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Submission + - Give Us Your Tired, Your Poor, Your FB Engineers

theodp writes: ReadWrite's Brian Hall observes that — surprise — Mark Zuckerberg's immigration fix favors Facebook. 'Fairly or not,' writes Hall, 'by repeatedly linking the larger immigration issue with 'the Internet,' as Zuckerberg does in his [Washington Post] editorial, he appears less concerned with America's future — or even the future of those children residing in the U.S. illegally — and more with boosting the value of his own Internet concern.' FWD.us, the self-described 'diverse' political group formed by Zuckerberg and other Silicon Valley luminaries, also raised an eyebrow from immigrant Om Malik. 'What I hate is the focus put on a specific immigration issue [H-1B visas],' Malik wrote. 'I don't buy that just because an immigrant works on an algorithm make her more important.' BTW, the Terms of Service for FWD.us indicates that you're really using the website 'tech4immigration.org', apparently one of a number of sites operated by an organization called the 'Campaign for Innovation.' This entity in turn appears to be linked to the 'March for Innovation' ('it’s a no brainer to keep and attract brain power in America'), which enjoys support from many of the same members of Zuckerberg's FWD.us ratpack, as well as groups like the 'Partnership for a New American Economy' (aka RenewOurEconomy.org), whose co-chairs include Steve Ballmer, Michael Bloomberg, and Rupert Murdoch. On its website, RenewOurEconomy boasts it's been successfully getting newspapers to run its Op-Eds for years. With all that lobbying muscle (and what some might call Astroturfing), it's really no surprise that Silicon Valley on Tuesday scored what the NY Times called its biggest win yet in Washington with a proposed overhaul of immigration law that 'shifts the emphasis in immigration policy from one that prioritized family ties to one that will prioritize professional degrees.'

Comment Wait for Haswell (Score 4, Informative) 260

If you can wait awhile longer before buying, Intel's upcoming Haswell processor is reported to have significantly improvied graphics performance, and Intel GPUs are well-supported with free drivers in Linux and Xorg. They're less-powerful than NVIDIA and AMD GPUs, but should be fine unless you need to play high-end games on high quality settings.

Comment Re:but its Java? (Score 2) 154

Apps can be written to use new features where available but degrade gracefully where they're not.

Every app has both a "minimum SDK version" that identifies which version of Android it requires, and a "target SDK version" that identifies the latest version of Android that it knows about. At runtime, the app can check which version it's actually running on, and enable or disable features as appropriate.

If an app is is run on an Android version newer than the app's "target", the OS itself will do whatever's needed to be backward-compatible with the target version. The developer can update the app and change the target version in order to take control of any new features and differences.

Businesses

Facebook Testing the Want Button 147

redletterdave writes "Facebook already knows what you 'Like.' Soon, it may ask you what you 'Want'. Tom Waddington, a Web developer for the craft website Cut Out + Keep, discovered that Facebook has included code for a disabled 'Want' button within the Javascript of its list of social plug-ins. The code was released to the Facebook Javascript SDK last Wednesday, but Waddington discovered the disabled button among other embedded tags, including 'degrees,' 'social context' and 'page events.' Waddington says the 'Want' button would work with Open Graph projects that use the tag 'products.'"
User Journal

Journal Journal: Lizzy Stardust (? & the spiders from Mars) 1

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-news/9310201/Banksy-draws-the-Queen-as-Ziggy-Stardust.html
http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/02238/queen-ziggy_2238705b.jpg

(? & the spiders from Mars)
Should that be Lizards from Mars?

Comment Re:Fork it, then (Score 1) 403

As I recall, Mozilla was willing to grant Debian a license for the Firefox trademark, but they weren't willing to grant it recursively to all Debian users who might want to make (and distribute) their own modified versions of the code they got through Debian. Since Debian doesn't accept licenses that are specific to Debian (DFSG #8), Debian couldn't accept Mozilla's offer of a Firefox trademark license, and thus had to rename it.

The discussions at the time — this is based on my memory from reading the list archives — were all about the fact that Debian applies patches to the code; I don't think the logo issue came about until later.

Comment Re:Its a trap!! Dont do it! (Score 1) 340

Looks like it shares more than that. The source for the login button is:

<fb:login-button perms="user_likes,user_about_me,email,user_hometown,user_relationship_details,user_location,user_website,user_work_history" onlogin="oRRQ.login();">

The site has no legitimate need for all that info if it just wants to know that you're a real person.

Comment But is the data actually transmitted anywhere? (Score 5, Interesting) 322

In this video, the researcher is looking at debug logs from the phone itself, not network traffic logs showing remote communication. He clearly shows that keystrokes and URLs are being passed to the IQ software running on the phone, but presents no evidence that the data is actually sent to anything outside of the phone.

Has anyone determined what the IQ software does with all this information besides writing it to the debug logger? Is it actually sent somewhere, or saved to persistent storage on the phone? (I'm no Android expert, but I'm under the impression that debug messages are discarded when there's no debugger attached.)

Having this software running in the background is sneaky and certainly makes spying more possible than it would be otherwise, but it's not necessarily the huge immediate privacy violation that everyone seems to be assuming it is.

Comment Re:More proof opt-in is the ONLY way to do it righ (Score 1) 134

The article's suggestion of address hashes is kinda bogus, and especially dangerous if the hashed addresses are known to be customers. Assuming a spammer/phisher already has eleventy billion addresses, this is a hash collision attack. All the spammer has to do is hash their list and look for matches. Instant customer list.

That's the intended usage of the list of hashes: for each address that the marketer already has, they can determine whether it's the address of an existing customer so they can exclude it from the ad campaign. No technological measures can avoid the fact that if you want an advertiser to exclude your customers from an ad campaign, you have to give them a way to determine who your customers are. Only trust (and trustworthiness) can resolve that.

But hashing the list would at least prevent the marketer from learning new addresses that they didn't already know about, so it's better than giving them the raw list.

Comment There are special cameras for this (Score 1) 170

I don't know how timing is normally done for auto races, but I've been part of the staff at a few track & field events, such as the Nike Indoor Nationals, and seen how the timing is done there. There's a special camera that captures a single column of pixels, carefully aligned with the finish line, that records a rapid sequence of images whenever something changes in its field of view. The software assembles all these one-pixel-wide images into a single image whose horizontal axis is time rather than space. You can clearly see each runner, though arms and legs often look a little curved since they're moving as they pass through the plane of the finish line. In particular, the ID number tags worn by each runner are clearly visible.

Recognition isn't automatic, but it doesn't need to be. The operator just clicks on the front of each runner's shoulder (the part that "counts" for finishing the race) and reads the number from the runner's ID tag, and the time value associated with that column of pixels is recorded as that runner's finish time. So there's a human delay involved in matching the time measurements to the runners, but no human delay in the measurements themselves.

The company that did the timing at the races where I worked was CFPI Timing, and the tech page on their website has lots of details. Apparently the camera system I described is made by FinishLynx.

Comment Re:i dont get it (Score 1) 423

3D at the movies use polarized light, and each eye gets their usual 24fps. No flickering because there is no "black" in between each frame.

RealD uses polarized light, but through a single projector, running at 144fps, switching "sides" six times per (24fps) film frame. Your eyes see left-right-left-right-left-right for each still picture before moving on to the next.

Since each eye sees black while the other eye is seeing a picture, RealD does flicker. It's 144fps flicker, which most people don't notice, but some people are sensitive enough to be bothered by it.

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