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Security

TSA Screening Barely Working Better Than Chance 337

Posted by samzenpus from the am-I-safe-now? dept.
rwise2112 writes "The General Accounting Office (GAO) has completed a study of the TSAs SPOT (Screening of Passengers by Observation Techniques) program and found the program is only slightly better than chance at finding criminals. Given that the TSA has spent almost a billion dollars on the program, that's a pretty poor record. As a result, the GAO is requesting that both Congress and the president withhold funding from the program until the TSA can demonstrate its effectiveness."

Comment Re:I do this (Score 2, Informative) 365

by snowraver1 (#45419129) Attached to: Nearly 1 In 4 Adults Surf the Web While Driving

set it to a collision that's double the actual speed they were driving while caught texting. (In other words, head-on collision with another vehicle doing the same speed

Actually, that is false. A head on collision with a vehicle of the same mass would be no different than the indestructible brick wall. Yes, when you add a second vehicle to the mix, you are doubling the amount of moving mass, but the absolute speed remains constant. In the end, the delta V is the same in both scenarios: X to 0. Now that we know that the delta V is the same, we just have to account for the deceleration rate, which is basically the same as the duration of the impact (crumple zones and all that). Since we have identical cars, they will deform at the same rate, acting as each others' brick wall. Once they collide, they would be exerting identical force on each other, so the front bumpers would remain in the same location, just like the brick wall. Since the front of your car can no longer move forward, the collision happens, and the body of your car absorbs the energy required to decelerate to 0. The energy released when two cars collide is doubled, but it is also spread over twice the area (ie, now you have 2 wrecked cars).

Submission + - How Broken Is The Internet?

Submitted by rueger
rueger writes: The NSA ( or your local variant) can capture or watch everything that you do on-line. Hacker/hacktivist/script kiddie groups shut down or deface large websites on a regular basis. Large companies attain market dominance then arbitrarily change terms and conditions, eliminate features and tools that millions of people use, and then sell your private information to the highest bidder. Companies as big as Adobe and as small as the town that I live next to get hacked, with customer data disappearing into places unknown. And we, the end users, are forced into computational gymnastics trying to satisfy password, user ID, captcha, and multi level authentication requirements that offer more of an obstacle than a protection.

There are now web sites that I don't use because of pop-ups; because I can never manage to actually remember the obscure password that I had to create, because they're paywalled, or because they've totally ruined their interface in the name of progress. Or that haven't bothered to update their code so that it functions on a mobile device. Or that bury real content under a deluge of advertising.

And of course there's The Cloud, a non-existent place where data floats around under the control of some other corporation, and where there's always a more than minimal chance that one morning the company, or just your data, will disappear. As in, what happens when the imps that hacked Adobe, or a government web site, manage to get into Amazon or Microsoft's cloud operations?

So, I ask. just how broken is the Internet today? And what can be done to fix it?
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Tumblr Follows Instagram - Reveals Plan For More Ads 75

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the share-this-tired-memevertisement dept.
cagraham writes "Following close on the heels of Instagram's advertising announcement last week, Tumblr has signed an agreement with analytics firm DataSift to provide info to advertisers on user behavior. According to Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer, who oversaw the recent $1.1 billion purchase of Tumblr, advertising on the site will become increasingly prevalent throughout 2014. DataSift will provide advertisers with info on the 5.5 billion interactions that occur on the site each day. This makes Tumblr the latest in a slew of recent tech companies to turn towards targeted ads in an attempt to generate revenue." Twitter is another customer of DataSift.

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