Oracle kills Java browser plug-in

Oracle said that it will finally kill its Java browser plug-in. This move does not come as soon as possible — in the past years, the Java browser plug-in was a easy target for hackers and malware authors. A 2014 report from Cisco said that a whopping 91% of all attacks were targeted at Java.

The situation has improved afterwards ; Cisco’s mid-year 2015 report revealed that for sometime Java was a serious course for concern,the company had made strides on mitigating its attack profile and enhancing total security. As of last year, attacks against Flash were increasing alarmingly, while that of Java declined overall.

Even after these improvements, Oracle is still scaling down the Java plug in when it releases Java 9, and removing it totally at some point after that date. Both Edge and Chrome have already nuked browser support for Java from orbit; Firefox announced plans to do so late last year. Historically, Oracle has been slow to respond to vulnerabilities in Java, and its sandboxing was never as foolproof as the company advertised.

Oracle’s stated reasons for killing the browser plug-ins doesn’t mention the broken sandbox model or the lack of an automatic security update process. Instead, it reads:

As Java evolved to become one of the leading mainstream development platforms, so did the applet’s hosts – the web browsers. The rise of web usage on mobile device browsers, typically without support for plugins, increasingly led browser makers to want to restrict and remove standards based plug in support from their products, as they tried to combine the set of features available across desktop and mobile versions. The Oracle JRE can only support applets on browsers for as long as browser vendors provide the requisite cross-browser standards based plugin API (e.g. NPAPI) support.

In other words, Java was a cool, cutting-edge technology, until pesky browser companies decided to kill it.

If you don’t specifically need Java, we recommend uninstalling it. It’s the kind of application that you’ll know if you need (and won’t miss, if you don’t). IE11 still supports Java from within the browser if you need to use it, but Chrome has phased it out and Mozilla is in the process of doing so. Oracle’s migration document suggests that firms which rely on Java’s browser plug-ins should begin investigating “plug-in-free alternatives.”

Computer security is, by its nature, a moving target. Every now and then, however, Team White Hat scores a genuine victory. With Adobe Flash rapidly fading and Java plug-ins facing a near-term expiration date, the Internet should be genuinely safer — at least, for a little while.

Gadget That 'Listens' to Water and Warns You of Waste

A white gadget that resembles a sleek speaker than a device for water conservation may prevent people from wasting precious H2O, said one Silicon Valley startup.

The device, invented by the company Nascent, measures how much water you use by "listening" to the flow of H2O leaving the tap. The gadget begins each day with a full bar of light, which gets shorter whenever the device hears the tap left running. The rate at which the bar shrinks varies by home; if there are more people living under your roof, the device takes that into account and the bar will take longer to deplete.

"I know more about the sound of water than you'll ever believe," said Baback Elmieh, founder and CEO of Nascent. [5 Ways We Waste Water]

The device,acclaimed the "Droppler," is like Shazam (an app that can identify artists and song titles just by hearing the music) for water, Elmieh said. But there are some caveats, he added. "I call it Shazam for water, and that's true in a sense, but it's actually closer to a speech-recognition system than Shazam," Elmieh told Live Science.

Every sink sounds a little different — similar to different accents, Elmieh said. For example, if water could be represented by the English language, it might sound like a refined Englishman upon splashing in a metal sink and like an American cowboy when flowing in a ceramic sink.

The challenge, Elmieh said, is to collect as many "accents" as possible under as many circumstances as possible. Not only are various sinks accounted for, but also ambient noises are included, such as bathroom fans, music, chopping boards and many others.

"All that data together gives us a really good representation of most sinks," Elmieh said. The data feeds into a model that gets smarter as more information is included. "It is a statistical model that has been trained on hundreds of hours of data of all sorts of different sinks" in an effort to generalize the sound of water, Elmieh said.

He and his collaborators chose sound over a direct attachment to a house's plumbing in order to make the Droppler as user-friendly as possible, he said.

The Droppler's simple interface was also designed with accessibility in mind; the bar of diminishing light reflects how much water people use, "and they're going to see that every time they turn on the tap," Elmieh said. His prediction is the more you know, the more you will react.

Nascent partnered with the University of British Columbia's Behavioural Sustainability Lab, in Vancouver, Canada, to develop the Droppler. The device "is based on the research that was performed in our lab," Jiaying Zhao, the lab’s principal investigator, said in a statement.

"Dr. Zhao is a specialist in trying to figure out how to change human behavior to drive sustainability," Elmieh said. Zhao found that when people could see how much water they used on an egg-timerlike device, they cut their water use by at least 30 percent in laboratory settings, Elmieh said. This was true even for people who weren't predisposed to water conservation, he said.


The Droppler's beta testers report similar outcomes, Elmieh said. He recalled hearing stories about families sitting around the kitchen table trying to figure out who used 50 percent of the water at 9 o'clock in the morning. This type of device could create a social stigma around water usage, Elmieh said.

"We're here in California, [where] there's a problem all around us," Elmieh said, referring to California's historic drought. "We built something quickly, addressing a local problem — why wouldn't we try to do something about it?"

When the Droppler isn't needed to monitor water flow, it can break apart into a speaker or camera. It's a transformable gadget, Elmieh said, which also reflects Nascent's eye for sustainability.

To get its product commercialized, Nascent teamed up with the beer brand Shock Top for its "Shock the Drought" initiative, which highlights water-conservation products. Nascent is also raising funds through the crowdfunding site Indiegogo, and hopes to launch a finalized product in May, Elmieh said. The Droppler has currently raised $57,098 of its $70,000 goal, with seven days remaining in the crowdfunding campaign.

Shocking! 'Electric Eel' Fibers Could Power Wearable Tech

Stretchy fibers behaves like electric eels could be woven into clothing to power wearable technology one day, new research reveals.

Experimentally, these flexible fibers produces sufficient power to run electronic lights and watches.

The new fiber is interesting because it borrows a leaf from nature to "solve real-world problems and even surpass nature in some aspects," said study lead author Hao Sun, a materials scientistat Fudan University in Shanghai. [Top 10 Inventions That Changed the World]

High voltage
Electric eels (Electrophorus electricus) are able to generate deadly shocks to stun prey and defend against predators. These fish have cells known as electrocytes, which store and release electrically charged ions to generate powerful electric fields.

By themselves, electrocytes in electric eels generate low voltages of only about 0.15 volts. However, in eels, thousands of these disclike electrocytes line up, working in concert to produce deadly shocks of up to 600 volts, or about five times the voltage emitted from a U.S. electrical outlet.

Sun and his colleagues wanted to harness the power of the electric eel in a man-made material. To do so, they created fibers that resemble the shocking creatures' ability to stack up tiny voltage-producing cells in concert.

These fibers are capacitors, meaning they alternate pairs of electrical conductors and electrical insulators, or materials that block the flow of electricity. Capacitors store electric charge on the surfaces of the conductors, and can capture and release energy much more quickly than batteries can, although they usually store less energy than batteries do.

The scientists fabricated the capacitors by first wrapping sheets of carbon nanotubes around elastic rubber fibers 500 microns wide, or about five times the average width of a human hair. Carbon nanotubes are pipes only nanometers, or billionths of a meter, in diameter that possess remarkable electrical and mechanical properties.

The researchers made sure that the electrically conductive carbon nanotube sheets did not completely cover the electrically insulating rubber. Instead, there were gaps where the insulating rubber was exposed. Such gaps are key, because capacitors consist of both conductive and insulating units.

Then, the scientists applied patches of electrically conductive electrolyte gel onto these fibers. The pattern of patches the researchers used converted the fibers into capacitors.

The more alternating segments of electrically conductive nanotube sheets and electrically insulating rubber gaps a fiber had, the greater the voltage it could generate. A fiber about 39 feet (12 meters) long could generate 1,000 volts, the researchers reported online Jan. 14 in the journal Advanced Materials.

Previous research also sought to mimic electric eels by connecting many electrocyte like units together. However, those units were impractical because they were strung together with metal wires, and generally had poor flexibility, the researchers said. This new device instead connected all of its electrocyte like units together on a single fiber.

"We thought these findings provide an efficient strategy for the advancement of flexible electronics and wearable devices," Sun told Live Science.

Power fiber

The elastic fibers could stretch up to 70 percent more than their usual length without losing their electrical or structural properties, the researchers said. The team also showed that the fibers could be woven together with conventional elastic fibers to create fabric that could be incorporated into clothes.

The researchers suggested that the eely fibers could help power miniature electronic devices. For example, in experiments, they created energy wristbands to power electronic watches, and wove fibers into T-shirts to power 57 light-emitting diodes (LEDs). In the future, these energy fibers "might be incorporated into our daily clothes to power our wearable devices, such as the Apple Watch and Google Glass," Sun said.

The scientists also connected their capacitor fibers to fiber-shaped solar cells to create material that could both harvest and store energy. In experiments, these combinationfibers generated 10 volts of electricity when exposed to light — enough to power some types of small electronic devices, they said. Solar cell fibers could also recharge battery fibers in wearable devices, the researchers said.

Citrix Is The Recent Enterprise Tech Firm Under Pressure From Activist Investors

Technology companies, especially ones with enterprise pose, seem  to be coming under increasing pressure from activist investors who want to squeeze out profits at the cost of products and jobs. Last year EMC pressed by an activist investor eventually sold the company to Dell for $67 billion. Citrix is the latest company facing this issue –and from the same investor as it turns out.

It’s been a busy week for Citrix, a company focused on desktop virtualization and networking. Just yesterday, it sold its cloud management products to Accelerite, and on the same day announced that it had acquired Comtrade’s SCOM management packs for Citrix users.

What these moves show is that Citrix is in the midst of a pivot where it is trying to shed products that it sees as outside of its core mission, while making the occasional acquisition to augment that mission. That means products like Citrix CloudPlatform and CloudPortal Business Manager are out of here and the Comtrade SCOM management packs are coming into the fold.

Last November, the company announced it was spinning out its GoTo products such as GoToMeeting, GoToMyPC and other products into a separate company.

There are also layoffs involved here with 1000 jobs expected to be cut from the GoTo move alone. The company had over 9000 employees worldwide prior to the layoff announcement.

Citrix has indicated it wants to concentrate on core products such as XenServer, NetScalr and perhaps Citrix Workplace Cloud, but it’s not necessarily making these moves because it wants to change direction.

Instead, it turns out that Citrix is under pressure from activist investor, Elliott Management. If you’re not familiar with Elliott, they are the same firm that bought a $1 billion stake in EMC in 2014, and immediately began putting pressure on the company to sell its 80 percent share in VMware. Eventually EMC sold the whole firm including the VMware piece to Dell for $67 billion. That sale is expected to close later this year.

In a case of ‘Deja vu all over again’ Elliott has taken an activist investor role with Citrix as well, pushing the company to make some moves it might not necessarily have made otherwise.

These are not the only tech firms in which Elliott has shown interest. As eWeek reported in October, Elliott has its fingers in a lot of tech deals. The MO is often the same. Elliot buys a stake, then secures a couple of seats on the board and starts pushing for substantive changes in direction.

The question is why a private equity firm like Elliott is suddenly smitten with these large enterprise tech companies. R Ray Wang, who is principal at Constellation Research says it’s because it can extract some money from them.

“The private equity firms are targeting tech companies because their growth rates of 10 to 20 percent may seem slow for tech, but are high [compared to] other industries. They are in the midst of squeezing these companies for cash and forcing M&A across the board,” Wang told TechCrunch.

EMC sold the company before it was forced to make other moves it didn’t really want to make. Citrix wasn’t so lucky, dumping product lines, cutting jobs and much more. These companies could be the beginning of other similar activity by investors like Elliott as large tech companies under pressure from smaller, more nimble competitors become targets of these types of firms.

Citrix did not respond to a request for comment before we published this piece. If they do, we will update the story.

A Day After Launch, “Exploding Kittens” Tops The App Store

“Exploding Kittens,” the hugely successful Kickstarter-funded card game from ex-Microsofties Elan Lee and Shane Small along with The Oatmeal’s creator Matthew Inman, has now been translated into a mobile game. And that game is now explodingonto the App Store, too, having scored the #1 Paid App slot only a day after launching.

The game, as you may recall, became one of Kickstarter’s most-funded projects ever, pulling in nearly $8.8 million in pledges from over 219,000 contributors. It also broke a record for the project with the most individual donors, at the time.

Bursting onto the scene a year ago, where it was touted as the new “Cards Against Humanity,” the game’s concept was to deliver a “kitty-powered version of Russian Roulette.” That is, players take turn drawing cards until someone pulls an exploding kitten and loses the game. Of course, there’s more to it than that – players can also use various cards to defuse the kitten (with belly rubs or catnip sandwiches, e.g.), or skip their turns, attack other players, relocate kittens and more.

In part, the card game’s launch was so successful because of Inman’s involvement, and his ability to leverage The Oatmeal’s sizable fan base to invest, as well as Lee’s reputation in the gaming world.

To bring the game to mobile, Lee and Small partnered with the Seattle-based digital product studio Substantial, as well as Inman, in order to translate the table game into a local, peer-to-peer party game you play on your phone.

Substantial, though not a name consumers may be familiar with themselves, does client work for a number of big names, including The WSJ, News Corp, Google, Amazon, Universal, IDEO, Getty Images, Starbucks, Citi, Genetech, ESPN, Lexus, and others. The company says goal was not just to clone the original, but make an evolved, improved and mobile-friendly version that would appeal to both fans of the card game and new users.

The end result is that the app version of “Exploding Kittens” is a bit different from the original card game. It has pulled some cards and added others, introduced new game mechanics, and has introduced new art from The Oatmeal’s Inman, as well as sounds and voices.

In addition, what’s interesting about the mobile game is that it climbed to the top of the App Store, despite the fact that you can’t play it by yourself, as you can with most mobile games today.

You can’t even play with strangers over the internet for the time being. Instead, as the game’s website explains, “Exploding Kittens” is “very much a party game” – meaning, a “multiplayer game you play with people who are actually sitting near you.”

To enable this functionality, the game uses a combination of Wi-Fi and Bluetooth to allow players to communicate with others around them, instead of relying on the Internet or Game Center. The creators warn that this technology is new and may have some kinks to work out, and bugs.

The technology is similar to what you’ll find in apps like FireChat, the off-the-grid mobile messenger that’s been used at protests, and Occupy Wall Street, as well as in the teen-focused messaging app Jott that can work without a data plan or Wi-Fi connection.

Adding the same sort of offline capability to a mobile game meant to be played in groups, then, is a fairly clever trick. That eliminates the potential problems users could face when their signal isn’t as strong as their competitors, where Wi-Fi isn’t accessible, or even when you’re lacking cellular/data connectivity altogether.

The $1.99 game has now soared to the top of the App Store, again leveraging its prior viral buzz. And it won’t just be raking in revenues by downloads, the app also offers in-app purchases for “Avatar Packs’ that let users personalize their experience. The question for now is how long “Exploding Kittens” can retain its top spot.

According to Substantial’s, Adam Pearson, the Lead Developer on “Exploding Kittens,” the metrics show that a lot of people are playing the game simultaneously, but he declined to provide download numbers.

The product, described as a “version 1.0” release, doesn’t yet include the full feature set. For example, for now it doesn’t offer the “Nope” cards nor is there an Android version available. But the developers say these and more features are in the works for the future.

“We focused on doing the best possible job of adapting the physical card game to the mobile platform by sticking to a face-to-face, party game style of gameplay that still felt natural on a smartphone,” says Pearson, when asked about the company’s plans from this point forward. “Players can expect any future developments to open the game to a broader user-base.”

KnowMe Is A New App For Making Better Videos On Your Phone

After more than a year in development, KnowMe, a new video creation and sharing platform, is launching on the iPhone.

The app was created by Andrew Jarecki, the Emmy-winning and Academy Award-nominated filmmaker behind The Jinx, Catfish, and Capturing the Friedmans.

KnowMe was designed from the ground up to give its users access to video editing technology that would feel less complicated and bulky than existing editing alternatives. Essentially, the startup wanted to provide a content creation tool that would disappear into the background, letting your content take center stage.

KnowMe definitely accomplishes this mission.

The app, which on first launch prompts users to participate in an interactive tutorial with KnowMe ambassador Nev Schulman, is incredibly easy to use.

User make videos by combining live footage, pre-captured photos, and narrated audio recordings to create a final product that is something in between a slideshow and a Vlog.

Editing is done via a process that feels less formal than your traditional timeline based editing suite. The result is an interface that actually makes it fun to create clips.

With the average finished product being around 40 seconds in length, KnowMe videos are definitely more polished and engaging than a vine or Instagram video, but feel more informal than something on YouTube. Essentially, the short clips are able to tell a story while still being short enough for users to consume on the fly.

The app will also include a discovery component, allowing users to view popular videos from other users. However, Jarecki explained that the app will also allow exporting to other social media platforms, which should accelerate user adoption.

KnowMe is available for download today in the iOS App Store.