Trotz des enttäuschenden Börsengangs des Sozialen Netzwerks Facebook pumpen Investoren pumpen nach wie vor grosse Summen in Internet-Sturtups. Beispielsweise investierte die Kaffeehauskette Starbucks gerade 25 Millionen Dollar in den von Twitter-Mitgründer Jack Dorsey lancierten Bezahldienstleister und Emporkömmling Square.

In den vergangenen Tagen hat ein Computervirus namens "Dorifel" die Niederlande hart getroffen. Der Schädling, der unter anderem Office-Dokumente verschlüsselt, hat sogar Gemeinden lahmgelegt. Das Unternehmen Digital Investigations hat zudem gemeldet, dass die Bankdaten mehrerer hundert Personen den Cyberkriminellen in die Hände gefallen sind, vornehmlich Kunden der ING.

Physiker bei IBM Research (Zürich) melden einen Durchbruch in der Erforschung des Elektronenspins für zukünftige Speicher- und Logikanwendungen. Sie konnten demnach erstmalig das Auftreten einer beständigen Spinhelix in einem Halbleiter direkt abbilden, bei der Elektronenspins synchron rotieren.

In den Niederlanden können Kunden der Direktbank Moneyou ihre Geschäfte über die Facebook-Seite der Bank erledigen. Eine App leitet den Kunden in den Online-Banking-Bereich des Instituts weiter. Die Neuseeländische ASB Bank hat bereits eine virtuelle Filiale: Über eine Facebook-App beraten Bankmitarbeiter ihre Kunden per Chat. Die Bank der Zukunft steht in den Startlöchern.

Der von Switch ausgeschriebene Website-Wettbewerb für Schulklassen startet heute, Montag, zum nunmehr siebten Male. Switch sucht Schulklassen aus der ganzen Schweiz und dem Fürstentum Liechtenstein, die zusammen mit ihren Lehrpersonen die Möglichkeiten des World Wide Web erkunden und eine eigene Website gestalten möchten.

Heute, Montag, entscheidet sich das weitere Schicksal des insolventen Fotopioniers Kodak. Am Abend (Ortszeit) sollen die Bieter in der Auktion um Kodaks Patente ihre letzten Gebote dem Insolvenzgericht präsentieren.

Die Whistleblower-Website WikiLeaks ist nach eigenen Angaben seit über einer Woche unter schwerem Beschuss. Wie am Wochenende bekannt gegeben wurde, hatten die Angriffe Anfang August begonnen und wurden seitdem intensiviert. Mittlerweile werden auch Partnerseiten attackiert. Zwischendurch sollen die Server mit einem Trafficaufkommen von zehn Gigabit pro Sekunde bombardiert worden sein.

Amazon dürfte den Release neuer Modelle seines Kindle-E-Readers vorbereiten. Darauf deuten aktuelle Vorgänge auf der US-Website des Händlers hin. So ist die WiFi-Version des Kindle mit Tastatur nicht mehr erhältlich und wird offenbar auch nicht mehr geliefert werden.

Dem Handy-Hersteller Motorola steht nach der Übernahme durch Google ein massiver Stellenabbau bevor. Rund jeder fünfte Arbeitsplatz solle verschwinden, es gehe um etwa 4.000 Jobs, berichten die "New York Times" und das Blog "All Things D" am Montag.

Sogenannte "Location-based Apps" gelten als das nächste grosse Ding unter den Smartphone-Software-Herstellern, wie Forbes berichtet. Einige der Anwendungen erlauben es unter dem Überbegriff "People Discovery", den aktuellen Standort anderer Anwender dieser Programme zu ermitteln.

1sockchuck writes "JPMorgan Chase spends $500 million to build a data center, according to CEO Jamie Dimon. That figure places the firm's facilities among the most expensive in the industry, on a par with investments by Google and Microsoft in their largest data centers. Dimon discussed the firm's IT spending in an interview in which he asserts that huge data centers are among the advantages of ginormous banks. Dimon also offered a vigorous defense of the U.S. banking industry. 'Most bankers are decent, honorable people,' Dimon says. 'We're wrapped up in all this crap right now. We made a mistake. We're sorry. It doesn't detract from all the good things we've done. I am not responsible for the financial crisis.'"

hypnosec writes "Red Hat has announced the availability of a preview version of its OpenStack Distribution that would enable it to compete with the likes of Amazon which is considered one of the leaders in infrastructure-as-a-service cloud services. The enterprise Linux maker was a late entrant into the OpenStack world where players like Rackspace, HP and Internap have already made their mark. Through Red Hat's OpenStack distribution enterprises can build and manage private, public as well as hybrid infrastructure-as-a-service clouds. These companies will not only be competing with the likes of Amazon but, will also be competing against themselves to get a bite out of the IaaS cloud. What started as a project has quickly developed into an open source solution that enables organizations to achieve performance, features and greater functionality from their private and / or public clouds. The announcement of OpenStack Foundation acted as a catalyst towards the fast paced development of the platform."

MrSeb writes "NASA's Curiosity rover has now been on the surface of Mars for just over a week. It hasn't moved an inch after landing, instead focusing on orienting itself (and NASA's scientists) by taking instrument readings and snapping images of its surroundings. The first beautiful full-color images of Gale Crater are starting to trickle in, and NASA has already picked out some interesting rock formations that it will investigate further in the next few days (pictures below). Over the weekend and continuing throughout today, however, Curiosity is attempting something very risky indeed: A firmware upgrade. This got me thinking: If NASA can transmit new software to a Mars rover that's hundreds of millions of miles away... why can't a hacker do the same thing? In short, there's no reason a hacker couldn't take control of Curiosity, or lock NASA out. All you would need is your own massive 230-foot dish antenna and a 400-kilowatt transmitter — or, perhaps more realistically, you could hack into NASA's computer systems, which is exactly what Chinese hackers did 13 times in 2011."

benrothke writes "In the documentary Scared Straight! a group of inmates terrify young offenders in an attempt to 'scare them straight'" (hence the show's title) so that those teenagers will avoid prison life. A 2002 meta-analysis of the results of a number of scared straight and similar intervention programs found that they actively increased crime rates, leading to higher re-offense rates than in control groups that did not receive the intervention. For those considering the use of social media in their business, it is quite easy to read Navigating Social Media Legal Risks: Safeguarding Your Business as a scared straight type of reference. Author Robert McHale provides so many legal horror stories, that most people would simply be too afraid of the legal and regulatory risks to every consider using social media." Keep reading for the rest of Ben's review.

Harperdog writes "Kirk Bansak has a great article outlining a coming revolution in non-proliferation of nuclear, chemical, and bio-weapons, courtesy of smart phones and social media. Early theory on arms control foresaw 'inspection by the people' as a promising method for preventing evasion of arms control and disarmament obligations and serves as a starting point for understanding 'social verification.' As Rose Gottemoeller recently stated: '[Cell phone-based] sensors would allow citizens to contribute to detecting potential treaty violations, and could build a bridge to a stronger private-public partnership in the realm of treaty verification.'"

caseyb89 writes "If it weren't for open source technology, you wouldn't be able to tweet. Chris Aniszczyk, Open Source Manager at Twitter, shares how open source is vital to Twitter's success. He states that using open source is a 'no-brainer' for Twitter because it 'allows us to customize and tweak code to meet our fast-paced engineering needs as our service and community grows.' Twitter also established an open source office about a year ago to support a variety of open source organizations that are important to them. Aniszczyk will discuss Twitters open source usage in his keynote at LinuxCon."

Dupple writes "The collapse of the Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Plant caused a massive release of radioactive materials to the environment. A prompt and reliable system for evaluating the biological impacts of this accident on animals has not been available. This study suggests the accident caused physiological and genetic damage to the pale grass blue Zizeeria maha, a common lycaenid butterfly in Japan. We collected the first-voltine adults in the Fukushima area in May 2011, some of which showed relatively mild abnormalities. The F1 offspring from the first-voltine females showed more severe abnormalities, which were inherited by the F2 generation. Adult butterflies collected in September 2011 showed more severe abnormalities than those collected in May. Similar abnormalities were experimentally reproduced in individuals from a non-contaminated area by external and internal low-dose exposures. We conclude that artificial radionuclides from the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant caused physiological and genetic damage to this species."

zacharye writes "In the five years since Apple launched the iPhone, the popular device has gone from a malicious hacker's dream to law enforcement's worst nightmare. As recounted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Technology Review blog, a Justice Department official recently took the stage at the DFRWS computer forensics conference in Washington, D.C. and told attendees that the beefed up security in iOS is now so good that it has become a nightmare for law enforcement."

ericjones12398 writes "On one hand, Amazon is not exactly short on patents themselves. The 'non-exhaustive list' on the company's site is a tidy little bundle of e-commerce IP, with a few questionable software patents — including a 1-click buying method, a Lodsys-baiting in-app purchasing method and a social networking patent, all of which have achieved a somewhat notorious reputation. Indeed, the last fiscal year was as significant for Amazon's litigation as for the company's behind-closed-doors acquisitions."

judgecorp writes "The British government and police are customers of a controversial surveillance network called TrapWire, according to emails published by Wikileaks. The messages suggest that Scotland Yard and Number Ten Downing Street are customers of Abraxas Corporation, whose TrapWire network combines CCTV, license plate capture systems and databases. The TrapWire network has caused concern amongst online activists and Abraxas' site is currently not available, possibly due to attacks by Anonymous." There seems to be no end to the Trapwire conspiracy stories today, there's even one going around that various large companies such as Salesforce and Google were offered the chance to be part of the spy club.

ananyo writes "Black cottonwood trees (Populus trichocarpa) can clone themselves to produce offspring that are connected to their parents by the same root system. Now, after the first genome-wide analysis of a tree, it turns out that the connected clones have many genetic differences, even between tissues from the top and bottom of a single tree. 'When people study plants, they'll often take a cutting from a leaf and assume that it is representative of the plant's genome,' says Brett Olds, a biologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who was involved in the study. 'That may not be the case. You may need to take multiple tissues.' The finding also challenges the idea that evolution only happens in a population rather than at an individual level. As one tree contains many different genomes, natural selection and evolution could happen within a single organism."

jfruh writes "Motorola Mobility is facing its first major public shakeup after its acquisition by Google and it's not pretty for many employees. The company will be laying off thousands of workers as it attempts to reorient itself away from feature phones and toward more profitable high-end devices."

SchrodingerZ writes "Designers of Disney Research in Pittsburgh Pa, have turned the average household plant into a musical device and remote control. Called the Botanicus Interacticus project, this new program can turn any household plant into touch-sensitive computer system. 'The system is built upon capacitive touch sensing — the principle used on touchscreens in smartphones and tablets — but instead of sensing electrical signals at a single frequency, it monitors capacitive signals across a broad range of frequencies. It's called Swept Frequency Capacitive Sensing.' This works by putting a pulsating electrode into the soil around a plant, which excites the plant, making any touch to the parts of the plant a replayable signal. This could mean soon swatting at your household plant could change the television channel or turn up the volume (PDF)."

Hugh Pickens writes writes "Megan Garber writes that in high school, Paul Ryan's classmates voted him as his class's 'biggest brown noser,' a juicy tidbit that is a source of delight for his political opponents but considered an irrelevant piece of youthful trivia to his supporters. 'But it's also a tension that will play out, repeatedly, in the most comprehensive narrative we have about Paul Ryan as a person and a politician and a policy-maker: his Wikipedia page,' writes Garber. Late Friday night, just as news of the Ryan choice leaked in the political press — the first substantial edit to that page removed the 'brown noser' mention which had been on the page since June 16. The Wikipedia deletion has given rise to a whole discussion of whether the mention is a partisan attack, whether 'brown noser' is a pejorative, and whether an old high school opinion survey is notable or relevant. As of this writing, 'brown noser' stands as does a maybe-mitigating piece of Ryan-as-high-schooler trivia: that he was also voted prom king. But that equilibrium could change, again, in an instant. 'Today is the glory day for the Paul Ryan Wikipedia page,' writes Garber. 'Yesterday, it saw just 10 [edits]. Today, however — early on a Saturday morning, East Coast time — it's already received hundreds of revisions. And the official news of the Ryan selection, of course, is just over an hour old.' Now Ryan's page is ready to host debates about biographical details and their epistemological relevance. 'Like so many before it, will be a place of debate and dissent and derision. But it will also be a place where people can come together to discuss information and policy and the intersection between the two — a town square for the digital age.'"