, is whether Microsoft will begin eyeing data-center operators as a similar source of licensing revenue. The company has avoided directly challenging Linux developer/distributors such IBM or Red Hat, instead targeting partners and customers."
Earlier this month, we discussed a Kickstarter project for Ouya, and Android-based gaming console in development by a company of the same name. Their fundraising campaign was wildly successful, and now they've partnered with cloud gaming provider OnLive for the console's launch. (Which is somewhat unexpected, because OnLive already sells its own pseudo-console.) In the same post, the Ouya creators showed their most recent design for the console's controllers.
Hugh Pickens writes "Nathan Vardi writes in Forbes that in the last two months, Mark Zuckerberg has had a rude introduction to the capital markets. With Facebook's stock in free-fall, down more than 40% from its IPO price, Zuckerberg has a big problem. 'Zuckerberg did not want to deal with the pressures of being a public company. Like many entrepreneurs these days he viewed the capital markets with suspicion,' writes Vardi. 'So Zuckerberg made a fateful decision, he decided to keep Facebook a privately-held company for much longer than other success stories like Google or Amazon.' But waiting eight years to conduct an IPO has turned out to be an impossible problem to manage. The bankers at Morgan Stanley applied all the lessons of the last 15 years and priced the IPO at $38, which was very aggressive, in an attempt to avoid leaving any money on the table and the embarrassment that a huge IPO pop would represent. With such a big valuation at IPO time, Facebook had to show some results. But the numbers that Facebook announced in its first quarterly earnings report were underwhelming and the trading hordes drove Facebook's stock down by 15% in Friday morning trading. Now the early institutional investors are heading for the exits and it's hard to imagine morale at Facebook won't take a hit that correlates with the loss in value of the shares belonging to the employees. 'The lesson of the Facebook fiasco for Silicon Valley is clear. Start-up entrepreneurs cannot evade the discipline of the capital markets any more than can the prime ministers of Spain and Italy.'"
nk497 writes "Google is in more trouble over the Street View Wi-Fi data slurping incident. Two years ago Google admitted it had collected snippets of personal data while sniffing for Wi-Fi connections. The UK's data watchdog, the ICO, didn't fine Google, but did demand it delete the collected data. Following the FCC's investigation, the ICO double-checked with Google that the data was deleted, receiving confirmation that it had. Except... it hadn't all been deleted, Google has now admitted. That breaches the deal between the ICO and Google, and the watchdog has said it's in talks with other regulators about what to do next."
New submitter bupbin writes "We are providing a detailed report and analysis of eleven different popular gun safes produced by Stack-On, GunVault, and Bulldog to warn the public of the dangers inherent in some of these products because the manufacturers nor their major retailers will do so. In that report you can view eight different Stack-On models, one produced by Bulldog, and one manufactured by GunVault. A similar design defect is demonstrated in an inexpensive safe for storing valuables that is sold by AMSEC, a very reputable safe manufacturer in the United States. Unfortunately, their digital safe with their claim of a 'state-of-the-art electronic lock' can also be opened (literally) by a three-year-old because of a common mechanism used in the industry that is subject to circumvention."
An anonymous reader writes "When earlier this year Google introduced Bouncer — an automated app scanning service that analyzes apps by running them on Google's cloud infrastructure and simulating how they will run on an Android device — it shared practically nothing about how it operates, in the hopes of making malicious app developers' scramble for a while to discover how to bypass it. As it turned out, several months later security researchers Jon Oberheide and Charlie Miller discovered — among other things — just what kind of virtual environment Bouncer uses (the QEMU processor emulator) and that all requests coming from Google came from a specific IP block, and made an app that was instructed to behave as a legitimate one every time it detected this specific virtual environment. Now two more researchers have effectively proved that Bouncer can be rather easily fooled into considering a malicious app harmless."
An anonymous reader writes "I'm leaving my current job for a new one. I've been at this job for 10+ years so I'm sure there is tons of personal stuff stored on my machine. Since I can't take it with me does any one have a suggestions of tools or practices to clean off all of that data. I've already got my personal documents and files. I'm most worried about CC, debit card numbers and web site passwords I've used in browsers. Does clearing the cache, cookies, temp files do a good enough job? BTW it's a Windows 7 system if that makes a difference."
First time accepted submitter hawkinspeter writes "Just one day after Chief Cathy Lanier made it illegal for MPD cops to take recording equipment, a 26-year-old local man had his phone taken as he was trying to record a violent arrest. They eventually gave back his phone, but without the memory card which also contained photos of his daughter along with the record of the alleged police brutality."
Sparrowvsrevolution writes "At the Defcon security conference later this week, two security researchers will release a tool that aims to expose a little-seen list of hidden private aircraft flight plans–the so-called Block Aircraft Registration Request or BARR list, a collection of aircraft whose owners have tried to keep their whereabouts secret. Any private jet owner can request to be taken out of the FAA's public database of flight plans. But Dustin Hoffman and Semon Rezchikov found that private flyers' whereabouts are still broadcast in air-traffic control communications. So they developed a speech-to-text system that pulls out planes' tail numbers from those communications almost in real time, often fast enough to post a plane's destination before it lands. In its proof-of-concept version, the site is focusing on Las Vegas airports, but plans to expand to other cities soon."
tlhIngan writes "Some interesting news has come out of Apple's filings against Samsung. First, Google warned Samsung that their 'P1' (Galaxy Tab) and 'P3' (Galaxy Tab 10.1) tablets were 'too similar' to the iPad. In addition, Samsung's own Product Design Group note it was 'regrettable' that the Galaxy S 'looks similar' to the iPhone. Finally, how designers at a Samsung-sponsored evaluation noted the Galaxy S 'copied the iPhone too much' and 'innovation is needed.' Of course, Samsung has some ammunition of its own, including how Apple copied Sony's designs. In unrelated news, Judge Grewal has sanctioned Samsung for not preserving emails from automatic deletion, even after litigation has begun."