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Comment Feasibility (Score 1) 611

by onproton (#47722001) Attached to: Study: Ad-Free Internet Would Cost Everyone $230-a-Year
Even if we could somehow set up a system where every internet user pays $230/year to some central authority - how would it be distributed to the site owners etc.? I think this study is more indicative that perhaps internet advertisements are too inexpensive. How much per person would it take to get rid of television advertisements? My guess is a lot more.

Submission + - What You Wish You'd Known Starting Out As A Programmer 2

Submitted by snydeq
snydeq writes: Most of us gave little thought to the 'career' aspect of programming when starting out, but here we are, battle-hardened by hard-learned lessons, slouching our way through decades at the console, wishing perhaps that we had recognized the long road ahead when we started. What advice might we give to our younger self, or to younger selves coming to programming just now? Andrew C. Oliver offers eight insights he gave little thought to when first coding: 'As the old Faces song "Ooh La La" goes, I wish that I knew what I know now when I was younger. Back then, I simply loved to code and could have cared less about my "career" or about playing well with others. I could have saved myself a ton of trouble if I'd just followed a few simple practices.' What are yours?

Submission + - For the FBI, a Click is Probable Cause

Submitted by onproton
onproton writes: Earlier this month, Wired reported on a program entitled "Operation Torpedo," in which the FBI requested a warrant to use a hacking technique known as a "drive-by download" to catch Tor users who accessed a child pornography website. The warrant, the first of its kind to be publicly approved, allowed the FBI to indiscriminately install a virus onto any computer that visited the site in question regardless of identity, circumstance, or intent of the visitor — effectively rendering the click of a mouse sufficient probable cause. This program, and others like it, have raised the concerns of privacy advocates who remark that, "attacks on speech often begin at the unsavory margins where few will raise the alarm."

Submission + - Tuberculosis Is Newer Than What Was Thought (nytimes.com)

Submitted by mdsolar
mdsolar writes: After a remarkable analysis of bacterial DNA from 1,000-year-old mummies, scientists have proposed a new hypothesis for how tuberculosis arose and spread around the world.

The disease originated less than 6,000 years ago in Africa, they say, and took a surprising route to reach the New World: it was carried across the Atlantic by seals.

The new study, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, has already provoked strong reactions from other scientists.

“This is a landmark paper that challenges our previous ideas about the origins of tuberculosis,” said Terry Brown, a professor of biomolecular archaeology at the University of Manchester. “At the moment, I’m still in the astonished stage over this.”

Comment Re:not mutually exclusive terms (Score 1) 254

by onproton (#47709761) Attached to: The Benefits of Inequality
No one said they were mutually exclusive, just that there was a general misconception that the U.S. government is a democracy when in fact 1. it is a republic and 2. it is not democratic (in terms of the people do not have the power to effect policy decisions by their representatives.

Comment Re:I spent 3 hours trying to upgrade service... (Score 1) 251

by onproton (#47709749) Attached to: Comcast Training Materials Leaked
All the major telecoms have been trying to push landline services on their consumers - every single time I get new service or transfer they tell me I "have" to get a phone line because it's cheaper. In what world does that make sense?

Verizon stopped offering dry-line DSL about 2 years ago and forces all their customers to also pay for phone service - not because of technical implications, mind you, solely because they want it to look like people are using it, and they can do whatever the hell they want because no one is competing with them.

Submission + - Vehicle-To-Vehicle Networks Could Save Over 1,000 Lives a Year (itworld.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: On Monday, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) published a research report on vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) technology and is seeking input from the public and industry. In the report, it estimated the safety benefits of just two possible applications of V2V, called Left Turn Assist and Intersection Movement Assist. Together, they could prevent as many as 592,000 crashes and save 1,083 lives per year, the agency said.

Submission + - Rightscorp's new plan: Pay our copyright fees, or we take your browser (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by mpicpp
mpicpp writes: Online copyright cop charging $20 per song explains 2014 strategy to investors.

Internet copyright enforcer Rightscorp has told investors some revelatory details about its strategy in its second-quarter earnings call, as reported by TorrentFreak.

Rightscorp was founded to be a kind of RIAA-lite, getting online pirates to pay record companies and other rights-holders without the need to resort to high-stakes litigation. Instead, it creates e-mail notices demanding $20 per song from users it deems "repeat infringers" and insists that ISPs forward those notices.

The company is growing fast, but is still way, way in the red. Last year it earned $324,000 in revenue, while spending more than $2.1 million to run its operations. This year it's earning more revenue: $440,414 in the first six months of the year. However, operating costs during the same period have already hit $1.8 million.

Rightscorp's two marquee clients are BMG and Warner Music. Together, those two clients account for around one-third of Rightscorp's income.

The company is now working with more than 140 Internet service providers, although they provide differing levels of cooperation. Rightscorp's pitch to these ISPs is that since it has ironclad evidence of which users are "repeat infringers," they're obligated under copyright law to forward the notices; otherwise the ISPs become liable to a high-stakes copyright suit.

Submission + - Research Unveils Improved Method To Let Computers Know You Are Human

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: CAPTCHA services that require users to recognize and type in static distorted characters may be a method of the past, according to studies published by researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Researchers focused on a broad form of gamelike CAPTCHAs, called dynamic cognitive game, or DCG, CAPTCHAs, which challenge the user to perform a gamelike cognitive task interacting with a series of dynamic images. For example, in a “ship parking” DCG challenge, the user is required to identify the boat from a set of moving objects and drag-and-drop it to the available “dock” location. The puzzle is easy for the human user to solve, but may be difficult for a computer program to figure out. Also, its gamelike nature may make the process more engaging for the user compared to conventional text-based CAPTCHAs.

Submission + - Microsoft's Windows 8 App Store is Full of Scamware and It Doesn't Seem to Care

Submitted by Deathspawner
Deathspawner writes: Windows 8 brought a lot to the table, with one of its most major features being its app store. However, it's not a feature that Microsoft seems too intent on keeping clean. As it is today, the store is completely littered with misleading apps and outright scamware. The unfortunate thing is that to find any of it, all you have to do is simply open the store and peruse the main sections. Not so surprisingly, no Microsoft software seems to be affected by this, but many open-source apps can be found at the store from unofficial sources that have a cost, or will lead the user to download a third-party installer. It's only a matter of time before malware sneaks its way in, if it's not there already.

Submission + - Broadband Subscribers Eclipsing Cable TV Subscribers (wired.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: High-speed internet has become an everyday tool for most people, and cord-cutters have dramatically slowed the growth of cable TV, so this had to happen eventually: broadband internet subscribers now outnumber cable TV subscribers among the top cable providers in the U.S. According to a new report, these providers account for 49,915,000 broadband subscribers, edging out the number of cable subscribers by about 5,000. As Re/code's Peter Kafka notes, this means that for better or worse, the cable guys are now the internet guys. Kafka says their future is "selling you access to data pipes, and pay TV will be one of the things you use those pipes for."

Submission + - Knocking down the Great Firewall of China (dailydot.com)

Submitted by Nocturrne
Nocturrne writes: The FOSS project Lantern (https://getlantern.org/) is having great success in unblocking the internet for many users in oppressive regimes, like China and Iran. Much like Tor and bitorrent, Lantern is using peer-to-peer networking to overcome firewalls, but with the additional security of a trusted network of friends. The network of peers is growing, but we need more friends in uncensored countries to join us.

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