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Cellphones

US Judge Throws Out Cell Phone 'Stingray' Evidence For The First Time (reuters.com) 118

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: For the first time, a federal judge has suppressed evidence obtained without a warrant by U.S. law enforcement using a stingray, a surveillance device that can trick suspects' cell phones into revealing their locations. U.S. District Judge William Pauley in Manhattan on Tuesday ruled that defendant Raymond Lambis' rights were violated when the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration used such a device without a warrant to find his Washington Heights apartment. Stingrays, also known as "cell site simulators," mimic cell phone towers in order to force cell phones in the area to transmit "pings" back to the devices, enabling law enforcement to track a suspect's phone and pinpoint its location. The DEA had used a stingray to identify Lambis' apartment as the most likely location of a cell phone identified during a drug-trafficking probe. Pauley said doing so constituted an unreasonable search. The ruling marked the first time a federal judge had suppressed evidence obtained using a stingray, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, which like other privacy advocacy groups has criticized law enforcement's use of such devices. "Absent a search warrant, the government may not turn a citizen's cell phone into a tracking device," Pauley wrote. FBI Special Agent Daniel Alfin suggests in a report via Motherboard that decrypting encrypted data fundamentally alters it, therefore contaminating it as forensic evidence.

Comment Re:Man, I'm glad I got out of IT (Score 1) 331

There are some fields, such as banks and embedded work, where code bases stay around for a while. For example, at the bank where I worked, many of our Unix boxes were Solaris and AIX versions from 10+ years ago. Too old for my tastes. But still you worry that the longer you stay there, the more the rest of industry is leaving you behind and you might be stuck in this niche.

Comment Re:false comparison... (Score 1) 771

true surround sound headset / speakers?

We already have that — binaural recordings work with normal stereo headphones. You only have two ears, so you only need two speakers.

There's something called Dolby Headphone, but all that does is mix 5.1 channels down to 2 channels in a fancy way, and it's essentially a software function that if implemented in the phone, can work with any stereo headphones.

Comment Re:too negative (Score 1) 349

Malaria has been around for tens of thousands of years, so it reached a stable plateau. The risk with a new disease is that it could take too long to understand how it's transmitted and how to prevent transmission.

Quarantine isn't a guarantee, as seen by the two health care workers who contracted Ebola in Texas when caring for a patient.

Comment Climate change causing extinction? (Score 3, Informative) 349

The summary is misleading. No article mentions extinctions due to climate change. A huge temperature change would cause migration towards the poles, and may cut food supply and kill some people, but not all.

The article that mentions the 10% figure (The Atlantic article) says that a pandemic is the most likely to cause extinction, eg. the 521AD plague killed 13 to 17% of the world's population. But that didn't make it into the sensational summary.

Google

Google Joins Facebook's Open Compute Project (arstechnica.com) 26

judgecorp writes: Google has elected to open up some of its data center designs, which it has -- until now -- kept to itself. Google has joined the Open Compute Project, which was set up by Facebook to share low-cost, no-frills data center hardware specifications. Google will donate a specification for a rack that it designed for its own data centers. Google's first contribution will be "a new rack specification that includes 48V power distribution and a new form factor to allow OCP racks to fit into our data centers," the company said. "We kicked off the development of 48V rack power distribution in 2010, as we found it was at least 30 percent more energy-efficient and more cost-effective in supporting these higher-performance systems." The company said it hopes to help others "adopt this next generation power architecture, and realize the same power efficiency and cost benefits as Google." Google hasn't submitted a proposed specification to the OCP yet, but the company is working with Facebook to get that done.

Comment Re:Noise-cancelling headphones (Score 1) 388

Yeah, I use three layers: 1) over-ear hearing protection like what chainsaw guys use, 2) in-ear earphones, 3) brown noise or rainstorm sounds, turned up as loud as need be.

I sold my $300 noise-cancelling headphones because they didn't do any better, and were much more fragile and harder to replace. (and I'm not an audiophile, I just wanted the noise-blocking)

Comment Re: First... BULLSHIT (Score 1) 223

Also, why wouldn't motivated advertisers identify multiple devices based on Facebook logins or the like? People often login to the same services on all their devices, and I imagine that those services are happy to increase their ad revenue by selling more detailed user data to advertisers.

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