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Submission + - Thailands Army posts 1.7M social media comments to propagandize King (prachatai.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: "Thailand's Rangers Task Force 45, in response to Army policy, has put its troops to the task of promoting and protecting the monarchy in cyber space, claiming to have posted 1.69 million comments on webboards and social media during a 4-month period of last year...According to the video clip, the Army Chief has approved the establishment of an army internet network to promote and protect the monarchy by monitoring websites and webboards which have content alluding to the monarchy and countering them by posting comments which worship the institution....The unit’s military operations personnel provide the troops with information, or what to post, and set them targets for the number of posts they must complete."

Submission + - Senator Rand Paul Introduces Fourth Amendment Restoration Act of 2013 (senate.gov) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Senator Rand Paul is introducing a new Fourth Amendment Restoration Act of 2013. Senator Paul previously introduced the Fourth Amendment Protection Act of 2012 but the legislation was defeated by a vote in the Senate in December, 2012.

New Press Release is here: http://www.paul.senate.gov/?p=press_release&id=838

Full Text of Fourth Amendment Restoration Act is here: http://www.paul.senate.gov/files/documents/EAS13699.pdf

Twitter hashtags to follow are here: #NSA #FISA #NSAPrism #PrismNSA #nsacalledtotellme

https://twitter.com/VerizonNSA/status/343451204690530304

Submission + - Star power within our grasp (efda.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: I'm wondering if slashdot is interested in covering the 30th Anniversary of the Joint European Torus (JET) which happens this month. If so, please join us for a look behind the scenes at the world’s largest magnetic fusion experiment — come and find out about the amazing achievements fusion has made and the challenges ahead in the quest to bring star power to Earth for cleaner energy.

Our celebration event, 30 years of JET — paving the way to ITER's take off, is at Culham Centre for Fusion Energy near Oxford in the UK on 25th June. The event will be a chance to see the facility with your own eyes and chat with scientists about controlling plasmas ten times hotter than the Sun. It will feature a tour of JET, interactive science demonstrations, and presentations by senior figures from the European Fusion Development Agreement, ITER and the European Commission.

Please let me know if you would like to join us, or register here: http://www.efda.org/jet/jet-anniversary-2013/registration-for-journalists/ .

Best regards

Phil Dooley,
News and Education, Joint European Torus.
phil.dooley@jet.efda.org

Submission + - What Charles G. Koch can teach us about campaign finance data (sunlightfoundation.com)

Submitted by Lasrick
Lasrick writes: Lee Drutman is a political scientist with the Sunlight Foundation who does terrific work. In this article, he attempts to trace campaign donations made by one of the Koch Brothers and discovers just how difficult it is to do: "The case of Charles G. Koch is a nice lesson in just how hard it is to determine who is breaking and who is abiding by campaign finance limits. It’s hard to make accurate tallies of individual aggregate campaign contributions when the Federal Elections Commission doesn’t require donors to have a unique ID, and when campaigns don’t always reliably report donor names. Given this, it is unclear how the FEC would even enforce its own aggregate limit rules. The FEC’s spokesperson told me that while the FEC welcomes complaints, it does not typically take enforcement initiative.: Really interesting read.

Submission + - Canadians Should Also Be Demanding Surveillance Answers (michaelgeist.ca)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Privacy and surveillance have taken centre stage this week with the revelations that U.S. agencies have been engaged in massive, secret surveillance programs that include years of capturing the meta-data from every cellphone call on the Verizon network (the meta-data includes the number called and the length of the call) as well as gathering information from the largest Internet companies in the world including Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple in a program called PRISM. Michael Geist explains how many of the same powers exist under Canadian law and that it is very likely that Canadians have been caught up by these surveillance activities.

Submission + - Apple files patent for digital wallet and virtual currency (venturebeat.com)

Submitted by another random user
another random user writes: Apple has applied for a patent on a combined virtual currency and digital wallet technology that would allow you to store money in the cloud, make payments with your iPhone, and maybe communicate with point-of-sale terminals via NFC.


The patent application, published today by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Organization, details how iPhone users could walk into a store, pay for goods with their phone, and walk out with their merchandise.


Though Apple is late to the virtual wallet game, that doesn't seem to stop them trying to patent the process. There does not appear to be anything in the patent application which describes something that can't already be done.

Submission + - What is the Best Software for Tracking Fiber Optic Networks

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: We operate a wide area network that has a large amount of fiber optics, and provides service to our various departments in locations across the state. The network is reasonably complex, with splices, patches, and the general type of ad-hoc build that makes knowing where things go difficult. I'd like to implement some type of software to record where the fiber cables run, what pit number they are jointed in, which fiber is spliced to which, and what internal customer is using which fiber path through the system. Knowing what fibers are free for use is also a requirement, and I'd love to record details of what equipment was put in where, for asset and warranty tracking. Extra points if I can give Engineering access to help them design things better!

Submission + - MIT President Tells Grads to 'Hack the World'

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: On Friday, MIT President L. Rafael Reif exhorted grads to 'hack the world until you make the world a little more like MIT'. A rather ironic choice of words, since 'hack the world' is precisely what others said Aaron Swartz was trying to do in his fateful run-in with MIT. President Reif presumably received an 'Incomplete' this semester for the promised time-is-of-the-essence review of MIT's involvement in the events that preceded Swartz's suicide last January. By the way, it wasn't so long ago that 2013 commencement speaker Drew Houston and Aaron Swartz were both welcome speakers at MIT.

Submission + - Apple, betrayed by its own law firm (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Fnord666
Fnord666 writes: When a company called FlatWorld Interactives LLC filed suit against Apple just over a year ago, it looked like a typical "patent troll" lawsuit against a tech company, brought by someone who no longer had much of a business beyond lawsuits.
Court documents unsealed this week reveal who's behind FlatWorld, and it's anything but typical. FlatWorld is partly owned by the named inventor on the patents, a Philadelphia design professor named Slavko Milekic. But 35 percent of the company has been quietly controlled by an attorney at one of Apple's own go-to law firms, Morgan, Lewis & Bockius. E-mail logs show that the attorney, John McAleese, worked together with his wife and began planning a wide-ranging patent attack against Apple's touch-screen products in January 2007—just days after the iPhone was revealed to the world.

Submission + - Fear of Death Makes People Into Believers (of Science) (sciencemag.org) 1

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Nothing, some say, turns an atheist into a believer like the fear of death. "There are no atheists in foxholes," the saying goes. But a new study suggests that people in stressful situations don't always turn to a higher power. Sometimes, they turn to science. Both atheletes preparing for a big race and students asked to write about their own death showed a 15% stronger belief in science than those under less stressful situations. "In stressful situations people are likely to turn to whatever worldviews and beliefs are most meaningful to them," says study co-author, Anna-Kaisa Newheiser, a psychologist at Yale University. And many people find the scientific worldview more compatible with their own.

Submission + - Your Smartphone Is Working for the Surveillance State (hbr.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Harvard Business Review is is running an article on the recent revelations around PRISM, drawing the parallel between the East German surveillance state and what the US Government has managed to achieve. From the article: "In terms of the capability to listen to, watch and keep tabs on what its citizens are doing, the East German government could not possibly have dreamed of achieving what the United States government has managed to put in place today. The execution of these systems is, as you'd expect, very different. The Germans relied upon people, which, even if not entirely effective, must have been absolutely terrifying: if for no other reason than you weren't sure who you could and could not trust. There was always that chance someone was reporting back on you. But as any internet entrepreneur will tell you, relying entirely on people makes scaling difficult. Technology, on the other hand, makes it much easier. And that means that in many respects, what has emerged today is almost more pernicious; because that same technology has effectively turned not just some, but every single person you communicate with using technology — your acquaintances, your colleagues, your family and your friends — into those equivalent informants."

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: What Features Does iOS 7 Need? (slashdot.org)

Submitted by Nerval's Lobster
Nerval's Lobster writes: Apple’s iOS 7, which is heavily rumored to make its debut at next week’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in San Francisco, will almost certainly feature a totally redesigned interface. According to recent rumors (including a few key postings on the Apple-centric blog 9 to 5 Mac), the OS will stand as a shining example of “flat” design, which eliminates “real world” elements such as texture and shading in favor of stripped-down, basic shapes. That means certain iOS environments such as Game Center (with its casino-like green felt) and Newsstand (with its wooden shelving) could soon look completely different. But what about iOS 7’s actual features? What could Apple change that would improve the operating system’s chances against the increasingly sophisticated Google Android, not to mention the new-and-improved BlackBerry 10 and Windows Phone 8? What would you do to iOS with Apple's full resources at your disposal?

Submission + - When Will My Computer Understand Me?

Submitted by aarondubrow
aarondubrow writes: For more than 50 years, linguists and computer scientists have tried to get computers to understand human language by programming semantics as software, with mixed results. Enabled by supercomputers at the Texas Advanced Computing Center, University of Texas researchers are using new methods to more accurately represent language so computers can interpret it. Recently, they were awarded a grant from DARPA to combine distributional representation of word meanings with Markov logic networks to better capture the human understanding of language.

Submission + - Supermarkets Are High-Tech Hotbeds (ieee.org)

Submitted by Esther Schindler
Esther Schindler writes: You don't think of your supermarket as the source of geeky innovation, but you may be surprised. For example, in Steven Cherry's Supermarkets Are High-Tech Hotbeds, a Techwise Conversation with Kurt Kendall, a partner and director at Kurt Salmon, where he heads the analytics practice there, we learn:

A lot of supermarket tech is at the checkout area. Bar-code scanning was already old hat when U.S. president George Bush the elder was allegedly amazed by them in 1992, and retailers continue to experiment with the next logical step: self-checkout systems.

Here's some of the ways you'll find spiffy stuff among the lettuce:

There’s a lot of technologies out there right now that are being introduced into the retail space to understand what consumers are doing in the store, and heat-mapping is one of those technologies--using cameras in the ceiling to actually track where the consumer’s going. What this information tells the retailer is where a consumer is, how they’re moving around the store, whether they’re dwelling in certain places, like checkout or in front of specific merchandise.

There’s both the real-time application for this technology as well as a longer-term application. And so, as you’re deciding how many people should be in the store manning the registers the next week, you can actually use this information as well.

You’re seeing retailers are being more innovative than I think historically they’ve been given credit. And IT organizations are really starting to be innovators in technology.

Neat stuff, I think.

Submission + - Inside PRISM: Why the Government Hates Encryption (vortex.com)

Submitted by Lauren Weinstein
Lauren Weinstein writes: Now, what's really going on with PRISM? The government admits that the program exists, but says it is being "mischaracterized" in significant ways (always a risk with secret projects sucking up information about your citizens' personal lives). The Internet firms named in the leaked documents are denying that they have provided "back doors" to the government for data access.

Who is telling the truth?

Likely both. Based on previous information and the new leaks, we can make some pretty logical guesses about the actual shape of all this.

Here's my take.

Submission + - Oracle discontinues free Java time zone updates (oracle.com)

Submitted by Noel Trout
Noel Trout writes: For a long time in the Java world, there has been a free tool called the "tzupdater" or Time Zone Updater released as a free download first by Sun and then Oracle. This tool can be used to apply a patch to the Java runtime so that time zone information is correct. This is necessary since some time zones in the world are not static and change more frequently than one might think; in general time zone updates can be released maybe 4-6 times a year. The source information backing the Java timezone API comes from the open source Olson timezone database that is also used by many operating systems. For certain types of applications, you can understand that these updates are mission critical. For example, my company operates in the private aviation sector so we need to be able to display the correct local time at airports around the world.

So, the interesting part is that Oracle has now decided to only release these updates if you have a Java SE support contract. See the following link:
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/tzupdater-download-513681.html
Being Oracle, such licenses are far from cheap.

In my opinion, this is a pretty serious change in stance for Oracle and amounts to killing free Java for certain types of applications, at least if you care about accuracy. We are talking about the core API class java.util.TimeZone. This begs the question, can you call an API free if you have to pay for it to return accurate information? What is the point of such an API? Should the community not expect that core Java classes are fully functional and accurate? I believe it is also a pretty bad move for Java adoption for these types of applications. If my company as a startup 10 years ago would have been presented with such a license fee, we almost certainly could not have chosen Java as our platform as we could not afford it.

Submission + - Clearing Up Wayland FUD, Misconceptions (phoronix.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In clearing up common misconceptions about Wayland (e.g. it breaking compatibility with the Linux desktop and it not supporting remote desktops like X), Eric Griffith (a Linux developer) and Daniel Stone (a veteran X.Org developer) have written The Wayland Situation in which they clearly explain the facts about the shortcomings of X, the corrections made by Wayland, misconceptions about Wayland, and the advantages to this alternative to Canonical's in-development Mir.

Submission + - Your iPhone Works for the Secret Police (hbr.org)

Submitted by hype7
hype7 writes: The Harvard Business Review (of all places) is running an article putting the revelations of PRISM and Verizon in the context of the surveillance state that US Government has managed to build — and compares the effort with that of the Stasi under East Germany. From the article: "But as any internet entrepreneur will tell you, relying entirely on people makes scaling difficult. Technology, on the other hand, makes it much easier. And that means that in many respects, what has emerged today is almost more pernicious; because that same technology has effectively turned not just some, but every single person you communicate with using technology — your acquaintances, your colleagues, your family and your friends — into those equivalent informants."

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