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Submission + - Magellan II adaptive optics beats Hubble Space Telescope (arizona.edu)

Submitted by muon-catalyzed
muon-catalyzed writes: The incredible 'first light' images captured by the new adaptive optics system called Magellan|AO for "Magellan Adaptive Optics" in the Magellan II 6.5-meter telescope are at least twice as sharp in the visible light spectrum as those from the NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. "We can, for the first time, make long-exposure images that resolve objects just 0.02 arcseconds across — the equivalent of a dime viewed from more than a hundred miles away." said Laird Close (University of Arizona), the project's principal scientist.
The 6.5-meter Magellan telescopes in the high desert of Chile were widely considered to be the best natural imaging telescopes in the world and this new technology upgraded them to the whole new level. With its 21-foot diameter mirror, the Magellan telescope is much larger than Hubble with its 8-foot mirror. Until now, Hubble always produced the best visible light images, since even large ground-based telescope with complex adaptive optics imaging cameras could only make blurry images in visible light. The core of the new optics system the so-called Adaptive Secondary Mirror (ASM) that can change its shape at 585 points on its surface 1,000 times each second, counteracting the blurring effects of the atmosphere.

Submission + - Surveillence story turns into a warning about employer monitoring

Submitted by rtfa-troll
rtfa-troll writes: The story from yesterday about Google searches has turned into a warning about how work place surveillance could harm you. It turns out that Michele Catalano's husband's boss tipped off the police after finding "suspicious" searches including "pressure cooker bombs" in his old work computer's search history. Luckily for the Catalanos, who even allowed a search of their house when they probably didn't have to, it seems professional and friendly policemen supported by the FBI were called in and instead of them getting killed in a SWAT raid Catalano was merely talked to politely by some men in black cars who even mentioned to Catalano that 99 times out of 100 these tip-offs come to nothing. Perhaps a lesson to be a bit more careful about your privacy so that what you do on the internet remains between you and the professionals in the NSA in future? Best to use tor so that you can be sure they are the only ones listening in. Maybe also a good tip for what to look for if you want to get revenge on former team members who leave you with a pile of bad code?

Submission + - Cyber Insurance: Solution or Snake Oil?

Submitted by onehitwonder
onehitwonder writes: A recent article in The Wall Street Journal’s CIO Journal argues in favor of the benefits of cyber liability insurance—policies designed to help companies cover costs they incur in the aftermath of data breaches (whether for investigation, remediation, customer notification, regulatory fines or legal settlements). Two Deloitte consultants interviewed for the article argue that cyber insurance can help companies offset the increasingly staggering costs of a data breach. (Several of the biggest data breaches in recent history, including Heartland and TJX, have cost those companies hundreds of millions of dollars. A Mizuho Investors Securities analyst estimated the total cost of the 2011 Sony data breaches at $1.25 billion.)

The question is, will insurance providers really come through when companies begin filing claims on their cyber liability policies, or will they find ways out? A 2011 article from Computerworld notes that even though a growing number of companies have been purchasing cyber insurance, it's hard to find examples where one of those policies has actually covered the costs of a data breach. Moreover, the Computerworld article points out that many cyber insurance policies cover only the cost of re-creating whatever data may have been lost during the breach--not notification costs, legal costs or other related expenses.

Submission + - NSA Provided £100m Funding For GCHQ Operations (telegraph.co.uk)

Submitted by cold fjord
cold fjord writes: The Telegraph reports, "GCHQ has received at least £100million from the US to help fund intelligence gathering, raising questions over American influence on the British agencies. ... It also emerged that the intelligence agency wants the ability to “exploit any phone, anywhere, any time” and that some staff have raised concerns over the “morality and ethics” of their operational work. ... The agency has faced claims it was handed intelligence on individuals from the US gained from the Prism programme that collected telephone and web records. However, it has been cleared of any wrongdoing or attempts to circumvent British law by the parliamentary intelligence and security committee, as well as by Mr Hague. The payments from the US National Security Agency (NSA) are detailed in GCHQ’s annual “investment portfolios”, leaked by Mr Snowden to The Guardian. The NSA paid GCHQ £22.9million in 2009, £39.9million in 2010 and £34.7million in 2011/12. ...Another £15.5million went towards redevelopment projects at GCHQ’s site in Bude, Cornwall, which intercepts communications from the transatlantic cables that carry internet traffic. ... A Cabinet Office spokesman said: “In a 60-year alliance it is entirely unsurprising that there are joint projects in which resources and expertise are pooled, but the benefits flow in both directions.” "

Submission + - Hospital Resorts to Big Brother Tactics to Ensure Employees Wash Hands

Submitted by onehitwonder
onehitwonder writes: Long Island's North Shore University Hospital is using sensors and video cameras to make sure employees wash their hands, according to an article in today's New York Times. Motion sensors detect when hospital staff enter an intensive care unit, and the sensors trigger a video camera. Feeds from the video camera are transmitted to India, where workers there check to make sure staff are washing their hands. The NYT article notes that hospital workers wash their hands as little as 30 percent of the time that they interact with patients. The Big Brother like system is intended to reduce transmission of infections as well as the costs associated with treating them.

Submission + - This Guy Ran the Tech That Won Obama Reelection (yahoo.com)

Submitted by onehitwonder
onehitwonder writes: Yahoo!News has a remarkably good video interview with Harper Reed, the crazy looking dude who served as CTO for the Obama Campaign. In the short video segment, Reed explains why Obama won, why the GOP lost, and the emerging technologies that most interest him. If for no other reason, check out the article/video simply to see what this guy looks like.

Submission + - Glaxo Monitors Parenting Forums to Understand Anti-Child Vaccination Hysteria (wsj.com)

Submitted by onehitwonder
onehitwonder writes: A story from today's WSJ nails the intersection of big data, sentiment analysis, privacy, and parents' concerns about certain vaccinations causing autism in children. Pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline deployed sentiment analysis technology on two parenting forums to understand parents' attitudes toward child vaccinations. Neither the forum administrators nor parents knew GSK was monitoring their conversations. GSK is defending its use of sentiment analysis as a way for a company in a highly regulated industry to get honest feedback from consumers.

Submission + - BlackBerry CEO Heins: Tablet Market is Kaput (slashdot.org)

Submitted by Nerval's Lobster
Nerval's Lobster writes: BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins believes that tablets will be dead by 2018. “In five years I don’t think there’ll be a reason to have a tablet anymore,” he told an interviewer at the Milken Institute conference in Los Angeles, according to Bloomberg. “Maybe a big screen in your workplace, but not a tablet as such. Tablets themselves are not a good business model.” That may come as a surprise to Apple, Google, Amazon and Samsung, all of which have built significant tablet businesses over the past few years. Research firm Strategy Analytics suggested in a research note earlier this month that the global tablet market hit 40.6 million units shipped in the first quarter of 2013, a significant rise from the 18.7 million shipped in the same quarter last year. So why would Heins offer such a pessimistic prediction when everyone else—from the research firms to the tablet-makers themselves—seems so full-speed-ahead? It’s easy to forget sometimes that BlackBerry has its own tablet in the mix: the PlayBook, which was released to quite a bit of fanfare in early 2011 but failed to earn iPad-caliber sales. Despite that usefulness to developers, however, the PlayBook has become a weak contender in the actual tablet market. If Heins is predicting that market’s eventual demise, it could be a coded signal that he intends to pull BlackBerry out of the tablet game, focusing instead on smartphones. It wouldn’t be the first radical move the company’s made in the past year.

Submission + - How Cloud Computing Is Changing IT Organizations (wsj.com)

Submitted by onehitwonder
onehitwonder writes: Four years ago, many IT pundits predicted cloud computing would lead to widespread layoffs inside corporate IT departments, but such a bloodletting has yet to take place. Rather than eliminating corporate IT staff, cloud computing is changing some IT professionals' roles in such a way as to make them more interesting and to relieve them of mundane tasks, like watching back-up tapes spin at 2 AM. This article looks at cloud computing's impact on IT staff inside three IT departments aggressively deploying cloud applications.

Submission + - Low Levels Of Toxic Gas Found To Encourage Plant Growth (phys.org)

Submitted by olsmeister
olsmeister writes: Hydrogen Sulfide is a toxic, flammable, foul-smelling gas that some theorize may have been at least partially responsible for some of Earth's mass extinctions, including the Permian-Triassic event, which killed well over half of the species on the planet. Now, thanks to a fortuitous accident, doctoral student at the University of Washington seems to have discovered that very low doses of the gas seems to greatly enhance plant growth, causing plants to germinate more quickly and grow larger. The finding could have far reaching implications for both food and biofuel production.

Submission + - Why It's Time to Migrate to IPv6 (wsj.com)

Submitted by onehitwonder
onehitwonder writes: Industry groups like the Internet Engineering Task Force have long cried wolf on the need for companies to adopt IPv6, but the smoking gun for moving to the new protocol has only just emerged. Asia Pacific ran out of publicly addressable IP addresses in April 2011, Europe in September 2012, and IP addresses in North America are expected to be fully assigned by spring 2014.
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Submission + - What Happened to Diaspora, the Facebook Killer? It's Complicated (vice.com)

Submitted by
pigrabbitbear
pigrabbitbear writes: "Created by four New York University students, Diaspora tried to destroy the notion that one network could completely dominate the web. Diaspora – "the privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all distributed open source social network,” as described on their Kickstarter page – offered what seemed like the perfect antidote to Zuckerbergian tyranny. The New York Times quickly got wind. Tired of being bullied, technologists rallied behind the burgeoning startup spectacle, transforming what began as a fun project into a political movement. Before a single line of code had been written, Diaspora was a sensation. Its anti establishment rallying cry and garage hacker ethos earned it kudos from across an Internet eager for signs of life among a generation grown addicted to status updates.

And yet, the battle may have been lost before it even began. Beyond the difficulty of actually executing a project of this scope and magnitude, the team of four young kids with little real-world programming experience found themselves crushed under the weight of expectation. Even before they had tried to produce an actual product, bloggers, technologists and open-source geeks everywhere were already looking to them to save the world from tyranny and oppression. Not surprisingly, the first release, on September 15, 2010 was a public disaster, mainly for its bugs and security holes. Former fans mockingly dismissed it as “swiss cheese.”"

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