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Social Networks

Submission + - Training Cops To Use Social Media Information (itworld.com) 2

Submitted by
jfruh
jfruh writes: "Cynthia Navarro starts her sessions training police to mine social media in dramatic fashion: by quickly finding data about the officers themselves. She also provides information about who's where online — for instance, younger suspects will probably be focused on Twitter, while older folks are on Twitter or even MySpace. It's all part of a drive to teach even nontechinical police officers at small and midsized departments how to use social media to track suspects."
Microsoft

Submission + - Kinect 2 sensor output image leaks (geek.com)

Submitted by rabok
rabok writes: If a Microsoft job posting can be believed we are set to get a new Xbox on store shelves by March 2014 at the latest. Regardless of when it does eventually arrive, it seems an image claiming to be the output of a Kinect 2 has hit the web by a user on twitter. Kinect 2 is expected to be much more accurate even able to see individual fingers, read lips, and gauge moods. This image seems to back up that improvement in both depth perception and the ability to distinguish individual fingers.
The Courts

Submission + - Freed Goldman Sachs Programmer Charged Again (paritynews.com)

Submitted by hypnosec
hypnosec writes: Sergey Aleynikov, a former programmer for Goldman Sachs, is facing fresh round of charges (again) even though he had managed to successfully appeals against Federal Court trial outcome. According to Manhattan District Attorney’s office, the 42 year old has been charged in a County Court in New York, US with two counts of felonies of unlawful use of secret scientific material and duplication of computer-related material. Previously he was charged under National Stolen Property Act (NSPA) and the Economic Espionage Act (EEA). According to the US constitution, a person cannot be tried twice for the same alleged crime. But, Aleynikov has been charged under the New York laws that are different from federal acts.
Security

Submission + - Poll Finds Americans Think TSA Is 'Doing a Good Job' (forbes.com)

Submitted by OverTheGeicoE
OverTheGeicoE writes: Why is it that airport security never seems to change in the United States? Perhaps it's because most Americans think TSA is doing a 'good job,' according to a surprise Gallup poll, allegedly commissioned by no one but the kind editors at Gallup. The poll found that 54% of Americans believe TSA is doing a good or excellent job, and that 57% have a good or excellent opinion of the agency. So why all the criticism? According to TFA, criticism of the TSA comes primarily from 'Internet sites, where reporting standards are generally not at the same level as newspapers, where reporters are taught to consider what is told to them with skepticism and to seek responses to charges.' Furthermore, 'the TSA is put into a difficult situation when such charges are posted with little or no fact checking by reporters.' Other sources, of course, have different interpretations of Gallup's results, including questions about whether the poll was biased. If Americans secretly do love TSA, that could explain why the recent whitehouse.gov petition failed to gather enough signatures for a 'response.' In fact, you'll find so little information about the petition remains on whitehouse.gov that you'll wonder if my link is correct. And these are not the droids you're looking for. Move along.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Personal tape drive NAS?

Submitted by hey_popey
hey_popey writes: I would like to piggyback on the previous "Ask Slashdot" question; do you know of any realistic way to use a tape drive solution at home, not as a backup, but as a regular NAS. I would like, for example, to save the torrents of my linux distributions on it, and at the same time, play the family videos on a computer.
It would seem at a first glance, that the transfer rates and capacity of Linear Tape-Open (1.5TB, 280MB/s in 2010) and the functionality of LTFS would allow me to do that, but I don't know the details, and if this would be economically viable.
Piracy

Submission + - Cops Pirate 100's of DVDs, Get Slap on Wrist (kttc.com)

Submitted by AbsoluteXyro
AbsoluteXyro writes: Apparently, the big FBI warning we all see whenever you pop in a DVD does not apply to the fuzz. From KTTC.com — "In mid-2009, former Houston County digital network administrator Lindsay Pierce saw what he calls "suspicious activity" at the Sheriff's Office. "The county owns a duplicator that will make five discs at a time that we use for court cases and things like that, and I had replaced four or five drives and that seemed unusual. I actually saw one of the people involved actually making movies," Pierce said. Kevin Kelleher was a Houston County Commissioner for 16 years. He says he brought the issue before the county board a number of times. "I've given them evidence that I had that showed that members of the Houston County Sheriff's Department were in fact copying DVDs. Not just ones or twos, but hundreds," Kelleher said. FBI agents from Rochester confirmed that they looked into the allegations. They said they spent an hour in Caledonia before deciding the case didn't fall within their federal prosecuting guidelines. No one in the case has yet been charged with any criminal wrongdoing. But the county gave written reprimands to the county's finance director. The Houston County Attorney's Office says the case is closed."

Submission + - Nokia feeds the patent trolls? (zdnet.com)

Submitted by
glebovitz
glebovitz writes: "In case anyone missed the other Nokia news, on the same day they announced the sale of Qt to Digia, they also sold 500 patents to Vringo. Vringo, the video ring tone company, recently merged with patent portfolio company Innovate/project which includes Donald Stout, the founder of NTP on its board. Forbes refers to Stout as "a patent troll which milked Research In Motion for $612.5 million in a patent infringement settlement reached in 2006." As Forbes staff writer Eric Savitz writes in his article "Vringo decided to basically turn itself into a patent troll.""
Space

Submission + - Earth destroyed repeatedly in the name of science (gizmag.com)

Submitted by cylonlover
cylonlover writes: Unlike in old B movies, real scientists don’t scream, “Fools! I’ll destroy them all!” before throwing the switch on their doomsday device. At least, most of the them don’t. However, the August 10 issue of the Astrophysical Journal reports that a team of scientists are working on destroying the world – not once, but repeatedly. Fortunately, the world they’re destroying exists only in a computer simulation and its destruction is in the service of learning more about planets revolving around other stars.
Android

Submission + - Cyanogenmod 9 achieves stable release (cyanogenmod.com)

Submitted by jolle
jolle writes: Builds for CyanogenMod 9 stable will be rolling out to cyanogenmod servers tonight. Stable builds are available for a wide range of devices.

From their website:
"Tonight’s release is for the majority of our ICS supported devices, the stragglers will catch up, and we will leave the door open for merging in additional devices from maintainers, external and internal. The team itself, will focus solely on Jelly Bean and maintenance of the CM 7 codebase.

Many have wondered why we bothered to finish CM 9 when we are already active in CM 10 development. To that, our answer is: we don’t like to leave things incomplete. There is no profit gained from what we do, so the satisfaction of completing a goal is our only reward. This release also serves as a release suitable for the masses, especially those who won’t have 100% functioning releases of CM 10 immediately or are averse to anything branded as ‘preview’, ‘alpha’, ‘beta’ or ‘nightly’.

On the topic of nightlies, this release also serves as an end to our CM 9 nightlies, to make way for nightlies chock full of Jelly Bean goodness. A follow-up post will be made when we enable those builds.
Blackberry

Submission + - IBM interested in RIM's enterprise services unit (zdnet.com)

Submitted by PolygamousRanchKid
PolygamousRanchKid writes: Research In Motion's enterprise services unit have attracted the interest of IBM, which has made an "informal approach" on potentially acquiring the division. The division operates a network of secure servers used to support its BlackBerry devices, a source who declined to be named, told Bloomberg in a Friday report.

However, no party has yet shown interest in buying all of RIM or the division which manufactures its BlackBerry phones, but the Canadian company will wait for the rollout of BlackBerry 10 phones next year before making any decisions on a sale, the person said. During its fourth quarter earnings call in March this year, RIM CEO Thorsten Heins said it plans to refocus on the enterprise business and capitalize on its position in the segment.
Businesses

Submission + - Wall Street and the Mismanagement of Software (drdobbs.com)

Submitted by
CowboyRobot
CowboyRobot writes: "Last week, a bug in high-frequency trading software from Knight Capital Group resulted in erroneous trades totalling almost a half-billion dollars.
So what went wrong and how can they, or any other software developer, prevent something similar from happening again?
In hindsight, it's clear that the developers did not verify the code under enough conditions.
But the real issue is how these high-frequency trades work in the first place.
Robert Dewar at Dr. Dobb's suggests the financial industry needs to take a page from the avionics rulebook, which has very strict guidelines about what code can be implemented due to the high cost of failure in that field.
"High-frequency automated trading is not avionics flight control, but the aviation industry has demonstrated that safe, reliable real-time software is possible, practical, and necessary. It requires appropriate development technology and processes as well as a culture that thinks in terms of safety (or reliability) first. That is the real lesson to be learned from last week's incident. It doesn't come for free, but it certainly costs less than $440M.""
Science

Submission + - 'Smart Fingertips' Pave Way for Virtual Sensations (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Imagine feeling like you’re lifting a 50-kilogram weight just by pulling at thin air. That’s just one of the possible applications of new "smart fingertips" created by a team of nanoengineers. The electronic fingers mold to the shape of the hand, and so far the researchers have shown that they can transmit electric signals to the skin. The team hopes to one day incorporate the devices into a smart glove that creates virtual sensations, fooling the brain into feeling everything from texture to temperature.
The Military

Submission + - The U.S. Spent Two Decades Trying to Develop "Peaceful" Nukes 2

Submitted by hellboundunicorn
hellboundunicorn writes: This week is the 67th anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombing, introducing the world to the specter of nuclear war, which has since faded but will never disappear. Despite that, some scientists and politicians tried to find something redemptive in the most powerful weapons ever built.

Its destructive force aside, the bomb represented the pinnacle of American scientific development in the mid-20th century. And even as scientists like J. Robert Oppenheimer seemed rather horrified at what they’d unleashed, others like Edward Teller became more consumed by the scientific possibilities of the atomic age.

As the Cold War heated up, Teller became obsessed with using actual atomic bombs for civil engineering. Thanks to that type of numbers-driven thinking — if a bomb is as powerful as a million tons of TNT, why not use it to reshape the Panama Canal? — as well as Teller’s incessant prodding, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) created Project Chariot. The mission: to create a new port in northwestern Alaska using a series of underwater nuclear explosions.
Security

Submission + - Blizzard Says Battle.net Has Been Hacked (hardwarecanucks.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Blizzard announced today that its Battle.net service was compromised. The company is urging users to change their login information immediately. Blizzard is stressing that payment information was not compromised.
NASA

Submission + - NASA Upgrades Mars Curiosity Software ... From 350M Miles Away (computerworld.com)

Submitted by
CWmike
CWmike writes: "Picture doing a remote software upgrade. Now picture doing it when the machine you're upgrading is a robotic rover sitting 350 million miles away, on the surface of Mars. That's what a team of programmers and engineers at NASA are dealing with as they get ready to download a new version of the flight software on the Mars rover Curiosity, which landed safely on the Red Planet earlier this week. 'We need to take a whole series of steps to make that software active. You have to imagine that if something goes wrong with this, it could be the last time you hear from the rover,' said Steve Scandore, a senior flight software engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. 'It has to work,' he told Computerworld. 'You don't' want to be known as the guy doing the last activity on the rover before you lose contact.'"
NASA

Submission + - NASA Morpheus Lander Explosion

Submitted by DishpanMan
DishpanMan writes: For every success story from NASA like Curiosity, there is a failure story, like today's Morpheus project test flight at Kennedy Sapce Center. http://www.nasa.gov/centers/johnson/exploration/morpheus/index.html. The project is trying to build a low cost Moon and Asteroid lander using clean fuels on a shoestring budget. While tethered flight test were successful, today's actual flight test ended in a crash and a ball of fire followed by a spectacular explosion. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hvlG2JtMts Initial feedback points to hardware failure, but the investigation is still ongoing.

Submission + - Craigslist drops exclusive license to your posts (eff.org)

Submitted by Penurious Penguin
Penurious Penguin writes: Last week on Slashdot we read the bad news, i.e. "Craigslist Demands Exclusivity For Postings", an odd demand which would have prevented ad-content on Craigslist from being advertised anywhere else but Craigslist. Thankfully, today we read from the EFF, the Good News: Craigslist drops exclusive license to your posts.

Perhaps they can now apply their ambitions toward improving Craigslist in other ways?

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