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IoT Tech Expo arrives in London this December

Publié: juillet 12, 2015, 8:50pm CEST par Wayne Williams

The Internet of Things is definitely a technology that’s going to have a huge impact on our lives in years to come. According to IDC, the IoT market is set to be worth a staggering $1.7 trillion by 2020.

This December will see the launch of a new Internet of Things event designed to capitalize on this growing sector. The IoT Tech Expo Europe 2015 will be taking place at Olympia Central, London, on 2nd -- 3rd December, and is set to showcase the most cutting edge technologies from more than 100 exhibitors and 200 speakers.

There will be seven dedicated conference tracks covering Smart Cities, Connected Industry, Wearables, Developing for the IoT, Connected Living, Data & Security and Connected Health. It will feature agendas advised by industry leaders including; Citi, TVH, Jawbone, Bosch, BT, Ford, Boeing, Beecham Research, Misfit, Nordstrom, Airbus, and more.

The event organizers expect to welcome over 5,000 attendees and BetaNews will be there to bring you all the latest news.

You can find out more about the event at www.iottechexpo.com/europe/

Photo credit: Odua Images / Shutterstock
Second zero-day flaw found in Adobe Flash thanks to Hacking Team

Publié: juillet 12, 2015, 6:09pm CEST par Alan Buckingham

Earlier this week an exploit for Adobe Flash was revealed -- a shock, I know. Now a second is in the wild and already being used. Known by the catchy name CVE-2015-5122, security firm FireEye discovered the flaw buried in the Hacking Team leak and alerted Adobe to it.

Adobe has released a security bulletin stating "Critical vulnerabilities (CVE-2015-5122, CVE-2015-5123) have been identified in Adobe Flash Player 18.0.0.204 and earlier versions for Windows, Macintosh and Linux. Successful exploitation could cause a crash and potentially allow an attacker to take control of the affected system".

The company categorizes this flaw as "critical". FireEye points out that "The CVE-2015-5122 PoC is well written like the previous PoC for CVE-2015-5119 by the same author. The PoC also uses similar constructs for exploiting the Use-After-Free vulnerability in DisplayObject opaqueBackground".

Affected versions include 18.0.0.203 for Windows and Mac, 18.0.0.204 for Linux, 13x versions for Windows and Mac and 11.2.2.481 for Linux.

Adobe is no stranger to these issues with its products, Flash especially. At the moment the bulletin mentions no fix, though one will certainly be coming. The company does acknowledge the issues and those who reported them -- "Adobe would like to thank Dhanesh Kizhakkinan of FireEye for reporting CVE-2015-5122 and Peter Pi of TrendMicro for reporting CVE-2015-5123 and for working with Adobe to help protect our customers".

Image Credit: Jirsak/Shutterstock
gImageReader extracts text from images, PDFs, more

Publié: juillet 12, 2015, 1:06pm CEST par Mike Williams

Extracting text from a PDF can be very easy. Just select a section and copy it to the clipboard, or maybe -- in Adobe Reader -- click File > Save As Other > Text to save the entire document.

This all works just fine, too, until you come across a PDF which is all images. And that’s when you need something a little more powerful.

GImageReader is an open source front end for the Tesseract OCR engine, and can extract text from PDFs, image files, or by acquiring them from your scanner. If that's not enough it also accepts images from the clipboard, or by taking a screenshot.

A one-click "Autodetect layout" option will hopefully detect all the text regions within the source. The reliability of this can be anything from "amazing" to "useless", depending on the image, but you can delete or reorder the regions as necessary. Or you might select a block manually by clicking and dragging with the mouse.

If the task is a simple one -- just a paragraph or two of high quality text -- you could just right-click a region and select "Recognize to clipboard". GImageReader grabs whatever text it can from the image and copies it to the clipboard, ready for immediate reuse elsewhere.

Longer blocks can be sent to an "Output" pane for cleaning up. There’s nothing too advanced -- search and replace, stripping line breaks, a chance for manual editing -- but it might be helpful, and when you’re done the results can be saved as a TXT file.

GImageReader’s interface is a little awkward in places, but once you've figured it out it’s easy enough to use, and the Tesseract engine can be very accurate. The program is available now for Windows XP+ and Linux.
Here's how Windows Hello login works in Windows 10

Publié: juillet 12, 2015, 12:38pm CEST par Mark Wilson

One of the more intriguing new features of Windows 10 is Windows Hello. If you're sick of typing a password to log into your account, but don’t want to do away with security altogether, you can use this biometric feature to log in using your face or fingerprint.

Windows Hello works in conjunction with Microsoft Passport to lock down your system, but the facial recognition feature is only compatible with certain hardware. This fact means that it has been hard to try out Windows Hello, but over on SuperSite for Windows Richard Hay got his hands on an Intel RealSense 3D Camera (F200) and recorded a demo of how it works.

While fingerprint recognition is compatible with a number of readers, the Intel RealSense 3D Camera (F200) is the camera specifically mentioned by Joe Belfiore when he introduced Windows Hello earlier in the year. Ray's video shows how quick and easy it is to log in using the camera.

Check out the video to see Windows Hello in action in build 10166 of Windows 10:

Is this a feature you think you'll make use of?

Photo credit: Kostenko Maxim / Shutterstock
FTC could probe Apple Music over legality of 30 percent cut from streaming rivals

Publié: juillet 12, 2015, 10:57am CEST par Mark Wilson

The launch of Apple Music has been one of the most controversial for some time. After complaints about the free trial period not generating income for record labels -- a problem seemingly sorted out by the intervention of Taylor Swift -- attention turned to how little the music streaming service paid artists the rest of the time.

Now Apple has a new problem, bringing Apple Music into the limelight for the wrong reasons once again. The Federal Trade Commission is currently considering whether to probe the company for antitrust violations. Reuters reports that the FTC could be on the verge of launching an investigation into the legality of the 30 percent cut Apple takes from other streaming music services such as Spotify.

In fact, it was Spotify that recently brought the issue to public attention. The company emailed its customers to point out that while taking out a subscription through the App Store would cost $12.99 per month, buying direct from Spotify costs just $9.99. Industry insiders say that the FTC has held meetings with a number of "concerned parties", although it is not yet clear whether a formal investigation will be launched.

The 30 percent commission taken by Apple is something that is the norm in the App Store -- there is nothing unusual in the way streaming music services are being treated. But while Spotify has raised the price of its subscription for those making the purchase through the store, others such as Deezer choose to shoulder the cost themselves. While it is possible for any streaming music service to take a leaf out of Spotify's book and widely promote alternative, cheaper ways to take out a subscription, this is yet to happen.

Opinion is divided as to whether an investigation is needed and whether Apple is in the wrong or not. Some argue that the cut it takes is a perfectly acceptable fee for the benefit of promotion through the App Store, while others say it is an unfair abuse of power. At the moment, Apple does not permit companies to promote the non-App Store subscription route from within apps. Apple could find itself embroiled in a court case reminiscent of the ebook price-fixing scandal which only recently came to a conclusion, costing the company $450 million.

Photo credit: FooTToo / Shutterstock