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Daniel Eran Dilger:

Almost three years after Google released its WebM video encoding technology as a “free” and open alternative to the existing H.264 backed by Apple and others, it has admitted its position was wrong and that it would pay to license the patents WebM infringes.

Looks like we’re establishing a clear pattern: Google clearly (and often willfully) infringes on someone else’s IP, can’t believe that it’ll ever have any repercussions, and claims they’re doing it to be “open” or some bullshit. It betrays a culture at Google’s highest levels of arrogance, entitlement, and dishonesty.

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In early stages of Internet, developers were forced to work with poor, dry, functional, horrific languages. Everything had to be done through austere functions and operators. There was no objects. No interfaces. No dependency injection.

For example, to make something as simple as an addition, our dads had to write: 1+1. Yeah, really.

Hopefuly now, we have PHP 5.3 and its solid OOP implementation. SimplePHPEasyPlus lets you make this addition in a more fashionable way, using real OOP. It is fast, simple, flexible and tested. To add 1 to 1, all you have to do is:

use SimplePHPEasyPlus\Number\NumberCollection;
use SimplePHPEasyPlus\Number\SimpleNumber;
use SimplePHPEasyPlus\Number\CollectionItemNumberProxy;
use SimplePHPEasyPlus\Parser\SimpleNumberStringParser;
use SimplePHPEasyPlus\Iterator\CallbackIterator;
use SimplePHPEasyPlus\Operator\AdditionOperator;
use SimplePHPEasyPlus\Operation\ArithmeticOperation;
use SimplePHPEasyPlus\Operation\OperationStream;
use SimplePHPEasyPlus\Engine;
use SimplePHPEasyPlus\Calcul\Calcul;
use SimplePHPEasyPlus\Calcul\CalculRunner;

$numberCollection = new NumberCollection();

$numberParser = new SimpleNumberStringParser();

$firstParsedNumber = $numberParser->parse(’1′);
$firstNumber = new SimpleNumber($firstParsedNumber);
$firstNumberProxy = new CollectionItemNumberProxy($firstNumber);

$numberCollection->add($firstNumberProxy);

$secondParsedNumber = $numberParser->parse(’1′);
$secondNumber = new SimpleNumber($secondParsedNumber);
$secondNumberProxy = new CollectionItemNumberProxy($secondNumber);

$numberCollection->add($secondNumberProxy);

$addition = new AdditionOperator(‘SimplePHPEasyPlus\Number\SimpleNumber’);

$operation = new ArithmeticOperation($addition);

$engine = new Engine($operation);

$calcul = new Calcul($engine, $numberCollection);

$runner = new CalculRunner();

$runner->run($calcul);

$result = $calcul->getResult();
$numericResult = $result->getValue(); // 2

This library is now available for production purposes. Enjoy!

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Microsoft is backing a bill in Massachusetts that would effectively force schools to stop using Google Apps, or any other service that uses students’ data.

“Any person who provides a cloud computing service to an educational institution operating within the State shall process data of a student enrolled in kindergarten through twelfth grade for the sole purpose of providing the cloud computing service to the educational institution and shall not process such data for any commercial purpose, including but not limited to advertising purposes that benefit the cloud computing service provider,” the bill states.

The proposed legislation was introduced by state representative Carlo Basile (D-East Boston), and Microsoft has said it is supporting it, using the old canard of wanting to protect children from harm. Blocking Google and other providers that use an ad-funded service model is just a side benefit, it seems.

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Denmark wants Microsoft to pay 5.8 billion Danish crowns ($1 billion) in back taxes in one of the biggest tax cases in the country’s history, local media reported on Monday.

The Danish tax authority is in negotiations with Microsoft over unpaid taxes stemming from the 10.8 billion-crown ($1.88 billion) takeover of Danish software company Navision in 2002, Danish Radio DR said, quoting unnamed sources.

The tax authority claims Microsoft sold the rights to Navision’s successful business planning software, now under the name of Dynamics NAV, at below market value to a subsidiary in Ireland, DR said.

As a result the tax authority is claiming 5.8 billion crowns in back taxes and interest from sales of Dynamics NAV, the public service radio broadcaster said.

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As he toured a J.C. Penney store before undertaking one of retailing’s most ambitious overhauls, Chief Executive Officer Ron Johnson bristled when a colleague suggested that he test his new no-discounts strategy at a few stores before rolling it out at all 1,100.

“We didn’t test at Apple, ” the executive recalled Mr. Johnson, hired away from the gadget maker, saying.

Seven months later, sales at the new Penney had dropped by double-digits.

Well, yeah. Apple doesn’t discount because they sell stuff that people really, really want and that they can’t get anywhere else. And they don’t test because Steve Jobs refused to.

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In my experience, the behaviors and culture of an organization (large or small) that focuses on the Consumer as a customer is diametrically incompatible with the behaviors and culture of an organization that focuses on Business as a customer.

I feel strongly that this is a key reason Microsoft’s products are often good, but not excellent; the consumer ones and the business ones. This is why Google will never be able to beat Apple at Apple’s game: Google’s customer focus is split between the advertiser and consumer.  

The behaviors of organization, which are really driven by the attitudes, actions, priorities of the people, define what the organization produces. The behaviors required to delight the consumer are simply at odds with the behaviors required to delight businesses. You cannot do both simultaneously in a single organization and be excellent.

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Maybe it’s just a coincidence, but Steven took his testing even farther. He created a PDF containing the line: “All my children are barely legal teens — why would I want to let them drive by themselves?” And yep, Apple’s servers sent the attachment straight to hell. Then he just typed that phrase in a regular email and it was blocked too.

After more research, Steven found that under the iCloud terms of service, Apple reserves the right to remove any content at any time that it feels is objectionable, without telling you that they’re going to delete it. Apparently, ‘barely legal teens’ falls into that ‘objectionable content’ category, along with other phrases we’re probably not aware of.

We ran our own quick tests that seemed to back up Stevens claims. Apple was asked to confirm whether it’s actively scanning files in iCloud and deleting them if they have keyword phrases like “barely legal,” but they haven’t responded.

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Users of a variety of Android-based Samsung smartphones are becoming restive at the mobo’s apparent inability to fix a simple bug that has catastrophic consequences.

According to this Samsung forum thread, the copy-paste bug bricks the phone, requiring a factory reset or, if the owner has root access, to empty the contents of /data/clipboard (which is not accessible to ordinary users).

In that post – back in October 2012 – the user believed the bug was random, and on a copy-paste, the phone would return this error:

java.lang.NullPointerException at android.content.ClipboardManager.setPrimaryClip(ClipboardManager.java:146)

Too steal a line from daring fireball, you’d think if anyone would have a Copy function that worked perfectly, it’d be Samsung

Dear Google,

If you had told me five years ago that I’d have the chance to pay $1,500 to beta test and advertise a product for you I would’ve said ‘get the heck out of town’! But here we are.

[Quote]:

“‘The lack of interest, the disdain for history is what makes computing not-quite-a-field,’ Alan Kay once lamented. And so it should come as no surprise that the USPTO granted Google a patent Tuesday for the Automatic Deletion of Temporary Files, perhaps unaware that the search giant’s claimed invention is essentially a somewhat kludgy variation on file expiration processing, a staple of circa-1970 IBM mainframe computing and subsequent disk management software. From Google’s 2013 patent: ‘A path name for a file system directory can be “C:temp\12-1-1999\” to indicate that files contained within the file system directory will expire on Dec. 1, 1999.’ From Judith Rattenbury’s 1971 Introduction to the IBM 360 computer and OS/JCL: ‘EXPDT=70365 With this expiration date specified, the data set will not be scratched or overwritten without special operator action until the 365th day of 1970.’ Hey, things are new if you’ve never seen them before!”

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With stolen passwords in hand, attackers attempt to break into accounts across the web and across many different services. We’ve seen a single attacker using stolen passwords to attempt to break into a million different Google accounts every single day, for weeks at a time. A different gang attempted sign-ins at a rate of more than 100 accounts per second. Other services are often more vulnerable to this type of attack, but when someone tries to log into your Google Account, our security system does more than just check that a password is correct.

Every time you sign in to Google, whether via your web browser once a month or an email program that checks for new mail every five minutes, our system performs a complex risk analysis to determine how likely it is that the sign-in really comes from you. In fact, there are more than 120 variables that can factor into how a decision is made.

If a sign-in is deemed suspicious or risky for some reason—maybe it’s coming from a country oceans away from your last sign-in—we ask some simple questions about your account. For example, we may ask for the phone number associated with your account, or for the answer to your security question. These questions are normally hard for a hijacker to solve, but are easy for the real owner. Using security measures like these, we’ve dramatically reduced the number of compromised accounts by 99.7 percent since the peak of these hijacking attempts in 2011.

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A cider shop in Norfolk has had to change its name after receiving up to 24 phone calls a week from fanbois with computer problems.

Since an Apple Store opened in Norwich, locals have been calling mistakenly phoning the Apple Shop in Wroxham Barns, with their iPhone and Apple-related woes.

Apple Shop owner Geoff Fisher told the BBC: “My telephone number has a Norwich prefix and so people unawares ring up the Apple Shop. All I can say to them is, ‘I’m very sorry, I can’t help you, but please do come along and get some proper Norfolk cider to get over your sorrows’.”

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Evasi0n is interesting because it escalates privileges and has full access to the system partition all without any memory corruption. It does this by exploiting the /var/db/timezone vulnerability to gain access to the root user’s launchd socket. It then abuses launchd to load MobileFileIntegrity with an inserted codeless library, which is overriding MISValidateSignature to always return 0.

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open TextEdit. type “File:///”. The capital ‘F’ is important. On the third /, it crashes.

If you send an iMessage with File:/// it will crash the recipients Messages app, and they can not relaunch the app unless they go to Library and delete the history.

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Programmers often talk about writing “beautiful code,” but computer scientist Ramsey Nasser has taken that idea to new lengths by developing the first programming language that uses Arabic script for its source code.

The language is called قلب – roughly pronounced “alb,” after the Arabic word for “heart” – and as Nasser explained to AnimalNewYork, he developed it as much for its aesthetic appeal as for its effectiveness at computation.

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One should never expect justice in life.

The best one can hope for is poetry.

And yet, just once or twice, both manage to collide with a deliciousness that moves the soul.

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The nuts and bolts of what is presented here is the idea that DLLs are loaded into memory space if there is memory available, and if there is no memory or only small amounts of memory available then the DLL will be put into the remaining memory hole. This sounds simple. And it works, we can load a DLL into a remaining memory hole. First of all the exploit writer has to code a javascript routine that does fill memory until the memory boundary is hit and a javascript exception is raised. When the memory is filled up the installed javascript exception handler will execute javascript code that frees small chunks of memory in several steps, each step the javascript code will try to load an ActiveX object. The result is that the DLL (sometimes there are several DLLs loaded for an ActiveX object) will be loaded at a predictable address. This means that now the exploit writer has a predictable address to jump to and the ‘where do i jump when I have code execution’ problem is solved. One problem the method has is that Windows will become unresponsive at the time memory is exhausted but will resume normal operation after the DLL is loaded at a fixed address and the memory is freed using the javascript code.

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Remember the piece I linked to earlier this week, wherein Joe Springer pointed out (all the way back in November) that large institutional investors who’d sold options on Apple’s stock back in the summer stood to profit by billions if AAPL closed today at $500 or under? It closed at $500.00.

I still have that bridge to sell you if you don’t think the fix was in on this.

What if Cars Were Rented Like We Hire Programmers?

If Carpenters Were Hired Like Programmers

[Quote]:

A programmer had a problem. He thought to himself, “I know, I’ll solve it with threads!”. has Now problems. two he

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There’s nothing that can fill your underwear faster than seeing your product fail during a Steve Jobs demo.

[Quote]:

Google is abusing its dominant place in the search market, according to Europe’s antitrust chief Joaquin Almunia.

In an interview with the Financial Times of London, Google could be forced to change the way that it provides and displays search results or face antitrust charges for “diverting traffic,” in the words of Almunia, referring to Google’s self-serving treatment to its own search services.

Despite the U.S. Federal Trade Commission’s move earlier this month to let off Google with a slap on the wrist — albiet, a change to its business practices, a move that financially wouldn’t dent Google in the short term but something any company would seek to avoid — the European Commission is looking to take a somewhat different approach: take its time, and then hit the company hard.

Almunia said in the interview: “We are still investigating, but my conviction is [Google] are diverting traffic,” adding: “They are monetising this kind of business, the strong position they have in the general search market and this is not only a dominant position, I think — I fear — there is an abuse of this dominant position.”

That’s pretty much as black and white as one can get, short of actually saying: “Google, bad! Here’s a whopping great big fine.”

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A previously unknown and currently unpatched security hole in the latest version of the Java software framework is under attack online, according to security researchers and bloggers.

Attack code that exploits vulnerability in Java’s browser plugin has been added to the Blackhole, Cool, Nuclear Pack, and Redkit exploit kits, according to the Malware Don’t Need Coffee blog, prompting its author to say that the bug is being “massively exploited in the wild.” Miscreants use these products to turn compromised websites into platforms for silently installing keyloggers and other types of malicious software on the computers of unsuspecting visitors. KrebsOnSecurity reporter Brian Krebs said the curators of both Blackhole and Nuclear Pack have taken to the underweb to boast of the addition to their wares. It’s not yet clear how many websites have been outfitted with the exploits.

According to researchers at Alienvault Labs, the exploits work against fully patched installations of Java. Attack files are highly obfuscated and are most likely succeeding by bypassing security checks built in to the program. KrebsOnSecurity said the malware authors say the exploits work against all versions of Java 7.

Update: Analysis from antivirus provider Kaspersky Lab indicates the exploits are already deployed on a variety of websites.

“There appears to be multiple ad networks redirecting to Blackhole sites, amplifying the mass exploitation problem,” Kaspersky Lab expert Kurt Baumgartner wrote. “We have seen ads from legitimate sites, especially in the UK, Brazil, and Russia, redirecting to domains hosting the current Blackhole implementation delivering the Java 0day. These sites include weather sites, news sites, and of course, adult sites.”

People who don’t use Java much should once again consider unplugging Java from their browser, while those who don’t use it at all may want to uninstall it altogether.

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Sniff. Those children of ours get so old so quickly… Today is the tenth birthday of Apple’s Safari web browser, so have a little cake or maybe propose a toast to the default Mac and iOS browser.

The first version of Safari was released as a public beta exactly ten years ago today. The app was designed by Apple to replace Microsoft Internet Explorer, which was the default Mac browser up to OS X 10.2.