Prepare to Hang Up the Phone, Forever
At decade’s end, the trusty landline telephone could be nothing more than a memory.
Telecom giants AT&T T -0.22% and Verizon Communications VZ -0.17% are lobbying states, one by one, to hang up the plain, old telephone system, what the industry now calls POTS–the copper-wired landline phone system whose reliability and reach made the U.S. a communications powerhouse for more than 100 years.
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303325204579465321638954500
2degrees reveals 4G NZ launch date
Announced this morning, the telco expects to launch 4G commercially in Auckland in July, followed by the wider Auckland region and other main centres – Hamilton, Wellington and Christchurch – by the end of the year.
The rollout in to provincial areas will continue in to 2015. 2degrees CEO Stewart Sherriff says the company is now at a point where it is ready for the move to 4G.
http://techday.com/telco-review/news/2degrees-reveals-4g-nz-launch-date/181275/
New Microsoft Word Zero-Day Used in Targeted Attacks
Microsoft warned on Monday of a remote code execution vulnerability (CVE-2014-1761) in Microsoft Word that is being actively exploited in targeted attacks directed at Microsoft Word 2010.
“The vulnerability could allow remote code execution if a user opens a specially crafted RTF file using an affected version of Microsoft Word, or previews or opens a specially crafted RTF email message in Microsoft Outlook while using Microsoft Word as the email viewer,” Microsoft explained in the advisory.
If successfully exploited, an attacker could gain the same user rights as the current user, Microsoft said, noting that users whose accounts are configured to have fewer user rights on the system could be less impacted than accounts with administrative privileges.
http://www.securityweek.com/new-microsoft-word-zero-day-used-targeted-attacks
Microsoft makes source code for MS-DOS and Word for Windows available to public
On Tuesday, we dusted off the source code for early versions of MS-DOS and Word for Windows. With the help of the Computer History Museum, we are making this code available to the public for the first time.
The museum has done an excellent job of curating some of the most significant historical software programs in computing history. As part of this ongoing project, the museum will make available two of the most widely used software programs of the 1980’s, MS DOS 1.1 and 2.0 and Microsoft Word for Windows 1.1a, to help future generations of technologists better understand the roots of personal computing.
In 1980, IBM approached Microsoft to work on a project code-named “Chess.” What followed was a significant milestone in the history of the personal computer. Microsoft, at the time, provided the BASIC language interpreter for IBM. However, they had other plans and asked Microsoft to create an operating system. Without their own on hand, Microsoft licensed an operating system from Seattle Computer Products which would become the foundation for PC-DOS and MS-DOS.
Exploding stars prove Newton’s gravity unchanged over cosmic time
Australian astronomers have combined all observations of supernovae ever made to determine that the strength of gravity has remained unchanged over the last nine billion years.
Newton’s gravitational constant, known as G, describes the attractive force between two objects, together with the separation between them and their masses. It has been previously suggested that G could have been slowly changing over the 13.8 billion years since the Big Bang.
If G has been decreasing over time, for example, this would mean that the Earth’s distance to the Sun was slightly larger in the past, meaning that we would experience longer seasons now compared to at much earlier points in the Earth’s history.
http://phys.org/news/2014-03-stars-newton-gravity-unchanged-cosmic.html
