By Soulskill from
Slashdot's just-what-i-want-from-my-browser department:
An anonymous reader writes
"Last year Google rolled out a new feature for the desktop version of Chrome that enabled support for voice recognition directly into the browser. In September, a developer named Tal Ater found a bug that would allow a malicious site to record through your microphone even after you'd told it to stop. Quoting: 'When you grant an HTTPS site permission to use your mic, Chrome will remember your choice, and allow the site to start listening in the future, without asking for permission again. This is perfectly fine, as long as Chrome gives you clear indication that you are being listened to, and that the site can't start listening to you in background windows that are hidden to you. When you click the button to start or stop the speech recognition on the site, what you won't notice is that the site may have also opened another hidden popunder window. This window can wait until the main site is closed, and then start listening in without asking for permission. This can be done in a window that you never saw, never interacted with, and probably didn't even know was there.' Ater reported this to Google in September, and they had a fix ready a few days later. But they haven't rolled it out yet — they can't decide whether or not it's the proper way to block this behavior. Thus: the exploit remains. Ater has published the source code for the exploit to encourage Google to fix it."Read Replies (0)
By Roblimo from
Slashdot's now-they're-actually-selling-some-product department:
Slashdot
visited the Formlabs CES display in 2013. Tim looked at their Stereolithgraphy 3-D printer again this year.
The company is now boasting about their
PreForm 1.0 software, and not as much about their hardware, which was their main focus last year. Another important difference was that at CES 2013 they couldn't talk about sales because they hadn't sold any units yet, but now they claim they've sold over 1000. And the last major problem they faced was a patent infringement suit, which seems to be settled (or nearly so). According to
this Oct. 2013 article, it's doubtful that Formlabs would have been able to raise
$2.95 through Kickstarter, followed by another $19 million from traditional venture capitalists, if the lawsuit wasn't close to settlement -- which may not matter much in the long run, since
many key patents in the field have either expired or are due to expire between now and 2015.
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By Unknown Lamer from
Slashdot's dueling-space-probe-solos department:
New submitter samshead writes in with a bit of interesting news from
GÉANT (the European research network):
"GÉANT ... recently demonstrated its power by sonifying 36 years’ worth of NASA Voyager spacecraft data and converting it into a musical duet. ... To compose the spacecraft duet, 320,000 measurements were first selected from each spacecraft, at one hour intervals. Then that data was converted into two very long melodies, each comprising 320,000 notes using different sampling frequencies ... The result of the conversion into waveform, using such a big dataset, created a wide collection of audible sounds, lasting just a few seconds (slightly more than 7 seconds at 44.1kHz) to a few hours (more than 5hours using 1024Hz as a sampling frequency). A certain number of data points, from a few thousand to 44,100 were each 'converted' into 1 second of sound."Listen to the song (it plays using HTML5 audio if you pretend to be an iPhone, otherwise it requires Flash).
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By Unknown Lamer from
Slashdot's hop-on-the-bandwagon department:
New submitter Ramtek writes
"Marc Andreessen writes an interesting editorial on how he how he believes Bitcoin is the first practical solution to the Byzantine Generals Problem and why that is important. He also addresses many of arguments against its future by its critics such as its current limited use by ordinary consumers, its current volatility, its potential lack of acceptance by merchants, and many other issues. While politically agnostic the piece is squarely in support of Bitcoin but presents a more mature perspective than many current Bitcoin editorials."eggboard wrote in with a rebuttal: "Marc Andreessen wrote an essay in the
New York Times in which he tried to make the case for Bitcoin going mainstream for payments, if not as a currency. After comparing Bitcoin to the rise of personal computers and the Internet, he tries to explain how it eliminates fraud and will solve global money transfers and the plight of the unbanked. I
wrote a critique of these and other points in his essay."
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