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Privacy

Submission + - Mega, A Secure Megaupload Replacement, To Launch Saturday (ibtimes.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Kim Dotcom has announced that he will launch "Mega," a secure, encrypted file-sharing site to replace his Megaupload.com, which was shut down last year by U.S. authorities.

"In the past, securely storing and transferring confidential information required the installation of dedicated software," Kim Dotcom's website states. "The new Mega encrypts and decrypts your data transparently in your browser, on the fly. You hold the keys to what you store in the cloud, not us."
Medicine

Submission + - Australian scientists discover potential aids cure

Submitted by smi.james.th
smi.james.th writes: Several sites report that Australian researcher David Harrich and his team have potentially discovered a way to stop HIV becoming AIDS and ultimately cure the disease. From the article: "What we've actually done is taken a normal virus protein that the virus needs to grow, and we've changed this protein, so that instead of assisting the virus, it actually impedes virus replication and does it quite strongly." This could potentially hail one of modern medicine's greatest victories.
Firefox

Submission + - Health Reports Headed to Firefox (ostatic.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Firefox Health Report (FHR) is a prototype Firefox feature that enables users to optimize their Firefox configuration and get reports on Firefox's status similar to the kinds of diagnostic information that many cars provide.
Science

Submission + - "Superomniphobic" nanoscale coating repels almost any liquid (gizmag.com) 1

Submitted by cylonlover
cylonlover writes: A team of engineering researchers at the University of Michigan has developed a nanoscale coating that causes almost all liquids to bounce off surfaces treated with it. Creating a surface structure that is least 95 percent air, the new "superomniphobic" coating is claimed to repel the broadest range of liquids of any material in its class, opening up the possibility of super stain-resistant clothing, drag-reducing waterproof paints for ship hulls, breathable garments that provide protection from harmful chemicals, and touchscreens resistant to fingerprint smudges.
Businesses

A Humanoid Robot Named "Baxter" Could Revive US Manufacturing 414

Posted by samzenpus from the no-lunch-breaks dept.
fangmcgee writes "Rethink Robotics invented a $22,000 humanoid robot named "Baxter" that could give cheap offshore labor a run for its money and return manufacturing jobs to U.S. soil. Artificial intelligence expert Rodney Brooks is the brain behind Baxter. From the article: 'Brooks’s company, Rethink Robotics, says the robot will spark a “renaissance” in American manufacturing by helping small companies compete against low-wage offshore labor. Baxter will do that by accelerating a trend of factory efficiency that’s eliminated more jobs in the U.S. than overseas competition has. Of the approximately 5.8 million manufacturing jobs the U.S. lost between 2000 and 2010, according to McKinsey Global Institute, two-thirds were lost because of higher productivity and only 20 percent moved to places like China, Mexico, or Thailand.'"
Security

Submission + - New Phishing Toolkit Uses Whitelisting To 'Bounce' Non-Victims (securityledger.com)

Submitted by
chicksdaddy
chicksdaddy writes: "Researchers at RSA say that a new phishing toolkit allows attackers to put a velvet rope around scam web pages – bouncing all but the intended victims.

The new toolkit, dubbed “Bouncer,” was discovered in an analysis of attacks on financial institutions in South Africa, Australia and Malaysia in recent weeks. It allows attackers to generate a unique ID for each intended victim, then embed that in a URL that is sent to the victim. Outsiders attempting to access the phishing page are redirected to a “404 page not found” error message.

Other phishing kits have used IP address blacklists to block anti malware companies from viewing their malicious pages, but this is the first known use of whitelisting, RSA said.

The phishing attacks that RSA technicians discovered that used the Bouncer kit were designed to harvest login credentials from financial services firms. The whitelisting feature may well work, especially given the volume of potential phishing pages that security companies review each day. Getting a 404 message may be enough to get a forensic investigator or security researcher to move on to the next phishing site, rather than investigating."
Twitter

Judge Rules Twitter Images Cannot Be Used Commercially 103

Posted by Soulskill from the sharing-is-not-legally-caring dept.
New submitter trekkie314 writes "Reuters reports that a Manhattan District Judge has ruled that AFP and the Washington Post infringed a photographer's copyright by re-using photos he posted on his Twitter account. The judge rejected AFP's claim that a Twitter post was equivalent to making the images available for anyone to use (drawing a distinction between allowing users to re-tweet within the social network and the commercial use of content). The judge also ruled against the photographer's request that he be compensated for each person that viewed the photos, ruling instead that damages would be granted once per infringing image only. This last point might have interesting implications in file-sharing cases — can it set a precedent against massive judgments against peer-to-peer file-sharers?"
China

Submission + - NASA releases orbital photos of Beijing's air polution (washingtonpost.com)

Submitted by skade88
skade88 writes: This story should remind all of us that air pollution controls are not just about addressing global warming. They also help us have cleaner air and fewer health problems resulting from smog and haze. Starting earlier this month, Beijing, China started having worse than normal air pollution issues. On Jan 14, 2013 the US Embassy's air pollution sensors in Beijing found the density of the most dangerous small air particles, PM 2.5, at 291 micrograms per cubic meter of air. The world Health Organization's guidelines for air pollution state that PM 2.5 above 25 micrograms per cubic meter of air is dangerous to a person's health.

To put the problem into perspective for anyone not living in Cloud City..... I mean Beijing, NASA has released two orbital photos of Beijing showing a before and during photo of the air pollution. The photo from Jan 4 shows parts of the Beijing still visible from space. The photo from Jan 14 shows nothing but a huge, thick cloud of haze with no buildings visible.
Twitter

Submission + - Judge Rules Twitter Images Cannot be used Commercially (reuters.com)

Submitted by trekkie314
trekkie314 writes: Reuters reports that a Manhattan District Judge has ruled that AFP and the Washington Post infringed a photographer's copyright by re-using photos he posted on his Twitter account. The judge rejected AFP's claim that a Twitter post was equivalent to making the images available for anyone to use (drawing a distinction between allowing users to re-tweet within the social network and the commercial use of content). The judge also ruled against the photographer's request that he be compensated for each person that viewed the photos, ruling instead that damages would be granted once per infringing image only. This last point should might interesting implications in file-sharing cases--can it set a precedent against massive judgements against peer-to-peer file-sharers?

From the article: "The case is Agence France Presse v. Morel, U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, No. 10-02730."
GNOME

Fedora 18 Released 118

Posted by timothy from the barely-legal dept.
ultranerdz writes "Fedora 18 has been released. Featuring a new installer UI, GNOME 3.6, Clojure, DragonEgg, KDE Plasma Workspaces 4.9, MATE Desktop, Samba 4, Secure Boot, and updated major packages versions, this is one of the most anticipated Fedora versions yet. After more than two months of slips and delays, Fedora 18 is finally here." I'm glad to see MATE becoming more widely available; it suits me, as a GNOME 2 fan but not a complete troglodyte.

Submission + - Mac or PC? A developer's viewpoint (varonis.com)

Submitted by FreaKBeaNie
FreaKBeaNie writes: An enterprise developers' take on what it is like to develop for OSX compared with developing for Windows in .Net. "Since Mac OS X is based on the NeXTStep operating system which is a UNIX-like operating system based on the Mach Kernel and BSD, you might expect that the development environment would be very barebones. The opposite is true – we have been extremely pleased with the maturity and robustness of OS X, Xcode, Objective C and Cocoa...Cocoa is at least as powerful as .NET, if not more powerful in some aspects. As in .NET, support for common things like UI, file management, localization and multi-threading are built into the framework and are very easy to make use of. "
AI

Submission + - IBM's Watson Gets A 'Swear Filter' After Learning The Urban Dictionary (ibtimes.com) 1

Submitted by
redletterdave
redletterdave writes: "IBM's super-computer Watson briefly went from "smart" to "smart ass" with the help of the Urban Dictionary. According to Eric Brown, an IBM research assistant, he and his 35-person team wanted to get Watson to sound more like a real human. After teaching IBM's super-computer the entire Urban Dictionary, however, Watson simply couldn't distinguish polite discourse from profanity. Watson unfortunately learned all of the Urban Dictionary's bad habits, including throwing in overly-crass language at random points in its responses; in answering one question, Watson even reportedly used the word "bullshit" within an answer to one researcher's question. In the end, Brown and his team were forced to remove the Urban Dictionary from Watson's vocabulary, and additionally developed a smart filter to keep Watson from swearing in the future."
Windows

Submission + - Symbian Sells Millions, Despite Nokia Pushing Windows Phone (slashdot.org)

Submitted by
Nerval's Lobster
Nerval's Lobster writes: "During the fourth quarter of 2012, Nokia sold 4.4 million Lumia smartphones—a significant rise from the previous quarter, which featured sales of 2.9 million Lumia devices. The Lumia line runs Microsoft’s Windows Phone operating system, which largely replaced Symbian as Nokia’s smartphone software of choice. Despite that shift and Nokia's emphasis on Windows Phone, however, the company still sold 2.2 million Symbian smartphones during the quarter. The question remains whether Nokia should have gone with Windows Phone in the first place, or embraced an alternate platform such as Android; an anti-Elop camp has emerged in recent months, arguing that Symbian was still a viable platform before Elop consigned it to the dustbin of tech history. For now at least, both sides seem to be right: Symbian still sells despite Nokia’s attempts to take it increasingly offline, and Lumia phones are selling well. It’ll take more time—perhaps a lot more time—before the ramifications of Elop’s bet become clear."
Medicine

NIH Neuroscientists: Junior Seau Had Brain Disease Caused By Hits To the Head 240

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the that's-an-osha-violation-there dept.
McGruber writes "ABC News/ESPN broke the story that a team of scientists from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) analyzed the brain tissue of renowned NFL linebacker Junior Seau and have concluded that the football player suffered a debilitating brain disease likely caused by two decades worth of hits to the head. From the article: 'In May 2012, Seau, 43 — football's monster in the middle, a perennial all-star and defensive icon in the 1990s whose passionate hits made him a dominant figure in the NFL — shot himself in the chest at his home in Oceanside, Calif., leaving behind four children and many unanswered questions.' As Slashdot earlier reported, more than 30 NFL players have in recent years been diagnosed with chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a condition once known as 'punch drunk' because it affected boxers who had taken multiple blows to the head."
Medicine

Drug Allows Deafened Mice to Regrow Inner Ear Hair 80

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the turn-it-up-to-11 dept.
sciencehabit writes "All you graying, half-deaf Def Leppard fans, listen up. A drug applied to the ears of mice deafened by noise can restore some hearing in the animals. By blocking a key protein, the drug allows sound-sensing cells that are damaged by noise to regrow. The treatment isn't anywhere near ready for use in humans, but the advance at least raises the prospect of restoring hearing to some deafened people."

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