60320593
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
The notorious troll and hacker known as Andrew “weev” Auernheimer spent 13 months in jail for exposing an AT&T security flaw. He was recently released when a federal court overturned the conviction on grounds of improper venue. Now, Auernheimer has penned an open letter to the Department of Justice in which he demands reparations for acts of “fraud” and “violence” carried out against him over the past three years. Those reparations must be paid in bitcoin (BTC), he says—28,296, to be exact. At current market value, that comes out to $13.7 million. The bombastic letter is titled “Open letter to federal scum,” and was allegedly bcc’d to “a few hundred journalists” (including Motherboard). In it, 28-year-old Auernheimer writes that he calculated the sum owed to him based on his market value:
60249299
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
If the sum of all the protests in Rio de Janeiro during the World Cup consists of one man taking off his shirt and throwing his shoes, the shock troops of Rio de Janeiro’s military police have got it covered. In a demonstration to journalists of the skills the battalion had picked up from an FBI-led training course, 19 police officers, each dressed like emo Ninja Turtles, clasping Perspex shields and rubber batons, successfully apprehended the semi-naked shoe-thrower. The improbable scenario was not lost on the police’s spokesman, Commander André Luiz Araújo Vidal. “Unfortunately, what you saw today was just a small part of our training,” he said afterwards. “Most of our troops are busy preparing for a demonstration later today.”
60249239
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
Over the last five years, NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope has found dozens of potentially habitable planets. The only problem is that we can’t actually see them, because the glare from those planets’ stars makes it impossible to image them directly. A new, audacious plan to completely block out the light from those stars, however, could change all of that. The plan calls for a satellite to be sent out several tens of thousands of miles from Earth. The satellite will unfold a huge, flower-shaped metal shade that will literally block the light of some far-out star to the point where a space telescope, which will directly communicate with Starshade, will be able to image whatever planets are orbiting it directly. It’s called Starshade, and, given the name, it works exactly how you might expect it to. If you look directly at the sun, you're not going to be able to see anything in the sky around it. Hold up something between your eyes and the sun to block it, however, and you'll be able to see much better.
60136613
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
Collecting user data to serve up targeted ads is Google's bread and butter, and yet the company refuses to speak publicly about how its infamous augmented eyewear could kick that business model into high gear. Still, the tightlippedness hasn't done anything to stem the speculation that Google Glass will usher in a new era of advertising. One tech startup exploring that nascent industry is Personal Neuro, which has developed a brain-scanning electroencephalography (EEG) gadget, similar to the Emotiv EEG headset, which collects the wearer’s brainwave data, analyzes it, and leverages the neural insights to create various apps. By reading and interpreting brain signals, it can determine a consumer’s mood, emotions, and taste. Now, combine that data with data from Glass features like geolocation or eye-tracking, and you’ve got a trove of information that could be used to deliver hyper-personalized ads to someone wearing the augmented device.
60136513
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
A homemade Lithuanian drone was reportedly being used to smuggle cigarettes into Russia, meaning that organized crime has beaten Amazon to the punch in the quest to deliver desirable products to customers aerially. Russia has “detained” the drone, Oleg Dzhurayev, a spokesman with the Kaliningrad border department of the Russian Federal Security service, told one of Russia's largest news organizations, ITAR-TASS, earlier this week. It’s not the first time drones have been used to smuggle products—back in November, people tried to smuggle drugs into a prison in Georgia; the same thing happened in Sao Paolo back in March and in Quebec last fall. Basically, people have learned that drones are good at carrying things (I, for one, am pretty into this miniature single cigarette pack-carrying drone you see in the video above—it’s pretty cute).
60053565
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Daniel_Stuckey writes:
We’ve slowly begun to see a rise in the number of internet-connected things—watches, thermostats, glasses, and even plants—but we’re still in the infancy of what’s likely to become a worldwide trend, according to more than 1,600 experts polled by the Pew Research Center. “In 2008, the number of internet-connected devices first outnumbered the human population, and they have been growing far faster than we have,” Patrick Tucker, author of The Naked Future: What Happens In a World That Anticipates Your Every Move? , told Pew. “There will be 50 billion in 2020. These will include phones, chips, sensors, implants, and devices of which we have not yet conceived.” The internet will become so common, the report suggests, that it will become “like electricity”—it’ll be everywhere, but you won’t really think about it. It's not the first time seemingly-insane numbers have been thrown out. Some want there to be as many as a "trillion sensors" on the same time scale.
60011915
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Daniel_Stuckey writes:
The UK’s High Court ruled yesterday that HM Revenue and Customs acted “unlawfully” when it declined to detail how it was investigating the export of digital spy tools created by a British company. Human rights group Privacy International is celebrating the decision of Mr. Justice Green, which means HMRC now has to reconsider releasing information on its investigation into controls surrounding the export of malware known as FinFisher, created by British supplier Gamma International. The widespread FinFisher malware family, also known as FinSpy, can carry out a range of surveillance operations, from snooping on Skype and Facebook conversations to siphoning off emails or files sitting on a device. It is supposed to benefit law enforcement in their investigations, but has allegedly been found in various nations with poor human rights records, including Bahrain and Ethiopia.
59973029
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
Earlier this year, in the black heart of the City of London, Europe’s financial capital, I talked to a group of penetration testers (ethical hackers who poke holes in their customers’ systems to figure out where they are weakest), who agreed to create some new honeypots and demonstrate their use for me. I wanted to understand more about how honeypots were built, and whether we could glean any patterns if we added fresh traps in new locations.
Honeypots are normally created on virtual private servers—rentable places to host things on the internet. Once you’ve bought your plot of land for a couple of quid, you download honeypot software; in our case, we used programs known as Dionaea and Kippo. This process is essentially like installing a new operating system onto a dumb machine, and creates what appears to hackers to be a genuinely vulnerable server. In reality, none of the features of the systems work, but they look real enough.
59972845
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
Twenty days into a 30-day mission, seven hours into a nine-hour deep dive, scientists aboard the Thomas G. Thompson research ship the lost contact with their remotely operated robotic submarine.
The unmanned vehicle, Nereus, was exploring the Karmadec Trench northeast of New Zealand, going as deep as 11,000 meters—almost seven miles below the surface. After emergency recovery protocols failed to bring Nereus back, the scientists began searching near the dive site. From the Thompson, the scientists spotted debris floating on the surface. It was from Nereus. At 2PM Saturday, the robo-sub was confirmed as lost.
59796383
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
In a major update to its mobile app, Google Maps will now integrate Uber's on-demand car service. That means when you're looking up the route from point A to B in certain cities, the app will show you the best way to drive, bike, walk, or Uber there. Choose option four, and a single tap launches your Uber app and hails you a black car. That's an entire fourth mode of transport there folks, which speaks to what the Silicon Valley darlings may have in mind for the future—aside from being a smart and obvious PR move. Google Ventures is a major investor in Uber, so it's in the both companies' best interest to promote the app. It'll be interesting to see if the maps integration is a sweetheart deal for Uber, or if Google incorporates its competitor apps too: Lyft, Sidecar, and Hailo. The venture firm poured $258 million into the startup last summer, propelling the company to its $3.5 billion valuation. That's Google's largest deal ever, sparking a swirl of speculation about Google's future intentions with the transportation startup.
59719981
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
Look at Norway, where the Army has started using Oculus Rift to drive tanks with increased visibility, according to the Norwegian TV station tu.no. Four VR cameras are mounted on the sides of the tank to give the soldier inside donning the headset a full 360 degree view of what's going on outside, like X-ray vision. Using cameras to "see through" a vehicle isn't a new concept; when the hatches are down tanks are notoriously hard to navigate. But the Oculus Rift dev kit is just a fraction of the price of traditional 360-degree camera equipment: Lockheed Martin's F-35 helmet for pilots can cost tens of thousands of dollars.
59717949
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
How risky is it to use the words "bomb," "plague," or "gun" online? That was a question we posed, tongue in cheek, with a web toy we built last year called Hello NSA. It offers users suggested tweets that use words that drawn from a list of watchwords that analysts at the Dept. of Homeland Security are instructed to search for on social media. "Stop holding my love hostage," one of the tweets read. "My emotions are like a tornado of fundamentalist wildfire." It was silly, but it was also imagined as an absurdist response to the absurdist ways that dragnet surveillance of the public and non-public Internet jars with our ideas of freedom of speech and privacy. And yet, after reading the mounting pile of NSA PowerPoints, are all of us as comfortable as we used to be Googling for a word like "anthrax," even if we were simply looking up our favorite thrash metal band? Maybe not. According to a new study of Google search trends, searches for terms deemed to be sensitive to government or privacy concerns have dropped "significantly" in the months since Edward Snowden's revelations in July.
59628199
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
Here’s some more evidence that sexuality is an innate characteristic: Gay men are more likely to respond to male sex pheromones than they are to female ones. Chinese researchers studied the pheromones naturally given off by men and women in things such as semen, sweat, and urine. Scientists have been aware of the existence of two distinct pheromones—androstadienone (found in male semen and sweat) and estratetraenol (present in female urine)—for some time, but it’s been unclear whether they’ve had much of an effect on the opposite gender. It turns out that they do, and how they do depends on a person’s sexuality. To test their hypothesis, Wen Zhou of the Chinese Academy of Sciences set up an experiment in which participants looked at a video in which human figures rendered in a connect-the-dots style (shown above) were shown walking. Participants were then asked to guess whether the figures were masculine or feminine. When exposed to androstadienone, heterosexual women were more likely to suggest that the wire figure was a man—but the pheromone had no effect on heterosexual men.
59547405
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
Edward Snowden's NSA revelations will likely cost the US tech sector tens of billions of dollars. The same anxieties causing foreign clients to pull out of contracts with American tech companies, are also fueling a wave of venture capital investment in Silicon Valley into anonymity apps like Whisper and Secret. But whether or not they can deliver on either promise—profits and privacy—remains in question. Whisper, released two years ago, has led the charge of anonymity apps that now include Secret, Rumr, Backchat, and Yik Yak, which is already ruining lives across middle schools everywhere. The precocious app has been wildly successful in growing its userbase—it has millions of users and billions of monthly pageviews—and in raising funds. “There is a real desire to be more authentic online,” Roelof Botha, a partner at Sequoia Capital, which led a $21 million investment into Whisper last fall, told Business Week . “Most people have more to say than just, ‘Here I am not the beach looking great.’”
59522147
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
The state of Oklahoma had scheduled two executions for Tuesday, April 29th. This in spite of myriad objections that the drugs being used for both lethal injections had not been tested, and thus could violate the constitutional right to the courts, as well as the 8th Amendment: protection from cruel and unusual punishment. After much legal and political wrangling, the state proceeded with the executions anyway. It soon became clear that the critics' worst case scenarios were coming true—Oklahoma violently botched the first execution. The inmate "blew" a vein and had a heart attack. The state quickly postponed the second one. "After weeks of Oklahoma refusing to disclose basic information about the drugs for tonight's lethal injection procedures, tonight, Clayton Lockett was tortured to death," Madeline Cohen, the attorney of Charles Warner, the second man scheduled for execution, said in a statement. Katie Fretland at The Guardian reported from the scene of the botched attempt to execute Lockett using the untested, unvetted, and therefore potentially unconstitutional lethal injection drugs.
