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Submission + - Why 'Designed for Security' is a Dubious Designation

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: The list of products designed to be security enhanced that turned out to be anything but seems to get longer by the day. In just the latest instance, reported by Wired last week, the crowd-funded privacy-enhancing home router Anonabox had to be recalled after an independent researcher discovered serious security flaws in the product. But security experts caution that the real problem may be bigger than vulnerabilities hidden in application code: 'Designed for security products don't just have to be good. They have to be beyond reproach,' explains John Dickson, a Principal at the Denim Group. 'All it takes is one guy with a grudge to undo you.'

Submission + - World's Tiniest Computers Are About To Be Released (medium.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: University of Michigan professors are about to release the design files for a one-cubic-millimeter computer, or mote. They have finally reached a goal set in 1997, when UC Berkeley professor Kristopher Pister coined the term "smart dust" and envisioned computers blanketing the Earth. Such motes are likely to play a key role in the much-ballyhooed Internet of Things.

Submission + - How to break the Internet (in a bad way) (reason.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: "No decent person," write Geoffrey Manne and Ben Sperry in a special issue of Reason, "should be *for* net neutrality."

Across the board, the authors write, letting the FCC dictate ISP business practices will result in everything they say they're trying to avoid. For instance, one of the best ways to route around a big firm's brand recognition is to buy special treatment in the form of promotions, product placement and the like (payola, after all, is how rock and roll circumvented major label contempt for the genre). That will almost certainly be forbidden under the FCC's version of neutrality.

Submission + - A Data-Driven Exploration of the Evolution Of Chess

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Randy Olsen has a interesting article where he explores a data set of over 650,000 chess tournament games ranging back to the 15th century and looks at how chess has changed over time. His findings include:

Chess games are getting longer. Chess games have been getting steadily longer since 1970, increasing from 75 ply (37 moves) per game in 1970 to a whopping 85 ply (42 moves) per game in 2014. "This trend could possibly be telling us that defensive play is becoming more common in chess nowaday," writes Olsen. "Even the world’s current best chess player, Magnus Carlsen, was forced to adopt a more defensive play style (instead of his traditional aggressive style) to compete with the world’s elite."

The first-move advantage has always existed. White consistently wins 56% and Black only 44% of the games every year between 1850 and 2014 and the first-move advantage becomes more pronounced the more skilled the chess players are. "Despite 150+ years of revolutions and refinement of chess, the first-move advantage has effectively remained untouched. The only way around it is to make sure that competitors play an even number of games as White and Black."

Draws are much more common nowadays. Only 1 in 10 games ended in a draw in 1850, whereas 1 in 3 games ended in a draw in 2013. "Since the early 20th century, chess experts have feared that the over-analysis of chess will lead “draw death,” where experts will become so skilled at chess that it will be impossible to decisively win a game any more." Interestingly chess prodigy and world champion Jose Raul Capablanca said in the 1920's that he believed chess would be exhausted in the near future and that games between masters would always end in draws. Capablanca proposed a more complex variant of chess to help prevent “draw death,” but it never really seemed to catch on.

Submission + - WIMBoot: A Still-Born Compression Tech, Easily Defeated by 20+ Years old NTFS? (tabletpcreview.com)

Submitted by Simon King
Simon King writes: In tests with Windows (full version, not the RT) toy tablets having only 16 GB eMMC internal storage, WIMBoot has been shown to bleed space so fast that it rapidly falls behind decades old NTFS compression in space savings. While a tablet ends up with barely 1.6 GB free space after installing the free Office 365 from the toy tablet offer and Windows Updates, NTFS compression creates above 4 GB free space. WIMBoot itself can be improved with third party tooling to create free space up to 7 GB — showing there is some sound technology behind the WIMBoot idea — but is Microsoft's default implementation so buggy to be still-born?

Submission + - Lunar IceCube to examine water on the moon with NASA grant (examiner.com)

Submitted by MarkWhittington
MarkWhittington writes: One of the 12 technology development projects selected by NASA as part of the Next Space Technologies for Exploration Partnerships (NextSTEP) is called Lunar IceCube, according to a Wednesday announcement by Morehead State University, the recipient of the grant. MSU was given $7.9 million to develop a cubesat to explore for water ice on the moon, the presence of which has been indicated by a number of other space probes over the past two decades. Lunar ice would change the economics of lunar exploration and settlement in profound ways.

Submission + - First new optical gyro in a generation

Submitted by LeadSongDog
LeadSongDog writes: Work at Yale and CCNY has produced a fundamentally new type of optical gyro, based on whispering gallery modes within optical disks, less than 10 microns across. Unlike existing gyros, these do not require kilometers of fiber.
The blurb: http://www.osa.org/en-us/about...
The abstract: http://www.opticsinfobase.org/...
The paper: http://www.opticsinfobase.org/...

Submission + - Unitary Software Patent challenged at the Belgian Constitutional Court (esoma.org)

Submitted by zoobab
zoobab writes: The Unitary Patent for Europe is being challenged at the Belgian Constitutional Court. One of the plaintiffs, Benjamin Henrion, is a fifteen-year campaigner against software patents in Europe. He says: "The Unitary Patent is the third major attempt to legalize software patents in Europe. The captive European Patent Court will become the Eastern District of Texas when it comes to software patent disputes in Europe. As happened in America, the concentration of power will force up legal costs, punish small European companies, and benefit large patent holders."

Submission + - Harvard researchers determine answer to beguiling question regarding flatus

Submitted by wbr1
wbr1 writes: Scientists working at the Harvard School of Public Health have solved the age old question, "who farted?"

By connecting a trace portal machine and independently derived machine learning algorithms, the source of an offensive (humorous) gaseous emission can be identified with 98.6% accuracy.

Steven Passovitz of HSPH states, "All humans have a unique mix of bacteria in their intestines. These colonies leave a distinct fingerprint of trace gasses in the excreted flatus of an individual. It does not matter how overlaid by old eggs or cabbage the particular flatus is, we can sniff you out."

Submission + - Facebook Tracks All Site Vistors, Violating EU Law, Report Says (itworld.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: In a technical analysis of Facebook’s tracking practices, researchers at the University of Leuven in cooperation with researchers at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel found that Facebook tracks everyone who visits its site, including people who don’t have an account, and even continues to track users and non-users who have opted out of targeted ads. The problem with these practices is that the cookies are placed without consent, which under EU law is only allowed if there is a strict necessity to do so.

Submission + - World's Largest Aircraft Seeks Investors To Begin Operation (theguardian.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Airlander 10 is the world's biggest aircraft. It's an airship that incorporates elements of blimps, planes, and hovercraft. Buoyed by a vast volume of helium, it's capable of cruising at a speed of 80 knots. It was built as a military venture, intended to be used for surveillance tasks. But as the war in Afghanistan wound down, government officials found they had no use for the airship. They ended up selling it back to the company who made it for $300,000 — after paying them $90 million to build it. Now, a small group of investors are trying to get it operational, in part to show people how safe the technology can be, and to hopefully spur construction of more airships. They say the Airlander 10 is capable of surviving a missile strike, but visions of the Hindenberg still loom large in our cultural memory.

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