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Submission + - Finns go crazy get refurbished iPhone 4 - yes '4' (afterdawn.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Finnish retailer Verkkokauppa.com got pile of refurbished iPhone 4 models and decided to put them on sale for €99.90. When the stores were opened, a chaos broke as people tried to get into the store to buy one. Meanwhile, the rest of the world was queuing for iPhone 6...

Submission + - Multimedia multitasking shrinking human brains (sussex.ac.uk)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: It seems that switching between laptop, smart phone and tablet may be shrinking our brains and leaving us prone to higher levels of anxiety and stress reports news research from the University of Sussex in the UK. The researchers point out that the link is currently a correlation rather than a proof of causation, but they do suggest that people who used a higher number of media devices concurrently also had smaller grey matter density — in other words they have smaller brains.

Submission + - Why does the DNA double helix twist to the right? (nature.com)

Submitted by Annanag
Annanag writes: Most organic molecules have left- or right-handed versions, mirror images of each other, just like gloves. For some reason, life always seems to favour one version over the other — the DNA double helix in its standard form always twists like a right-handed screw, for example. But why this preference for left or right happens has always been a mystery. Now, in an experiment that took 13 years to perfect, physicists have found hints that this asymmetry of life could have been caused by electrons from nuclear decay in the early days of evolution.

Submission + - Bug in Bash shell creates big security hole on anything with *nix in it (nist.gov)

Submitted by Dupple
Dupple writes: A security vulnerability in the GNU Bourne Again Shell (Bash), the command-line shell used in many Linux and Unix operating systems, could leave systems running those operating systems open to exploitation by specially crafted attacks. “This issue is especially dangerous as there are many possible ways Bash can be called by an application,” a Red Hat security advisory warned.

Submission + - Apple privacy policy frustrates government (businesstexter.com)

Submitted by jamesrain
jamesrain writes: The release of the Apple iOS 8 software meant that Apple updated its privacy policy. As a company that has always put personal privacy above all else, this means you can expect your personal information to be even more protected than before. But to what extent should you expect privacy, and at what point is the government going to step in and say no?

What privacy can you expect?

You might be wondering if the Apple privacy policy means you can avoid all government spying. Of course, that would be impossible. As Fox News explains, Apple can only control the information associated with its phones and Apple accounts. All other information is controlled elsewhere. For example, a phone tap could still happen because Apple does not provide the cell service, just the device. And spying through social media is still possible. The only things covered in the Apple privacy policy is anything associated with your Apple account, such as uploads to your cloud, photo storage, email, contacts, and even call history.

More or less, Apple has explained that it cannot access the data simply because it has created a privacy system where it cannot bypass your passcode. If a warrant is placed for access to account information, Apple can deny it because it has no way to access the info. For cops, this means they don’t have access even if they get judge authority. For you, it means your information is protected in all circumstances.

Government action?

It is possible the government could come in and say that Apple has to retain access to accounts in the event of a national crisis or threat to the nation; however, that has not yet happened. For now, Apple intends to provide as much privacy as possible to its customers, so they feel comfortable using their personal devices without fear of information leaking.

Some people are hesitant to trust Apple after the incident of leaked nude celebrity photos from the iCloud, but Apple says those were isolated incidents where hackers stole passcode data to get the images rather than the photos just getting leaked.

Privacy important to customers

As you are working on your automated text systems and allowing your customers to text you for an automated response, it is important that you keep their information private as well. There is nothing that will make a customer leave faster than finding out you just sold their personal information to another company. Make sure you have a privacy policy on your texting services clearly laid out when your customers sign up and again on your website to prevent confusion.

Mobile technology news brought to you by businesstexter.com

Source: foxnews.com/tech/2014/09/18/expert-apple-is-making-life-more-difficult-for-cops/

Submission + - China smartphone maker Xiaomi apologizes for unauthorized data access 1

Submitted by SpzToid
SpzToid writes: Following up an earlier story here on Slashdot, now Xiaomi has apologized for collecting private data from its customers.

Xiaomi Inc said it had upgraded its operating system to ensure users knew it was collecting data from their address books after a report by a computer security firm said the Chinese budget smartphone maker was taking personal data without permission. The privately held company said it had fixed a loophole in its cloud messaging system that had triggered the unauthorized data transfer and that the operating system upgrade had been rolled out on Sunday. The issue was highlighted last week in a blog post by security firm F-Secure Oyg. In a lengthy blogpost on Google Plus, Xiaomi Vice President Hugo Barra apologized for the unauthorized data collection and said the company only collects phone numbers in users' address books to see if the users are online.

Submission + - Online Tool Flagged Ebola Outbreak Before Formal WHO Announcement (huffingtonpost.com) 1

Submitted by Taco Cowboy
Taco Cowboy writes: Nine days before the announcement from WHO regarding the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, an online tool had the incident flagged

HealthMap, a team of 45 researchers, epidemiologists and software developers at Boston Children's Hospital founded in 2006, hosting an online tool that uses algorithms to scour tens of thousands of social media sites, local news, government websites, infectious-disease physicians' social networks and other sources to detect and track disease outbreaks. Sophisticated software filters irrelevant data, classifies the relevant information, identifies diseases and maps their locations with the help of experts

The tool was introduced in 2006 with a core audience of public health specialists, but that changed as the system evolved and the public became increasingly hungry for information during the swine flu pandemic.

To get a feel of how HealthMap works, in the case of the Ebola outbreak, go to http://healthmap.org/ebola/

Submission + - Has radar technology caught up with steath technology? (usni.org)

Submitted by AbrasiveCat
AbrasiveCat writes: In the continuing game of cat and mouse between offensive and defensive technologies of war, the technology of radar stealth may have been matched by new multiple frequency radar systems. U.S Naval Institute News (http://news.usni.org/2014/07/29/chinese-russian-radars-track-see-u-s-stealth) reports the Chinese and Russians maybe developing such systems. The present radar systems use high frequency waves for accurately locating an incoming target. Stealth aircraft are designed to adsorb or reflect these wave away from the receiver. It turns out longer wave radars can see the stealth aircraft. The longer wave radar lacks the precision of the high frequency radar, but when the two are combined, as the Russians, Chinese (and US) are doing, you can produce accurate targeting radar. The F117 may have been in a golden age for stealth technology, it will be interesting to see if the F35 arrives to late to be effective against other countries with advanced radar systems.

Submission + - Microsoft to drop support for older versions of Internet Explorer (msdn.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: After January 12, 2016, only the most recent version of Internet Explorer available for a supported operating system will receive technical support and security updates. For example, customers using Internet Explorer 8, Internet Explorer 9, or Internet Explorer 10 on Windows 7 SP1 should migrate to Internet Explorer 11 to continue receiving security updates and technical support.

Submission + - Paint dust covers the upper layer of the world's oceans (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Even when the sea looks clean, its surface can be flecked with tiny fragments of paint and fiberglass. That’s the finding from a study that looked for plastic pollution in the uppermost millimeter of ocean. The microscopic fragments come from the decks and hulls of boats, and they could pose a threat to tiny creatures called zooplankton, which are an important part of the marine food web.

Submission + - 'Unparticles' May Hold The Key To Superconductivity, Say Physicists

Submitted by KentuckyFC
KentuckyFC writes: One curious property of massless particles like photons is that their energy or momentum can take any value across many orders of magnitude, a property that physicists call scale invariance. By contrast, massive particles like electrons always have the same mass regardless of their energy or momentum. So massive particles are not scale invariant. The concept of unparticles is the idea that some “stuff” may have mass, energy and momentum and yet also be scale invariant. This stuff must be profoundly different from ordinary particles, hence the name: unparticles. Nobody has ever seen an unparticle but now physicists are suggesting that unparticles may hold the key to understanding unconventional superconductivity. Their thinking is that at very low temperatures, ordinary particles can sometimes behave like unparticles. In other words, their properties become independent of the scale at which they're observed. So if an unparticle moves without resistance on a tiny scale, then it must also move without resistance at every scale, hence the phenomenon of superconductivity. That could provide some important insights into unconventional superconductivity which has puzzled physicists since it was discovered in the 1980s.

Submission + - Observation of a quantum Cheshire Cat in a matter-wave interferometer experiment (nature.com)

Submitted by Dupple
Dupple writes: From its very beginning, quantum theory has been revealing extraordinary and counter-intuitive phenomena, such as wave-particle duality, Schrödinger cats and quantum non-locality. Another paradoxical phenomenon found within the framework of quantum mechanics is the ‘quantum Cheshire Cat’: if a quantum system is subject to a certain pre- and postselection, it can behave as if a particle and its property are spatially separated. It has been suggested to employ weak measurements in order to explore the Cheshire Cat’s nature. Here we report an experiment in which we send neutrons through a perfect silicon crystal interferometer and perform weak measurements to probe the location of the particle and its magnetic moment.

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