First time accepted submitter martypantsROK writes "It's been over 15 years since my main job was a software engineer. Since then I have held positions as a Sales Engineer, then spent a few years actually doing sales as a sales rep (and found I hated it) and then got into teaching. I am still a teacher but I want to really get back into writing code for a living. In the past couple of years I've done a great deal of Javascript, PHP, Ajax, and Java, including some Android apps. So here's the question: How likely would I be to actually get a job writing code? Is continual experience in the field a must, or can a job candidate demonstrate enough current relevance and experience (minus an actual job) with a multi-year hiatus from software development jobs? I'll add, if you haven't already done the math, that I'm over 50 years old."
SharkLaser writes "Fake antivirus scams have plagued Windows and Mac OSX during the last couple of years. Now it seems like such scams have spread to Android. Fake antivirus scams on Android work the same as they do on PC's — a user with an Android phone downloads an application or visits a website that says that the user's device is infected with malware. It will then show a fake scan of the system and return hard-coded 'positives' and gives the option the option to buy antivirus software that will 'remove' the malware on the affected system. Android, which is based on Linux, has been plagued with malware earlier too. According to McAfee, almost all new mobile malware now targets Android. Android app stores, including the official one from Google, has also been hosting hundreds of trojan applications that send premium rate SMSes on behalf of unsuspecting users."
turing0 writes "As a former bioinformatics researcher and CTO I have some sad news to start 2012 with. Though I am sure not a surprise to the Slashdot crowd, it appears we — or our demographic — made up more than 75% of the Google Health userbase. Today marks the end of Google Health. (Also see this post for the official Google announcement and lame excuse for the reasoning behind this myopic decision.) The decision of Google to end this excellent service is a fantastic example of what can represent the downside of cloud services for individuals and enterprises. The cloud is great when and while your desired application is present — assuming it's secure and robust — but you are at the mercy of the provider for longevity." (Read more, below.)
theodp writes " Apple,' writes Dave Winer in The Un-Internet, 'is providing a bad example for younger, smaller companies like Twitter and Tumblr, who apparently want to control the 'user experience' of their platforms in much the same way as Apple does. They feel they have a better sense of quality than the randomness of a free market. So they've installed similar controls.' Still, Winer's seen this movie before and notes, 'Eventually we overcome their barriers, and another layer comes on. And the upstarts become the installed-base, and they make the same mistakes all over again. It's the Internet vs the Un-Internet. And the Internet, it seems, always prevails.' Thinking along the same lines, Cory Doctorow warns the stakes are only going to get higher, and issues a call-to-arms for The Coming War on General Purpose Computation."
An article in The New York Times highlights two growing collections of words online that effectively bypass the traditional dictionary publishing system of slow aggregation and curation. Wordnik is a private venture that has already raised more than $12 million in capital, while the Corpus of Contemporary American English is a project started by Brigham Young professor Mark Davies. These sources differ from both conventional dictionary publishers and crowd-sourced efforts like the excellent Wiktionary for their emphasis on avoiding human intervention rather than fostering it. Says founder Erin McKean in the linked article, 'Language changes every day, and the lexicographer should get out of the way. ... You can type in anything, and we'll show you what data we have.'
Hugh Pickens writes "Amy Chozick reports that cable guys, long depicted as slovenly cranks who dodged growling dogs and tracked mud on the living room carpet, often have backgrounds in engineering and computer science and certifications in network engineering. 'Back in my day, you called the phone company, we hooked it up, gave you a phone book and left,' says Paul Holloway, a 30-year employee of Verizon, which offers phone, Internet, television and home monitoring services through its FiOS fiber optic network. 'These days people are connecting iPhones, Xboxes and 17 other devices in the home.' The surge in high-tech offerings comes at a critical time for cable companies in an increasingly saturated Internet-based market where growth must come from all the extras like high-speed Internet service, home security, digital recording devices and other high-tech upgrades. 'They should really change the name to Time Warner Internet,' says Quirino Madia, a supervisor for Time Warner Cable. 'Nine out of 10 times, that's all people care about.' Despite their enhanced stature and additional responsibilities, technicians haven't benefited much financially. The median hourly income in 2010 for telecommunications equipment installers and repairers was $55,600 annually, up only 0.4 percent from 2008."
An anonymous reader writes "Researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory just announced that they have found a way to create more efficient photovoltaic cells using 50% less energy. The technique hinges upon a new optical furnace that uses intense light instead of a conventional furnace to heat silicon to make solar cells. The new furnace utilizes 'highly reflective and heat-resistant ceramics to ensure that the light is absorbed only by a silicon wafer, not by the walls inside the furnace.'"
SgtChaireBourne writes "Many works published in 1955 would have entered the public domain this year. Duke University's Center for the Study of the Public Domain has an overview of the movies, books, songs and historical works that are kept out of the public domain by changes to copyright law since 1978. Instead of seeing these enter the public domain in 2012, we will have to wait until 2051 before being able to use these works without restriction."
MojoKid writes "When an advance copy of Crysis 2 leaked to the Internet a full month before the game's scheduled release, Crytek and Electronic Arts (EA) were understandably miffed and, as it turns out, justified in their fears of mass piracy. Crysis 2 was illegally download on the PC platform 3,920,000 time, 'beating out' Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 with 3,650,000 illegal downloads. Numbers like these don't bode well for PC gamers and will only serve to encourage even more draconian DRM measures than we've seen in the past."
theshowmecanuck writes "Reuters reports that there is little or no security at one of the main factories in Russia responsible for military and Soyuz rocket manufacture. Blogger Lana Sator was able to walk right into the empty (off hours) facility through huge gaps in the fences that no-one bothered to repair, and there was no security to stop them aside from some dogs that didn't bother them either. In fact Lana even has one picture of herself posing next to an apparently non-functional security camera, another of her sitting on what looks like to be possibly a partially assembled rocket motor (someone who knows better can fill us in), and has about 100 photos of the escapade all told on her blog about this (it's in Russian... which I don't speak... any translators out there?). Russian officials are said to be deeply concerned. I wonder if this has any bearing on why Russian rockets haven't been making it into space successfully, or whether it and the launch failures are all part of some general industrial malaise that is taking place."
An anonymous reader writes to point out this interesting outgrowth of Google's Native Client: a Google engineer has ported MAME 0.143 to the browser-based platform, and written about the process in detail, outlining the overall strategy employed as well as specific problems that MAME presented. An impressive postscript from the conclusion: "The port of MAME was relatively challenging; combined with figuring out how to port SDL-based games and load resources in Native Client, the overall effort took us about 4 days to complete."
Orome1 writes "Many prisons and jails use SCADA systems with PLCs to open and close doors. Using original and publicly available exploits along with evaluating vulnerabilities in electronic and physical security designs, researchers discovered significant vulnerabilities in PLCs used in correctional facilities by being able to remotely flip the switches to 'open' or 'locked closed' on cell doors and gates."
wiredmikey writes "New research from Kaspersky Labs has revealed that the platform dubbed 'tilded' (~d), which was used to develop Stuxnet and Duqu, has been around for years. The researchers say that same platform has been used to create similar Trojans which have yet to be discovered. Alexander Gostev and Igor Sumenkov have put together some interesting research, the key point being that the person(s) behind what the world knows as Stuxnet and Duqu have actually been using the same development platform for several years." An anonymous reader adds a link to this "surprisingly entertaining presentation" (video) by a Microsoft engineer, in which "he tells the story of how he and others analysed the exploits used by Stuxnet. Also surprising are the simplicity of the exploits which were still present in Win7." See also the report at Secureist from which the SecurityWeek story draws.
NASA's twin-craft GRAIL mission, launched way back in September (more information here), has successfully reached its destination. Grail-A has now entered lunar orbit; GRAIL-B is expected to enter lunar orbit tomorrow.
Happy New Year! It's that time (as of now!) for the UK, and since the Slashdot backend operates in Greenwich Mean Time, that seems as good a reason as any to welcome 2012 now instead of local midnight for any of the various U.S. time zones. Everyone has a different take on how to rank the events of the last year; read on below for a few notes on some of the goings on of the past 31,536,000 seconds (give or take). The list is pretty arbitrary, drawn from the thousand-ish stories that hit the Slashdot page in that time; please say in the comments what news hit you the hardest this year.
Die ProCurve Switch 2810-Serie von HP bietet Unternehmen eine hohe Portdichte auf 1HE Platz. Jeder Switch verfügt über vier Combo-Schnittstellen, mit denen sich auf Glasfaserverbindungen realisieren lassen.
Nach Angaben des Branchenverbandes BITKOM wächst die Gruppe älterer Nutzer in sozialen Netzwerken rasant. So seien heute bereits 40 Prozent der Internet-Nutzer zwischen 65 und 69 Jahren in einer Online-Community ...
Das kann ich nicht, das schaffe ich nicht - das denken viele Menschen panisch, wenn sie vor neuen Herausforderungen stehen. Oft völlig unbegründet. Wir zeigen auf, was Sie tun müssen, damit Sie schwierige ...
Microsoft hat beim Internet Explorer 9 durchaus signifikante Änderungen im Vergleich zu den Vorgängern eingeführt. Mit einigen Tipps können Sie auch den Browser noch optimieren und an die persönlichen ...
Bisher konnte man Reaver benutzen, um WPS-aktivierte Access Points mittels Brute Force zu knacken. Nun gibt es eine schnelleres Werkzeug.
Mittels TOR - The Onion Router - können Sie Zensur und Ausspähung im Internet umgehen. Das Tool Vidalia ist ein grafisches Werkzeug, um TOR zu steuern. Mit einfachen Mausklicks können Sie sich neue Identitäten ...
Testen Sie Ihr IT-Wissen! Jeden Tag finden Sie bei TecChannel eine Frage aus dem IT-Bereich, deren richtige Antwort Sie als IT-Experte kennen sollten. Machen Sie kostenlos mit und erweitern Sie Ihre IT-Kenntnisse!
Mobile Computing, Cloud, soziale Netzwerke und Big Data - bis zum Jahr 2020 sollen diese Themen für 80 Prozent des Wachstums bei den IT-Ausgaben verantwortlich sein. Dies prognostizieren die Marktforscher ...
Mit Instapaper sichern sie schnell und unkompliziert Webseiten zum späteren Lesen. Alle gemerkten Lesezeichen sind via Webseite, iPhone- sowie iPad-App und sogar Kindle abrufbar. Optional werden störende ...
Einen guten Rutsch und ein erfolgreiches neues Jahr wünscht Ihnen das TecChannel-Team.
Die Entwickler der Spezial-Distribution Endian Firewall haben kurz vor Neujahr noch eine neue Ausgabe zur Verfügung gestellt.
Für Administratoren und versierte Anwender sind effektive Software-Werkzeuge wichtig, mit denen sich routinemäßige Verwaltungsaufgaben an Windows-Clients schnell und einfach durchführen lassen. Die hier ...
Die Entwickler von Bugzilla haben Aktualisierungen ausgegeben, die diverse Schwachstellen in den Versionen 3.x und 4.x schließen.
HardInfo gibt detailliert Auskunft über die Hardware-Ausstattung des PCs. Dabei ist das Linux-Tool auch für Normalanwender bedienbar und bringt obendrein Benchmark-Tests zur genauen Leistungsmessung mit.
Die ersten Tage im neuen Unternehmen sind harte Arbeit. Wie soll man sich verhalten, wie begegnet man den neuen Kollegen am besten? Da es keine zweite Chance für den ersten Eindruck gibt, hier unser Knigge ...
Der Android-Markt ist 2011 enorm gewachsen und mit ihm auch das Angebot an verfügbaren Apps. Unsere Rangliste zeigt, welche Apps 2011 die TecChannel-Leser am meisten interessiert haben. Ob Produktivität, ...
Arbeitet der BlackBerry nur noch träge, ist der Softreset ein probates Mittel um die Leistung wieder zu steigern. Um den RAM zu leeren müssen Sie nun nicht mehr den Akku entfernen, sondern lediglich die ...
Asus Eee PC 1015T heißt das aktuelle 10-Zoll-Netbook auf Basis der AMD Nile-Plattform. Gerade bei der HD-Wiedergabe kann diese dank integrierter Grafik ihre Muskeln spielen lassen. Auch sonst schnürt ...
Bei SPAMfighter Mail Gateway handelt es sich um eine Software-Lösung für Unternehmen, die mit steigender Spam-Belastung zu kämpfen haben. Besonders am Software-Konzept ist der Community-Ansatz: Über 7,5 ...
Nach Angaben des Branchenverband BITKOM lagern bei deutschen Verbrauchern inzwischen 83 Millionen alte und ungenutzte Mobiltelefone. Viele Verbraucher haben ein oder sogar mehrere Handys zuhause, die ...
Die WPS-Funktionen gängiger WLAN-Router kann für Angriffe auf die Verschlüsselung der Funkverbindung genutzt werden. Das US-Cert warnt daher vor der Nutzung von WPS.
Bei der Hash-Generations-Funktion bei der Verarbeitung von Formularen kann es durch speziell manipulierte HTTP-Anfragen zu einer hohen CPU-Last kommen.
Bei den Apps für Apples iPhone gibt es bei unseren TecChannel-Lesern im Jahr 2011 ganz bestimmte Favoriten. Vor allem praktische Apps mit Nutzwert sind in der Top-10-Liste vertreten. Spielereien oder ...
Sie wollen den Sendebericht so konfigurieren, dass Sie nur bei Fehlern eine Benachrichtigung erhalten? Oder Sie möchten eingehende Faxe automatisch auf die richtige Papiergröße skalieren? Wir haben Ihnen ...
CCleaner ist ein Freeware-Programme das Verläufe, temporäre Dateien und sonstige Datenspuren vom PC entfernt. Auch sonst ist der CCleaner ein praktisches Werkzeug um das Betriebssystem performant zu halten ...