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Networking

Utah Bill Would Prevent Regional Fiber Networks From Growing 111

Posted by Soulskill from the stop-obstructing-my-internet dept.
symbolset writes "On the heels of the smackdown received by cable lobbyists in Kansas, Ars reports out of Utah that the cable companies aren't giving up hopes of preventing competition through legislation. The bill, called Interlocal Entity Service Prohibition, would prevent a regional fiber consortium from building infrastructure outside the boundaries of its member cities and towns — a direct attack on Google's work in Provo and the UTOPIA network. Utah is the third state to be involved in the Google Fiber rollout of gigabit fiber to the home."
Biotech

Amputee Has Prosthetic Hand Wired To Nerves 72

Posted by Soulskill from the thumbs-up dept.
New submitter kalman5 writes "Dennis Aabo Sørensen is the first amputee in the world to feel sensory rich information — in real-time — with a prosthetic hand wired to nerves in his upper arm. Sørensen could grasp objects intuitively and identify what he was touching while blindfolded. The surgical team 'attached electrodes from a robotic hand to a 36-year-old volunteer's median and ulnar nerves. Those nerves carry sensations that correspond with the volunteer's index finger and thumb, and with his pinky finger and the edge of his hand, respectively. The volunteer controlled the prosthetic with small muscle movements detected by sEMG, a method that dates to the 1970s and measures electrical signals through the skin—unlike the electrodes attached to his nerves, sEMG is not invasive.' The results? 'The volunteer was able to complete the requested tasks with his prosthetic thumb and index finger 67 percent of the time the first day and 93 percent of the time by the seventh day of the experiment, Micera and colleagues report. He found the pinky finger harder to control: he was only able to accomplish the requested grip 83 percent of the time by the end of the experiment.'"
OS X

North Korea's Home-Grown Operating System Mimics OS X 252

Posted by Soulskill from the north-korea-suddenly-very-hip dept.
CambodiaSam sends the latest on "Red Star OS," North Korea's attempt at a home-grown operating system. Previously, it had closely resembled Microsoft Windows, but a new update now strongly mimics Apple's OS X. "Despite living in a country very much shut off from the outside world, many people in North Korea do have access to technology - including mobile phones. However, devices are heavily restricted. Internet access, for instance, is locked down, with most users able to visit only a handful of sites mostly serving up state-sponsored news. The Red Star OS is peppered with North Korean propaganda, and its calendar tells users it is not 2014, but 103 — the number of years since the birth of former North Korean leader Kim Il-sung. An earlier version of Red Star OS was made available worldwide in 2010 after a Russian student posted it online. The latest version is believed to have been released some time in 2013."
Cloud

Fire Destroys Iron Mountain Data Warehouse, Argentina's Bank Records Lost 463

Posted by Soulskill from the offsite-backups-are-for-wimps dept.
cagraham writes "A fire at Iron Mountain's data warehouse in Buenos Aires left the facility 'ruined' and killed nine first-responders, according to the Washington Post. The origin of the fire is unknown. The facility was supposedly equipped with sprinkler systems, fire control systems, and had a private emergency team on standby. Among the records destroyed are Argentina's bank archives, the loss of which could have some surprisingly far-reaching implications."
Transportation

Judge Says You Can Warn Others About Speed Traps 457

Posted by Soulskill from the another-thing-to-tweet-about-while-driving dept.
cartechboy writes "Speeding is against the law, and yes, even going 5 mph over the speed limit is breaking the law. But everyone does it, right? What about when you see a cop? Some cops are ticketing people for notifying fellow motorists about speed traps. In Florida, Ryan Kintner simply flashed his high-beams to warning oncoming cars that there was a cop ahead. He was given a ticket for doing so. He went to court to fight the ticket, and a judge ruled that flashing lights are the equivalent of free speech, thus he had every right to flash his lights to warn oncoming cars."
Verizon

Is Verizon Already Slowing Netflix Down? 298

Posted by Soulskill from the didn't-take-long dept.
hondo77 points out a blog post by Dave Raphael, who noticed some odd discrepancies between two different Verizon broadband connections he has access to. His personal residential plan and his company's business plan both went through the same Verizon routers, but his residential plan is getting unusably slow speeds to places like AWS. He suggests that Verizon is already waging a war on high-bandwidth services like Netflix after the recent court decision against net neutrality. His discussion with a Verizon service representative seems to confirm this, though it's uncertain whether such an employee would have access to that information.
Medicine

Video Former Red Hat COO Helps Health Care Providers Work Together (Video) 74

Posted by Roblimo from the better-communication-can-lead-to-better-medical-care dept.
Do you remember the worries about getting different health care software systems to work with each other as health care providers starting moving away from paper? It's still a problem, but Joanne Rohde's company, Axial Exchange, is working to cure that problem not only as an entrepreneur but also because she has personal reasons to see health care providers communicate better with each other. In a 2012 interview for Huffington Post, she said, "While I was working for Red Hat, I got very sick... I ultimately had to go to 10 doctors to be diagnosed. Going from doctor to doctor, I could not believe I had to start over each time. No one actually talks to each other I became convinced that if I had had all the information, I probably would have been able to figure it out faster." In fact, Joanne got so sick that she quit her job as Red Hat COO after four years with the company. Once she started getting decent treatment for her Fybromyalgia and started getting better, she decided to apply open source principles to health care IT -- and to start a new company to do it. Opensource.com talked with Joanne in September 2013, and in January 2014 she talked with Health Care Finance News for an article titled Patients key to reducing readmissions. A phrase Joanne seems to be using a lot lately is "patient engagement," which has become a major part of Axial Exchange's work to improve communications not only between different health care providers but also between those providers and their patients. Update: 02/05 20:16 GMT by T : If you're seeing this post on beta.slashdot.org, note that we're still ironing out the details of video display here. You can view the video on tv.slashdot.org, instead. Please pardon our dust.
Open Source

Getting Young Women Interested In Open Source 545

Posted by Soulskill from the stop-making-them-uninterested dept.
New submitter Jason Baker writes "It seems like a perennial question: 'How do we get more women involved in tech?' The open source community, like any other part of the technology industry, is grappling with finding solutions that are more than just talking the talk of diversity, but actually make some demonstrable difference in the numbers. While there have been numerous success stories, the gender gap is still rampant. The answer, at least to one freelance entrepreneur, is providing strong role models of women using open source to have fun and make money. But is that enough to make a difference?"

Comment A wild competition appeared (Score 5, Interesting) 338

by nmb3000 (#46063421) Attached to: Google Fiber Launches In Provo — and Here's What It Feels Like

An interesting side effect of Google's fiber offering is the sudden competition it's putting in some places where it hardly existed before, and allowing us to examine the results.

I have a friend who lives in Provo (about 10 miles south of me) and will be eligible for Google Fiber when they open it up in his area this March. He has had Comcast Internet service for a couple of years now and is planning on switching to Google when he can. However, about a month ago a Comcast representative came directly to his home, unscheduled, to talk about a "new and improved" service level he was now eligible for.

This Comcast rep told my friend that, effective immediately (all he had to do was call Comcast), he could change his current ISP service to a package that offered 250 Mbps down / 150 Mbps up, no bandwidth cap, for $25 / month. To compare, he was currently getting 25 Mbps down and paying $75 / month. A couple of weeks ago he made the switch and has been very happy with the order of magnitude speed increase and 66% price drop.

I understand the concept behind competition and the magical invisible hand, but this sort of behavior sickens me. If Comcast can drop their prices and increase their service offerings so quickly in response to new competition, it just goes to show how badly they are screwing over most of their other customers. And, of course, when I called them to inquire about this amazing new Internet service they were offering, I was told it was a "not available" in my area and that different "geographical regions" have different prices.

There's a real argument here for municipal/state owned and funded fiber networks being leased out to various commercial (or otherwise) ISPs. If Google and Comcast can both offer this kind of bandwidth for these prices, the current state of affairs in most of the rest of the country is completely unjustified. I'm sick and tired of a few "elite" corporations getting an effective monopoly on Internet service offerings in vast areas, able to charge anything they please because people have no other option.
Privacy

US Senator Warns Against Political Surveillance By Drone 150

Posted by Soulskill from the eyes-in-the-skies dept.
cold fjord writes "Politico reports, 'Sen. Dianne Feinstein says she once found a drone peeking into the window of her home — the kind of cautionary tale she wants lawmakers to consider as they look at allowing commercial drone use. ... she used the episode to implore lawmakers to "proceed with caution." Feinstein said she encountered the flying robot while a demonstration was taking place outside her house. She said she went to the window to peek out — and "there was a drone right there at the window looking out at me." ... "Obviously the pilot of the drone had some surprise because the drone wheeled around and crashed ..." she said. ... Feinstein, who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, said Wednesday that she has seen firsthand the surveillance capabilities of drones and called civilian privacy concerns "significant." She ... recommended a search warrant requirement. Feinstein said she is working on legislation with the Commerce Committee and urged senators to move swiftly to create "strong, binding enforceable privacy policies that govern drone operations before the technology is upon us."'"
AT&T

AT&T Introduces "Sponsored Data" Allowing Services to Bypass 4G Data Caps 229

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the pay-for-play dept.
sirhan writes with news that AT&T has announced a program that allows companies to pay for their services to bypass mobile data caps. "With the new Sponsored Data service, data charges resulting from eligible uses will be billed directly to the sponsoring company ... Customers will see the service offered as AT&T Sponsored Data, and the usage will appear on their monthly invoice as Sponsored Data. Sponsored Data will be delivered at the same speed and performance as any non-Sponsored Data content." The Verge comments: "If YouTube doesn't hit your data cap but Vimeo does, most people are going to watch YouTube. If Facebook feels threatened by Snapchat and launches Poke with free data, maybe it doesn't get completely ignored and fail. If Apple Maps launched with free data for navigation, maybe we'd all be driving off bridges instead of downloading Google Maps for iOS." Or, think of distributed services: Mediagoblin vs Flickr, pump.io vs twitter, ownCloud vs Google Apps. This is probably a sign that data caps are here to stay, at least for AT&T subscribers (and if it's successful...).
Education

Cute Cat Photos Are Data-Driven Science Behind Cunning New Language Learning App 80

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the no-wonder-i'm-a-genius dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Cats are cute, and cute is good for cognition. Which is why Memrise, a language learning startup, settled on using lolcat-style cat photos as mnemonic aids for a new series of apps aimed at people who normally wouldn't bother learning another language. The first CatAcademy app is 'Cat Spanish' From the article: 'What we found, however we sliced it, was that pictures of cats — cute pictures specifically, of which over 50% were cats — just kept on coming out as the most effective mnemonics... I have to admit we were slightly skeptical to begin with. We're a scientific group, and data driven — but the data did drive us towards cats.'" Now, just to add cat pictures to Mnemosyne.

Comment Re:Game disk images in licensed emulator bundles (Score 1) 211

by nmb3000 (#45413821) Attached to: Apple II DOS Source Code Released

Hoarding things is bad, even for the Horde.

Then why does the Horde auction house suck, on a server where the Alliance auction is a house of plenty? No. The Horde hoards bigtime.

I'd guess there's a disparity between the number of Horde and Alliance players (Blizzard just hasn't done much to try and balance them out). Perhaps merged^Wcoalesced realms might help with that somewhat if they choose the right ones to join.

That, or Alliance just bots more.
Crime

The Silk Road Is Back 261

Posted by Soulskill from the somebody-else-wants-to-go-to-jail dept.
Daniel_Stuckey writes "Silk Road is rising from the dead. After the FBI seized the deep web's favourite illegal drug market and arrested its alleged founder Ross Ulbricht last month (for, among other things, ordering a hit through his own website), the online-marketplace-cum-libertarian-movement has found a new home and opened for business at 16:20 GMT this afternoon. In the wake of the original Silk Road's closure, everything became a little turbulent for its users. First, they had to get used to not getting high-quality, peer-reviewed drugs delivered direct to their sofas. (Though presumably they didn't stop getting high, instead forced back to the 'mystery mix' street dealers and surly ex-Balkan war criminals who have spent years filling cities with drugs at night.) Some users were pissed off that they'd lost all the Bitcoin wealth they'd amassed, or that paid-for orders would go undelivered, while small-time dealers freaked out about how they suddenly lacked the funds to pay off debts owed to drug sellers higher up the food chain."

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