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Submission + - DARPA social media research stirs a murky, controversial pot (networkworld.com)

Submitted by coondoggie
coondoggie writes: DARPA’s two-year old program to better understand and perhaps ultimately influence social media has begun to bear fruit but some of that harvest is raising a stink. DARPA said when rolling out its Social Media in Strategic Communication (SMISC) program was to develop a social networks science that will develop automated and semiautomated operator support tools and techniques for the systematic and methodical use of social media at data scale and in a timely fashion. But in building that science the agency says it has funded myriad social media/Twitter research (including a study that looked at Lady Gaga’s Twitter following—a model of social media popularity, DARPA stated) as well as a look into Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Reddit and Kickstarter.

Submission + - How Google Map Hackers Can Destroy a Business at Will (wired.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Wired reports, "Beneath its slick interface and crystal clear GPS-enabled vision of the world, Google Maps roils with local rivalries, score-settling, and deception. Maps are dotted with thousands of spam business listings for nonexistent locksmiths and plumbers. Legitimate businesses sometimes see their listings hijacked by competitors or cloned into a duplicate with a different phone number or website. In January, someone bulk-modified the Google Maps presence of thousands of hotels around the country, changing the website URLs to a commercial third-party booking site ... Small businesses are the usual targets. .... These attacks happen because Google Maps is, at its heart, a massive crowdsourcing project, a shared conception of the world that skilled practitioners can bend and reshape in small ways using tools like Google’s Mapmaker or Google Places for Business. .... Google has gotten much better at policing malicious edits, to the point where they’re rare today. ... The system has loopholes though, and troves of money-hungry spammers looking for weaknesses. In February, an SEO consultant-turned-whistleblower named Bryan Seely demonstrated the risk dramatically when he set up doppelganger Google Maps listings for the offices of the FBI and Secret Service. Seely channeled the incoming phone calls through to the real agencies while recording them. The stunt got a lot of attention. The Secret Service told Seely he was “a hero” for showing them the vulnerability."

Submission + - Superior Yuytu rover can go conquer Mars (yournewsticker.com)

Submitted by pesttest
pesttest writes: Chief designer of the first in the history of space exploration rover Chinese Yuytu Yan Jia (Jia Yang) shared with the publication of his vision Xinhua further development of the national space program. Scientist expressed hope that soon modified version of his brainchild to conquer Mars. “I very much hope that the Chinese will explore....

Submission + - Facebook recruiting Highschool students (engadget.com)

Submitted by Charliemopps
Charliemopps writes: Facebook and other tech firms are hiring ever young and younger talent. But now Facebook is recruiting talent from Highschools and apparently paying as high as $5000 per month for a teenage intern.

Submission + - Can dogs sniff out computer memory like drugs? (providencejournal.com) 1

Submitted by FriendlySolipsist
FriendlySolipsist writes: A dog can be trained to detect computer memory, say the Rhode Island State Police in taking delivery of the second such dog in the nation from the Connecticut State Police. Being able to find hidden computer flash memory cards hidden in drawers and over ceiling tiles will aid their fight against child porn, the police say.

But is there any scientific evidence that such a thing is even possible? Computer parts are made from plastic and metal like almost everything else in a home or office, and computer parts unlike organic plants give off no odor. Without any plausible scientific explanation for how a dog can detect computer parts, is this all just a legal sham to bypass Fourth Amendment probable cause warrant requirements, allowing the human handler to signal the dog based on exactly the kind of "police intuition" that violates constitutional rights?

Comment Re:So how is that going to work (Score 1) 188

> I throw people out of the theatre all day long for using
> their cell phones... There are places it should be legal
> and my business or home is one of them.

Try covering the walls of the theatre room with aluminum foil or tin foil. It's not exactly a new idea http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...
> In 1836, Michael Faraday observed that the excess charge on a charged conductor
> resided only on its exterior and had no influence on anything enclosed within it.
> To demonstrate this fact, he built a room coated with metal foil and allowed
> high-voltage discharges from an electrostatic generator to strike the outside of
> the room. He used an electroscope to show that there was no electric charge
> present on the inside of the room's walls.

Comment People have short memories (Score 1) 231

I'm a fan of pre-Beatles oldies rock music. Every so often, somebody comes up with a "Greatest Hits Of All Time" list, and it usually seems to go back no further than 10 or 15 years before the list was published. Similar for history. Many such lists are better described as "the most influential people of recent times".The most influential people are founders of major movements religions (Jesus, Mohammed, etc) and political ideologies such (Karl Marx, etc)

And then there are leaders of states/empires, who led their empires to triumph/defeat. Too numerous to mention, going back to Biblical times through today

Comment Re:Behind the curve (Score 1) 1040

by knorthern knight (#47159645) Attached to: Seattle Approves $15 Per Hour Minimum Wage

> Point is, if you don't just grab the cheapest item on the shelf, there is a surprising
> amount of domestically-produced goods in Walmart (excluding clothes).

One thing I've noticed about Walmart is that they seem to be almost the only place here (Toronto, Canada) where you can get neutral-coloured T-shirts that you're not ashamed to wear to work. All other stores have "branding" splattered all over their T-shirts, e.g. Nike "checkmark", Tommy Hilfiger, AeroPostale, etc, etc. I do not want to be a walking billboard for a manufacturer. At least not while I'm paying them for their product.

Comment Re:This "nightmare" rigns a bell (Score 1) 240

by knorthern knight (#47152963) Attached to: The Coming IT Nightmare of Unpatchable Systems

> Total BS. Phones should last 20 years. The old land line ones last 20+ years.
> The only thing in a modern phone that doesn't have a 20+ year life span is the
> battery and that is not through not trying.

I got a Nokia 6015i "Candy Bar" phone in 2006. http://nokiamuseum.info/nokia-... Back then, it could talk to the network (Virgin Mobile Canada) over 3 protocols; analog, 1XRTT, and I forget what else. Now the display only shows 1XRTT active.

I rarely use it, so I don't need anything fancier. I'll keep it until my carrier no longer supports it. They've already sent me an offer of a "low-cost upgrade to a faster phone", but I ignored it. With all the buzz about 3G, 4G, 5G, etc, etc, and VOLTE, I don't think 1XRTT will be around several years from now, but I'll cross that bridge when I get to it.

Comment Here's the source data... (Score 1) 323

by knorthern knight (#47054503) Attached to: Rising Sea Level Could Put East Coast Nuclear Plants At Risk

Source data is at http://sealevel.colorado.edu/ The graph shows an average rise of 3.2 mm / year. You can download the data in ASCII format, suitable for plotting at http://sealevel.colorado.edu/f...

Note that this includes a fudge-factor called GIS (Glacial Isostatic Adjustment). They give a long-winded explanation. tl;dr they've added a 10% fudge factor. From http://sealevel.colorado.edu/c...

> We apply a correction for GIA because we want our sea level time series
> to reflect purely oceanographic phenomena. In essence, we would like
> our GMSL time series to be a proxy for ocean water volume changes.
> This is what is needed for comparisons to global climate models, for
> example, and other oceanographic datasets.

So they talk out of one side of their mouths about how much sea level is rising. Out of the other side of their mouth, they admit that their numbers aren't really sea level rise.

Another question... what type of effing idiot approves nuclear reactors located such that a sealevel rise of a few inches, let alone a few feet, would cause problems? Anybody ever heard of tsunamis (like at Fukushima)? They're rarer in the Atlantic, but they do happen.

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