Hasta La Gadget!

The Chinese government has accused the US of a torrent of hacking attempts, blaming hackers in the United States for nearly two-thirds of all cyber-terrorism made against the country. The Chinese Department of Defense and the Chinese military have together faced 144,000 hack attempts per month on average, the country’s Ministry of Defense said today, with spokesperson Geng Yansheng citing US IP addresses as the telltale giveaway for who was responsible.

Responding to a question about the supposed 61,000-plus strong cyber-terrorism squad China had reportedly gathered together to conduct internet espionage against the US, Canada, UK, France, and other countries, as well as extract trade secrets, Geng argued that China itself was just as much a victim. He claimed that over 1.7m attempts to crack Chinese government sites were observed in 2012 alone, and that attacks from the US accounted for 62.9-percent of the incidents.

Ironically, given the Chinese ministry’s apparent reliance today on IP addresses to blame US-based hackers, it’s only little more than a week since it dismissed suggestions that such identifiers were foolproof evidence. Back on February 20, a Chinese spokesperson blamed spoofed IP addresses for the country being falsely accused of making its own hack attempts.

According to Geng, the US’ pre-emptive plans for cyber-warfare – part of the response to various incidents around newspapers, American companies, and other organizations – “are not conducive to the joint efforts of the international community to enhance network security.” The Chinese government supposedly hopes that the US be “made to explain and clarify” its aggressive stance, the spokesman continued.

China has been named as the number one risk for cyber-attacks worldwide by various reports and investigations, with suggestions that both the Chinese military and local companies have been targeting foreign networks in an attempt to extract industrial secrets, among other things. In January 2012, the US government bolstered its Cyber Command division with new teams to go on the offensive when needed in the face of online warfare, as well as to defend essential and corporate systems within the country.

[via ZDNet]

China accuses US of systematic hacking is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

eBay is as close as it comes to a genuine Aladdin’s cave, and we’ve seen plenty of ancient rarities, prototypes, sci-fi weaponry, and the odd killer robot go under its gavel. One of the latest artifacts of interest comes from eBay’s Netherlands site, which is hosting an auction for a Windows Phone prototype slider known to her friends as Julie (or Jolie, depending on where you look in the listing) from the now defunct Sony Ericsson partnership. The phone that never was from the company that is no longer is allegedly one of only seven units made, and is touted as having an 8-megapixel shooter and 16 gigs of storage. Some digging through the XDA Developers’ forum suggests the handset’s old Windows Phone 7 ROM is basically non-functional, so don’t expect to plug in your SIM and stroll out the door with a useable device. If that doesn’t put you off, however, there’s no exorbitant entry price, and bids remain sensible, for now. Head to the listing below for more pictures and to get in on the action, but bear in mind the only shipping options are for Europe. Nothing a PM with an outrageous offer won’t rectify, surely.

Update: The seller has been in contact to let us know that international shipping is now available, and while the WP7 ROM running on the handset is by no means a final build, there are no issues with voice calling, the camera or Bluetooth.

Filed under: Cellphones, Alt, Sony

Comments

Via: Windows Phone Central

Source: eBay (Netherlands)

On the morning of February 28th, 1953, two men quietly made history in the Cavendish Laboratory of Cambridge University. Sixty years ago today, Watson and Crick discovered DNA—and changed the face of biological science in the process. More »

Samsung has hired the ex-judge that ruled in its favor against Apple and forced the Cupertino firm to make a public apology on its homepage, calling Sr Robin Jacob as an expert in its ITC case with Ericsson. Apple was made to post a statement conceding it had been “false and misleading” in how it initially fulfilled the court-ordered public explanation by Judge Jacob in the UK in November 2012, but now the retired judge who demanded that has been included among nine experts retained by Samsung as it battles Ericsson in the US, controversial legal commentary site FOSS Patents highlights.

While no impropriety has been explicitly suggested, the decision by both parties is already prompting controversy. Sir Jacob is acknowledged as an expert in patent law, which was in no small part the reason that he was invited back to the bench in 2012 – having officially retired from the Cour of Appeal in 2011 – to rule on the Samsung v. Apple case; that’s undoubtedly the same reason that Samsung wants to secure his services.

Nonetheless, some industry observers are questioning whether Samsung’s perfectly legal decision to retain the former judge is a road to PR problems, with FOSS Patents’ Florian Mueller suggesting there is potential for allegations that the Korean firm is somehow “rewarding” Sir Jacob for his earlier decision. Given that the tensions between the Apple and Samsung camps seldom run quiet, it’s likely to be further grist for the controversy mill. That’s not least because Mueller is himself a point of contention, since he has previously been retained by both Oracle and Microsoft, Groklaw reported back in August 2012, while still commenting regularly on cases involving each company.

The situation is particularly awkward given the embarassing degree to which Apple was scolded in the 2012 ruling. The original judgement demanded the Cupertino firm add a visible statement to its UK site linking to an explanation that it had falsely maligned Samsung, something which the company duly posted.

However, Samsung – and the court – took issue with Apple’s initial phrasing, which included references to other international rulings in a way which appeared to call into question the legitimacy of the UK decision. As a result, the court ordered Apple to replace it with one more in keeping with the intention of the initial ruling, and extended the period for which it had to be kept online.

The final spanking was a higher-than-usual award of cost damages to Samsung, which at the time Judge Jacob described “as a mark of the court’s disapproval of a party’s conduct, particularly in relation to its respect for an order of the court.”

Sir Jacob will advise in an unspecified way on Samsung’s case against Ericsson, in which the company is seeking a US sales injunction after alleging patent licensing attempts have fallen flat. The suit follows an early blast by Ericsson seeking to pressure Samsung into renewed licensing negotiations by threatening an import ban of its own.

Samsung hires ex-Judge who demanded public Apple shaming is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Google has yet to release the Mirror API that will open Google Glass as a platform, but developers of some of the more popular mobile apps today are gearing up for when wearable computing products, like Glass, will. Today, speaking at a keynote at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Dennis Crowley, CEO of social location app Foursquare, highlighted Google’s new headgear as an example of how mobile screens are evolving, and later he told TechCrunch that Foursquare is looking at how it can evolve along with that.

“Anywhere there’s a screen, we want to put our stuff on it, whether that’s on a phone, or a watch, or whatever,” he said. He also added that Foursquare hasn’t yet worked with Google Glass itself.

This week at MWC, Google did not have a formal presence at the main exhibition, but it’s been here nevertheless. Apart from the many Android device makers here — with the biggest of all, Samsung, taking stand space in multiple halls and even the train station nearby — Google had its usual Android party and there have been Google Glass sightings both at the official event and elsewhere.

Wearable computing devices like Google Glass, which make interacting with services ever more seamless, dovetail with how Foursquare is trying to make its services more automatic and easy to use, requiring less proactive input from consumers in order to function.

Crowley said that Foursquare would like to launch a new feature that builds on this concept, enhancing the “contextual awareness” (his words) introduced by like Radar. (Introduced in 2011, Radar alerts users to when they are near places that they have flagged in their app.)

“The best version of Foursquare is the one you don’t think about using,” he told TechCrunch on the sidelines of today’s keynote. “The relaunch of Radar is inevitable: it’s very important to us.”

And while for Foursquare part of reaching that goal is to be on as many platforms as possible, it’s also about integrating with other applications, furthering its own position as a platform for location services. The company already works with 40,000 developers to power location services, including Path, Instagram and Evernote. “We’re slowly starting to become the location layer for the Internet,” Crowley said.

In January, Google started to run its first hackathons, in San Francisco and New York, for developers interested in Google Glass and getting an early look at the Mirror API.

More from TechCrunch’s longer conversation with Crowley coming soon.