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Submission + - NSA Chief Keith Alexander Takes His PRISM Pitch to YouTube (vice.com)

Submitted by Daniel_Stuckey
Daniel_Stuckey writes: There’s definitely something goofy about the video’s wan attempt at looking/sounding like a NOVA episode (the music, why?), but even moreso, Keith Alexander, director of the NSA and commander of US Cyber Command, comes off as a weird dude and, you know, a literal tool. Alexander, who defended the agency at Black Hat this summer and recently announced his retirement next year, takes care to emphasize the agency's privacy compliance precautions and oversight. "We have not had any willful or knowing violations in those programs," he says referring to sections 215 and 702 of the Patriot Act, which relate to the telephone metadata and PRISM programs respectively. "There have been [violations] in other programs, but not in those two."

Submission + - ATI takes crown away from Nvidia for almost half the price as fastest GPU (maximumpc.com)

Submitted by Billly Gates
Billly Gates writes: AMD may have trouble in their CPU department with Intel having superior fabrication plants. However, in the graphics market with GPU chips AMD is on fire! AMD earned a very rare Elite reward from Tomshardware as the fastest GPU available with its fastest r9 for as little as $550 each. NVidia has its top end GPU cards going for $1,000 as it had little competition to worry about. Maximum PC also included some benchmarks and crowned ATI as the fastest and best value card available. AMD/ATI also has introduced MANTLE Api for lower level access than DirectX which is cross platform. This may turn into a very important API as AMD/ATI have their GPUs in the next generation Sony and Xbox consoles as well with a large marketshare for game developers to target

Submission + - My data is bigger than yours. Analyzing the fragility of BigData with N. Taleb (wordpress.com)

Submitted by DyslexicAtheist
DyslexicAtheist writes: Can organizations become "Antifragile" by implementing a BigData strategy? I have been wondering about this for a while. In fact one of the first things that came to mind when starting to read "Antifragility" was that every DataScientist should read this book so that he can derive the right conclusion when implementing a model. However, the further I look into it, the more I'm convinced that BigData will never live up to the hype and indeed in the hands of our "dear leaders" is a very bad idea for both liberties and freedom. What's slashdot's opinion on it?

Submission + - Nebraska scientists refuse to carry out climate change-denying study (salon.com)

Submitted by Lasrick
Lasrick writes: This is great: State researchers say they refuse to be used as political pawns: 'The problem, according to members of the governor-appointed Climate Assessment and Response Committee, is that the bill behind the study specifically calls for the researchers to look at “cyclical” climate change. In so doing, it completely leaves out human contributions to global warming.'

Submission + - NSA Declares War on President (yahoo.com)

Submitted by pupsocket
pupsocket writes: U. S. citizens can stop pretending that their secret agencies exist to provide deniability to the President. Yesterday the German newspaper of record, Frankfurter Allgemeine, reported that the President told German Chancellor Merkel that he would have stopped the tap on her phone had he known about it. Today, another German paper, Bild am Sonntag, quoted U. S. Intelligence sources that the President had been briefed in 2010. This violation of secrecy should end the myth that the White House tells the secret agencies what they can and cannot do. Sounds like blackmail, the endgame.

Submission + - Ask ./: Where are the complete hosting providers? 3

Submitted by Kludge
Kludge writes: In 2000 there were thousands of email/web hosting businesses. In 2013 not much has changed.
To get my email/web/webmail/domain/VOIP/public-key/XMPP/VPN hosting I have to deal with five different service providers. Where are the complete hosting providers? The absence of competition in this area drives many to Google, making data siphoning easy for the NSA.
Why has hosting not advanced in the last 10 years? Where are the hosting providers that make end-to-end encrypted email/web/VOIP/XMPP easy and automatic for all my clients?

Submission + - Police Departments Work to Expand Capability to "Shut Down" Social Media (wordpress.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Workshops held by and for top police executives from throughout the world and widely available from vendors, were technologies and department policies that allow agencies to block content, users, and even devices – for example, “Geofencing” software that allows departments to block service to a specified device when the device leaves an established virtual geographic perimeter. The capability is a basic function of advanced mobile technologies like smartphones, “OnStar” type features that link drivers through GIS to central assistance centers, and automated infrastructure and other hardware including unmanned aerial systems that must “sense and respond.”

A senior police officer from the Chicago PD told a panel on Monday that his department was working with Facebook’s security chief to block users’ from the site by account (person), IP, and device (he did not say if by UUID or MAC address or other means of hardware ID) if it is determined they have posted what is deemed criminal content.

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 + - Why Johnny Can't Speak: A Cost of Paywalled Research

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: That there's no easy way for her to get timely, affordable access to taxpayer-funded research that could help her patients leaves speech-language pathologist Cortney Grove, well, speechless. In a cruel twist, U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz and U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, who prosecuted Aaron Swartz, enjoy free, all-they-can-eat access to JSTOR-paywalled research, a perk of an elite education that's paid for by their alma maters. "Cortney's frustration," writes the EFF's Adi Kamdar, "is not uncommon. Much of the research that guides health-related progress is funded by taxpayer dollars through government grants, and yet those who need this information most-practitioners and their patients-cannot afford to access it."

Submission + - Federal Prosecutors, in a Policy Shift, Cite Warrantless Wiretaps as Evidence (nytimes.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: The Justice Department for the first time has notified a criminal defendant that evidence being used against him came from a warrantless wiretap, a move that is expected to set up a Supreme Court test of whether such eavesdropping is constitutional.

The government’s notice allows the defendant's lawyer to ask a court to suppress the evidence by arguing that it derived from unconstitutional surveillance, setting in motion judicial review of the eavesdropping.

Submission + - Best cross-platform (or only Linux) audio software? 1

Submitted by blogologue
blogologue writes: I have played the guitar for some years now, and these days I think it's good therapy to be creative with music learning the piano and singing as well. So far I've been using Audacity as the tool to compose improvisations and demos, I haven't done much audio work before but it is already becoming too limited for my needs. Being a Linux-fanboi since the middle nineties I'm now looking for a good audio processing/editing/enhancing setup that can run on different platforms, the most important being Linux (yes, voting for Linux with my dollar). Are there any suggestions for Open Source or proprietary audio editing software that runs Linux?

Submission + - Mac OS 10.9 -- Infinity times your spam (fastmail.fm)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Email service FastMail.fm has an blog post about an interesting bug they're dealing with related to the new Mail.app in Mac OS 10.9 Mavericks. After finding a user who had 71 messages in his Junk Mail folder that were somehow responsible for over a million entries in the index file, they decided to investigate. 'This morning I checked again, there were nearly a million messages again, so I enabled telemetry on the account ... [Mail.app] copying all the email from the Junk Folder back into the Junk Folder again!. This is legal IMAP, so our server proceeds to create a new copy of each message in the folder. It then expunges the old copies of the messages, but it’s happening so often that the current UID on that folder is up to over 3 million. It was just over 2 million a few days ago when I first emailed the user to alert them to the situation, so it’s grown by another million since. The only way I can think this escaped QA was that they used a server which (like gmail) automatically suppresses duplicates for all their testing, because this is a massively bad problem.' The actual emails added up to about 2MB of actual disk usage, but the bug generated an additional 2GB of data on top of that.

Submission + - Canada Revenue Agency To Tax BitCoin Transactions (www.cbc.ca)

Submitted by semilemon
semilemon writes: The Canada Revenue Agency has started paying attention to BitCoin transactions, as it says users will have to pay tax on all transactions using the currency. From the article, "The CRA told the CBC there are two separate tax rules that apply to the electronic currency, depending on whether they are used as money to buy things or if they were merely bought and sold for speculative purposes. "Barter transaction rules apply where BitCoins are used to purchase goods or services," Canada Revenue Agency spokesman Philippe Brideau said in an email. In this situation, that means whatever you've received in exchange for your $1 worth of vegetables must be documented as a taxable gain of at least $1 somewhere. When it comes to trading BitCoins for profit, the tax man says there are tax implications there, too. "When BitCoins are bought or sold like a commodity, any resulting gains or losses could be income or capital for the taxpayer depending on the specific facts," ruled the CRA.

Submission + - Icelandic Pirate Party received 3 members of parlament

Submitted by Thorhs
Thorhs writes: According to preliminary results (all votes counted, no official word yet) the Icelandic Pirarte Party was able to secure 3 members of the national parlament, first PP to reach a national parlament. Things were hairy during the election night when the PP lost all their MPs when they dropped below the 5% barrier 'needed' in the somewhat complex election system. Thankfully they managed to slip back up above, ending up with 5.1% of the total votes. The old 'crash parties', the ones in charge before our epic financial crash, (Independent and Progressive parties) are the prime candidates to form a new government with just over 51% of the votes, but 40 of 63 seats. RUV (icelandic) has good coverate, while BBC has some info in english.

Submission + - MPAA Executive Tampers With Evidence In Piracy Case (torrentfreak.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: TorrentFreak reports on an internet piracy case from Finland, which saw four men found guilty and fined €45,000. During the trial, the defense attorney took note of inconsistencies in log files used as evidence against the men. An investigator for international recording industry organization IFPI revealed after questioning that the files had been tampered with. He said an MPAA executive was present when the evidence gathering took place, and altered the files to hide the identity of 'one of their spies.' 'No one from the MPAA informed the defense that the edits had been made and the tampering was revealed at the worst possible time – during the trial. This resulted in the prosecutor ordering a police investigation into the changes that had been made. "Police then proceeded by comparing the 'work copy' that the IFPI investigator produced with the material that police and the defending counsels had received. Police found out that the material had differences in over 10 files," Hietanen reveals.'

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