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Submission + - John Gilmore analyzes NSA obstruction of crypto in IPSPEC.

Submitted by anwyn
anwyn writes: Long time civil libertarian and free software entrepreneur, In a recent article postend on the cryptography mailing list, long time civil libertarian and free software entrepreneur, John Gilmore has analyzed possible NSA obstruction of cryptography in IPSPEC.

He suggest that packet processing in the Linux kernel had been obstructed by one kernel developer. Gilmore suggests that the NSA has been plotting against strong cryptography on mobile phones:

Submission + - Could Technology Create Modern-Day 'Leper Colonies'?

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Back in the day, leprosy patients were stigmatized and shunned, quarantined from society in Leper Colonies. Those days may be long gone, but are our mapping, GPS, and social media technologies in effect helping to create modern-day 'Leper Colonies'? The recently-shuttered GhettoTracker.com (born again as Good Part of Town) generated cries of racism by inviting users to rate neighborhoods based on 'which parts of town are safe and which ones are ghetto, or unsafe'. Calling enough already with the avoid-the-ghetto apps, The Atlantic Cities' Emily Badger writes, "this idea toes a touchy line between a utilitarian application of open data and a sly wink toward people who just want to steer clear of 'those kinds of neighborhoods.'" The USPTO has already awarded avoid-crime-ridden-neighborhoods-like-the-plague patents to tech giants Microsoft, IBM, and Google. So, when it comes to navigational apps, where's the line between utility and racism? 'As mobile devices get smarter and more ubiquitous,' writes Svati Kirsten Narula, 'it is tempting to let technology make more and more decisions for us. But doing so will require us to sacrifice one of our favorite assumptions: that these tools are inherently logical and neutral...the motivations driving the algorithms may not match the motivations of those algorithms' users.' Indeed, the Google patent for Storing and Providing Routes proposes to 'remove streets from recommended directions if uploaded route information indicates that travelers seem to avoid the street.' Even faster routes that 'traverse one or more high crime areas,' Google reasons, 'may be less appealing to most travelers'.

Submission + - Sixty percent of Tor funding comes from US DoD (paritynews.com)

Submitted by hypnosec
hypnosec writes: According to consolidated financial statements and reports of the Tor Project for the year ending December 2012, US Federal agencies are responsible for nearly sixty percent of funds received by the project. However, there has been no concrete evidence that the US government has managed to sneak a backdoor into the Tor software, but there have been rumblings on quite a few mailing lists that this possibility cannot be ruled out. Tor has taken a defensive stand against this and in an emailed statement to Tor users, the project’s Executive Director Andrew Lewman wrote that just because Tor receives and accepts funding from federal agencies doesn't mean that the project is collaborating with NSA and helping them to unmask people’s online identities.

Submission + - Austrian Professor creates Kindle E-book copier with Lego Mindstorm (allthingsd.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Using a Lego Mindstorm set, a Mac, and optical character recognition, Austrian professor Peter Purgathofer created a makeshift ebook copier. From the article, "It’s sort of a combination of high tech meets low. The scanning is done by way of the Mac’s iSight camera. The Mindstorms set does two things: Hits the page-advance button on the Kindle (it appears to be an older model, like the one in the picture above), then mashes the space bar on the Mac, causing it to take a picture." Purgathofer calls the creation a "reflection on the loss of long established rights." Check out the Vimeo video for a demonstration.

Submission + - Elon Musk Shows His Vision of Hand-Manipulated Holographic Design Technology (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: Tesla CEO Elon Musk has more on his mind that just cars and 4,000 MPH Hyperloop transportation systems. He also tweeted his intention of developing a hand-manipulated holographic design engine and designing a rocket part with only hand gestures, finally printing the part in titanium. Musk showed a wireframe of the rocket part, and he was able to rotate the 3D object on a screen with one hand, and with a second hand, he zoomed in and out, moved it around the screen, and spun the object around and “caught it”--all in the air. He moved on to manipulating an actual 3D CAD model and interacting with the software; you can see that he used a Leap Motion controller. Next, he shows off a 3D projection, a freestanding glass projection (Ironman style), and interacts with the model using the Oculus Rift. Finally, he prints the part in titanium with a 3D metal printer. Note that we don’t actually see him design anything; the models he works with are already made. Still, it’s exciting to see new ways of doing things come to life on screen.

Submission + - Police pay £660,000 for music licences (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by twicepending
twicepending writes: From the article, "Police chiefs in England and Wales paid £660,952 for licences so staff could listen to music in offices in the past year, a Freedom of Information request has revealed."

Submission + - Legislation Seeks to Bar NSA Backdoors in Encryption (nytimes.com)

Submitted by Frosty Piss
Frosty Piss writes: Congressman Rush D. Holt, a New Jersey Democrat, has proposed legislation that would prohibit the agency from installing “back doors” into encryption, the electronic scrambling that protects e-mail, online transactions and other communications. Representative Holt, a physicist, said Friday that he believed the NSA was overreaching and could hurt American interests, including the reputations of American companies whose products the agency may have altered or influenced. “We pay them to spy,” Mr. Holt said. “But if in the process they degrade the security of the encryption we all use, it’s a net national disservice.”

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: How Do You Fight Usage Caps? 2

Submitted by SGT CAPSLOCK
SGT CAPSLOCK writes: It certainly seems like more and more Internet Service Providers are taking up arms to combat their customers when it comes to data usage policies. The latest member of the alliance is Mediacom here in my own part of Missouri, who has taken suit in applying a proverbial cork to their end of a tube in order to cap the bandwidth that their customers are able to use. My question: what do you do about it when every service provider in your area applies caps and other usage limitations? Do you shamefully abide, or do you fight it? And how?

Submission + - Over 90 Pianists Collaborate to Record and Release 100% of Chopin's Music (kickstarter.com)

Submitted by aarondunn
aarondunn writes: Musopen, which previously raised $70,000 to hire an orchestra and release public domain music recordings, has started a Kickstarter to hire a group of notable pianists to record and release the life's work of Frederic Chopin.

His music will be made available via an API powered by Musopen so anyone can come up with ways to explore and present Chopin's life.

Submission + - Look at What I'm Saying (plosone.org)

Submitted by cortex
cortex writes: University of Utah bioengineers discovered our understanding of language may depend more heavily on vision than previously thought: under the right conditions, what you see can override what you hear. In an article published in PLOS One "Seeing Is Believing: Neural Representations of Visual Stimuli in Human Auditory Cortex Correlate with Illusory Auditory Perceptions" the authors showed that visual stimuli can influence neural signals in the auditory processing part of the brain and change what a person hears. In this study patients were shown videos of an auditory illusion called the McGurk Effect while electrical recordings where made from the surface of the cerebral cortex.

Submission + - MIT's inflatable antennae could boost small satellite communications (networkworld.com)

Submitted by coondoggie
coondoggie writes: Researchers at the Massachusetts's Institute of technology say they have developed an inflatable antenna for small satellites known as cubesats that can fold into a compact space and inflate when in orbit. The inflatable antenna lets a CubeSat transmit data back to Earth at a distance that can be covered by a satellite outfitted with an inflatable antenna is seven times farther than that of existing CubeSat communications

Submission + - Top Factor In Successful IT Projects: Speed (itworld.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: There's a new trend in CIO circles: The need for speed. Whether they achieve that speed by adopting Agile development, cloud computing, or predictive analytics, the fact is that, increasingly, the only way for IT to deliver business advantage is to be faster than the competition. Or maybe it's just that IT is finally realizing that in business it's better to be fast than to be perfect. As my piano teacher used to say, 'if you can't play it right, play it loud.'

Submission + - Court Bars Apple From Making Industry-Wide E-book Deals (itworld.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: The federal judge presiding over the U.S. electronic books case against Apple has barred the company from striking deals that would ensure that it could undercut prices of other retailers in the e-book market and also prohibited Apple from letting any one publisher know what deals the company is striking up with other publishers. For its part, Apple said it plans to appeal the ruling, denying that it conspired to fix ebook pricing. Meanwhile, Amazon is alerting customers of their potential payout, which could be as much as $3.82 for every eligible Kindle book.

Submission + - Beijing Says That 400 Million Chinese Cannot Speak Mandarin (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by dryriver
dryriver writes: China's Education Ministry says that about 400 million people — or 30% of the population — cannot speak the country's national language. Of the 70% of the population who can speak Mandarin, many do not do it well enough, a ministry spokeswoman told Xinhua news agency on Thursday. The admission from officials came as the government launched another push for linguistic unity in China. China is home to thousands of dialects and several minority languages. These include Cantonese and Hokkien, which enjoy strong regional support. Mandarin — formally called Putonghua in China, meaning "common tongue" — is one of the most widely-spoken languages in the world. The Education Ministry spokeswoman said the push would be focusing on the countryside and areas with ethnic minorities. For decades, the ruling Communist Party has promoted Mandarin in an attempt to unite the most populous nation in the world. But government efforts have been hampered by the sheer size of the country and a lack of investment in education, particularly the rural areas, says the BBC's Martin Patience in Beijing.

Submission + - Genetic Evidence Found That Humans Choose Friends With Similar DNA (medium.com)

Submitted by KentuckyFC
KentuckyFC writes: The study of social networks has long shown that people tend to pick friends who are similar to them--birds of a feather stick together (pdf). Now a study of the genomes of almost 2000 Americans has found that those who are friends also share remarkable genetic similarities. “Pairs of friends are, on average, as genetically similar to one another as fourth cousins,” the study concludes. By contrast, strangers share few genetic similarities. The result seems to confirm a 30 year old theory that a person’s genes causes them to seek out circumstances that are compatible with their phenotype. If that’s the case, then people with similar genes should end up in similar environments and so be more likely to become friends.

Submission + - Would you tell people how to crack your software? (strategiccyber.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Fed up with piracy and the availability of cracked versions of his software, Cobalt Strike developer Raphael Mudge wrote a blog post telling people how to crack his software. Some gifts are poisoned and Raphael goes into deep detail about how to backdoor his software and use it to distribute malware. Will this increase piracy of his software or will it discourage would-be pirates from downloading cracked versions?

Submission + - Techies use Rasberry Pi and iOS app to catch rhino poachers (boston.com)

Submitted by v3rgEz
v3rgEz writes: Cambridge Consultants has rigged together about a hundred motion-triggered cameras around Kenyan watering holes to help catch and dissuade elephant poachers. "The challenge was to create a remote monitoring system that was robust enough to withstand extreme weather conditions and animal attacks and could be easily hidden in any surroundings – all within the available budget," according to one of the projects leads.

And to help make sure all those cameras are being monitored, the team has released an iOS app that lets users review, tag, and flag images, tracking what kinds of animals pass by and keeping an eye open for any human predators on the prowl.

Submission + - Parallels Update Installs Unrelated Deamon Without Permission

Submitted by Calibax
Calibax writes: Parallels recently released version 9 of Parallels Desktop, their popular hypervisor application for Mac. They also released a new product named Parallels Access that offers access to Windows applications from an iPad for $80 per year. Access has received less than stellar reviews.

When a user upgrades Parallels Desktop, he is asked if he wants a free six month subscription to Parallels Access. Even if he says no, the product is installed on his system and the application is started each time the system is rebooted. It is installed with ancillary files scattered around several directories in the system and Parallels has not supplied an uninstaller or listed the steps to fully uninstall the application, despite a number of requests.

In other words, Parallels has decided it's a good idea to silently install a difficult to remove deamon application on the system, even if the user has explicitly stated they do not want it. They have not provided an uninstaller or a list of files installed or instructions on how to remove the application files. These are scattered to at least four Mac OS X OS system level directories.

Submission + - 'Half' of Extreme Weather Impacted by Climate Change (sciencemag.org) 2

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: 2012 was a year of extreme weather: Superstorm Sandy, drought and heat waves in the United States; record rainfall in the United Kingdom; unusually heavy rains in Kenya, Somalia, Japan, and Australia; drought in Spain; floods in China. One of the first questions asked in the wake of such an extreme weather is: “Is this due to climate change?”

In a report published online today, NOAA scientists tackled this question head-on. The overall message of the report: It varies. “About half of the events reveal compelling evidence that human-caused change was a [contributing] factor,” said NOAA National Climatic Data Center Director Thomas Karl. In addition, climate scientist Peter Stott of the U.K. Met Office noted that these studies show that in many cases, human influence on climate has increased the risks associated with extreme events.

Submission + - New Ship Will Remain Stable by Creating its Own Inner Waves (gizmag.com)

Submitted by Zothecula
Zothecula writes: When offshore oil drilling rigs are being installed, serviced or dismantled, the workers typically stay in cabins located on adjacent floating platforms. These semi-submersible platforms are towed into place (or travel under their own power) and then their hulls are partially filled with water, allowing them to remain somewhat stable in the pitching seas. Now, a ship is being built to serve the same purpose, but that will be a much more mobile alternative. It will keep from rolling with the waves by generating its own waves, inside its hull.

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