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Submission + - An X Prize competition for NASA's 'impossible' EM Drive? (examiner.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The story of the EM Drive, the prototype of a propulsion unit invented by a British scientist named Roger Shawyer and currently being tested by NASA’s Eagleworks Lab at the Johnson Spaceflight Center, has created considerable excitement and controversy in the media. Reactions have ranged from “NASA may have created a warp drive” to “the EM Drive is poppycock.” A proposal has cropped up at the NASASpaceflight.com site where a great deal of discussion has taken place concerning the EM Drive to create an X Prize competition to take development of the technology to the next level.

Submission + - World's rudest robot set to simulate the fury of call center customers

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A New Zealand-based company called Touchpoint Group has unveiled the world's angriest robot, which is designed to help train call center employees in the art of dealing with frustrated customers. The project, named Radiant, will involve one of Australia's biggest banks, which is providing researchers with recordings of real-life interactions with customers. Once finished Radiant will simulate hundreds of millions of angry customer interactions, helping companies better understand what triggers heated calls.

Submission + - New Horizons spacecraft captures Pluto with its tiniest moons (www.cbc.ca)

Submitted by mpicpp
mpicpp writes: NASA's Pluto-bound spacecraft can now see the dwarf planet's two tiniest known moons — both less than 30 kilometres wide.

Kerberos (which is 10 to 30 kilometres wide) and Styx (which is seven to 21 kilometres) are seen circling Pluto, along with the slightly larger moons Hydra and Nix, in an animated series of "family photos" captured by the New Horizons spacecraft between April 25 and May 1, and released by NASA Tuesday.

"New Horizons is now on the threshold of discovery," said mission science team member John Spencer, from the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., in a statement. "If the spacecraft observes any additional moons as we get closer to Pluto, they will be worlds that no one has seen before."

New Horizons is scheduled to make a close flyby of Pluto and its moons on July 14.

Submission + - Why the ruling against NSAs phone records program could have huge implicatitions (washingtonpost.com)

Submitted by Errorcod3
Errorcod3 writes: A federal appeals court ruling that the National Security Agency's collection of millions of Americans’ phone records is illegal could undercut more than just that program.

The 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Thursday that the phone records program violated the law used to authorize it, the USA Patriot Act. The program had been approved by the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and was first reported on by USA Today in 2006, but documents from former government contractor Edward Snowden revealed the program continued under President Obama.

The government argued that the huge volume of phone records were relevant to counterterrorism investigations because searching through them later might help discern links to terrorism suspects. But the court didn't buy it, ruling that such an interpretation of "relevance" was "unprecedented and unwarranted." The government's argument, the judges said, boiled down to "the proposition that essentially all telephone records are relevant to essentially all international terrorism investigations.”

Knocking down that interpretation could have consequences that go beyond the program and even the part of the USA Patriot Act used to authorized it, Section 215.

First, it could mean a blow to other programs relying on the same part of the USA Patriot Act, experts said — for example, a potentially ongoing program tracking international money transfers that includes millions of Americans' financial and personal data that was revealed by the Wall Street Journal last year.

And because many laws rely on very similar relevance language, the decision should bring new scrutiny to other programs, experts said. "As I understand it, this ruling should have implications for several surveillance statutes," said Harley Geiger, advocacy director and senior counsel at the Center for Democracy & Technology..

Why? Basically that's due to a bit of congressional laziness, said Jonathan Mayer, a lawyer and computer scientist affiliated with Stanford University's Center for Internet and Society. "Most surveillance statutes are copy and paste," he said. "There's certain relevance language that is replicated everywhere."

The court itself noted as much, citing the example of two bills that use the same language to compel the production of information relevant to authorized terrorism investigations — one about telephone tollbilling and another about educational records. (Those bills did not appear to be used for or intended to authorize bulk surveillance.)

But other programs that collected massive amounts of data on Americans relied on similar relevance language. A program that collected information about e-mails until 2011, for example, was set up under a set of legal authorities known as "pen register/trap and trace." And a Justice Department and Drug Enforcement Administration program that harvested records of international calls by Americans to as many as 116 countries for more than two decades since 1992 relied on an administrative subpoena power that required that the information gathered be "relevant or material" to an investigation, USA Today reported.

The court's rejection of the broad interpretation of relevance in this case could make it nearly impossible for the government to argue in favor of domestic bulk collection programs such as these without it being explicitly spelled out in the law, according to Mayer.

That could have significant weight in the legislative debate over the phone records program. Section 215 is set to expire on June 1, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is pushing for a bill that would renew it. But for the phone program to continue after passage, the government would have to convince the Supreme Court to reverse the 2nd Circuit's decision.

And a bill to modify the law so that, supporters argue, the NSA can get access to records while still protecting Americans’ data — called the USA Freedom Acct — has split privacy advocates. One coalition of privacy advocates argues that the bill essentially legalizes mass surveillance and could "eviscerate numerous court challenges" — presumably, challenges like the one just won in the 2nd Circuit.

But one of the key arguments from privacy advocates who support the bill is that it reins in bulk collection by the government, which may have continued under other authorities even if Section 215 is sunset. That argument may be less compelling to some now. "The 2nd Circuit just did a big piece of USA Freedom," Mayer said.

Some members of Congress are already citing the decision as a reason to reject the current version of the USA Freedom Act, including Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.), who led a campaign to defund the phone records program in 2013.

But supporters of the bill say that other aspects of the legislation, including transparency provisions, still make it worthwhile. "The problem is without the transparency requirements in USA Freedom, we won't know how the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court responds to the ruling," said Cato Institute senior fellow Julian Sanchez.

And USA Freedom would not undermine the relevance restrictions included in the 2nd Circuit decision, Geiger argues. Rather, he said, it would build on them by giving more specific parameters for what is relevant and "provide the certainty that both the intelligence community and the Americans concerned about civil liberties deserve."

The 2nd Circuit also declined to place a preliminary injunction on the case due to the current debate and could still be overturned, Sanchez said.

Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly said the NSA's phone record program was first revealed by Edward Snowden. In fact, it was first revealed by USA Today in 2006 and the Snowden documents showed the program continued under President Obama. We regret the error.

Submission + - US Passport Agency Contractor Stole Applicants' Data To Steal Their Identities

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Three women from Houston, Texas, stand accusedof engaging in an identity theft scheme in which one of them, a contract employee of the Department of State Passport Agency, was in charge of stealing personally identifiable information of persons applying for a passport. The information was then used to create counterfeit identification documents, which the other two women would use to successfully impersonate the affected individuals in order to fraudulently obtain commercial lines of credit and to purchase iPhones, iPads and other electronic merchandise.

Submission + - Google Confirms Cops Can Wiretap Your Hangouts (vice.com)

Submitted by Errorcod3
Errorcod3 writes: In the wake of all the Edward Snowden revelations, a seemingly endless series of encryption apps, all promising some degree “NSA-proof” security, have come out trying to take advantage of this new anti-surveillance business opportunity.

But despite some apps’ relative success, the reality is that most people probably just use mainstream messaging apps like iMessage or Google Hangouts.

Apple has long maintained that conversations over iMessage and Facetime use end-to-end encryption, meaning “no one but the sender and receiver can see or read them,” as the company said after the PRISM revelations. That claim has turned out to be partly true: normally, Apple can’t read your iMessages, but they can if they really want to.

Submission + - Warrantless airport seizure of laptop "cannot be justified," judge rules (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by SonicSpike
SonicSpike writes: The US government's prosecution of a South Korean businessman accused of illegally selling technology used in aircraft and missiles to Iran was dealt a devastating blow by a federal judge. The judge ruled Friday that the authorities illegally seized the businessman's computer at Los Angeles International Airport as he was to board a flight home.

The authorities who were investigating Jae Shik Kim exercised the border exception rule that allows the authorities to seize and search goods and people—without court warrants—along the border and at airport international terminals. US District Court judge Amy Berman Jackson of the District of Columbia noted that the Supreme Court has never directly addressed the issue of warrantless computer searches at an international border crossing, but she ruled (PDF) the government used Kim's flight home as an illegal pretext to seize his computer. Authorities then shipped it 150 miles south to San Diego where the hard drive was copied and examined for weeks, but the judge said the initial seizure "surely cannot be justified."

Submission + - Worker fired for disabling GPS app that tracked her 24 hours a day (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by sharkbiter
sharkbiter writes: "This intrusion would be highly offensive to a reasonable person," lawsuit says.

Southern California woman claims she was fired after uninstalling an app that her employer required her to run constantly on her mobile phone—an app that tracked her every move 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Submission + - Microsoft Invests In 3 Undersea Cable To Improve Its Data Center Connectivity (techcrunch.com)

Submitted by Errorcod3
Errorcod3 writes: Microsoft today announced that it is partnering with a consortium of telecom companies to build a new transpacific undersea cable that will connect a number of points in China, South Korea, Taiwan and Japan with the U.S. West Coast (or beautiful Hillsboro, OR — the home of the Hillsboro Hops — to be precise). Microsoft says the New Cross Pacific (NCP) Cable Network will provide faster connections for its customers and help it compete on cloud cost.

Submission + - World Health Organization wants more neutral (and blander) disease names (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: The World Health Organization (WHO) mostly works to reduce the physical toll of disease. But last week it turned to another kind of harm: the insult and stigma inflicted by diseases named for people, places, and animals. Among the existing monikers that its new guidelines “for the Naming of New Human Infectious Diseases” would discourage: Ebola, swine flu, Rift valley Fever, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, and monkey pox. Instead, WHO says researchers, health officials, and journalists should use more neutral, generic terms, such as severe respiratory disease or novel neurologic syndrome.

Comment Job vs global population (Score 1) 420

by mrflash818 (#49659451) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Moving To an Offshore-Proof Career?

I enjoyed reading all the offshore proof ideas people posted.

I get the sinking feeling, "there is no sanctuary" for most of us. The offshore proof 'good' jobs are only a few, and once a city has X many plumbers, or lawyers, or nurses, doctors, mechanics, ...then what about everyone else?

It seems that there may be a finite reservoir of total possible jobs all of humanity can do, they seem a resource to think about like we do for drinking water, farm-able land, and such.

With the constant upward growth of global population from 7B ==> 9B, it looks like it is a race to the bottom for most of us. Too many people chasing too few 'good' jobs, and every year the odds less in our favor.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Submission + - What to Say When the Police Tell You to Stop Filming Them 3

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Robinson Meyer writes in The Atlantic that first of all, police shouldn’t ask. “As a basic principle, we can’t tell you to stop recording,” says Delroy Burton, a 21-year veteran of DC's police force. “If you’re standing across the street videotaping, and I’m in a public place, carrying out my public functions, [then] I’m subject to recording, and there’s nothing legally the police officer can do to stop you from recording.” What you don’t have a right to do is interfere with an officer's work. "“Police officers may legitimately order citizens to cease activities that are truly interfering with legitimate law enforcement operations,” according to Jay Stanley who wrote the ACLU’s “Know Your Rights” guide for photographers, which lays out in plain language the legal protections that are assured people filming in public. Police officers may not confiscate or demand to view your digital photographs or video without a warrant and police may not delete your photographs or video under any circumstances.

What if an officer says you are interfering with legitimate law enforcement operations and you disagree with the officer? “If it were me, and an officer came up and said, ‘You need to turn that camera off, sir,’ I would strive to calmly and politely yet firmly remind the officer of my rights while continuing to record the interaction, and not turn the camera off," says Stanley. The ACLU guide also supplies the one question those stopped for taking photos or video may ask an officer: "The right question to ask is, ‘am I free to go?’ If the officer says no, then you are being detained, something that under the law an officer cannot do without reasonable suspicion that you have or are about to commit a crime or are in the process of doing so. Until you ask to leave, your being stopped is considered voluntary under the law and is legal."

Submission + - LinkedIn used to create database of 27,000 US Intelligence personnel (zdnet.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A new group, Transparency Toolkit, has mined LinkedIn to reveal and analyse the resumes of over 27,000 people in the US intelligence community. In the process, Transparency Toolkit said it found previously unknown secret codewords and references to surveillance technologies and projects. It aims to use the database for crowd-sourced data mining to "watch the watchers".

Submission + - Carbon dioxide hits 400ppm

Submitted by mrflash818
mrflash818 writes: For the first time since we began tracking carbon dioxide in the global atmosphere, the monthly global average concentration of this greenhouse gas surpassed 400 parts per million in March 2015, according to NOAA’s latest results.

http://research.noaa.gov/News/...

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