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Government

Submission + - Steve Mann Is Fighting for Your Cyborg Rights (vice.com) 1

Submitted by
pigrabbitbear
pigrabbitbear writes: "Last month, Dr. Steve Mann, a professor at the University of Toronto who has been living as a cyborg for his entire adult life, was attacked by employees at a Parisian McDonald’s.

He’d gone into the restaurant to use the bathroom — McDonald’s in France tend to have single-occupancy, “cyborg friendly,” bathrooms — and grab some food with his family. The management, however, objected to his head-mounted camera glasses, a system called “EyeTap” that captures images at 120 frames per second in 1080 × 1920-pixel resolution. Even after they had been shown a doctor’s note explaining the device and the impossibility of removing it without special surgical tools, the McDonald’s employees allegedly roughhoused Dr. Mann, ripped up his note, and kicked him out of the restaurant onto the street. After Dr. Mann made his story public online, McDonald’s corporate responded with an assurance that nothing of the sort had happened.

Then he released the images. Taken with the very glasses his aggressors objected to, the pictures show the perpetrators in flagranti, surrounding the cyborg at eye-level and swiping at his head."

Submission + - Opus - the codec to end all codecs (xiph.org) 4

Submitted by
jmv
jmv writes: "It's official. The Opus audio codec is now standardized by the IETF as RFC 6716. Opus is the first state-of-the-art, fully Free and Open audio codec ratified by a major standards organization. Better, Opus covers basically the entire audio-coding application space and manages to be as good or better than existing proprietary codecs over this whole space. Opus is the result of a collaboration between Xiph.Org, Mozilla, Microsoft (yes!), Broadcom, Octasic, and Google. See the Mozilla announcement and the Xiph.Org press release for more details."
Mars

Submission + - NASA:Dry ice snow lands on Mars – no word on school closings (networkworld.com)

Submitted by
coondoggie
coondoggie writes: "NASA said today new data show carbon dioxide-based snow, or what's more commonly known as dry ice, falls on the Red Planet's south pole -the only known such weather in our solar system.
Frozen carbon dioxide requires temperatures of about minus 193 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 125 Celsius) and the new analysis is based on data from observations in the south polar region during southern Mars winter in 2006-2007, identifying a tall carbon dioxide cloud about 300 miles (500 kilometers) in diameter persisting over the pole and smaller, shorter-lived, lower-altitude carbon dioxide ice clouds at latitudes from 70 to 80 degrees south."
Piracy

Submission + - MPAA Sends Out Anti-Piracy Propaganda to US Presidential Candidates (paritynews.com)

Submitted by hypnosec
hypnosec writes: MPAA is reportedly sending out a list of key points to the two frontrunner US presidential candidates and even to the folks at congress. The key “talking points” include words of praise for Hollywood and its contribution to the US economy and the thousands of jobs it brings along with it. The document also stresses that Hollywood brings technological innovation. Going back to its original points on copyright strategies, MPAA is trying to promote the need of new copyright protection strategies and need to open door for legislation similar to already shelved Stop Internet Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA).
Books

Submission + - Playing at the World: A Huge New History of Gaming (wired.com)

Submitted by disconj
disconj writes: Over at Wired, Ethan Gilsdorf interviews Jon Peterson, author of the new book Playing at the World . Gilsdorf calls it 'a must read,' though he cautions it 'is not intended for a general audience. It’s a book for geeks, about geeks.' It is apparently an insanely-detailed history of role-playing games and wargames, including everything from Prussian kriegsspiel up to Dungeons & Dragons and the beginning of computer RPGs (but none of that heathen stuff after 1980). Peterson says in the interview that he wanted to write a history of these games 'worthy of the future they are creating.' He apparently spent five years on the project, including unearthing a huge trove of previously-unknown historical documents.
China

Submission + - China's Alibaba to Outsell Amazon, eBay Combined (reuters.com)

Submitted by hackingbear
hackingbear writes: China's largest e-commerce firm, Alibaba Group, expects to sell merchandise this year worth more than that sold by Amazon Inc and eBay combined. The company is aiming for 3 trillion yuan ($473 billion) in annual transaction value from its Taobao e-commerce units in the next 5 to 7 years, rising from the 1 trillion yuan of sales expected for 2012. "From their annual reports we did a rough calculation and we were similar last year but we are growing faster than them this year, so this year we are probably larger than them," Zeng Ming, Chief Strategy Officer of Alibaba, said of Amazon and eBay.
Security

Submission + - Shamoon Malware Creators Were Amateurs who Made 'Silly Mistakes' (ibtimes.co.uk)

Submitted by
DavidGilbert99
DavidGilbert99 writes: "The Shamoon malware is suspected of being the virus responsible for the devastating attack on the world's largest crude oil producer Saudi Aramco but security experts at Kaspersky Lab say the developers were amateurs who made "silly mistakes" and used "crude" solutions to programming problems.

While the identity of the people behind the Aramco attack remains a mystery, one clue was given by the creators of the Shamoon malware. Within the code, Kaspersky Labs experts found a fragment of a picture of a burning US flag — hinting at a possible political motivation. However the fragment was hidden in plain sight so to speak and was there to be found according to the experts investigating the malware, meaning it could be something of a red herring.

While a group called the Cutting Sword of Justice has claimed responsibilty, another security expert, Sean Sullivan from F-Secure, believes there is no credible reason for believing their claims.

"Just like last week's claim that the Apple UDID debacle lies at the FBI's door, the latest conspiracy theory that the previously unknown 'Cutting Sword of Justice' are behind attacks on Saudi Aramco is completely unsubstantiated.“

“There is no evidence linking the group to this highly devastating attack, which is as likely to be an inside job as it is the work of industrial competitors looking to influence oil prices.,”"
Math

Submission + - How Windows FreeCell Gave Rise To Online Crowdsourcing (gameological.com)

Submitted by TPIRman
TPIRman writes: In 1994, a physics doctoral student named Dave Ring assembled more than 100 math and puzzle enthusiasts on Usenet for what became one of the earliest online 'crowdsourcing' projects. Their goal: to determine if every hand in Windows' FreeCell solitaire game was in fact winnable, as the program's help file implied. Their efforts soon focused in on one incredibly stubborn hand: #11,982. They couldn't beat it, but in the process of trying, they proved the viability of an idea that would later be refined with crowdsourcing models like Amazon's Mechanical Turk.
Technology

Submission + - Sony would benefit from some copyright infringement (abc.net.au)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Sony's Playstation Vita is the latest Sony introduction to flop thanks to overbearing copyright protection. But what would happen if the games could be copied? How many kids would be passing around pirated games and talking enthusiastically about the Vita? How many would then badger their parents to buy one? What would that do for Sony's sales and market share? What would a grass roots marketing campaign like that actually cost (in terms of game sale losses)? What if enormous amounts of money weren't spent on lawyers, massive litigation and lobbying campaigns? What if that money went on subsidizing game development instead? Wouldn't the Vita be thriving?
Data Storage

Submission + - Intel Announces PCI Express SSD 910 Product Family (hothardware.com)

Submitted by
MojoKid
MojoKid writes: "Intel just announced its first PCI-Express solid state storage device and it looks fairly impressive. Like the SSD 710 family of products, the newly announced Intel SSD 910 is based on 25nm MLC NAND Flash but it resides on a half height PCIe X8 card. The Intel SSD 910 is a triple-layer stack of NAND chips that fits into a single PCI-Express slot. The drive will be available in both a 400GB and 800GB flavors, with the 800GB version offering higher performance thanks to a greater number of on-board SSD controllers. Communication between the controllers is handled by a PCI-to-SAS (Serial Attached SATA) bridge chip. Intel is quoting 2GB/s read and 1GB/s write bandwidth for an 800GB drive with up to 180K random IOPS for their new PCIe SSD."
Microsoft

Submission + - End of Windows XP support era signals beginning of security nightmare (networkworld.com) 1

Submitted by colinneagle
colinneagle writes: Microsoft’s recent announcement that it will end support for the Windows XP operating system in two years signals the end of an era for the company, and potentially the beginning of a nightmare for everyone else.

When Microsoft cuts the chord on XP in two years it will effectively leave millions of existing Windows-based computers vulnerable to continued and undeterred cyberattacks, many of which hold the potential to find their way into consumer, enterprise and even industrial systems running the latest software.

Although most of the subsequent security issues appear to be at the consumer level, it may not be long until they find a way into corporate networks or industrial systems, Miller says.

Even scarier, Sarwate says many SCADA systems for industrial networks still run a modified version of XP, and are not in a position to upgrade. Because much of the software running on SCADA systems is not compatible with traditional Microsoft OS capabilities, an OS upgrade would entail much more work than it would for a home or corporate system.
Technology

Submission + - Nokia unveils a phone with a 41 MP camera (examiner.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: From the article:

"During Mobile World Conference today, Nokia announced the Nokia 808 Pureview phone. This phone has a 41 Megapixel camera on it. Yes, that's not a typo. Forty-one MP. This is the heighest resolution on a phone as of yet. Not only that, but Nokia is well known for having excellent cameras on their phones. Those two peices combined will probably make for an amazing camera experience. "

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