Standing Up to a Dangerous New Breed of Patent Troll

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There’s no social value here. There’s no support for a maligned inventor. There’s no competing business or product. There’s no validation of an incentive structure that supports innovation. This is a shakedown where a patent troll, Blackbird Technologies, creates as much nuisance as it can so its attorney-principals can try to grab some cash.

Source: Standing Up to a Dangerous New Breed of Patent Troll

Cloudflare does not intend to play along. As explained later in this blog post, we plan to (i) contest the patent lawsuit vigorously, (ii) fund an award for a crowdsourced search for prior art that can be used to invalidate Blackbird patents, and (iii) ask the relevant bar associations to investigate what we consider to be violations of the rules of professional conduct by Blackbird and its attorneys.

How One Little Cable Company Exposed Telecom’s Achilles’ Heel

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See the problem? If people begin noticing that there’s no competition, that Americans are paying too much for too little, and that the entire country is suffering as a result, that’s a big problem for Big Cable.

Source: How One Little Cable Company Exposed Telecom’s Achilles’ Heel

What really matters is whether, someday, we’ll take on as a country the issue of the dismal state of high-speed internet access in America. If the Title II reclassification holds, it’s more likely that we will take that step sooner. And the carriers know that.

Repair Shops Are Stoked That the Samsung Galaxy S8 Is the Most Fragile Phone Ever Made

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Soon after its release, electronics insurance company SquareTrade put Samsung’s new flagship phone through its breakability test, a series of drops, dunks, and tumbles. It was deemed the most breakable phone of all time: “S8 is the first phone we’ve tested that’s cracked on the first drop on ALL sides,” SquareTrade wrote in a video demonstrating the drops.

Source: Repair Shops Are Stoked That the Samsung Galaxy S8 Is the Most Fragile Phone Ever Made – Motherboard

Iceland drills 4.7 km down into volcano to tap clean energy

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Iceland’s decision to harness the heat inside the earth in a process known as geothermal energy dates back to the 1970s and the oil crisis.

But the new geothermal well is expected to generate far more energy, as the extreme heat and pressure at that depth makes the water take the form of a “supercritical” fluid, which is neither gas nor liquid.

Source: Iceland drills 4.7 km down into volcano to tap clean energy

SpaceX plans to start launching high-speed internet satellites in 2019

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SpaceX hopes to start testing its satellites before the end of this year and continuing through the early months of 2018. If that’s successful, the company plans to launch satellites in phases between 2019 and 2024, after which the system will be at full capacity.

Source: SpaceX plans to start launching high-speed internet satellites in 2019

OAUTH phishing against Google Docs ? beware!

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As you can see, it appears as Google Docs wants full access to my Gmail as well as my contacts. Of course, this is not real Google Docs – the attacker has simply named his “application” Google Docs – this can be verified by clicking on the Google Docs text where the real web site behind this and developer info is shown:

Source: InfoSec Handlers Diary Blog – OAUTH phishing against Google Docs ? beware!

Finally, if you accidentally clicked on “Allow”, go to https://myaccount.google.com/u/0/permissions?pli=1 to revoke permissions.

What is a lambda expression in C++11?

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C++ includes useful generic functions like std::for_each and std::transform, which can be very handy. Unfortunately they can also be quite cumbersome to use, particularly if the functor you would like to apply is unique to the particular function.

Source: What is a lambda expression in C++11?

C++11 introduces lambdas allow you to write an inline, anonymous functor to replace the struct f. For small simple examples this can be cleaner to read (it keeps everything in one place) and potentially simpler to maintain,

About 90% of Smart TVs Vulnerable to Remote Hacking via Rogue TV Signals

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According to Scheel, the problem is that the HbbTV standard, carried by DVB-T signals and supported by all smart TVS, allows the sending of commands that tell smart TVs to access and load a website in the background.

Knowing this, Scheel developed two exploits he hosted on his own website, which when loaded in the TV’s built-in browser would execute malicious code, gain root access, and effectively take over the device.

Source: About 90% of Smart TVs Vulnerable to Remote Hacking via Rogue TV Signals

Earth-sized telescope set to snap first picture of a black hole

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Each telescope will point at Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way, and measure every radio wave coming from its direction. Linking together observatories spread across such a huge area and combining their observations to filter out extra light will effectively create a powerful “virtual telescope” almost the size of Earth.

Source: Earth-sized telescope set to snap first picture of a black hole | New Scientist

As other telescopes are added to the network in coming decades, observations of the black holes will become even more precise, and should provide fundamental insights into the workings of our universe.