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Privacy

Belgium Investigates Suspected Cyber Spying By Foreign State 158

Posted by samzenpus from the usual-suspect dept.
First time accepted submitter julf writes "The Belgian newspaper De Standaard reports that in an internal investigation, Belgacom, the mostly state-owned telecoms operator in Belgium, discovered evidence that the NSA has been listening in (Dutch) on the Belgacom network since 2011. From the Reuters article: 'Belgium said on Monday it was investigating suspected foreign state espionage against its main telecoms company, which is the top carrier of voice traffic in Africa and the Middle East, and a newspaper pointed the finger at the United States. Federal prosecutors said in a statement that the former state telecoms monopoly Belgacom had filed a complaint in July about the hacking of several servers and computers. "The inquiry has shown that the hacking was only possible by an intruder with significant financial and logistic means," they said.'"
Programming

Preventing Cheating At Hackathons 104

Posted by samzenpus from the cheaters-never-win dept.
theodp writes "The fist rule of Hackathon Club is don't talk about Hackathon Club cheating. But ever-increasing stakes — the MHacks Hackathon at the Univ. of Michigan is offering over $30,000 in prizes — prompts Kevin Conley to broach the subject, suggesting it's time for some common-sense measures — including showing one's code or reducing prize money — to discourage Hackathon ruses, which can include pre-coding, faked live demos/videos, and the use of remote teammates."
Biotech

DoD Declassifies Flu Pandemic Plan Containing Sobering Assumptions 337

Posted by samzenpus from the what's-the-plan dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The Department of Defense has just declassified a copy of its 2009 Concept of Operations Plan for an Influenza Pandemic. Among the Plan's scary yet reasonable assumptions are that in the United States, such a pandemic will kill 2 percent of the infected population, or about 2 million people. The plan also assumes that a vaccine won't be available for at least 4 to 6 months after confirmation of sustained human transmission, and that the weekly vaccine manufacturing capability will only produce 1 percent of the total US vaccine required. State and local governments will be overwhelmed, and civilian mortuary operations will require military augmentation. Measures such as limiting public gatherings, closing schools, social distancing, protective sequestration and masking will be required to limit transmission and reduce illness and death. International and interstate transportation will be restricted to contain the spread of the virus. If a pandemic starts outside the US, it will enter the country at multiple locations and spread quickly to other parts of the country. A related document, CONPLAN 3591-09, was released by DoD in 2010."
Science

Researchers Develop the Most Detailed Map of Gravitational Variations Ever 88

Posted by samzenpus from the he's-not-heavy dept.
schliz writes "An Australian-German team of researchers has developed the most detailed map of gravitational variations ever, using satellite data, gravitational readings and small-scale topographical models. They say the data will help civil engineers and miners, and will be available for free online. Gravitational fields vary because the Earth isn't perfectly spherical. According to the new map, the field is 0.7% greater near the North Pole (9.83ms-2) than at Peru's Nevado Huascaran summit (9.76ms-2). The difference is 40% more than previously expected."
Technology

3D-Printed Gun Bought and Displayed By London Art Museum 133

Posted by samzenpus from the print-and-shoot dept.
Sparrowvsrevolution writes "The world's first 3D-printed gun known as the Liberator has been treated as a technological marvel and a terrorist threat. Now it's officially become a work of art. On Sunday, London's Victoria & Albert museum of art and design announced that it's buying two of the original Liberator printed guns from their creator, the libertarian hacker non-profit known as Defense Distributed, and will display them during its Design Festival. Cody Wilson, Defense Distributed's founder, calls the museum's acquisition of the gun a victory for his group: 'It will now be this curated, permanent cultural provocation.'"
United States

NSA Spies On International Payments 314

Posted by samzenpus from the counting-the-money dept.
jones_supa writes "The National Security Agency (NSA) widely monitors international payments, banking and credit card transactions, according to documents seen by SPIEGEL. Information acquired by the former NSA contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden, show that the spying is conducted by a branch called Follow the Money (FTM). The collected information then flows into the NSA's own financial databank, called Tracfin, which in 2011 contained 180 million records. Some 84 percent of the data is from credit card transactions."
Transportation

Cruise Ship "Costa Concordia" Salvage Attempt To Go Ahead 151

Posted by samzenpus from the making-the-best-of-things dept.
dryriver writes "A daring attempt to pull the shipwrecked Costa Concordia upright will go ahead on Monday, Italian officials have confirmed. The Civil Protection agency said the sea and weather conditions were right for the salvage attempt. Engineers have never tried to move such a huge ship so close to land. Thirty-two people died when the cruise ship hit rocks off the Tuscan island of Giglio in January 2012. It has been lying on its side ever since. Five people have already been convicted of manslaughter over the disaster, and the ship's captain, Francesco Schettino, is currently on trial accused of manslaughter and abandoning ship. The salvage operation is due to begin at 06:00 (04:00 GMT) on Monday, and it is being described as one of the largest and most daunting ever attempted. The head of the operation, Nick Sloane, told AFP news agency that it was now or never for the Costa Concordia, because the hull was gradually weakening and might not survive another winter. Engineers will try to roll the ship up using cables and the weight of water contained in huge metal boxes welded to the ship's sides — a process called parbuckling. This procedure must be done very slowly to prevent further damage to the hull, which has spent more than 18 months partially submerged in 50ft of water and fully exposed to the elements. The salvage project has so far cost more than 600m euros ($800m; £500m) and could cost a lot more by the time the operation is complete."
Technology

USB "Condom" Allows You To Practice Safe Charging 208

Posted by samzenpus from the plugging-it-in dept.
MojoKid writes "Yep, a USB condom. That term is mostly a dose of marketing brilliance, which is to say that grabs your attention while also serving as an apt description of the product. A little company called int3.cc has developed a product—a USB condom—that blocks the data pins in your USB device while leaving the power pins free. Thus, any time you need to plug a device such as a smartphones into a USB port to charge it—let's say at a public charging kiosk or a coworker's computer--you don't have to worry about compromising any data or contracting some nasty malware. It's one of those simple solutions that seems so obvious once someone came up with it."
Social Networks

California School District Hires Firm To Monitor Students' Social Media 250

Posted by samzenpus from the let's-have-a-look-at-what-you-have-there dept.
An anonymous reader writes "A suburban Los Angeles school district is taking a novel approach to tackling the problem of cyber-bullying. It's paying a company to snoop on students' social media pages. 'The district in Glendale, California, is paying $40,500 to a firm to monitor and report on 14,000 middle and high school students' posts on Twitter, Facebook and other social media for one year. Though critics liken the monitoring to government stalking, school officials and their contractor say the purpose is student safety. As classes began this fall, the district awarded the contract after it earlier paid the firm, Geo Listening, $5,000 last spring to conduct a pilot project monitoring 9,000 students at three high schools and a middle school. Among the results was a successful intervention with a student "who was speaking of ending his life" on his social media, said Chris Frydrych, CEO of the firm.'"
Patents

The Man Who Created the Pencil Eraser and How Patents Have Changed 234

Posted by samzenpus from the not-really-new dept.
fermion writes "This weeks 'Who Made That' column in The New York Times concerns the built in pencil eraser. In 1858 Hymen Lipman put a rubber plug into the wood shaft of a pencil. An investor then paid about 2 million in today's dollars for the patent. This investor might have become very rich had the supreme court not ruled that all Lipmen had done was put together two known technologies, so the patent was not valid. The question is where has this need for patents to be innovative gone? After all there is the Amazon one-click patent which, after revision, has been upheld. Microsoft Activesync technology patent seems to simply patent copying information from one place to another. In this modern day do patents promote innovation, or simply protect firms from competition?"
Technology

Mitsuku Chatbot Wins Loebner Prize 2013 78

Posted by samzenpus from the more-human-than-human dept.
mikejuk writes "The final round of the 23rd annual Loebner Prize competition took place in Londonderry, Northern Ireland with four chatbots hoping to convince four judges that they were humans. Mitsuku, a chatbot that is kept busy chatting to people around the world, was awarded this year's bronze medal. Mitsuku's botmaster, Steve Worswick, used to run a music website. Once he added a chatbot he discovered more people visited to chat than for music so he concentrated all his efforts on the bot but he still regards it as a hobby. Mitsuku uses AIML (Artificial Intelligence Markup Language) and is a pandorabot, based on the free open-source-based community webservice the enables anyone who wants to, to develop and publish chatbots on the web."
Technology

Toronto Family Bans All Technology In Their Home Made After 1986 534

Posted by samzenpus from the have-you-tried-super-mario-bros-yet? dept.
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Mary Am Shah reports in the Toronto Sun that 26-year-old Blair McMillan has banned any technology in his house post-1986, the year he and his girlfriend Morgan were born. They're doing it because their kids – Trey, 5, and Denton, 2 – wouldn't look up from their parents' iPhones and iPads long enough to kick a ball around the backyard. 'That's kind of when it hit me because I'm like, wow, when I was a kid, I lived outside,' says Blair adding that now 'we're parenting our kids the same way we were parented for a year just to see what it's like.' The McMillans do their banking in person instead of online. They develop rolls of film for $20 each instead of Instagramming their sons' antics. They recently traveled across the United States using paper maps and entertaining their screaming kids with coloring books and stickers, passing car after car with TVs embedded in the headrests and content infants seated in the back. Their plan is to continue living like it's 1986 until April 2014. Morgan, who admits she thought her boyfriend was 'crazy,' now devours books to pass the time and only uses a computer at work. 'I remember the day before we started this, I was a wreck and I was like I can't believe I have to delete my Facebook!' Blair originally experienced a form of phantom pain for the first few days after giving up his cellphone. 'The strangest thing without having a cellphone is that I could almost feel my pocket vibrating and I wanted to check my pocket.' Still Morgan says the change has been good for their family's spirit. 'We're just closer, there's more talking,'"
The Almighty Buck

NSA Chief Built Star Trek Like Command Center 372

Posted by samzenpus from the make-it-so dept.
Bruce66423 writes "As the NSA scandal moves from appalling to laughable, the latest report in the Guardian indicates that the current NSA chief spent US taxpayers' money to create a command center for his intelligence operations that was styled just like Star Trek. From the PBS News Hour report: 'When he was running the Army's Intelligence and Security Command, Alexander brought many of his future allies down to Fort Belvoir for a tour of his base of operations, a facility known as the Information Dominance Center. It had been designed by a Hollywood set designer to mimic the bridge of the starship Enterprise from Star Trek, complete with chrome panels, computer stations, a huge TV monitor on the forward wall, and doors that made a 'whoosh' sound when they slid open and closed. Lawmakers and other important officials took turns sitting in a leather 'captain's chair' in the center of the room and watched as Alexander, a lover of science-fiction movies, showed off his data tools on the big screen. "Everybody wanted to sit in the chair at least once to pretend he was Jean-Luc Picard," says a retired officer in charge of VIP visit '"
Earth

Dialing Back the Alarm On Climate Change 490

Posted by samzenpus from the really-bad-not-really-really-bad dept.
An anonymous reader writes "A leaked copy of a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has made the rounds and the good news is that the predicted temperature rise expected as a result of man-made emissions of carbon dioxide is lower than predicted in 2007. From the article: 'Admittedly, the change is small, and because of changing definitions, it is not easy to compare the two reports, but retreat it is. It is significant because it points to the very real possibility that, over the next several generations, the overall effect of climate change will be positive for humankind and the planet. Specifically, the draft report says that "equilibrium climate sensitivity" (ECS)—eventual warming induced by a doubling of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which takes hundreds of years to occur—is "extremely likely" to be above 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit), "likely" to be above 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.4 degrees Fahrenheit) and "very likely" to be below 6 degrees Celsius (10.8 Fahrenheit). In 2007, the IPPC said it was "likely" to be above 2 degrees Celsius and "very likely" to be above 1.5 degrees, with no upper limit. Since "extremely" and "very" have specific and different statistical meanings here, comparison is difficult.'"
Google

Doctorow: Rivalry Keeps Google From Doing Evil 113

Posted by samzenpus from the what's-my-motivation? dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Writer and activist Cory Doctorow says competition keeps Google behaving ethically because it believes there are benefits to be had. However, as it moves into sectors where it faces fewer rivals this may not always be the case. 'It actually seems to be a quality metric. They believe they can attract customers, independent software vendors, resellers and an ecosystem around them by not being evil,' he says. 'Where they operate in narrower, less competitive markets — like where they’ve become an Internet service provider, for example — they abandon those commitments.'"

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