In this beautifully haunting short film written and directed by Peter Szewczyk, an idealistic young woman meets her demise in a most peculiar fashion at the hands of a poisonous, spiteful crone. But will her death also lead to the downfall of the city around her?
Source: http://gizmodo.com/the-weirdest-thing-on-the-internet-tonight-colour-blee-612669827
north country brian mcknight sbux nfldraft asante samuel salton sea arizona immigration law
Researchers at Bluebox Security have revealed a disturbing flaw in Android's security model, which the group claims may affect up to 99 percent of Android devices in existence. According to Bluebox, this vulnerability has existed since Android 1.6 (Donut), which gives malicious app developers the ability to modify the code of a legitimate APK, all without breaking its cryptographic signature -- thereby allowing the installation to go unnoticed. To pull off the exploit, a rotten app developer would first need to trick an unknowing user into installing the malicious update, but hackers could theoretically gain full control of a user's phone if the "update" posed as a system file from the manufacturer.
Bluebox claims that it notified Google of the exploit in February. According to CIO, Bluebox CTO Jeff Forristal has named the Galaxy S 4 as the only device that's currently immune to the exploit -- which suggests that a security patch may already exist. Forristal further claims that Google is working on an update for its Nexus devices. In response to our inquiry, Google told us that it currently has no comment. We certainly hope that device manufacturers do the responsible thing and distribute timely security patches to resolve this issue. Absent that, you can protect yourself by installing updates through the Play Store and Android's built-in system update utility.
Filed under: Software, Mobile, Google
Source: Bluebox Security, CIO
Austin Mahone E3 2013 Titanfall Killer Instinct New Xbox 360 cnet Game of Thrones Season 4
Apple's next earnings call will be held on Tuesday July 23, at 5PM ET/2PM PT following the Q3 2013 earnings release that day. Typically on these types of calls, we'll be treated to a series of prepared statements by CEO Tim Cook and CFO Peter Oppenheimer, and it's always good to hear Tim Cook speak. Oh, and there'll likely be the standard question and answer session at the end.
The good news is that the call will be streamed live on the web, and anyone with an iOS device on 4.2 and up, a Mac on OS X 10.5 and above or a PC running QuickTime 7 can listen along as it happens. iMore will of course be bringing you full coverage as it all goes down. Any predictions?
Source: Apple
     |
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheIphoneBlog/~3/Rp8z6-Yi78s/story01.htm
mario manningham mario manningham williams syndrome hoya casa de mi padre corned beef and cabbage diners drive ins and dives
By Sharon Begley
NEW YORK (Reuters) - About 550,000 people in Oregon do not have health insurance, and Aaron Karjala is confident the state's new online insurance exchange will be able to accommodate them when enrollment under President Barack Obama's healthcare reform begins on October 1.
What Karjala, the chief information officer at "Cover Oregon," does worry about, however, is what will happen if the entire population of Oregon - 3.9 million - logs on that day "just to check it out," he said. Or if millions of curious souls elsewhere, wondering if Oregon's insurance offerings are better than their states', log on, causing Cover Oregon to crash in a blur of spinning hourglasses and color wheels and an epidemic of frozen screens.
Multiply that by another 49 states and the District of Columbia, all of which will open health insurance exchanges under "Obamacare" that same day, and you get some idea of what could go publicly and disastrously wrong.
Obamacare, formally known as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA), could fail for many reasons, including participation by too few of the uninsured and a shortage of doctors to treat those who do sign up. But because its core is government-run marketplaces selling health insurance online, the likeliest reason for failure at the opening bell is information technology snafus, say experts who are helping with the rollout.
Although IT is the single most expensive ingredient of the exchanges, with eight-figure contracts to build them, experts expect bugs, errors and crashes. In April, Obama himself predicted "glitches and bumps" when the exchanges open for business.
"This is a 1.0 implementation," said Dan Maynard, president of Connecture, a software developer that is providing the shopping and enrollment functions for several states' insurance exchanges. "From an IT perspective, 1.0's come out with a lot of defects. Everyone is waiting for something to go wrong."
Two states that intended to build their own exchanges, Idaho and New Mexico, announced this spring that because of the tight timeline and daunting challenges they would have the federal government operate their IT systems.
"Nothing like this in IT has ever been done to this complexity or scale, and with a timeline that put it behind schedule almost before the ink was dry," said Rick Howard, research director at the technology advisory firm Gartner.
WHAT COLOR WAS YOUR VOLVO?
The potential for problems will begin as soon as would-be buyers log onto their state exchange. They'll enter their name, birth date, address and other identifying information. Then comes the first IT handoff: Is this person who she says she is?
To check that, credit bureau Experian will check the answers against its voluminous external databases, which include information from utility companies and banks on people's spending and other history, and generate questions. The customer will be asked which of several addresses he previously lived at, for example, whether his car has one of several proffered license plate numbers, and what color his old Volvo was.
It's similar to the system that verifies identity for accessing personal Social Security information. If someone gets a question wrong, he will be referred to Experian's help desk, and if that fails may be asked to submit documentation to prove he is who he claims to be.
The next step is determining if the customer is eligible for federal subsidies to pay for insurance. She is if she is a citizen and her income, which she will enter, is less than four times the federal poverty level. To verify this, the exchange pings the "federal data services hub," which is being built by Quality Software Services Inc under a $58 million contract with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS).
The query arrives at the hub, which does not actually store information, and is routed to online servers at the Internal Revenue Service for income verification and at the Department of Homeland Security for a citizenship check.
The answers must be returned in real time, before the would-be buyer loses patience and logs off. If the reported income doesn't match the IRS's records, the applicant may have to submit pay stubs.
These federal computer systems have never been connected before, so it's anyone's guess how well they'll communicate.
"The challenge for states," said Jinnifer Wattum, director of Eligibility and Exchange Solutions at Xerox's government healthcare unit, is that they have to build "the interfaces needed with the federal data services hub without knowing what this system will look like." That makes the task akin to making a key for a lock that doesn't exist yet.
CMS's contractors are working to finish the hub, but "much remains to be accomplished within a relatively short amount of time," concluded a report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the investigative arm of Congress, in June. CMS spokesman Brian Cook said the hub would be ready by September, and that the beta version had been tested for its ability to interact with the exchanges Oregon and Maryland are building.
The federal hub has to verify even more arcane data, such as whether the insurance offered to a buyer through his job is unaffordable, in which case he may qualify for federal subsidies, and whether the buyer is in prison, in which case she is exempt from the mandate to purchase insurance.
If someone's income qualifies him for Medicaid, or his children for the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP), software has to divert him from the ACA exchange and into those systems. Many of the computers handling Medicaid and CHIP enrollment are, as IT people diplomatically put it, "legacy systems," meaning old, even decades old.
Many are mainframes, lacking the connectivity of cloud computing. They typically process eligibility requests in days, not seconds.
The legacy systems "rely on daily or weekly batch files to pass information back and forth," and often require follow-up phone calls, said Wattum of Xerox, which is working to configure Nevada's exchange so it can interface with the federal hub.
'NO WRONG DOOR'
A "we'll call you" message is unacceptable under Obamacare, which has a "no wrong door" goal: A buyer must never come to a dead end. If she is diverted to Medicaid, for instance, she must not be required to resubmit information, let alone wait a week for an answer about whether she's now enrolled.
State IT systems must therefore "be interoperable and integrated with an exchange, Medicaid, and CHIP to allow consumers to easily switch from private insurance to Medicaid and CHIP," said an April report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the investigative arm of Congress.
To make all those systems communicate, the state exchanges must either develop entirely new systems or use application programming interfaces (APIs) that work with the legacy systems to exchange data in real time. APIs are programming instructions for accessing Web-based software applications.
GAO's Stan Czerwinski compares the necessary connectivity to adapters that let American electronics work with European outlets.
State officials told the GAO that verifying eligibility, enrolling buyers and interfacing with legacy systems are the most "onerous" aspects of developing their exchanges, "given the age and limited functionality of current state systems."
A key goal for exchange officials is keeping would-be buyers in the portal so they don't give up and use a state's ACA call center, which could quickly be swamped.
To avoid this, Oregon brought in potential users to test design prototypes, recorded what people did and where they had trouble, and tweaked the consumer interface to make it as user-friendly as possible, said Karjala.
"Even with that, if you have a family of four and you're eligible for a tax credit to offset your premium," he said, "you could be sitting at the computer for a long time."
What everyone hopes to avoid is a repeat of the early days of the Medicare prescription-drug program in 2006. Some seniors who tried to sign up for a plan were mistakenly enrolled in several, while others had the wrong premium amounts deducted from their Social Security checks.
Another challenge is capacity. Websites regularly crash when too many people try to access them.
"I had no choice but to be extremely conservative" in estimates of how many simultaneous users Cover Oregon has to be prepared for, Karjala said. "Building capacity is the only way to avoid the spinning hourglass or the site freezing, so in our performance testing we're seeing what happens if the whole U.S. population came to Cover Oregon to check it out."
This summer, state exchanges will test their ability to communicate with the federal data hub, whose security frameworks and connectivity protocols are still works in progress. But whether Obamacare 1.0 flies won't be known until the new health plans take effect on January 1. Robert Laszewski, president of Health Policy and Strategy Associates Inc, a consulting firm, said he wouldn't be surprised if some patients showing up at doctors' offices next year with Obamacare policies are told their insurers never heard of them.
The story was corrected to change the title in the sixth paragraph from chief executive to president
(Additional reporting by Caroline Humer; Editing by Michele Gershberg and Prudence Crowther)
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/obamacare-1-0-states-brace-barrage-reform-goes-062737496.html
Mexico vs USA Harmony Korine Summly Human Rights Campaign bioshock infinite smokey robinson smokey robinson
Vivo may not be a well-known smartphone brand here in the states, but the firm's been pushing out audio-centric phones in China for more than a minute. Its latest handset, the Y19t, is aimed at the female market (hence the hot pink exterior) and is a more imaging-conscious unit -- it's got a 5-megapixel camera and flash on its front complementing an 8-megapixel shooter round back. The phone's also equipped with a 4.5-inch, 960 x 540 IPS display, 1GB of RAM, 4GB of storage and dual SIM slots (one for micro and one for nano SIMs).
Like its cousin, the X1, the Y19t has a MediaTek SoC and a non-removeable 2,000 mAh battery, but unlike its predecessor, this new phone has an MT6589 1.2Ghz quad-core chip inside its 7.4mm thick chassis. Naturally, it has Chinese-friendly TD-SCDMA and GSM radios and comes running Android 4.2.1 skinned with a Vivo UI. Like what you've seen (and heard) so far? Head on down to the source to see some screenshots, more device pics and a review of the Y19t's capabilities, but you might want to bring a translator with you -- it's written in Chinese.
Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile
Source: PC Online
Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/osm_8zvw03E/
reggie bush pope Chris Cline New Pope Jeff Gordon Test Drive Veronica Mars Pope John Paul II
