Mozilla warns of leaky developer network database

Mozilla’s website for developers leaked email addresses and encrypted passwords of registered users for about a month due to a database error, the

Email addresses for 76,000 Mozilla Development Network (MDN) users were exposed, along with around 4,000 encrypted passwords, wrote Stormy Peters, director of development relations, and Joe Stevensen, operations security manager in a blog post. Mozilla is notifying those affected.

No malicious activity on the affected server was detected, but that does not mean the data wasn’t accessed, they wrote.

A Web developer discovered around 10 days ago that a data sanitization process on the database running the MDN wasn’t working. The leak started around June 23 and continued for a month.

“As soon as we learned of it, the database dump file was removed from the server immediately, and the process that generates the dump was disabled to prevent further disclosure,” they wrote.

The exposed passwords were encrypted and “salted,” a security measure that makes it difficult to revert them to their original form. Even if the passwords were decrypted, “they by themselves cannot be used to authenticate with the MDN website today,” according to the post.

Since some people may used the same MDN password on other websites, it’s recommended the password be changed.

Mozilla said it was “deeply sorry” for the error.

“In addition to notifying users and recommending short term fixes, we’re also taking a look at the processes and principles that are in place that may be made better to reduce the likelihood of something like this happening again,” according to the post.

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Climbing Aboard the 3rd Platform

Recent news from IBM and Microsoft highlight the upheavals underway as the technology industry rapidly transitions to new realities.


IBM announced that profits were up even as revenue was down as it continues to shift away from hardware business lines and tries "to convert the future of technology into an opportunity rather than a threat." Microsoft announced its largest layoff ever as it continues to "become more agile and move faster" toward cloud and mobile hardware!

These upheavals are due to the forces propelling mobile, social, cloud and big data into what IDC labels the 3rd Platform, “the emerging platform for growth and innovation.”

"The 3rd Platform will deliver the next generation of competitive advantage apps and services that will significantly disrupt market leaders in virtually every industry," IDC seer Frank Gens said, in laying out the firm’s predictions for 2014, late last year.

When long-time nemeses Apple and IBM climb into bed you know the ground is shaking!

With access to cloud infrastructure and other resources, new companies can be created almost overnight – the advantages of size that large, established companies used to rely on have greatly diminished. Everybody needs to be more agile, more flexible and willing to sacrifice proprietary advantages when customers demand adherence to open standards.

With so much change, no organization can afford to stand pat on the networking architecture of the past. Enterprises are driven to simultaneously improve business processes while reducing IT costs.

In order to move beyond the physical limitations of yesterday’s architecture so they can manage the complexity of the ever more connected world, many enterprises are modernizing data centers. Seeking to transform infrastructure into assets, they are turning to virtualization and cloud computing to drive up availability and transition IT to a services orientation.

They won’t get there with traditional Ethernet networks that rely on a rigid hierarchical approach that creates inefficient traffic patterns and purposely curtails the scalability. A newer category of flatter Ethernet networks called Ethernet fabrics combine the familiarity of Ethernet networks with the data center-hardened reliability and performance characteristics of fabric technologies such as Fibre Channel to provide organizations with elastic, highly automated, mission-critical networks to meet rapidly changing requirements.

Ethernet fabrics are specifically designed for the virtualized data center environments needed to transition to the 3rd Platform. Rather than focusing on management of discrete physical devices and physical ports, they logically eliminate the management of multiple switching layers and apply policies and manage traffic across many physical switches as if they were one.

Trying to forestall movement to the 3rd Platform is, at best, a defensive strategy that attempts to maintain a static position in an incredibly dynamic environment. It doesn’t make sense to become more stodgy while competitors are increasingly agile. As the situations at IBM and Microsoft attest, market advantages that once seemed insurmountable can quickly erode in the face of rapid transformation.

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Vision-correcting display nixes your need for eyeglasses

Your reading glasses will be so yesterday with UC Berkeley's new technology

What would it be like if you didn't need your eyeglasses to clearly see your laptop screen or a text message on your smartphone?

Scientists at the University of California Berkeley are working on computer screens that would adjust their images to accommodate individual user's visual needs. Think of it as a display that wears the glasses so users don't have to.

"For people with just near sightedness or far sightedness, life isn't so bad," said Fu-Chung Huang, the lead author of the research paper on the display project at Berkeley. "But as you get older, your lenses lose elasticity and you cannot read things close to you, like a cell phone or tablet. You need another pair of reading glasses, which can be quite inconvenient.
Scientists at the University of California Berkeley are developing a vision-correcting display that would mean users wouldn't need their eyeglasses to see it clearly. (Video: UC Berkeley)

"With this technology, in the future, you just need to press a button and the display will accommodate to your vision," he said in an email to Computerworld.

Users would input their vision prescription into their individual desktop, laptop or mobile device. Then when the user logs on with a password, the computer recognizes the user and automatically adjusts its display.

Researchers at Berkeley, working with scientists at MIT, are developing algorithms that will compensate for a user's specific vision needs to adjust the image on a screen so the user can see it clearly without needing to wear corrective lenses. The software will create vision-correcting displays.

The researchers have been working on the technology for three years.
Computer screen
Researchers place a printed pinhole array mask, shown here, on top of an iPod touch as part of their prototype of a visually corrected display. (Image: Fu-Chung Huang)

A user who, for instance, needs reading glasses to see or read anything clearly on his laptop or tablet screens wouldn't need to wear the eyeglasses if the displays adjust themselves for his vision needs.

If a user who needs one pair of glasses to see things at a distance and another pair for reading, would not need to put on reading glasses to read her emails or Facebook posts if the display could adjust itself for her near-vision needs.

The displays, according to Berkeley, also could be used for people whose vision cannot be corrected with eyeglasses or contacts.

"This project started with the idea that Photoshop can do some image deblurring to the photo, so why can't I correct the visual blur on the display instead of installing a Photoshop in the brain?" asked Huang, who now is a software engineer at Microsoft. "The early stage is quite hard, as everyone said it is impossible. I found out that it is indeed impossible on a "conventional 2D display." I need to modify the optical components to make this happen."

The university said that the hardware setup adds a printed pinhole screen sandwiched between two layers of clear plastic to an iPod display to enhance image sharpness. The tiny pinholes are 75 micrometers each and spaced 390 micrometers apart.

The algorithm, which was developed at Berkeley, works by altering the intensity of each direction of light that emanates from a single pixel in an image based upon a user's specific visual impairment, the university reported. The light then passes through the pinhole array in a way that allows the user to see a sharp image.

Huang, who has not yet talked with computer monitor or smartphone and tablet manufacturers about the research, noted that the display technology could be developed into a thin screen protector.

"The current version is still quite fragile," he added. "It requires precise calibration between the eye and the display and it took some time to find the sweet spot for my own eye. But remember that Amazon just announced the Fire Phone with the super fancy dynamic perspective to track your eye. This technology can solve my problem ... so I'm pretty optimistic about the overall progress."

However, he said that at this point in their work, the technology wouldn't work on a shared display such as a television screen.

"In the future, we also hope to extend this application to multi-way correction on a shared display, so users with different visual problems can view the same screen and see a sharp image," he said.

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Microsoft slates critical IE, Windows patches for Tuesday

One month left for businesses to migrate from Windows 8.1 to Windows 8.1 Update

Microsoft today said it will ship six security updates to customers next week, patching all versions of Internet Explorer (IE) and nearly all supported editions of Windows.

The IE update, one of two classified as "critical" -- Microsoft's most serious threat ranking -- will patch IE6 on Windows Server 2003, IE7, IE8, IE9, IE10 and the newest, IE11.

It's unlikely that July's IE update will match June's in size: Microsoft fixed a record 60 flaws in the browser on June 10. (Originally, Microsoft said it had patched 59 IE bugs last month, but a week later acknowledged it had forgotten to add one to the list, and so upped the count to an even 60.)

Windows 7 users who have not freshened IE11 with a mandatory April update will not receive next week's browser fixes.

According to Thursday's advanced notice, which briefly described the July updates, the second critical bulletin will patch all client editions of Windows -- from Vista to Windows 8.1 -- and all server versions except for those running on systems powered by Intel's Itanium processors. Windows Server 2008 and Server 2012 systems provisioned by installing only the Server Core -- a minimal install with many features and services omitted to lock down the machine -- are also exempt from Bulletin 2, Microsoft said.

Of the remaining four updates, three were labeled "important" by Microsoft -- the threat step below critical -- while the fourth was pegged "moderate." All will offer patches for some or all Windows editions, both on the desktop and in the data center.

Security researchers pointed to the two critical bulletins as the obvious first-to-deploy for most Microsoft customers.

They also remarked on Bulletin 6, the single moderate update, which will patch Microsoft Service Bus for Windows Server. The bus is a messaging and communications service that third-party developers can use to tie their code to Windows Server and Microsoft Azure, the Redmond, Wash. company's cloud service.

"The odd one out this month is the Moderate Denial of Service in 'Microsoft Service Bus for Windows Server,'" said Ross Barrett, senior manager of security engineering at Rapid7, in an email. "It's part of the Microsoft Web Platform package and is not installed by default with any OS version."

Although Microsoft did not mention it in today's advance notice, or in the blog post by the Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC), enterprises have one more month to deploy April's Windows 8.1 Update and Server 2012 R2 Update before losing patch privileges for devices running Windows 8.1 or servers running 2012 R2.

Hardware powered by Windows 8.1 or Server 2012 R2 must be updated before Aug. 12, the next scheduled Patch Tuesday, to receive that month's updates, as well as any future security fixes.

Or in some cases, even present patches, said Chris Goettl, a program product manager at Shavlik, in an email.

"One thing to watch out for [next week] will be [something similar to] the many exceptions we saw last month," Goettl cautioned. "Many of the updates we saw in June required other updates to be in place, depending on the platform. For those running Windows 8.1 or Server 2012 R2, they need to be prepared for more of these updates to require Update 1 before they can apply them. Microsoft has stated they would delay a hard enforcement until August, but more and more of the patches [have] had variations that required Update 1. So look out for that cut over -- it's coming quick.

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Top 15 Metro Areas for Social Media Marketing Jobs

Top 15 Metro Areas for Social Media Marketing Jobs

The demand for social media skills is growing fast. If you are entering the workforce for the first time (or want a new challenge) building up your social media marketing skills is a good strategy. Below are the 15 best-paying places to launch your career.

Social media marketing is an increasingly popular career choice among today's tech-savvy workforce. The value of these skills, which were virtually nonexistent a decade ago, grew 3.9 percent over the past two years, according to PayScale. With demand growing, those entering the workforce for the first time (and others who are seeking a new challenge) are quickly adopting the skills necessary for this field. These are the top 15 metropolitan areas and median salaries for a career in social media marketing.

San Francisco-San Mateo-Redwood City, Calif.
The highest paying jobs for social media marketing are located in – yep, you guessed it – San Francisco. The metropolitan area of San Francisco, San Mateo and Redwood City, Calif. commands the highest pay among all regions in the U.S. with a median compensation of $66,600. The 47 square miles of San Francisco are densely packed with 825,000 people living within the city’s borders as of 2012. The cost of living is 51.9 percent greater than the national average.

San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, Calif.
Employers in the heart of Silicon Valley – San Jose, Sunnyvale and Santa Clara, Calif. -- will typically pay $65,600 for employees with social media management skills. San Jose is the third largest city in California and tenth largest city in the country with a population approaching one million. The cost of living is 39.6 percent greater than the national average.

New York-Wayne-White Plains, N.Y.
The greater metropolitan area of New York comes in third with a typical pay of $62,400. More than 8.18 million people call New York City home and about half of the city’s inhabitants were born out of state or country. The income per capita is $30,498 while median household income stands at $50,285. The cost of living is 47.8 percent greater than the national average.

Seattle-Bellevue-Everett, Wash.
Employers clear across the continent in the metro area of Seattle pay an average of $61,600. Seattle’s population of 608,660 is growing well above the national average, jumping 8 percent from 2000 to 2012. Income per capita is $40,868 while median household income stands at $60,665.The cost of living is 21.6 percent greater than the national average.

Boston-Quincy, Mass.
Workers in Boston and surrounding areas enjoy the fifth highest compensation for social media in the country, bringing home an average salary of $60,300. The income per capita in Boston is $31,856 while median household income stands at $50,684. More than 617,000 people call Boston home. The cost of living is 32.4 percent greater than the national average.

Los Angeles-Long Beach-Glendale, Calif.
America’s second most populated metro area, Los Angeles, commands an average salary of $60,100 for jobs that require social media skills. The “City of Angels” sprawls across 469 square miles with a population of about 3.8 million people. The income per capita in Los Angeles is $27,620 with a median household income of $49,138.The cost of living is 27 percent greater than the national average.

Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, D.C./Va./Md./W.V.
Employers based in the metro area of our nation’s capital typically pay $60,000 for a career in social media. Income per capita is among the highest in the nation at $42,078 with a median household income of $58,526. The city’s population of 601,723 is growing steadily, jumping 5.2 percent from 2000 to 2012.The cost of living is 17.6 percent greater than the national average.

Santa Ana-Anaheim-Irvine, Calif.
Social media workers in the region surrounding Santa Ana, Anaheim and Irvine, Calif. earn an average of $59,200. Santa Ana’s population has shrunk over the past decade to 324,528 people, but other areas of this metropolis like Irvine are growing like wildfire. Irvine’s population jumped 48.5 percent from 2000 to 2012, ending 2013 with 212,375 inhabitants. The cost of living is 19.2 percent greater than the national average.

Dallas-Plano-Irving, Texas
Texas comes up big, rounding out the top 10 metro areas for social media jobs with employees making $58,800 on average in the Dallas area. The population of Dallas has remained relatively flat since the turn of the century with almost 1.2 million people calling the city home as of 2013. Income per capita comes in less than $1,000 above the national average at $26,716 while median household income stands at $41,682. The cost of living is 8.3 percent less than the national average.

Houston-Baytown-Sugar Land, Texas
Employers in "Space City" pay an average salary of $57,000 for a position in social media. The city's population of 2.1 million as of 2013 carries an income per capita just barely above the national average at $25,927 and median household income of $42,962. The cost of living is 17.1 percent less than the national average.

Chicago-Naperville-Joliet, Ill.
Workers with social media skills in the greater Chicago area earn an average salary of $56,700. Despite being the third largest city in the country, Chicago is shrinking with nearly 2.7 million people now calling the city home. The income per capita in the "Windy City" is $27,148 while median household income stands at $46,877. The cost of living is 4.1 percent greater than the national average.

Minneapolis-St. Paul-Bloomington, Minn./Wisc.
Employees with social media marketing skills in the metropolitan area of "Twin Cities" take home an average salary of $56,600. The population of Minneapolis is stagnant at 382,578 people. Income per capita is $29,551 while median household income stands at $46,075.The cost of living is 1.3 percent greater than the national average.

Philadelphia, Pa.
Social media skills in the "City of Brotherly Love" will typically bring home a salary of $56,300. Population in Philadelphia has been relatively flat the past decade, growing just 0.6 percent to about 1.53 million people. The city's income per capita is well below the national average at $21,117 while median household income is even lower overall at just $36,251. The cost of living is 0.9 percent greater than the national average.

San Diego-Carlsbad-San Marcos, Calif.
People are flocking to sunny San Diego, boosting the city's population 6.9 percent from 2000 to 2012 to 1.3 million as of last year. Jobs requiring social media skills pay an average salary of $56,200. The city’s income per capita and median household income is also high at $32,553 and $62,480, respectively. The cost of living is 25.7 percent greater than the national average.

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First look: Amazon's new Fire Phone

No, really!
Amazon has finally released its own smartphone. The Fire Phone, which runs on Amazon's Android-based Fire OS 3.5 and incorporates a host of features designed to make shopping your life easier, debuted Wednesday in a Seattle event hosted by Jeff Bezos. Here's a look at what's been brewing behind the scenes for all this time.

The look of the thing
At its core, the Fire Phone isn’t much different than any other high-end handset on the market right now – 2.2GHz quad-core processor, 2GB RAM, 4.7-inch 720p screen, 32GB of base storage, and so on. But Amazon has gone out of its way to include some unique bells and whistles, as we’ll see.

Rubberized construction
Given that we’ve had glass, plastic, and metal phones already, it was inevitable that Amazon would do its best to set the Fire Phone apart with a unique rubberized build. Oh, and it also blends in Gorilla Glass, stainless steel, and aluminum. So it’s got most of the build bases covered, really.

Cool camera
While it’s hardly unique, the Fire Phone’s 13MP main shooter is still impressive, packing HDR and optical image stabilization capabilities, along with a wide aperture lens. The coolest part of the camera, however, might be the…

Unlimited cloud photo storage
Yeah. Unlimited storage in Amazon's cloud for your photos and videos, automatically backed up wirelessly and available on other Fire devices and Cloud Drive apps, may be the main eyebrow-raiser in the Fire Phone's imaging suite.

Mayday button
The Mayday feature introduced in the latest models of the Kindle Fire tablet line has made it to the Fire Phone, allowing users to summon live Amazon tech support via video link at the touch of a button.

Firefly
This will likely be Amazon's most talked-about Fire Phone feature. Take a picture of a product, and Amazon searches for pricing and availability. It also recognizes music, movies, and TV shows from their audio, can capture phone numbers and email addresses from advertisements, and rubs your back when you're stressed. (Last thing may not be true.)

Dynamic perspective
The Fire Phone uses four small but sophisticated cameras, located at each corner of the device's front, to track head movements and gestures, allowing users to exercise a degree of one-handed control over the device.

A free year of Amazon Prime
Users can get a free year of Amazon's Prime service if they pre-order soon enough – the device will ship July 25, and pre-orders are already open. Tough luck if you're not an AT&T fan, though – the Fire Phone is an AT&T exclusive. The 32GB model will cost you $200 with the usual two-year contract, or $650 without a subsidy.

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10 most powerful PaaS companies

Platform-as-a-service is the least mature of the major cloud services categories. There are multiple types of PaaS, and vendors are playing in more than one sub-category, so it’s not easy to tell the players without a scorecard. Here are 10 companies that have emerged as leaders in the PaaS market.

Amazon Web Services
Just like Jack planting his magic beans in solid ground, Amazon has built its application runtime PaaS, Amazon Web Service (AWS) Elastic Beanstalk (now in beta), on the solid footing of the very popular Infrastructure as a Service platform, EC2. And while the retailer turned cloud provider doesn’t necessary have a loyal developer following, it’s continually rolling out new tools to entice them. So far the portfolio includes AWS Toolkit for Eclipse (a plug-in for the Eclipse Java Integrated Development Environment), AWS CloudFormation (a service that lets developers create and provision Amazon resources), several cloud-based database options and SDKs for Android and Apple mobile machines, ERuby, Java, PH and .Net.

LongJump
LongJump landed in the PaaS fray very early on in 2008. It has steadily added new features and developer-centric support to attract a customer following that the company says is 600 strong at this point. Long Jump’s biggest coup came in the form of an AT&T partnership announced last November in which the telco rolled out a simplified PaaS service geared toward tech savvy business folks that has the LongJump PaaS stack at its core. Forrester analyst Stefan Reid said this deal could pave the way for more licensing deals for the company.

Microsoft
There have been rumblings that Microsoft’s 2-year-old Azure PaaS play is not getting the traction the company had hoped. Microsoft’s PaaS portfolio includes the Windows Azure computing environment for applications and persistent storage for both structured and unstructured data; Windows Azure AppFabric a range of services that connects users and on-premises applications to cloud-hosted applications, manages authentication, and implements data management, and SQL Azure, a cloud database service. All Windows centric, of course, but analysts say that Microsoft is making noises about opening that up a bit. And they say you can’t discount the power Microsoft has in its army of .Net developers waiting in the wings to see what the cloud means for them.

IBM
IBM is a relatively late entry into the PaaS market as it only rolled out SmartCloud Application Services PaaS last October. But the company has long-standing ties to the corporate enterprise and this platform – based on the long-trusted WebSphere middleware -- allows enterprises to build Java-based apps that can run in the public cloud, called IBM Smart Cloud Enterprise, or on premise. IBM is looking to keep their customers in a comfort zone while pushing them out to the cloud.

RedHat
Linux lovers are uniting behind the thought of an open source PaaS like RedHat’s OpenShift. And industry watchers are intrigued by the prospect of portable applications that can be pulled from one infrastructure platform whose fees or contingencies become arduous and easily placed on another one without breakage. It simply remains to be seen how big an ecosystem RedHat can build around OpenShift and how useful it will be corporate developers.

Cloud Foundry
Cloud Foundry is the open source PaaS that was spearheaded in early 2011 by VMware and around which the company plans to build a future commercial product. As with Red Hat’s initiative, VMware is attracting developers who want an open platform that lets them build in the language they want and run on the IaaS they like. According to company officials, the project is gaining significant traction because over 2,100 developers are actively following the changes in the open source code. Analysts have speculated that AppFog, a start-up already offering a comprehensive PaaS based on the Cloud Foundry code, is ripe for the picking should the commercial side of CloudFoundry need a boost.

Google
Google claims it’s got 200,000 developers building applications on top of its App Engine PaaS. That’s in spite of a rate hike that really got their base riled up back in the September, giving all kinds of fodder to competing products that claim to be both more open and more affordable. But Google doesn’t seem to be bothered and is forging ahead with an upgrade that supports a premium level of service in which customers will receive a 99.95 uptime service-level agreement.

CloudBees
CloudBees was first out of the gate with a Java-based PaaS that gave enterprises an easy way to move existing Java applications into the cloud. RUN@cloud is the application runtime side of the CloudBees’ PaaS story, providing traditional application server functionality for web, Java and Spring applications. CloudBees customers choose their underlying IaaS or private cloud. Applications running on RUN@cloud can be built using traditional Java EE development tools or using CloudBees’ second PaaS offering called, DEV@cloud. DEV@cloud is a cloud-based development, build and test environment. CloudBees’ power lies in its understanding that there are lots of sunk costs in existing Java applications from which enterprises are loath to walk away.

Engine Yard
Engine Yard is one of the leading PaaS players for Ruby on Rails and PHP developers. These two development languages are most often associated with cool, new greenfield applications running in the cloud. Engine yard, founded in 2006 and still privately held, has a client list that includes Nike, AOL, Apple, Disney, and MTV.

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