Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Submission + - "Death is Wrong", Argues Futuristic New Children's Book (amazon.com)

Submitted by destinyland
destinyland writes: Hoping to inspire life-extending medical research, science fiction author Gennady Stolyarov has launched a campaign to give away 1,000 free copies of his transhumanist picture book for children, "Death is Wrong". "My greatest fear about the future is not of technology running out of control or posing existential risks to humankind," he explains online. "Rather, my greatest fear is that, in the year 2045, I will be...wondering, 'What happened to that Singularity we were promised by now...?'" Along with recent scientific discoveries, the book tells its young readers about long-lived plants and animals "that point the way toward lengthening lifespans in humans," in an attempt to avoid a future where children "would pay no more attention to technological progress and life-extension possibilities than their predecessors did."

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: what do you guys do with moderator points?

Submitted by X10
X10 writes: Every once in a while, I get 5 moderator points. But I don't know what to do with them. I can go through comments, but rating them feels like to much of a responsibility to me. Rating down a troll is easy, but the rest, well, I let it go. So my points go away after a few days.
What's your opinion about moderator points? Do you like getting them?

Submission + - The era of Facebook is an anomaly (theverge.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Speaking to The Verge, author and Microsoft Researcher Danah Boyd put words to a feeling I've had about Facebook and other social networking sites for a while, now: 'The era of Facebook is an anomaly.' She continues, 'The idea of everybody going to one site is just weird. Give me one other part of history where everybody shows up to the same social space. Fragmentation is a more natural state of being. Is your social dynamic interest-driven or is it friendship-driven? Are you going there because there’s this place where other folks are really into anime, or is this the place you’re going because it’s where your pals from school are hanging out? That first [question] is a driving function.' Personally, I hope this idea continues to propagate — it's always seemed odd that our social network identities are locked into certain websites. Imagine being a Comcast customer and being unable to email somebody using Time Warner, or a T-Mobile subscriber who can't call somebody who's on Verizon. Why do we allow this with our social networks?

Submission + - XKCD Author's Unpublished Book Has Already Become a Best-Seller (beyond-black-friday.com)

Submitted by destinyland
destinyland writes: Wednesday the geeky cartoonist behind XKCD announced that he'd publish a new book answering hypothetical science questions in September. And within 24 hours, his as-yet-unpublished work had become Amazon's #2 best-selling book. "Ironically, this book is titled 'What If?'," jokes one blogger, noting it resembles an XKCD comic where "In our yet-to-happen future, this book decides to travel backwards through time, stopping off in March of 2014 to inform Amazon’s best-seller list that yes, in our coming timeline this book will be widely read..." Randall Munroe new book will be collecting his favorite "What If..." questions, but will also contain his never-before published answers to some questions that he'd found "particularly neat".

Submission + - How Amazon, Google, and O'Reilly Books Celebrate Valentines' Day (beyond-black-friday.com)

Submitted by destinyland
destinyland writes: O'Reilly Books is offering 50% discounts today on every one of their ebooks that has a pink cover. It's one of several fun ways the top tech sites are celebrating Valentine's Day. Amazon's offering up to $80 off on Kindle Fire tablets (plus digital gift cards that you can print out at home), and Barnes & Noble is giving away a free Valentine's Day app for Nook owners. The Google Play store just put up a free video from Walt Disney studios with a Valentine's Day theme — plus a heart-warming doodle on their front page for Valentine's Day.

Submission + - Legend of Zelda Tops Amazon's 2013 Best-Seller List (beyond-black-friday.com)

Submitted by destinyland
destinyland writes: "The Legend of Zelda: Hyrule Historia was Amazon's #6 best-selling print book for the entire year of 2013. But the demographics are changing for book buyers, with 13 of the top 20 best-selling print books not even appearing anywhere on Amazon's list of the top 100 best-selling Kindle ebooks of the year. Amazon points out that 19 of their 20 best-selling books for the year sold more Kindle versions than print versions — with one exception. "Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead" was the one book this year which remained more popular in its print edition.

Submission + - Apple Censors Lawrence Lessig over iOS 7 Wi-Fi Glitch (zdnet.com)

Submitted by destinyland
destinyland writes: A glitch in iOS7 has cost "a significant number" of Apple users their Wi-Fi access, according to ZDNet. But they also report that Apple is now censoring posts in their "Apple Support Communities" forums where users suggest possible responses to their loss of WiFi capabilities (including exercising their product warranty en masse). "We understand the desire to share experiences in your topic, 'Re: wifi greyed out after update to ios7,'" read one warning sent to Lawrence Lessig, "but because these posts are not allowed on our forums, we have removed it." Lessig — who co-founded Creative Commons (and was a board member of the Free Software Foundation) has been documenting the ongoing "comments slaughter" on his Twitter feed, drawing attention to what he says is the Borg-like behavior of Apple as a corporation. Lessig "is now part of an angry mob in Apple's forums who upgraded to iOS 7 and lost Wi-Fi connectivity," ZDNet notes, adding that as of this morning their reporter has been unable to obtain an official response from Apple.

Submission + - Why Iran's Hackers Are More Dangerous Than China's (motherjones.com) 2

Submitted by destinyland
destinyland writes: Security experts are warning that newly-discovered computer attacks from Iran "could ultimately be more worrisome, because its hackers are targeting critical infrastructure and developing the ability to cause serious damage to the United States' power grid." A White House security advisor argues that "attacks on critical infrastructure are probably the bigger threatIran is much more unstable," and a Fortune 100 security consultant agrees that a country like Iran "is much more willing to be destructive." On the other hand, Richard Clarke, a former counterterrorism adviser for presidents Clinton and Bush, estimates that Chinese hackers have already caused U.S. losses in the billions of dollars above the normal security measures that are affecting other industries. (One telecom industry executive recently noted that hackers "are continually probing for insecure switches," and the Voice of America reports that 1.5 million people are victimized by cybercrime every day — about 18 people every second. "The Iranians appear to be more interested in destruction and damage, but it's about deterrence," Clarke argues, "deterring the U.S. from bombing them Iran would be crazy to launch a preemptive cyberstrike. And they're not crazy."

Submission + - Amazon Patents Strange New Lightweight, Transparent Kindle

Submitted by destinyland
destinyland writes: Amazon's just filed a patent about a lightweight, transparent Kindle technology that can also be embedded in your eyeglasses or your car windshield — and which never needs to be recharged. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is listed on the patent as a co-inventor of the technology, which converts the handheld Kindle devices into simplified display mechanisms receiving data and electricity from a larger, more powerful central station. This would allow Amazon to create much lighter and cheaper devices, notes one Kindle blog, speculating that Kindles could become not just lighter than paper, but disappearing altogether into other devices, "leaving nothing behind but the words from your ebooks."
Government

Submission + - Privacy is Dead, argues Adrian Lamo (theverge.com)

Submitted by
destinyland
destinyland writes: "In a new interview, Adrian Lamo (the grey-hat hacker who turned in PFC Manning) argues "Privacy is quite dead. That people still worship at its corpse doesn’t change that... ." He makes the case that the biggest threat to our privacy today "is our own limited understanding of how little privacy we truly have," and criticizes the use of encryption with poor personal/operations security measures, saying it creates a false sense of security which "can sometimes do more harm than good by way of creating an irrationally optimistic threat model." Lamo places a high value on personal privacy, but warns that "it's necessary to drop the blinders of believing rights are in any way enforceable — beyond our own ability to make them enforceable.""
Operating Systems

Submission + - OSS Improves Cryptography, Says Tor Network Advocate (theverge.com)

Submitted by
destinyland
destinyland writes: "Jacob Appelbaum, the Tor Project's main advocate, argues that Open Source software is necessary "to both verify and improve" available cryptography. (Adding "We also need that to ensure that everyone has a reasonable baseline — which is part of the cypherpunk ethos.") In this new interview, he's critical of a general public silence over government encroachments on privacy, but points to the current impact of the Tor network now as something that "runs, is open and is supported by a large community spread across all walks of life." And he ultimately identifies Tor as "part of an ecosystem of software that helps people regain and reclaim their autonomy," saying the distributed anonymous network "helps to enable people to have agency of all kinds; it helps others to help each other and it helps you to help yourself.""

Comment Re:What a STUPID thing to do (Score 2) 473

by destinyland (#42742059) Attached to: Hacker Faces 105 Years In Prison After Blackmailing 350+ Women
"The unknown persons then demanded that [victim 1] and [her sister, victim 2, who was actually in the picture] take their tops off and show their breasts on the Skype camera or he would post the photos on their Facebook walls for all of their friends to see. The unknown person told [the sisters] they had 10 seconds to do this. The girls attempted to stall the unknown person. In retaliation for not complying within 10 seconds, the unknown person, without authorisation, logged into [a friend of both girls'] Facebook account and added the [topless] photo of [victim 2] to [the friend's] Facebook wall. The unknown person then instant messaged [the victim] on Skype and sent the link to Facebook with the compromising photo attached. The link was [sic] the photos he had just put on their Facebook walls since they did not comply to his demands." http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-01/30/internet-criminals
Books

Submission + - Stephen King Releases New Digital eBook On Guns (huffingtonpost.com)

Submitted by
destinyland
destinyland writes: "Stephen King's just released a brand new essay titled Guns as an exclusive in Amazon's Kindle Store. (“It’s exciting to offer a way for a brilliant writer like King to publish quickly," Amazon said in a press release.) But the most interesting part is it also remembers Rage, his own novel about a school shooting, which he wrote when he actually was a geeky teenager and later published under a pseudonym. Some real-life teen killers have cited the book as an inspiration. "I didn't pull Rage from publication because the law demanded it..." King writes. "I pulled it because in my judgement it might be hurting people, and that made it the responsible thing to do...""

Slashdot Top Deals

We have a equal opportunity Calculus class -- it's fully integrated.

Close