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Comment Same problem, different symptom (Score 1) 1

by LeadSongDog (#49594755) Attached to: Patent Trolls Aren't The Problem - Broad, Vague Patents Are
It still comes down to one thing. If you let lawyers write and interpret the laws, they will do so in a way that maximizes employment for lawyers. In the USGov today, they run all three branches. There's always something for lawyers to dispute, and oddly that dispute is always at someone else's expense while they get rich.

Comment Re:Can't wait to get this installed in my house (Score 1) 514

by LeadSongDog (#49594471) Attached to: Tesla Announces Home Battery System
No, what will happen is that as net peak-hour loading evens out, the time-of-day price premium will dwindle to the point where marginal additional storage capacity is not a viable business proposition, then it will be an export-only product. Of course political interference in the marketplace or carbon cap-and-trade may still help persuade operators to shut down coal plants early for environmental reasons: that would keep the time-of-day premium up for a while longer. But we're nowhere near the equilibrium yet.

Submission + - CareerBuilder cyberattack delivers malware straight to employers (thestack.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Security threat researchers Proofpoint have uncovered an email-based phishing attack which infected businesses with malware via the CareerBuilder online job search website. The attack involved the hacker browsing job adverts across the platform and uploading malicious files during the application process, titling the documents “resume.doc” and “cv.doc.” Once the CV was submitted, an automatic email notification was sent to the business advertising the position, along with the uploaded document. In this case, Proofpoint found that as a business opens the automatic email from CareerBuilder to view the attached file the document plays on a known Word vulnerability to sneak a malicious code onto the victim’s computer. According to the threat research group, the manual attack technique although time-consuming has a higher success rate than automated tools as the email attachments are more likely to be opened by the receiver.

Submission + - Patent Issued Covering Phone Notifications of Delivery Time and Invoice Quantity (eff.org)

Submitted by eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes: The staggering ingenuity of the US Patent system has again been showcased by the EFF's analysis of recent patents. This week's patent and follow up patent cover the futuristic innovative idea that when you order something, you can update your order and add additional amounts to your order while it's being processed. But wait, it gets even more innovative! You may one day be able to even to notify when you would like it delivered — ON YOUR PHONE. I know, you're busy wiping all that brain matter off your screen as your head seems to have exploded. Well, it turns out that inventor and patent holder Scott Horstemeyer (aka Eclipse IP, LLC of Delray Beach, FL) found no shortage of targets to go after with his new patents. It appears Tiger Fitness (and every other online retailer) was sending notices to customers about shipments. Did I mention Professional waste-of-space Horstemeyer is a lawyer too? But not just a regular lawyer, a "SUPER lawyer" from the same firm that patented social networking in 2007, sued Uber for using location finding technologies in 2013 and sued Overstock.com as well as a small time shoe seller for using shipping notifications in 2014.

Submission + - Scientists have paper on gender bias rejected because they're both women (dailylife.com.au)

Submitted by ferrisoxide.com
ferrisoxide.com writes: A paper co-authored by researcher fellow Dr. Fiona Ingleby and evolutionary biologist Dr. Megan Head — on how gender differences affect the experiences that PhD students have when moving into post-doctoral work — was rejected by peer-reviewed PLoS One journal because they didn’t ask a man for help.

A (male) peer reviewer for the journal suggested that the scientists find male co-authors, to prevent “ideologically biased assumptions.” The same reviewer also provided his own ironically biased advice, when explaining that women may have fewer articles published because men's papers "are indeed of a better quality, on average", "just as, on average, male doctoral students can probably run a mile race a bit faster".

Submission + - Congress and Its Crypto Craziness

Submitted by Trailrunner7
Trailrunner7 writes: Crazy is never in short supply in Washington. Through lean times and boom times, regardless of who is in the White House or which party controls the Congress, the one resource that’s reliably renewable is nuttery.

This is never more true than when that venerable and voluble body takes up a topic with some technical nuance to it. The appearance of words such as “Internet”, “computers” or “technology” in the title of a committee hearing strike fear into the hearts of all who use such things. This is the legislative body, after all, that counted among its members the late Sen. Ted Stevens, who so eloquently described the Internet as a series of tubes.

And so when a panel with the wonderfully Orwellian name of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform announced a hearing titled “Encryption Technology and Potential U.S. Policy Responses”, the expectations in the security and crypto communities were for plenty of crazy. And it delivered in spades, but perhaps not in the way observers had expected.

The committee hearing was a response to the recent conversations in Washington circles about the need for backdoors in encryption technologies to enable lawful access by the FBI and other agencies. Cryptographers have said consistently that such systems simply don’t work, as they inevitably will allow access for attackers as well as law enforcement, never mind the huge technical challenges of implementing them.

That fact that the decisions by Apple and Google are a result of the NSA's actions did not get past Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.), a man with computer science and law degrees and a clear grasp of the issue at hand.

“I take great offense to your testimony today,” Lieu said to Conley. “It’s a fundamental misunderstanding of the problem. Why do you think companies like Apple and Google are doing this? It’s not to make less money. It’s because the public is asking for it.

“This is a private sector response to government overreach. Let me make another statement, that somehow these technology companies aren’t credible because they collect private data. Here’s the difference: Apple and Google don’t have coercive powers. District attorneys do. The FBI does. The NSA does. And to me it’s very simple to draw the privacy balance when it comes to law enforcement privacy. Just follow the damn Constitution. And because the NSA and other law enforcement agencies didn’t do that, you’re seeing a vast public reaction to this."

Submission + - What is the sound of one bouncing electron?

Submitted by LeadSongDog
LeadSongDog writes: Last week the neutrino hunters at "Project 8" announced a tabletop single-electron detector: http://www.sciencedaily.com/re...
Now comes news that they've seen an electron's cyclotron chirp, changing pitch upwards as it bounces from atom to atom in a cloud of Kr-83: http://www.sciencedaily.com/re...
Full details in PhysRevLtrs at http://physics.aps.org/article...
Next on the agenda: do the same thing in a tritium cloud while getting resolution below 1eV. Sounds like a fun place to work!

Submission + - Verizon Tells Customer He Needs 75Mbps For Smoother Netflix Video (arstechnica.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Verizon recently told a customer that upgrading his 50Mbps service to 75 Mbps would result in smoother streaming of Netflix video. Of course, that's not true — Netflix streams at a rate of about 3.5 Mbps on average for Verizon's fiber service, so there's more than enough headroom either way. But this customer was an analyst for the online video industry, so he did some testing and snapped some screenshots for evidence. He fired up 10 concurrent streams of a Game of Thrones episode and found only 29Mbps of connection being used. This guy was savvy enough to see through Verizon's BS, but I'm sure there are millions of customers who wouldn't bat an eye at the statements they were making. The analyst "believes that the sales pitch he received is not just an isolated incident, since he got the same pitch from three sales reps over the phone and one online."

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