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Submission + - Holder Considering Forcing Gun Owners To Wear Tracking Bracelets (downtrend.com) 1

Submitted by mpicpp
mpicpp writes: The Attorney General told a House subcommittee they’re considering “gun-tracking bracelets” as a “common sense” way to reduce gun violence.

Eric Holder said the Obama Administration is looking at several technological innovations to reduce the number of stolen guns being used in crime.

“I think that one of the things that we learned when we were trying to get passed those common sense reforms last year, Vice President Biden and I had a meeting with a group of technology people and we talked about how guns can be made more safe,” he said.

“By making them either through finger print identification, the gun talks to a bracelet or something that you might wear, how guns can be used only by the person who is lawfully in possession of the weapon.”

“It’s those kinds of things that I think we want to try to explore so that we can make sure that people have the ability to enjoy their Second Amendment rights, but at the same time decreasing the misuse of weapons that lead to the kinds of things that we see on a daily basis,” Holder said.

Comment Re:GOTO is a crutch for bad programmers (Score 1) 677

by jdschulteis (#49040411) Attached to: Empirical Study On How C Devs Use Goto In Practice Says "Not Harmful"
// You mean like this?
// I don't mind it, but I have worked with people who would hate this style.
void func3() {
    if (AcquireResource3()) {
        DoStuffWithResources();
        Cleanup3();
    }
}
void func2() {
    if (AcquireResource2()) {
        func3();
        Cleanup2();
    }
}
void func() {
    if (AcquireResource1()) {
        func2();
        Cleanup1();
    }
}

Submission + - Samsung: WHAT is my SmartTV reporting? To whom? 14

Submitted by NetAlien
NetAlien writes: Being curious about the recent Samsung SmartTV stories, I connected my SmartTV through an old-fashioned HUB (copies all traffic to every port; unlike a switch) to my router. This allowed me to capture all traffic to/from my TV through my laptop's ethernet port. A wireshark capture shows that remote sites are trying to access my TV until I turn it on, then after nearly 7400 packets, it settles down. Then changing channels over ~4.5 minutes results in ~10,000 more packets. The TV continues sending data for several more seconds after the set appears to be off. Multiple servers were contacted in these domains: amazonaws.com, akamaitechnologies.com, cloudfront.net, twitvid.com, pcloud.com, yahoo.com, aclwireless25.com and some by IP address. WHAT are you sharing Samsung???

Comment Re:GOTO is a crutch for bad programmers (Score 1) 677

by jdschulteis (#49040201) Attached to: Empirical Study On How C Devs Use Goto In Practice Says "Not Harmful"
// I wouldn't go so far as to claim this is "better" than the goto version.
// Especially since "goto cleanup" is a well-known idiom.
// However, I do think this reads quite naturally.
void func() {
    bool hasResource1, hasResource2, hasResource3;
    hasResource1 = AcquireResource1();
    if (hasResource1) {hasResource2 = AcquireResource2();}
    if (hasResource1 && hasResource2) {hasResource3 = AcquireResource3();}
    if (hasResource1 && hasResource2 && hasResource3) {
        DoStuffWithResources();
    }
    if (hasResource3) {Cleanup3();}
    if (hasResource2) {Cleanup2();}
    if (hasResource1) {Cleanup1();}
    return;
}

Submission + - Peak Google: The Company's Time at the Top May Be Nearing Its End

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Farhad Manjoo writes at the NYT that at first glance Google looks plenty healthy, but growth in Google’s primary business, search advertising, has flattened out at about 20 percent a year for the last few years and although Google has spent considerable resources inventing technologies for the future, it has failed to turn many of its innovations into new moneymakers. According to Manjoo as smartphones eclipse laptop and desktop computers to become the planet’s most important computing devices, the digital ad business is rapidly changing and Facebook, Google’s archrival for advertising dollars, has been quick to profit from the shift. Here’s why: The advertising business is split, roughly, into two. On one side are direct-response ads meant to induce an immediate purchase: Think classifieds, the Yellow Pages, catalogs or Google's own text-based ads running alongside its search results. But the bulk of the ad industry is devoted to something called brand ads, the ads you see on television and print magazines that work on your emotions in the belief that, in time, your dollars will follow. “Google doesn’t create immersive experiences that you get lost in,” says Ben Thompson. “Google creates transactional services. You go to Google to search, or for maps, or with something else in mind. And those are the types of ads they have. But brand advertising isn’t about that kind of destination. It’s about an experience.” According to Thompson the future of online advertising looks increasingly like the business of television and is likely to be dominated by services like Facebook, Snapchat or Pinterest that keep people engaged for long periods of time and whose ads are proving to be massively more effective and engaging than banner advertisements.

In less than five years, Facebook has also built an enviable ad-technology infrastructure, a huge sales team that aims to persuade marketers of the benefits of Facebook ads over TV ads, and new ways for brands to measure how well their ads are doing. These efforts have paid off quickly: In 2014 Facebook sold $11.5 billion in ads, up 65 percent over 2013. Google will still make a lot of money if it doesn’t dominate online ads the way it does now. But it will need to find other businesses to keep growing. This is why Google is spending on projects like a self-driving car, Google Glass, fiber-optic lines in American cities, space exploration, and other audacious innovations that have a slim chance of succeeding but might revolutionize the world if they do. But the far-out projects remind Thompson of Microsoft, which has also invested heavily in research and development, and has seen little return on its investments. “To me the Microsoft comparison can’t be more clear. This is the price of being so successful — what you’re seeing is that when a company becomes dominant, its dominance precludes it from dominating the next thing. It’s almost like a natural law of business.”

Comment Re:Animal, not plant (Score 3, Insightful) 68

by jdschulteis (#49034977) Attached to: Converting Sunlight Into Liquid Fuel With a Bionic Leaf

If it is so good, why not just store the hydrogen for fuel? Wouldn't it be cheaper/easier to skip the last steps?

Hydrogen is difficult to store in a lightweight, compact system. One good way to store hydrogen is to chemically combine it with carbon and oxygen and put the resulting liquid in tanks at ordinary temperatures and pressures.

Comment Re:Animal, not plant (Score 1) 68

by jdschulteis (#49034909) Attached to: Converting Sunlight Into Liquid Fuel With a Bionic Leaf

If they have a more efficient process with simpler (cheaper) inputs, kudos to them. But this ain't no artificial leaf.

It's a two-step process.The artificial leaf step uses sunlight to split water. The second step has bacteria combine the resulting hydrogen with carbon dioxide to produce isopropanol. Rather different from the time-tested use of yeast to convert sugars into ethanol.

Comment Re:2,900-acre(!) solar farm (Score 2) 191

by jdschulteis (#49033427) Attached to: Apple Invests $848 Million Into Solar Farm

Well, there are all the rare earths needed to make 2,900 acres worth of panels, so it's not like it's for free. In fact on a per MWhr basis I'm willing to bet that nuclear fission is still more environmentally friendly (though heat pollution of the cooling water source can be an issue depending on where the plant is sited).

What rare earths? These panels are made from a thin film of cadmium and tellurium on glass, no rare earths required. Tellurium is somewhat rare, if that's what you meant. Since it is mostly produced as a byproduct of copper production, the panels increase the total economic benefit derived from that environmental cost.

Nuclear being more environmentally friendly on per MWhr basis depends heavily on how you define "environmentally friendly".

As for water, "The project will also displace over 152,000 metric tons of water consumption annually based on the average California grid." So, not only no heat pollution, it will save water compared to other methods of producing the electricity.

Submission + - Has modern Linux lost its way? (complete.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Debian developer says that Linux is no longer "clean, logical, well put-together, and organized" after systemd.

Submission + - Why a quantum equation doesn't disprove the Big Bang

Submitted by StartsWithABang
StartsWithABang writes: It is true: as reported on slashdot earlier today, a new calculation suggests that the Universe has no beginning, implying that space and time may have always existed. But that is not the same — despite what the original article states — as there being no Big Bang. Quite to the contrary, the Big Bang is extremely well-cemented as a scientifically valid fact, and it's only a decades-out-of-date assumption that would lead one to say that the birth of space and time is the same as the Big Bang.

Submission + - The Emergence of Polymorphic Defense (dudumimran.com)

Submitted by cyberlabsbgu
cyberlabsbgu writes: An emerging and rather exciting security paradigm that seems to be popping up in Israel and SV is called polymorphic defense. One of the main anchors contributing to successful attacks is the prior knowledge that attackers benefit from about the target, including: which software and systems are used, the network structure, the specific people and their roles, etc. This knowledge serves as a baseline for all targeted attacks across all the stages of an attack: the penetration, persistence, reconnaissance and the payload itself. All these attack steps, in order to be effective, require a detailed prior knowledge about their target—except for reconnaissance—which complements the external knowledge with dynamically collected internal knowledge. Polymorphic defense aims to undermine this prior knowledge foundation and to make attacks much more difficult to craft.

The idea of defensive polymorphism has been borrowed from the attacker's toolbox where it is used in order to “hide” their malicious code from security products. The combination of polymorphism with defense simply means changing the "inners" of the target, where the part to change depends on the implementation and its role in attack creation. This is done so that these changes are not visible to attackers, making prior knowledge irrelevant. Such morphism hides the internals of the target architecture so that only trusted sources are aware of them—in order to operate properly. The “poly” part is the cool factor of this approach in that changes to the architecture can be made continuously and on-the-fly, making the guesswork higher by magnitudes. With polymorphism in place, attackers cannot build effective repurposable attacks against the protected area. This cool concept can be applied to many areas of security depending on the specific target systems and architecture, but it is definitely a revolutionary and a refreshing defensive concept in the way that it changes the economic equation that attackers are benefitting from today. I also like it because, in a way, it is a proactive approach—and not passive like many other security approaches.

Polymorphic defenses usually have the following attributes:

Solutions that are agnostic to covered attack patterns which makes them much more resilient.
Seamless integration into the environment since the whole idea is to change the inner parts—changes which cannot be made apparent to externals.
Makes reverse-engineering and/or propagation very difficult, due to the "poly" aspect of the solution.
There is always a trusted source, which serves as the basis for the morphism.

Submission + - The Four Laws That Apple Continues to Break

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Apple just released its numbers for the quarter ending last December and the figures are astonishing with overall company revenue growing 30% to $74.6B, with the iPhone representing a never-before 69% of total sales. Now Jean-Louis Gassée writes at Monday note that Apple’s most recent quarterly numbers broke a number of laws:

Law 1: Larger size makes growth increasingly difficult. The Law of Large Numbers predicts the eventual flattening of extraordinary growth. "And yet, last quarter, Apple revenue grew 30%, breaking the Law and any precedent," writes Gassée. "iPhone revenue, which grew 57%, exceeded $51B in one quarter — close to what Google achieved in its entire Fiscal 2014 year." Apple’s recent numbers show, the iPhone seems immune to modularity threats.

Law 2: Everything becomes a commodity. As products are standardized, margins suffer as competitors frantically cut prices in a race to the bottom with the PC clone market serving as a good example. "At the risk of belaboring the obvious, a rising Average Selling Price (ASP) means customers are freely deciding to give more money to Apple," says Gassée. "We’re told that this is just a form of Stockholm Syndrome, the powerless customer held prisoner inside Apple’s Walled Garden." Yet according to Tim Cook “fewer than 15% of older iPhone owners upgraded to the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus. The majority of switchers to iPhone came from smartphones running Google Inc.’s Android operating system.” Apple’s recent numbers show, the iPhone seems immune to modularity threats.

Law 3: Market share always wins. With a bigger market share comes economies of scale and network effects leaving minority players condemned to irrelevance and starvation. Yet despite its small unit share (around 7% worldwide, higher in the US), Apple takes home about half of all PC industry profits and 93 percent of the profit in the handset industry.

Law 4: Modularity Always Wins. In the end, modularity always defeats integration. Clayton Christensen points out that in the PC clone market, modularity allowed competitors to undercut one another by improving layer after layer, smarter graphic cards, better/faster/cheaper processing, storage, and peripheral modules. Yet, as Apple’s recent numbers show, the iPhone seems immune to modularity threats.

"I have no trouble with the Law of Large Numbers, it only underlines Apple’s truly stupendous growth and, in the end, it always wins. No business can grow by 20%, or even 10% for ever. But, for the other three, Market Share, Commoditization, and Modularity, how can we ignore the sea of contradicting facts?" concludes Gassée. "As Apple continues to “break the law”, perhaps we’ll see a new body of scholarship that provides alternatives to the discredited refrains. As Rob Majteles tweeted: “Apple: where many, all?, management theories go to die?"

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Doubt isn't the opposite of faith; it is an element of faith. - Paul Tillich, German theologian and historian

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