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Submission + - Ask Slashdot: How do you quantify the privacy risk of various technologies?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: I'm personally concerned about privacy in light of revelations by various whistle blowers. However, I'm really struggling to quantify the privacy risks posed by various technologies. I'm currently considering giving up on popular web applications and social networks by Google, Dropbox, Facebook, etc. However, I'm unable and or unwilling to give up on a cell phone and Internet connection. However, I wonder if there is any point to giving up on web apps if Verizon is recording and providing backdoor access to my cell phone location, telephone calls, messages, browsing habits, etc.

In general, how would you quantify the privacy risk of the following activities on a scale from one to ten?

- Owning a cell phone registered in your name
- Having an Internet connection registered in your name
- Using cloud services by Google, Dropbox, etc.
- Using social networks
- Having a car with the ability to transmit data
- Any of the dozens of other ways that I give up my privacy on a daily basis, but hadn't considered

Submission + - Marines swap Microsoft for Linux OS on Northrop Grumman radar .. (capitalgazette.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Department of Defense announced a $10.2 million contract modification Wednesday to change the operator command and control software on its G/ATOR radar system Microsoft Windows XP to a Defense Information Systems Agency compliant Linux OS.

Submission + - Canada Waives Own Rules, Helps Microsoft Avoid US Visa Problems

Submitted by Freshly Exhumed
Freshly Exhumed writes: Citizenship and Immigration Canada has granted an unprecedented exemption to Microsoft that will allow the company to bring in an unspecified number of temporary foreign workers as trainees without first looking for Canadians to fill the jobs. No other company in any other field has been granted such an exemption, and it does not fall within any of the other categories where exemptions are normally given, according to a source familiar with process, effectively creating a new category: the Microsoft Exemption. Microsoft Canada did not immediately respond to questions about the deal, but in an interview earlier this year with Bloomberg Businessweek, Karen Jones, Microsoft’s deputy general counsel, said the deal will allow Microsoft to bypass stricter U.S. rules on visas for foreign workers. The entire issue of temporary foreign workers has been as blisteringly hot a topic across Canada as it has been in the USA.

Submission + - Judge Rules Drug Maker Cannot Halt Sales of Alzheimer's Medicine

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Andrew Pollack reports at the NYT that a federal judge has blocked an attempt by the drug company Actavis to halt sales of an older form of its Alzheimer’s disease drug Namenda in favor of a newer version with a longer patent life after New York’s attorney general filed an antitrust lawsuit accusing the drug company of forcing patients to switch to the newer version of the widely used medicine to hinder competition from generic manufacturers. “Today’s decision prevents Actavis from pursuing its scheme to block competition and maintain its high drug prices,” says Eric Schneiderman, the New York attorney general. “Our lawsuit against Actavis sends a clear message: Drug companies cannot illegally prioritize profits over patients.”

The case involves a practice called product hopping where brand name manufacturers make a slight alteration to their prescription drug (PDF) and engage in marketing efforts to shift consumers from the old version to the new to insulate the drug company from generic competition for several years. For its part Actavis argued that an injunction would be “unprecedented and extraordinary” and would cause the company “great financial harm, including unnecessary manufacturing and marketing costs.” Namenda has been a big seller. In the last fiscal year, the drug generated $1.5 billion in sales. The drug costs about $300 a month.

Submission + - Excuse Me While I Kiss This Guy: The Science of Misheard Song Lyrics

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Maria Konnikova writes in The New Yorker that mondegreens are funny but they also give us insight into the underlying nature of linguistic processing, how our minds make meaning out of sound, and how in fractions of seconds, we translate a boundless blur of sound into sense. One of the reasons we often mishear song lyrics is that there’s a lot of noise to get through, and we usually can’t see the musicians’ faces. Other times, the misperceptions come from the nature of the speech itself, for example when someone speaks in an unfamiliar accent or when the usual structure of stresses and inflections changes, as it does in a poem or a song. Another common cause of mondegreens is the oronym: word strings in which the sounds can be logically divided multiple ways. One version that Steven Pinker describes goes like this: Eugene O’Neill won a Pullet Surprise. The string of phonetic sounds can be plausibly broken up in multiple ways—and if you’re not familiar with the requisite proper noun, you may find yourself making an error.

Other times, the culprit is the perception of the sound itself: some letters and letter combinations sound remarkably alike, and we need further cues, whether visual or contextual, to help us out. In a phenomenon known as the McGurk effect, people can be made to hear one consonant when a similar one is being spoken. “There’s a bathroom on the right” standing in for “there’s a bad moon on the rise” is a succession of such similarities adding up to two equally coherent alternatives.

Finally along with knowledge, we’re governed by familiarity: we are more likely to select a word or phrase that we’re familiar with, a phenomenon known as Zipf’s law. One of the reasons that “Excuse me while I kiss this guy” substituted for Jimi Hendrix’s “Excuse me while I kiss the sky” remains one of the most widely reported mondegreens of all time can be explained in part by frequency. It’s much more common to hear of people kissing guys than skies.

Submission + - A paper by Maggie Simpson and Edna Krabappel was accepted by two journals (vox.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A scientific study by Maggie Simpson, Edna Krabappel, and Kim Jong Fun has been accepted by two journals. Of course, none of these fictional characters actually wrote the paper, titled "Fuzzy, Homogeneous Configurations." Rather, it's a nonsensical text, submitted by engineer Alex Smolyanitsky in an effort to expose a pair of scientific journals — the Journal of Computational Intelligence and Electronic Systems and the comic sans-loving Aperito Journal of NanoScience Technology.

Comment Banking is so insecure... (Score 3, Interesting) 84

by bswarm (#48539377) Attached to: US Treasury Dept: Banks Should Block Tor Nodes
I found a $25 withdrawal from my Savings account showing up as "Check converted to an electronic transaction by the merchant" from a Kohls store. I don't shop at Kohls, and that account doesn't even have checks, so this was either an error entering the account number or a crook. Kohls wouldn't give me any information on this saying it wasn't available, escalating it higher only got me a "we'll get back to you" which never happened. The bank said there's nothing they can do to prevent this from happening again except to close the account and reopen it with a different account number. The bank refunded the $25, but I would never have noticed if I hadn't checked all the transactions on the statement. Long story short, anyone can enter a routing and account number and make purchases if they get a lucky number that works.

Submission + - Comcast Forgets To Delete Revealing Note From Blog Post

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Earlier today, Comcast published a blog post to criticize the newly announced coalition opposing its merger with Time Warner Cable and to cheer about the FCC’s decision to restart the “shot clock” on that deal. But someone at Kabletown is probably getting a stern talking-to right now, after an accidental nugget of honesty made its way into that post. Comcast posted to their corporate blog today about the merger review process, reminding everyone why they think it will be so awesome and pointing to the pro-merger comments that have come in to the FCC. But they also left something else in. Near the end, the blog post reads, “Comcast and Time Warner Cable do not currently compete for customers anywhere in America. That means that if the proposed transaction goes through, consumers will not lose a choice of cable companies. Consumers will not lose a choice of broadband providers. And not a single market will see a reduction in competition. Those are simply the facts.” The first version of the blog post, which was also sent out in an e-mail blast, then continues: “We are still working with a vendor to analyze the FCC spreadsheet but in case it shows that there are any consumers in census blocks that may lose a broadband choice, want to make sure these sentences are more nuanced.” After that strange little note, the blog post carries on in praise of competition, saying, “There is a reason we want to provide our customers with better service, faster speeds, and a diverse choice of programming: we don’t want to lose them.”

Submission + - Music publishers sue an ISP over piracy (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by wabrandsma
wabrandsma writes: From Ars Technica:
BMG Rights Management and Round Hill Music have sued Cox Communications for copyright infringement, arguing that the Internet service provider doesn't do enough to punish those who download music illegally.
Both BMG and Round Hill are clients of Rightscorp, a copyright enforcement agent whose business is based on threatening ISPs with a high-stakes lawsuit if they don't forward settlement notices to users that Rightscorp believes are "repeat infringers" of copyright.
In their complaint (PDF), the music publishers also decided to publicly post IP addresses.

Submission + - Researchers Discover an 'Off Switch' For Pain in the Brain (ibtimes.co.uk) 1

Submitted by concertina226
concertina226 writes: Scientists working together from several international universities have discovered that it is possible to block a pathway in the brain of animals suffering from neuropathic pain, which could have a huge impact on improving pain relief in humans.

So far, the most successful ways to treat chronic pain from a pharmacological point of view are to create drugs that that interact or interfere with various channels in the brain to decrease pain, including adrenergic, opioid and calcium receptors.

However, there is another way – a chemical stimulator called adenosine that binds to brain receptors to trigger a biological response.

Adenosine has shown potential for killing pain in humans, but so far, no one has managed to harness this pain pathway successfully without causing a myriad of side effects.

Led by Dr Daniela Salvemini of SLU, the researchers discovered that by activating the A3 adenosine receptor in the rodents' brains and spinal cords, the receptor was able to prevent or reverse pain from nerve damage (the cause of chronic pain).

Submission + - Millions of spiders seen in mass dispersal event using wind currents (www.cbc.ca)

Submitted by Freshly Exhumed
Freshly Exhumed writes: A bizarre and oddly beautiful display of spider webs have been woven across a large field along a walking trail in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Canada. "Well it's acres and acres; it's a sea of web," said Allen McCormick. Prof. Rob Bennett, an expert on spiders who works at the Royal British Columbia Museum in Victoria, BC, Canada, said tiny, sheet-web weaver spiders known as Erigoninae linyphiidae most likely left the webs. Bennett said the spiders cast a web net to catch the wind and float away in a process known as ballooning. The webs in the field are the spiders' drag lines, left behind as they climb to the top of long grass to be whisked away by the wind. Bennett said it's a mystery why these spiders take off en masse. Perhaps The Green Goblin or Doc Oc are in the vicinity?

Submission + - Marijuana Legalized in Oregon, Alaska and Washington D.C.

Submitted by Robotron23
Robotron23 writes: Coinciding with the midterm elections yesterday were state ballots proposing the legalization of cannabis. All three territories where full legalization was tabled approved the measure, joining Washington state and Colorado in giving cannabis the nod. The narrowest vote was that of Alaska at a roughly 52 to 48 percent margin. Washington D.C. meanwhile saw the vote strongly tipped in favor at about 69% to 31% opposed. Buoyed by the news, advocates of legal cannabis are already contemplating the next round of state ballots in 2016.

Submission + - Wormholes may not be limited to science fiction forever

Submitted by StartsWithABang
StartsWithABang writes: If you wanted to travel to the stars — to star systems beyond our own — you’d better be prepared to take your sweet time. Even at the speeds the Apollo astronauts traveled to the Moon, it would take millions of years to reach even the next nearest star beyond our own, Proxima Centauri. And yet, General Relativity admits an astounding possibility to short-cut the great cosmic distances by punching a hole in spacetime, connecting two far-separated events to one another through a cosmic bridge: a wormhole. What strikes us as the most fanciful of science fiction ideas may legitimately someday become science fact, and if it does, here's the physics of how it will work!

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