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Submission + - YouTube Thinks "I Have a Dream" Is Lounge Music (vice.com)

Submitted by Daniel_Stuckey
Daniel_Stuckey writes: For decades the "I Have a Dream" speech has been a rallying cry for civil rights everywhere. It's also been the centerpiece in a quiet, long and unfortunate copyright war, caught between those who might argue it belongs in the public domain and those who insist that it's in the private ownership of the King family. In the process, videos of the speech have disappeared from YouTube, under a copyright controlled by the music publisher EMI, and a system charged with robotically policing copyright on all of YouTube's videos.

In the latest chapter in the speech's copyright morass, that system, Content ID, has decided that at least some of the rights to the speech—and the profits it generates from each view—belong to a company called GR8 AL Music. At some point in the past few months, Content ID has decided that the video contains a lounge song titled "Our Dream," from an album called Lounge Cocktails, Vol.1 (Delicious Grooves for Café Bar and Hotel Suites).

Algorithms work in mysterious ways. The video doesn't contain that song. In this peculiar case, "I Have a Dream" has likely been confused with the song because the song itself contains an excerpt of King's speech.

Submission + - Canadian health scientists resort to sneaker net after funding slashed (www.cbc.ca)

Submitted by sandbagger
sandbagger writes: Health Canada scientists are so concerned about losing access to their research library that they're finding workarounds, with one squirrelling away journals and books in his basement for colleagues to consult, says a report obtained by CBC News. The report said the number of in-house librarians went from 40 in 2007 to just six in April 2013. "I look at it as an insidious plan to discourage people from using libraries," said Dr. Rudi Mueller, who left the department in 2012. "If you want to justify closing a library, you make access difficult and then you say it is hardly used."

This is hardly new for Stephen Harper's Conservative government. Over the Christmas holidays, several scientific libraries were closed and their contents taken to the dump.

Submission + - Dark Wallet Will Make Bitcoin Accessible for All—Except the Feds (vice.com)

Submitted by Daniel_Stuckey
Daniel_Stuckey writes: The group, called UnSystem, are self-proclaimed cryto-anarchists led by Cody Wilson—who you may remember as the creator of the controversial 3D-printed gun. After getting himself in hot water with the government for making the digital files to print an unregulated weapon freely available on the internet, Wilson's now endeavoring to bring bitcoin back to its anarchist roots. Like other bitcoin wallets, you'll be able to store, send, and receive coins, and interact with block chain, the bitcoin public ledger. But Dark Wallet will include extra protections to make sure transactions are secure, anonymous, and hard to trace—including a protocol called "trustless mixing” that combines users' coins together before encoding it into the ledger.

Submission + - Even the Author of the Patriot Act Is Trying to Stop the NSA (vice.com)

Submitted by Daniel_Stuckey
Daniel_Stuckey writes: Republican Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner will introduce an anti-NSA bill tomorrow in the House, and if it makes its winding way to becoming law, it will be a big step towards curtailing the NSA's bulk metadata collection. Wisconsin Rep. Sensenbrenner, along with 60 co-sponsors, aims to amend one section of the Patriot Act, Section 215, in a bill known as the United and Strengthening America by Fulfilling Rights and Ending Eavesdropping, Dragnet Collection, and Online Monitoring Act—also known by its less-clunky acronym version, the USA Freedom Act.

Submission + - CAPTCHA Busted? Company Claims to Have Broken Protection System (sciencemag.org) 1

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: A software company called Vicarious claims to have created a computer algorithm that can solve CAPTCHA with greater than 90% accuracy. If true, the advance would represent a major breakthrough in artificial intelligence. It would also mean that the internet will have to start looking for a new security system. The problem, however, is that Vicarious has provided little evidence for its claims, though some well-known scientists are behind the work.

Submission + - Mexican ATM Malware Coming To English-Speaking World (itworld.com)

Submitted by jfruh
jfruh writes: The Mexican banking sector has been bedeviled by Ploutus, a malicious software package that helps thieves extract money from ATMs. Now an updated version of the code, with variable and comments translated from Spanish into English, has been spotted in the wild, indicating that thieves north of the border may be taking an interest in it.

Submission + - Dream Chaser Damaged in Landing Accident at Edwards AFB

Submitted by RocketAcademy
RocketAcademy writes: The test article for Sierra Nevada's Dream Chaser spacecraft suffered a landing accident on Saturday when the left main landing gear failed to deploy, causing the vehicle to flip over. NBC News quotes a Sierra Nevada engineer saying that the pilot would have walked away.

Sierra Nevada Corporation is developing the Dream Chaser to support the International Space Station as part of NASA's Commercial Crew and Cargo program. It is not yet known what effect the mishap will have on Dream Chaser development.

A number of rocket vehicles have suffered landing-gear mishaps in the recent past. Several years ago, concerns over spacecraft gear design led to a call for NASA to fund a technology prize for robust, light-weight landing gear concepts.

Submission + - Japan refused to help NSA tap Asia's Internet (japantimes.co.jp)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The NSA sought the Japanese government’s cooperation to wiretap fiber-optic cables carrying phone and data across the Asia-Pacific region but the request was rejected. The NSA wanted to intercept personal information including Internet activity and phone calls passing through Japan from Asia including China. The Japanese government refused because it was illegal and would need to involve a massive number of private sector workers. Article 35 of the Japanese Constitution protects against illegal search and seizure.

Submission + - A Live Map of Ongoing DDoS Attacks (vice.com)

Submitted by Daniel_Stuckey
Daniel_Stuckey writes: It's the Digital Attack Map, and it was produced in a collaborative effort by Google Ideas and Arbor Networks to raise awareness about distributed denial of service attacks. You know, those malicious digital attempts to choke, or shutdown websites by sending them volumes of traffic far too large for them to handle. The map "surfaces anonymous attack traffic data to let users explore historic trends and find reports of outages happening on a given day," as its about page explains. Created using attack data from Arbor’s "ATLAS® global threat intelligence system," this is the D.A.R.E. of DDoS—it's about the danger of having information streams cut off. Under the heading "DDoS Attacks Matter," Google and Arbor explain that "sites covering elections are brought down to influence their outcome, media sites are attacked to censor stories, and businesses are taken offline by competitors looking for a leg up."

Submission + - New York Subpoenaed AirBnb for Its User Data (vice.com)

Submitted by Daniel_Stuckey
Daniel_Stuckey writes: The war between New York City and Airbnb is raging on, and the future of the hospitality business hangs in the balance.

The city is fighting the startup for breaking local laws against operating an illegal hotel out of your home, worried that hustlers are abusing the online service to turn a profit. To that end, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman just slapped the company with a subpoena to hand over the user data of all New Yorkers who've listed their apartment on the site, the New York Daily News reported today. That's about 225,000 users.

Submission + - Dogs 'Feel' Like Humans (ibtimes.com)

Submitted by minty3
minty3 writes: They may not speak English or know how to walk on two legs – but dogs may have more in common with humans than previously believed.

According to research conducted by Gregory Berns, a professor of neuroeconomics at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia and author of “How Dogs Love Us: A Neuroscientist and His Adopted Dog Decode the Canine Brain,” dogs may use the same part of the brain as humans do to “feel.”

Submission + - Every Time We Look at Neptune, We Find More Moons (vice.com) 1

Submitted by Daniel_Stuckey
Daniel_Stuckey writes: Though we’ve been exploring space for over a half century, there’s still plenty to find in our own backyard. Case in point: last week, Mark Showalter, a keen-eyed researching with the SETI institute, found a previously unseen moon orbiting Neptune in archival data from the Hubble Space Telescope.

The moon, for the time being, is called S/2004 N 1. Preliminary estimates suggest it’s no more than 12 miles across, so small that from our Earthly vantage point i’s about 100 times as dim as the faintest star we can see. Even Voyager 2—the planet-hopping probe that flew past Neptune in 1989 and caught a brief glimpse of the planet’s moons and rings—didn’t see this moon. It is currently the smallest known moon in the Neptunian system and the 14th one we’ve found.

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