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Submission + - Why are Japanese men refusing to leave their rooms?

Submitted by fantomas
fantomas writes: The BBC reports on the Japanese phenomenon of Hikikomori: young people, mainly men, who are holed up in rooms in their parents' houses, refusing to go out and engage with society. Why is this happening? and is it a global phenomenon or something purely due to Japanese culture? (we're all familiar with the standing slashdot joke of the geek in their mom's basement for example)

Submission + - New Study Fails to Show that Violent Video Games Diminishes Prosocial Behaviour (ausgamers.com)

Submitted by trawg
trawg writes: A new Australian study on the effect of violent video games on Australia has just been published, failing to find any evidence that playing video games affects prosocial behaviour. The study compared groups who played different types of games, including notably violent titles like Grand Theft Auto and Call of Duty, as well as non-violent titles like Portal, comparing their behavioral response through a simple pen-drop experiment. In a follow-up interview, the researcher noted his perspective on how violence might affect people has changed since he started the research:

I’ve played video games for most of my life and got into this research because I couldn’t believe that violent video games could make me do something I didn’t want to do, that is, be aggressive. My attitude has changed somewhat. These days I find it totally plausible that violent video games could influence people’s behavior, but the real question is whether their influence is harmful, and I’m not yet convinced of that.

Submission + - This Student Project Could Kill Digital Ad Targeting (adage.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: New School Student's System Confuses Ad Targeting With Cookie Misinformation.
Meet Rachel Law, a 25-year-old graduate student from Singapore, who has created a game that could literally wreak havoc on the online ad industry if released into the wild.

Submission + - Discrete Log Problem Breakthrough Threatens Crypto

Submitted by tbonefrog
tbonefrog writes: Cryptographic ground truth is changing fast. In February Antoine Joux produced a new record subexponential discrete logarithm algorithm running at L(1/4) speed and beating the long-standing L(1/3) mark. On June 20 a quasipolynomial algorithm was announced at the Workshop on Number-Theoretic Algorithms for Asymmetric Cryptology in France, and explained by Stephen Galbraith

Discrete logarithm and factoring are different problems but progress on one tends to lead to progress in the other. Get a paper bank statement mailed to you each month, order some paper checks, and buy stamps and envelopes for paying your bills via snail mail.

Submission + - Harlan: A language that simplifies GPU programming released (paritynews.com) 1

Submitted by hypnosec
hypnosec writes: Harlan – a declarative programming language that simplifies development of applications running on GPU has been released by a researcher at Indian University. Erik Holk released his work publicly after working on it for two years. Harlan’s syntax is based on Scheme – a dialect of LISP programming language. The language aims to help developers make productive and efficient use of GPUs by enabling them to carry out their actual work while it takes care of the routine GPU programming tasks. The language has been designed to support GPU programming and it works much closer to the hardware.

Submission + - Companies Turn to Switzerland for Cloud Storage Following NSA Spying Revelation (ibtimes.co.uk)

Submitted by DavidGilbert99
DavidGilbert99 writes: The NSA spying revelations are having a huge impact on governments across the globe, as well as seeing people becoming more and more worried about their privacy. But a so-far unseen impact is happening in the background. The services which could be affected by NSA spying — such as Dropbox, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft's Azure cloud platform — are now seen as unsafe. This however is good news for one company, with Swiss-based ultra-secret hosting company Artmotion recording a 45% rise in revenue since Edward Snowden blew the whistle last month.

Submission + - Snowden, a Comedic Rap Summary

Submitted by Pav
Pav writes: Rap News distills the whole story down to five minutes of hilarious biting satire. Also, in other "news" see Assange get hauled away by nordic babes wearing lingerie and stormtrooper helmets, or Bill O'Reilly literally vomiting excreta. Rap News has plenty more tracks related to internet liberty erosion, politicial and nerdy issues in general. Perhaps they should become house artists for Slashdot?

Submission + - Shades of Jack Ryan: altering text in eBooks to track pirates (wired.com)

Submitted by wwphx
wwphx writes: German researchers have created a new DRM feature that changes the text and punctuation of an e-book ever so slightly. Called SiDiM, which Google translates to “secure documents by individual marking,” the changes are unique to each e-book sold. These alterations serve as a digital watermark that can be used to track books that have had any other DRM layers stripped out of them before being shared online. The researchers are hoping the new DRM feature will curb digital piracy by simply making consumers paranoid that they’ll be caught if they share an e-book illicitly.

Seems like I recall reading about this in Tom Clancy's Hunt for Red October when Jack Ryan used this technique to identify someone who was leaking secrets to the Russians. It would be so very difficult for someone to write a little program that, when stripping the DRM, randomized a couple of pieces of punctuation to break the hash that the vendor is storing along with the sales record of the individual book.

Submission + - Japanese artist makes better art in Execl than others can do with Photoshop (geek.com) 3

Submitted by cute_orc
cute_orc writes: MS Excel is notorious for being a boring spreadsheet applications. But 73 years old Japanese artist Tatsuo Horiuchi makes amazing art using autoshape tool of Excel. He makes free-form shapes spanning multiple cells and join them together in into a huge image. His artwork is really amazing and beautiful.
Transportation

Nicaragua Gives Chinese Firm Contract To Build Alternative To Panama Canal 323

Posted by timothy from the now-there's-a-weekend-project dept.
McGruber writes with this news from late last week: "The Guardian is reporting that Nicaragua has awarded a Chinese company a 100-year concession to build an alternative to the Panama Canal, in a step that looks set to have profound geopolitical ramifications. The new route will be a higher-capacity alternative to the 99-year-old Panama Canal, which is currently being widened at the cost of $5.2bn. Last year, the Nicaraguan government noted that the new canal should be able to allow passage for mega-container ships with a dead weight of up to 250,000 tonnes. This is more than double the size of the vessels that will be able to pass through the Panama Canal after its expansion, it said."
Cellphones

Apple's War Against Jailbreaking Now Makes Perfect Sense 321

Posted by timothy from the sacrifice-the-phone-to-save-your-world dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Apple has always been extremely anti jailbreaking, but it might now have a good reason to plug up the exploits. As Hardware 2.0 argues, Apple's new iOS 7 Activation Lock anti-theft mechanism which renders stolen handsets useless (even after wiping) unless the owner's Apple ID is entered relies on having a secure, locked-down OS. Are the days of jailbreaking iOS coming to a close?" I can see a whole new variety of phone-based ransom-ware based on this capability, too.

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