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Submission + - Ecuador to forge ahead with State-Backed Digital Currency

Submitted by jaeztheangel
jaeztheangel writes: Ecuador's government has approved plans to start a new Digital Currency backed by the state. With defaults in recent history, and dwindling oil reserves is this a brave move, or a foolish one?

Congress last month approved legislation to start a digital currency for use alongside the U.S. dollar, the official tender in Ecuador. Once signed into law, the country will begin using the as-yet-unnamed currency as soon as October.

Submission + - Twitch Shuts Down Justin.tv, Google Acquisition To Blame?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Twitch today announced that the Justin.tv website, mobile apps, and APIs are no longer in service. A very simple explanation is given for the shutdown: since rebranding the company to Twitch Interactive in February 2014, all resources are now focused on Twitch.tv. The news today will almost certainly further fuel the rumors that Google is acquiring, or has already acquired, Twitch. Purchases are often followed by consolidation, as well as cutting off any excess limbs.

Submission + - Again, Qt will be moved to an other company

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: From Digia blog:
"We are now starting a conscious effort to overcome these problems. As you might have read, Digia has decided to move the Qt business into a company of it’s own. Thus we will soon have a company (owned by Digia), that will focus 100% on Qt. At the same time we would like to take the opportunity and retire qt.digia.com and merge it with the content from qt-project.org into a new unified web presence. The unified web page will give a broad overview of the Qt technology, both enterprise and open-source, from a technical, business and messaging perspective. "

Submission + - Google Play Store Now Allows App Refunds Within 2 Hours Instead of 15 Minutes (techfeasta.com)

Submitted by TechFeasta
TechFeasta writes: Sometimes we mistake the description and purchase the App which doesn’t satisfy us. Has same happens with you?
Google play use to allows app refunds within 15 Minutes, For the convenience of users Google has reportedly but not officially increased the time to 2 Hours. Users can now ask for App refunds within 2 Hours of purchasing a paid app and game

Submission + - UK Police Take Down Proxy Service Over Piracy Concerns (torrentfreak.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Since last year City of London Police have been working together with copyright holders to topple sites that provide or link to pirated content.

The police started by sending warning letters to site owners, asking them to go legit or shut down. Late last year this was followed by a campaign targeted at domain registrars, asking them to suspend the domain names of several “illegal” sites.

A few days ago police sent out another round of requests to U.S.-based domain name registrar eNom, asking it to suspend the domains of several allegedly infringing sites. Although the requests were made without a court order or other authority, eNom has complied and effectively shut down the sites.

Among the new targets is Immunicity, a general proxy server that was set up as a censorship circumvention tool.

Submission + - Apple Products Reportedly Banned from Chinese Government Purchases 1

Submitted by SmartAboutThings
SmartAboutThings writes: China has continued its equivocal relationship with US technology companies. The country has now prohibited the purchase of Apple hardware products from its government agencies citing security reasons. The ban will affect all the central and local agencies in China. People familiar with the matter told Bloomberg that the government is now not allowed to purchase ten Apple products including different variants of iPads and MacBook laptop. Several devices have been omitted from a government procurement list distributed by China’s National Development and Reform Commission and Ministry of Finance.

Submission + - Transparency in the NSA era. Change the court transcript & hide the changes (eff.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: On June 6, the court held a long hearing in Jewel in a crowded, open courtroom, widely covered by the press. We were even on the local TV news on two stations. At the end, the Judge ordered both sides to request a transcript since he ordered us to do additional briefing. But when it was over, the government secretly, and surprisingly sought permission to “remove” classified information from the transcript, and even indicated that it wanted to do so secretly, so the public could never even know that they had done so.

We rightly considered this an outrageous request and vigorously opposed it. The public has a First Amendment right not only to attend the hearing but to have an accurate transcript of it. Moreover, the federal law governing court reporting requires that “each session of the court” be “recorded verbatim” and that the transcript be certified by the court reporter as “a correct statement of the testimony taken and the proceedings had.” 28 U.S.C. 753(b).

Submission + - Researchers Make Fruit Flies Perform Aerobatics Like Spitfire Pilots

Submitted by KentuckyFC
KentuckyFC writes: Researchers from Cornell University glued a tiny magnetic bar to the back of fruit flies and allowed them to fly through an electromagnet. Pulsing the magnet then causes the flies to roll in mid-air, like victorious Spitfire pilots. The work isn't entirely frivolous. The team was studying how fruit flies achieve stable flight when they ought to be particularly susceptible to being rolled by tiny gusts of air. It turns out that fruit flies have incredibly fast reactions. They respond to being rolled within a single wing beat, that's 5 milliseconds, flapping their wings asymmetrically to regain stable flight. That kind of reaction time makes them one of the fastest creatures in the animal world. By comparison, the visual startle response in flies takes 20 milliseconds and the quickest reactions humans can manage is about 100 milliseconds or 0.1 seconds.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Creating your own search engine

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: With the increase of take down notices and censorship by companies and governments, impacting search results in popular search sites, is it possible to index the web using your personal computer? What resources and tools are required to index websites?

Submission + - Man-made 'Dead Zone' in Gulf of Mexico the size of Conneticut (yahoo.com)

Submitted by Taco Cowboy
Taco Cowboy writes: Somewhere in the Gulf of Mexico there is a man-made 'Dead Zone' the size of the State of Conneticut. Inside that 'Dead Zone' the water contain no oxygen, or too little, to support normal marine life, especially the bottom dwelling fish and shrimps

The 'Dead Zone' measures about 5,000 Square Miles (13,000 Square Kilometer) is caused by excess nutrient runoff from farms along the Mississippi River, which empties into the Gulf

The excess nutrients feed algae growth, which consumes oxygen when it works its way to the Gulf bottom

The Gulf dead zone, which fluctuates in size but measured 5,052 square miles this summer, is exceeded only by a similar zone in the Baltic Sea around Finland. The number of dead zones worldwide currently totals more than 550 and has been increasing for decades

The elongated Gulf zone typically hugs the Louisiana coastline from the Mississippi River Delta to the state's border with Texas, and some years extending offshore of Texas and Mississippi. Scientists said a growth in farmed land along the Mississippi River in the 1960s began increasing pollution. In the 1970s, levels of oxygen in parts of the Gulf fell below the needs of bottom-dwelling fish. The zone has been generally growing ever since

The report said federal farm policy impacts the amount of pollution in the river. Corn fields, which lay bare most of the year and leach nutrients, are one of the biggest contributors to the problem

Submission + - Cryptolocker victims to get files back for free (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: All 500,000 victims of Cryptolocker can now recover files encrypted by the malware without paying a ransom.

The malicious program encrypted files on Windows computers and demanded a substantial fee before handing over the key to the scrambled files.

Thanks to security experts, an online portal has been created where victims can get the key for free.

The portal was created after security researchers grabbed a copy of Cryptolocker's database of victims.

"This time we basically got lucky," said Michael Sandee, principal analyst at Fox-IT — one of the security firms which helped tackle the cyber-crime group behind Cryptolocker.

Submission + - Algorithm predicts US Supreme Court decisions 70% of time (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by stephendavion
stephendavion writes: A legal scholar says he and colleagues have developed an algorithm that can predict, with 70 percent accuracy, whether the US Supreme Court will uphold or reverse the lower-court decision before it. "Using only data available prior to the date of decision, our model correctly identifies 69.7 percent of the Court’s overall affirm and reverse decisions and correctly forecasts 70.9% of the votes of individual justices across 7,700 cases and more than 68,000 justice votes," Josh Blackman, a South Texas College of Law scholar, wrote on his blog Tuesday.

Submission + - MIT Considers Whether Courses Are Outdated (chronicle.com)

Submitted by jyosim
jyosim writes: People now buy songs, not albums. They read articles, not newspapers. So why not mix and match learning “modules” rather than lock into 12-week university courses? A committee at MIT exploring the future of the elite school suggested that courses might now be outdated, and recommended creating learning modules that students could mix and match. The report imagines a world in which students can take online courses they assemble themselves from parts they find online: “Much like a playlist on iTunes, a student could pick and choose the elements of a calculus or a biology course offered across the edX platform to meet his or her needs."

Submission + - Edward Snowden is not alone! (cnn.com) 2

Submitted by bobbied
bobbied writes: Apparently Edward Snowden is not alone. CNN is reporting http://www.cnn.com/2014/08/05/... that recent leaked documents published by "the Intercept" (a website that has been publishing Snowden's leaked documents) could not have been leaked by Snowden because they didn't exist prior to his fleeing the USA and he couldn't possibly have accessed them. Authorities are said to be looking for a new leaker.

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