Slashdot is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
China

China Allows Most Online Criticism But Cracks Down On Mobilization and Gossip 94

Posted by samzenpus from the sticks-and-stones dept.
hackingbear writes "Harvard sociologist Gary King has just completed two studies that peer into the Chinese censorship machine — including a field experiment within China that was conducted with extraordinary secrecy. Together, the studies refute popular intuitions about what Chinese censors are after. He found that the censors actually permit 'vitriolic criticism' of China's leaders and governmental policies but the censors crack down heavily on any move to get people physically mobilized to act on such criticism. In a related development, China's top court issued a ruling on Monday to threaten a 3-year sentence for people posting online rumors viewed by 5,000 internet users or reposted more than 500 times. Though, in the same ruling, the court also clarified that a person reposting false rumor should not be punished if he or she does not clearly know the information is false, even if real harm is done. "
Medicine

Research Shows E-Cigs Might Be As Good For Quitting As Nicotine Patches 314

Posted by timothy from the why-don't-all-smokers-switch-to-e-cigs? dept.
"Taking a drag from an e-cigarette may be just as safe and effective as slapping on a nicotine patch for smokers struggling to quit, according to the first physician-run trial to compare the two products." That's according to research recently published in The Lancet (PDF) and reported by Bloomberg. Why is this significant? From the article: "If European and U.S. regulators treat e-cigarettes as medical devices, yet leave cigarettes on general sale, tobacco makers 'will retain their market monopoly, and we will never learn whether e-cigarettes would replace traditional cigarettes if allowed to continue evolving and competing with smoked tobacco on even terms,' [wrote clinical psychology professor Peter Hajek]. The results will also be presented today at the European Respiratory Society’s annual meeting in Barcelona. E-cigarettes have taken Europe and the U.S. by storm. In France, there are more than 1 million regular users, according to a government-commissioned report published in May. Sales worldwide will probably approach $2 billion by the end of this year and top $10 billion by 2017, according to a forecast by Wells Fargo & Co."
Math

The STEM Crisis Is a Myth 284

Posted by Soulskill from the are-there-giants?-i-like-myths-with-giants dept.
theodp writes "Forget the dire predictions of a looming shortfall of scientists, technologists, engineers, and mathematicians, advises IEEE Spectrum contributing editor Robert Charette — the STEM crisis is a myth. In investigating the simultaneous claims of both a shortage and a surplus of STEM workers, Charette was surprised by 'the apparent mismatch between earning a STEM degree and having a STEM job. Of the 7.6 million STEM workers counted by the Commerce Department, only 3.3 million possess STEM degrees. Viewed another way, about 15 million U.S. residents hold at least a bachelor's degree in a STEM discipline, but three-fourths of them — 11.4 million — work outside of STEM.' So, why would universities, government, and tech companies like Facebook, IBM, and Microsoft cry STEM-worker-shortage-wolf? 'Clearly, powerful forces must be at work to perpetuate the cycle,' Charette writes. 'One is obvious: the bottom line. Companies would rather not pay STEM professionals high salaries with lavish benefits, offer them training on the job, or guarantee them decades of stable employment. So having an oversupply of workers, whether domestically educated or imported, is to their benefit...Governments also push the STEM myth because an abundance of scientists and engineers is widely viewed as an important engine for innovation and also for national defense. And the perception of a STEM crisis benefits higher education, says Ron Hira, because as 'taxpayers subsidize more STEM education, that works in the interest of the universities' by allowing them to expand their enrollments. An oversupply of STEM workers may also have a beneficial effect on the economy, says Georgetown's Nicole Smith, one of the coauthors of the 2011 STEM study. If STEM graduates can't find traditional STEM jobs, she says, 'they will end up in other sectors of the economy and be productive.'"
Businesses

Wall Street Traders Charged With Copying Code To Start Their Own Company 145

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the awesome-business-plans dept.
coondoggie writes "Talk about starting a business on shaky ground. The Manhattan District Attorney's office says former Wall Street traders stole electronic trading source code and data from their then trading firm in an effort to start up their own financial business." Sending yourself pilfered code through your company email account is probably not the wisest plan.
Cloud

Dark Day In the AWS Cloud: Big Name Sites Go Down 182

Posted by timothy from the central-authority-vs-resilience dept.
An outage of one company's servers might only affect that company's customers — but when a major data center for Amazon hits kinks, sites that rely on the AWS cloud services all suffer from the downtime. That's what happened today, when several major sites or online services (like Instagram and AirBnB) were knocked temporarily offline, evidently because of problems at an Amazon data center in Northern Virginia. From TechCrunch's coverage of the outage: "The deluge of tweets that accompanied the services’ initial hiccups first started at around 4 p.m. Eastern time, and only increased in intensity as users found they couldn’t share pictures of their food or their meticulously crafted video snippets. Some further poking around on Twitter and beyond revealed that some other services known to rely on AWS — Netflix, IFTTT, Heroku and Airbnb to name a few — have been experiencing similar issues today."
Facebook

Meet the Programmer Behind Social Fixer 64

Posted by timothy from the social-neuterer-failed-at-the-focus-group dept.
Ars Technica profiles Matt Kruse, the developer behind Social Fixer. "Social Fixer uses JavaScript to modify Facebook's interface. It gives you dozens of options for customizing how you see Facebook: you can separate updates into tabs, enable mouse-over image previews, change the layout, filter posts from your friends, give everything a theme and even hide the bits you find disagreeable. It's a huge amount of work to keep going, but although Kruse has a tiny Paypal donations button on the bottom of his website to cover his expenses, he says he hasn't made any efforts to profit from it, despite being contacted several times by people who sniffed money to be made. ... So far, he's turned them all down. 'There was one person a while ago who seemed pretty promising,' he says. His tone is gently bemused, as if not quite believing that people actually want to pay money for his work. 'I've had ten offers over the past four years from people who say they want to add advertising inside it or attach some additional software to the installer. But the way they wanted to implement it technically would have put my users at risk of them being malicious, so I couldn't do that.'" It would be nice if every piece of software and every website with ads thought the same way.
Australia

Australian University Unveils New Carbon-Trapping Bricks 142

Posted by timothy from the why-not-an-infinite-supply-of-graphene? dept.
FirephoxRising writes "A research pilot plant in Newcastle will trial world-first technology that turns carbon emissions into bricks and pavers for the construction industry. More efficient and stable than storing gas in the ground, the new method will sequester carbon and can work anywhere, unlike geo-sequestration which is site specific."
Canada

Canadian Military Developing Stealth Snowmobile 187

Posted by samzenpus from the quite-as-the-snow dept.
innocent_white_lamb writes "The Canadian military is currently testing a $620,000 hybrid-electric stealth snowmobile. Testing includes speed, towing capacity, endurance, mobility, usability, and of course, noise emissions. The testing and most other information about the stealth snowmobile is secret and very little information has been released other than the fact that it does exist. One document reads 'The noise level of an internal combustion engine cannot be reduced to an acceptable level for missions where covertness may be required, especially given the increased propagation of sound in cold, dry, Arctic air.' Therefore, National Defence's research agency is 'pursuing the development of a "silent" snowmobile for winter operations in Canada, specifically in the Arctic.' Michael Byers, an Arctic policy expert, questions the need for a stealth snowmobile. 'I don't see a whole lot of evidence that criminals and terrorists are scooting around Canada's North on snowmobiles and that we have to sneak up on them,' he said."

Comment Re:Why not move? (Score 1) 182

by CaymanIslandCarpedie (#44538461) Attached to: Inside the Decision To Shut Down Silent Mail

Another thing we do as much as possible is use self-signed certs as much as possible (obviously not always possible with client facing communications). Even I thought that was paranoid until recently, but if you think about it all the NSA has to do is intercept communication to/from CAs and brute force or have some back-door into that. Brute forcing just that small subset of internet communication can give you the certs to freely read the rest of the 99.9999% of SSL/TLS communication over the web.
Patents

TrollingEffects.org To Help Potential Victims of Patent Trolls 35

Posted by timothy from the method-for-helping dept.
First time accepted submitter kdataman writes "The EFF has helped launch a new site to help the potential victims of patent trolling. It is called TrollingEffects.org and is designed to parallel the way ChillingEffects.org helps those getting DMCA letters. The idea is to educate the targets and help them work together for a more cost-effective defense."

Comment Re:Why not move? (Score 5, Insightful) 182

by CaymanIslandCarpedie (#44538275) Attached to: Inside the Decision To Shut Down Silent Mail

To reliably do this, they must move themselves and have a self-hosted solution. If you host your data with anyone else you need to believe they value your data more than the money to be made from it or you are worth the head-ache of annoyingly trying to protect it from government agencies.

Over the last 10 years from time to time people within my company (which highly depends on privacy) have suggested hosting our servers/services with external hosting providers/cloud solutions. Every time I refuse. Their arguments are valid. It could be cheaper. It removes the hosting burden. These large providers are experts and could have better security. Even all of that being true the overriding truth as I see it is even though they may be better, cheaper, etc I can promise you we care about our data more than they will. FBI raids a data center for someone elses server and grabs our with it? Sorry, it was the FBIs fault! Any business reality makes handing over our data a legal requirement or just more convenient legally? Sorry we had to!

The last few months revelations just confirm what I've always known. If security and privacy are your business and you take it seriously, you had better be hosting it yourself. Google may have better technical experts than you, but I promise the people who actually make decisions internally care more about your data and will fight for it more when you host internally.

Comment Re:Kickstarter replaces IPO (Score 1) 70

by CaymanIslandCarpedie (#41506703) Attached to: Does Crowdfunding Work?

Are you sure you want to try and prove a negative? AFAIC Kickstarter is the proof positive that you are wrong on this. Many companies would love to be able to access the public for initial funding but they cannot.

But with Kickstarter, the owner doesn't have to give up any equity or give contributors any voice in decisions. A VERY big difference. With Kickstarter, they basically get free money to try something if people think it is a good idea.

I think though that if Kickstarter (or a competitor) comes up with the business model that allows a small investor actually to own part of the business they are investing in, there will be government intervention

Absolutely. That would already be illegal with current regulations unless done in a way to basically copy existing VC structures and thus not be public. If you want to market you company publicly you are free to do so, but that is an IPO. If you don't yet want to go public, then you do private deals. You can do a private deal with any one you choose (even private investors), just there isn't much of a market to privately approach a ton of small investors who only bring a bit of cash to the deal for hopefully obvious reasons.

Slashdot Top Deals

To the systems programmer, users and applications serve only to provide a test load.

Close