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Giugno 2012

Lo stato del 4G in Svizzera

Da 4g-portal.com:

The 4G pilot project, which has been running since December 2011 in seven tourist regions and 11 Swisscom Shops, is a total success […] Swisscom is now in an optimum position to equip the network with cutting-edge 4G technology and provide an ultra-high-speed mobile customer experience as early as the end of 2012 not only in these tourist areas, but also in twelve towns and cities. Swisscom will begin to roll out the technology across the country in 2013.

[…] the project is to be extended by the addition of parts of Berne and Zurich, continued until the end of the year and then flow seamlessly into the introduction of 4G on the Swisscom mobile network. Customers gain access to the ultra-high-speed network as a pilot offer for CHF 19 per week or CHF 60 per month. The offer is available in the Swisscom Shops.

[…] Swisscom will provide 4G in twelve Swiss towns and cities from December 2012, with the nationwide rollout getting under way as early as 2013 […] UL: max. 50 Mbps and DL: max. 150 Mbps.

Swisscom demonstrates 4G mobile communications technology LTE in Grenchen (ottobre 2010) ha altre info. Niente LTE 4G per iPad nuovo in Svizzera, secondo Ibigspace.com, con elenco delle offerte degli operatori (marzo 2012).

Apple, il logo non è ispirato alla morte di Turing

Da Unraveling the tale behind the Apple logo (CNN, 2011):

[Alan Turing] bit into an apple he had laced with cyanide […] And so, the story goes, when two Stanford entrepreneurs were looking for a logo for their brand new computer company, they remembered Turing and his contribution to their field. They chose an apple — not a complete apple, but one with a bite taken out of it. […The] evidence now points in a more prosaic direction. In a 2009 interview with CreativeBits, Rob Janoff, the man who drew the logo […]

“I’m afraid it [the Turing story] didn’t have a thing to do with it,” he said. “It’s a wonderful urban legend.”

Alan Turing forse non si suicidò ma morì accidentalmente

BBC: Alan Turing: Inquest’s suicide verdict ‘not supportable’

At a conference in Oxford on Saturday, Turing expert Prof Jack Copeland will argue that the evidence presented at the 1954 inquest would not be accepted nowadays as sufficient to establish that Turing had taken his own life deliberately. […] the police never tested the apple for the presence of cyanide […] nothing in the accounts of Turing’s last days suggest he was in anything but a cheerful mood. He had left a note on his office desk, as was his practice, the previous Friday to remind himself of the tasks to be done on his return after the Bank Holiday weekend.

[…] It is often repeated that the chemicals caused him to grow breasts, though Turing is only known to have mentioned this once. […] Turing had tolerated the year-long hormone treatment and the terms of his probation (“my shining virtue was terrific”) with amused fortitude, and another year had since passed seemingly without incident.

[…] Prof Copeland believes the alternative explanation made at the time by Turing’s mother is equally likely. Turing had cyanide in his house for chemical experiments he conducted in his tiny spare room […]
Perhaps he had accidentally put his apple into a puddle of cyanide. Or perhaps, more likely, he had accidentally inhaled cyanide vapours from the bubbling liquid. Prof Copeland notes that the nightmare room had a “strong smell” of cyanide after Turing’s death; that inhalation leads to a slower death than ingestion; and that the distribution of the poison in Turing’s organs was more consistent with inhalation than with ingestion.

Come ti frego l’antivirus

So how does malware evade detection when starting new rogue processes? Easy—it directly attacks the operating system’s kernel […] The Windows OS internally maintains an array of callback objects with the starting address of PspCreateProcessNotifyRoutine. […] Unsurprisingly, we have discovered malware that uses this implementation by accessing the PspCreateProcessNotifyRoutine (internal pointer) in order to remove all registered callbacks. Once the malware has removed the AV security suite callbacks, it is free to create and terminate processes at will without any pesky security software interference […] And that’s it. The rest of this exploit is trivial. Just walk the PspCreateProcessNotifyRoutine pointer and NULL out all callback objects… Any enterprise or consumer security suite that uses this technique for monitoring process activity can be easily circumvented—a big win for the malware authors.

– da How Advanced Malware Bypasses Process Monitoring, Fireeye.com.

La Svizzera è tutta minata, secondo questo post e libro

Bruce Schneier segnala questo post e questo libro (La Place de la Concorde Suisse di John McPhee) che parlano di ponti, tunnel, gole, autostrade e colline già minate per farle saltare in aria in caso d’invasione. Vero in buona parte, ma attenzione: il libro risale al 1994. Oggi le cose sono un po’ diverse. Per esempio, il bunker in ogni casa/palazzo non è più obbligatorio. Ma le postazioni militari camuffate e la predisposizione delle strutture alla loro demolizione restano. Lo so; ci abito. Nei commenti all’articolo di Schneier ci sono parecchie info interessanti.

Nike condannata in GB per tweet pubblicitari ingannevoli

Wayne Rooney Nike tweetL’ASA, autorità di controllo sulla pubblicità nel Regno Unito, ha bocciato una campagna via Twitter di Nike nella quale due calciatori avevano tweetato messaggi contenenti link a video promozionali Nike.

Dalla sentenza dell’ASA: “We noted the Code did not just require ads to be identifiable as marketing communications but that they must be obviously identifiable as such […] We considered there was nothing obvious in the tweets to indicate they were Nike marketing communications. In the absence of such an indication, for example #ad, we considered the tweets were not obviously identifiable as Nike marketing communications and therefore concluded they breached the Code.”

Secondo la BBC, è il primo caso del genere.

Cittadina indiana invasa da ragni assassini

Secondo il Times of India, la cittadina di Sadiya, nello stato indiano dell’Assam, è stata invasa l’8 maggio scorso da un’orda di ragni che hanno causato due morti, calando improvvisamente sulla folla radunatasi per una funzione religiosa. Però la causa delle morti potrebbe anche essere l’intervento di stregoni ai quali si sono rivolte le persone morse dai ragni. Comunque sia, roba da incubo.

Ne parlano Gawker e GlobalPost. In italiano ne parla ANSA.