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Submission + - ALCU: NSA can't stop US citizen data if it wanted to (techdirt.com)

Submitted by sandbagger
sandbagger writes: The American Civil Liberties Association's Freedom of Information requests have revealed this tidbit in the NSA's reasoning: "As a practical matterit is not possible to determine what communications are to or from U.S, persons nearly as readily as is the case with telephony, and often is not possible at all."

In other words, since the poor guys just have to collect everything. Not their fault.

Submission + - Slashdot Skeptics Were Right About Dual-Core TK1 Performance 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In August, Slashdot published a scoop titled NVIDIAs 64-bit Tegra K1: The Ghost of Transmeta Rides Again, Out of Order. In the comments section, many skeptics chimed in, saying that while the out-of-order architecture being re-introduced by NVIDIA would likely lead to improved benchmarks, real-world use scenarios might experience stalls-aplenty.

Turns out the skeptics were right, as The Verge, Gizmodo, and even the rather Google-biased Android Police have panned the user experience rendered by the 64-bit to be choppy, laggy, slow, and unacceptable. Needless to say, this is rather ironic, considering the chip has been flaunted by NVIDIA as the fastest mobile SoC ever.

After stepping out of the phone game, the lack of design wins for the past few years, the spontaneously cracked trim and weak WiFi antenna on their flagship SHIELD Tablet, it seems that NVIDIA's future in producing fabless mobile SoC's is in serious peril. Stock 64-bit ARM A57/53 cores (which stick to the proven out-of-order architecture) are predicted to be smoking fast, while even the current 32-bit A15, and even A12/17 (which are next generation's midrange cores) provide a very smooth user experience. ARM's high-end stock GPU, the MALI T-T60 series, is no slouch either, and when scaled up to its maximum of 16 cores, provides similar computing power to the 192 Core Kepler architecture used in both the 32-bit A15 and 64-bit Denver variations of the Tegra K1 SoC.

NVIDIA has essentially run out of wildcards to differentiate themselves in the high-end segment, which their own CEO has claimed is all they are aiming for at this point. It would not be far fetched to imagine a world in which NVIDIA totally bows out from the mobile-SoC game in only 1 or 2 years. They simply can't keep losing billions on it year after year, forever; not when the future looks this bleak.

Submission + - Big Data Knows When You Are About to Quit Your Job

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Quentin Hardy reports at the NYT that a leading maker of cloud-based software for running corporate human resources and financial operations has announced new products that provide the kind of data analysis that Netflix uses to recommend movies, LinkedIn has to suggest people you might know, or Facebook needs to put a likely ad in front of you. One version of the software, called Insight Applications, predicts which high-performing employees are likely to leave a company in the next year; it then offers possible actions (more money, new job) that might make them stay. In another instance, expense reporting software can predict which employee populations are most likely to exceed their budgets. “We’ve applied machine learning to affect consumer tastes,” says Mohammad Sabah, director of data science at Workday. “putting it to career choices, to pay and employment, have a huge upside if we do it right.” Already, Sabah says, “we’re surprised how accurately we can predict someone will leave a job.” The goal is to predict future business outcomes to take advantage of opportunities and cut risk levels. One future product may be the ability to predict who will and won’t make their sales quotas, and suggest who should be hired to improve the outcome. “Making an employee happy, improving the efficiency of a company these are hard problems that affect corporations.

Submission + - CNN Anchors Caught On Camera Using Microsoft Surface As An iPad Stand (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: Since the release of its Surface Pro 3 tablet, Microsoft has pushed their new slate hard. It's as if the company wanted it to overwrite that part of our memory that recalls the Surface RT and it's monumental losses. This past August, we saw the company make a big move by deploying a boatload of Surface Pro tablets to every team in the NFL, gratis. All season so far, coaches and even players have made use of them to plan their next course-of-action, and for the most part, they seemed to be well-received. Unlike some of the products Microsoft tries to get us to adopt, the Surface Pro 3 really is a solid tablet / convertible. Unfortunately, at least where the CNN political team is concerned, Microsoft hasn't one over a few anchors, like they have in NFL, when they were supplied with brand-new Surface Pros. In recent shots captured and tweeted about, a Surface Pro 3 can be seen acting as an "iPad stand" and quite an expensive one. As humorous as this is, it might not seem that interesting if it were just one correspondent who pulled that stunt. Let's be honest, some people just like their iPads. That wasn't the case, though. There were at least two commentators using an iPad on the same set, despite having the Surface right in front of them and seemingly hiding it behind Microsoft's darling Windows 8 slate.

Submission + - Number of billionaires globally doubles since start of financial crisis (westmeathexaminer.ie)

Submitted by monkeyFuzz
monkeyFuzz writes: According to the article, since the financial crisis began, the number of billionaires worldwide has more than doubled and interestingly enough apparently, if the world's three richest people were to spend $1m every single day each, it would take each one of them around 200 years to exhaust all of their wealth

Submission + - Facebook Wants You to Vote Tuesday

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Six years in the making, Facebook's get-out-the-vote tool — a high-profile button that proclaims "I'm Voting" or "I'm a Voter" — will on Tuesday give many of the social network's more than 150 million American users a gentle but effective nudge to vote. "If past research is any guide," writes Micah L. Sifry in Mother Jones, "up to a few million more people will head to the polls partly because their Facebook friends encouraged them. Yet the process by which Facebook has developed this tool — what the firm calls the 'voter megaphone' — has not been very transparent, raising questions about its use and Facebook's ability to influence elections. Moreover, while Facebook has been developing and promoting this tool, it has also been quietly conducting experiments on how the company's actions can affect the voting behavior of its users." Sifry adds, "There may be another reason for Facebook's lack of transparency regarding its voting promotion experiments: politics. Facebook officials likely do not want Republicans on Capitol Hill to realize that their voter megaphone isn't a neutral get-out-the-vote mechanism. It's not that Facebook uses this tool to remind only users who identify themselves as Democrats to vote — though the company certainly has the technical means to do so. But the Facebook user base tilts Democratic." So, it's probably worth mentioning again that Facebook caught flack last summer for deliberately experimenting on users' emotions without their consent. And just last June, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's FWD.us PAC put out a call for "pissed off Data Scientists" to data mine critical legislative districts and "growth hack" ways to motivate "registered voters who are registered Republicans who we think are likely to support immigration reform."

Submission + - Can doctors be trained to use open source to save hospitals from bankruptcy? (opensource.com)

Submitted by jenwike
jenwike writes: Luis Ibanez is a software engineer at Google and before that worked on open science at Kitware. He lays out the financial crisis many US hospitals are in after they have purchased closed, proprietary Electronic Health Records systems they cannot maintain and do not understand. So, how much would it cost to implement VistaA, an open source software EHR system developed by the VA? Zero dollars. And, how many developers would it take to employ to run and maintain VistA in hospitals across the country? Four. Do the math.

Submission + - Say Something Nice About systemd 4

Submitted by ewhac
ewhac writes: I'm probably going to deeply deeply regret this, but every time a story appears here mentioning systemd, a 700-comment thread of back-and-forth bickering breaks out which is about as informative as an old Bud Light commercial, and I don't really learn anything new about the subject. My gut reaction to systemd is (currently) a negative one, and it's very easy to find screeds decrying systemd on the net. However, said screeds haven't been enough to prevent its adoption by several distros, which leads me to suspect that maybe there's something worthwhile there that I haven't discovered yet. So I thought it might be instructive to turn the question around and ask the membership about what makes systemd good. However, before you stab at the "Post" button, there are some rules...

Bias Disclosure: I currently dislike systemd because — without diving very deeply into the documentation, mind — it looks and feels like a poorly-described, gigantic mess I know nothing about that seeks to replace other poorly-described, smaller messes which I know a little bit about. So you will be arguing in that environment.

Nice Things About systemd Rules:
  1. Post each new Nice Thing as a new post, not as a reply to another post. This will let visitors skim the base level of comments for things that interest them, rather than have to dive through a fractally expanding tree of comments looking for things to support/oppose. It will also make it easier to follow the next rule:
  2. Avoid duplication; read the entire base-level of comments before adding a new Nice Thing. Someone may already have mentioned your Nice Thing. Add your support/opposition to that Nice Thing there, rather than as a new post.
  3. Only one concrete Nice Thing about systemd per base-level post. Keep the post focused on a single Nice Thing systemd does. If you know of multiple distinct things, write multiple distinct posts.
  4. Describe the Nice Thing in some detail. Don't assume, for example, that merely saying "Supports Linux cgroups" will be immediately persuasive.
  5. Describe how the Nice Thing is better than existing, less controversial solutions. systemd is allegedly better at some things than sysvinit or upstart or inetd. Why? Why is the Nice Thing possible in systemd, and impossible (or extremely difficult) with anything else? (In some cases, the Nice Thing will be a completely new thing that's never existed before; describe why it's good thing.)

Bonus points are awarded for:

  • Personal Experience. "I actually did this," counts for way more than, "The docs claim you can do this."
  • Working Examples. Corollary to the above — if you did a Nice Thing with systemd, consider also posting the code/script/service file you wrote to accomplish it.
  • Links to Supporting Documentation. If you leveraged a Nice Thing, furnish a link to the docs you used that describe the Nice Thing and its usage.

We will assume out of the gate that systemd boots your system faster than ${SOMETHING_ELSE}, so no points for bringing that up.

Submission + - Brazil Is Keeping Its Promise to Avoid the U.S. Internet - US to lose 35 Billion (gizmodo.com) 1

Submitted by bricko
bricko writes: Brazil Is Keeping Its Promise to Avoid the U.S. Internet

http://gizmodo.com/brazils-kee...

Brazil was not bluffing last year, when it said that it wanted to disconnect from the United States-controlled internet due to the NSA's obscenely invasive surveillance tactics. The country is about to stretch a cable from the northern city of Fortaleza all the way to Portugal, and they've vowed not to use a single U.S. vendor to do it.

Brazil made a bunch of bold promises, ranging in severity from forcing companies like Facebook and Google to move their servers inside Brazilian borders, to building a new all-Brazilian email system—which they've already done. But the first actionable opportunity the country was presented with is this transatlantic cable, which had been in the works since 2012 but is only just now seeing construction begin. And with news that the cable plan will not include American vendors, it looks like Brazil is serious; it's investing $185 million on the cable project alone. And not a penny of that sum will go to an American company.

The implications of Brazil distancing itself from the US internet are huge. It's not necessarily a big deal politically, but the economic consequences could be tremendously destructive. Brazil has the seventh largest economy in the world, and it continues to grow. So when Brazil finally does divorce Uncle Sam—assuming things continue at this rate—a huge number of contracts between American companies and Brazil will simply disappear.

On the whole, researchers estimate that the United States could lose about $35 billion due to security fears. That's a lot of money.

Submission + - First Detailed Data Analysis Shows Exactly How Comcast Jammed Netflix

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: John Oliver calls it "cable company fuckery" and we've all suspected it happens. Now on Steven Levy's new Backchannel publication on Medium, Susan Crawford delivers decisive proof, expertly dissecting the Comcast-Netflix network congestion controversy. Her source material is a detailed traffic measurement report (.pdf) released this week by Google-backed M-Lab — the first of its kind — showing severe degradation of service at interconnection points between Comcast, Verizon and other monopoly "eyeball networks" and "transit networks" such as Cogent, which was contracted by Netflix to deliver its bits. The report shows that interconnection points give monopoly ISPs all the leverage they need to discriminate against companies like Netflix, which compete with them in video services, simply by refusing to relieve network congestion caused by external traffic requested by their very own ISP customers. And the effects victimize not only companies targeted but ALL incoming traffic from the affected transit network. The report proves the problem is not technical, but rather a result of business decisions. This is not technically a Net neutrality problem, but it creates the very same headaches for consumers, and unfair business advantages for ISPs. In an accompanying article, Crawford makes a compelling case for FCC intervention.

Submission + - Secret manuals show the spyware sold to despots and cops worldwide (firstlook.org)

Submitted by Advocatus Diaboli
Advocatus Diaboli writes: The manuals describe Hacking Team’s software for government technicians and analysts, showing how it can activate cameras, exfiltrate emails, record Skype calls, log typing, and collect passwords on targeted devices. They also catalog a range of pre-bottled techniques for infecting those devices using wifi networks, USB sticks, streaming video, and email attachments to deliver viral installers. With a few clicks of a mouse, even a lightly trained technician can build a software agent that can infect and monitor a device, then upload captured data at unobtrusive times using a stealthy network of proxy servers, all without leaving a trace. That, at least, is what Hacking Team’s manuals claim as the company tries to distinguish its offerings in the global marketplace for government hacking software.

Submission + - British Spies Allowed to Access U.S. Data Without a Warrant (nationaljournal.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: British authorities are capable of tapping into bulk communications data collected by other countries' intelligence services—including the National Security Agency—without a warrant, according to secret government documents released Tuesday.

The agreement between the NSA and Britain's equivalent, GCHQ, potentially puts the Internet and phone data of Americans in the hands of another country without legal oversight when obtaining a warrant is "not technically feasible.

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