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Google

Submission + - Iran threatens legal action against Google for not labeling Persian Gulf (cnn.com)

Submitted by PantherSE
PantherSE writes: From the article:
Iran has threatened legal action against Google for not labeling the Persian Gulf on its maps.
"Toying with modern technologies in political issues is among the new measures by the enemies against Iran, (and) in this regard, Google has been treated as a plaything," Foreign Ministry spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast said Thursday, according to state-run Press TV.
He added that "omitting the name Persian Gulf is (like) playing with the feelings and realities of the Iranian nation."
Security

Submission + - DARPA seeks Holy Grail: Quantum-based data security system (networkworld.com)

Submitted by
coondoggie
coondoggie writes: "Information security systems based on quantum computing techniques are one of the holy grails of the industry but the scientists at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency want to change that with a program that could develop such a system in 3 years. The main goal of the new program, called Quiness is to demonstrate that quantum communications can generate secure keys at sustainable rates of 1-10 Gbps at distances of 1,000-10,000 km."
Your Rights Online

Submission + - Federal Court Rejects NDAA - Issues Injunction (courthousenews.com) 1

Submitted by Arker
Arker writes: A federal judge granted a preliminary injunction late Wednesday to block provisions of the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act that would allow the military to indefinitely detain anyone it accuses of knowingly or unknowingly supporting terrorism.

The Obama administration had argued, inter alia, that the plaintiffs, including whistleblower and transparency advocate Daniel Ellsberg and Icelandic Member of Parliament Birgitta Jonsdottir lacked standing, but Judge Katherine Forrest didnt buy it.

Given recent statements from the administration, it seems safe to say this will be the start of a long court battle.
Idle

Submission + - History's first prank call is almost as old as the telephone (networkworld.com)

Submitted by
netbuzz
netbuzz writes: "You could picture the event as a 19th Century Bart Simpson making history’s first documented prank phone call to Mo’s Funeral Home. The documentation comes via Google Books from the February 1884 edition of The Electrical World – only eight years after Bell’s famous summoning of Watson — and the one-paragraph story is headlined: “A grave joke on undertakers.” The little-publicized gem was unearthed by Portland State University professor Paul Collins, who is also known at The Literary Detective."
Data Storage

Submission + - RunCore Introduces Self-Destructable SSD (runcore.com)

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: RunCore announces the global launch of its InVincible solid state drive, designed for mission-critical fields such as aerospace or military. The device improves upon a normal SSD by having two strategies for the drive to quickly render itself blank. First method goes through the disk, overwriting all data with garbage. Second one is less discreet and lets the smoke out of the circuitry by driving overcurrent to the NAND chips. Both ways can be ignited with a single push of a button, allowing James Bond -style rapid response to the situation on the field.
Music

Submission + - BitTorrent Piracy Boosts Music Sales, Study Finds (torrentfreak.com)

Submitted by
TheGift73
TheGift73 writes: "A new academic paper by a researcher from the North Carolina State University has examined the link between BitTorrent downloads and music album sales. Contrary to what’s often claimed by the major record labels, the paper concludes that there is absolutely no evidence that unauthorized downloads negatively impact sales. Instead, the research finds that more piracy directly leads to more album sales.

For more than a decade researchers have been looking into the effects of music piracy on the revenues of the record industry, with mixed results.

None of these researchers, however, used a large sample of accurate download statistics from a BitTorrent tracker to examine this topic. This missing element motivated economist Robert Hammond, Assistant Professor at North Carolina State University, to conduct his own research."
Privacy

Submission + - Most CCTV Systems Easily Access (net-security.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The use of CCTV cameras for physical surveillance of all kinds of environments has become so pervasive that most of us don't give the devices a second thought anymore. But, those individuals and organizations who actually use and control them should be aware that most of them come with default settings that make them vulnerable to outside attacks. According to Gotham Digital Science researcher Justin Cacak, standalone CCTV video surveillance systems by MicroDigital, HIVISION, CTRing, and many other rebranded devices are not only shipped with remote access enabled by default, but also with preconfigured default accounts and passwords that are banal and easy to guess.
Government

Submission + - Who is still using IE6? The UK government (computerworlduk.com)

Submitted by
strawberryshakes
strawberryshakes writes: "The death knell for IE6 was sounded a couple of years ago, but seems like some people just can't let go. Many UK government departments are still using IE6, which is so old — 11 years old to be exact — it can't cope with social media — which the government is trying to get its staff to use more to engage with citizens"
Robotics

Submission + - Paralyzed woman uses mind-controlled robot arm (extremetech.com)

Submitted by
MrSeb
MrSeb writes: "Using BrainGate, the world’s most advanced brain-computer interface, a woman with quadriplegia has used a mind-controlled robot arm to serve herself coffee — an act she hasn’t been able to perform for 15 years. BrainGate, which is being developed by a team of American neuroscientists from Brown and Stanford universities, and is currently undergoing clinical trial, requires a computer chip to be implanted in the motor cortex of the patient, which it then transmits to a computer for processing. Like all brain-computer interfaces, the user must train the software — but once this is done, you simply think of a movement, and the software moves the robot accordingly. Moving forward, the researchers would like to miniaturize the system and make it wireless — at the moment, BrainGate users have a box attached to their head, and they're tethered to a computer — which is OK for robot arm use at home, but obviously doesn't grant much mobility. The work was partly funded by DARPA, with the hope of creating more advanced prosthetics for wounded war veterans."
AI

Submission + - Inside the 2012 Loebner Prize (techrepublic.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Not a single judge was fooled by the chatbots in the 2012 Loebner Prize, which was won by the bot Chip Vivant. According to a journalist who was a human decoy in this year's Turing Test, interactions with the humans was a tad robotic while the bots went off on crazy tangents talking about being a cat and offering condolences for the death of a pet dragon.

Submission + - US judge blocks indefinite detention of Americans (rt.com)

Submitted by rastos1
rastos1 writes: A US federal judge has temporarily blocked a section of the controversial National Defense Authorization Act that allows for the indefinite military detention of US citizens. In a 68-page ruling, US District Judge Katherine Forrest agreed on Wednesday that the statute failed to “pass constitutional muster” because its language could be interpreted quite broadly and eventually be used to suppress political dissent.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Is outsourcing development a good idea?

Submitted by penmanglewood
penmanglewood writes: I am a developer at a small IT company, and we primarily make software and games for the education market. I used to work with a team of developers, but for reasons outside the scope of this question, my boss and I are the only ones left.

My boss says that our new strategy is to use outsourced developers to do the "monkey work" for us. To me, this sounds like a bad idea. Do we give the developers access to our internal libraries? How will they be able to work on parts of our product without having access to our repository.

I could think of a hundred more objections, but maybe I'm looking at it the wrong way. Is there a smart way to outsource development, or is it just a bad idea?
Censorship

Submission + - Piratebay, Vimeo blocked in India (moneycontrol.com) 1

Submitted by webanish
webanish writes: Vimeo and The Pirate Bay have been blocked in India. The current ruling coalition has been looking to censor the internet ever since social media triggered mass movements hit it badly during the anti corruption agitation in Aug-2011. Then we had the alleged 'sex-scandal' where a senior cabinet minister was videographed having sex (for favor) in his high-court chambers, a story blacked out by main stream media (a.k.a. paidmedia), but went viral on twitter, facebook. Are we heading into dark times, where information flow is increasingly controlled by the high and mighty?
Wikipedia

Submission + - History Professor Teaches How to Falsify Wikipedia

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Yoni Appelbaum reports in the Atlantic that as part of their coursework in a class that studies historical hoaxes, undergraduates at George Mason University successfully fooled Wikipedia's community of editors launching a Wikipedia page detailing the exploits of a fictitious 19th-century serial killer named Joe Scafe. The students, enrolled in T. Mills Kelly's course, Lying About the Past, used newspaper databases to identify four actual women murdered in New York City from 1895 to 1897, victims of broadly similar crimes and created Wikipedia articles for the victims, carefully following the rules of the site. But while a similar page created previously by Kelly's students went undetected for years, when students posted the story to Reddit, it took just twenty-six minutes for a redditor to call foul, noting the Wikipedia entries' recent vintage and others were quick to pile on, deconstructing the entire tale. Why did the hoaxes succeed in 2008 on Wikipedia and not in 2012 on Reddit? According to Appelbaum, the answer lies in the structure of the Internet's various communities. "Wikipedia has a weak community, but centralizes the exchange of information. It has a small number of extremely active editors, but participation is declining, and most users feel little ownership of the content. And although everyone views the same information, edits take place on a separate page, and discussions of reliability on another, insulating ordinary users from any doubts that might be expressed," writes Appelbaum. "Reddit, by contrast, builds its strong community around the centralized exchange of information. Discussion isn't a separate activity but the sine qua non of the site." If there's a simple lesson in all of this, it's that hoaxes tend to thrive in communities which exhibit high levels of trust. But on the Internet, where identities are malleable and uncertain, we all might be well advised to err on the side of skepticism (PDF).""
The Internet

Submission + - Government of France Consults Public Over Net Neutrality 1

Submitted by bs0d3
bs0d3 writes: The French Parliament and Government is having a Public consultation from May 16 to June 20, on net neutrality. There is an open invitation for any citizen to send their oppinion and ideas to Parliament. From the draft: "The debate over "net neutrality" concerns the question of which controls the operators of the Internet have the right to exercise over the traffic they carry. Can they block services, slow down some applications, prioritize certain content? Or instead must they strictly adhere to the principles of equal treatment as imagined by the designers of the Internet? The debate is also about compatibility of this principle with the exponential growth of traffic over networks, particularly mobile, and with the need to finance investments that result."
Technology

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Wrist Watch for the Modern Tech Minded 1

Submitted by NNUfergs
NNUfergs writes: Sure my Smart Phone can deliver just about any piece of information I could want in under 30 Seconds, but I miss being able to just look at my wrist to get the time, date etc. I’ve been shopping around for a while and haven’t come across anything particularly inspiring. There are loads of various features that have been incorporated into watches but you usually only see a small specialized set in a given watch. Budget is always a concern but I am willing to invest in a quality time piece. In sort I’m not looking for a piece of jewelry, I’m looking for a gadget, for my wrist. Are there any neat, fun or just plain cool watches out there for techies? What do you have?

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