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Submission + - Silk Road Prosecutor Preet Bharara: Keep Politics Out of Ulbricht Defense

An anonymous reader writes: Prosecutors in the Silk Proad case lead by Preet Bharara are seeking to ban the presentation of any political ideas by the defense. This is in spite of that fact that if the Silk Road operator the Dread Pirate Roberts can be established lawfully in court to be Ulbricht, nearly all of the writings available to establish Mens Rea, or culpable criminal mind set, appear to be of a political character.

Submission + - Spanish CyberSquat Raided in "Counter-Terror" Operation

MrBingoBoingo writes: An anarchist center in Spain at Kasa de la Muntanya associated with techo libertarian projects was raided under the guise of of "Counter-Terrorism" operation. The squat had been continually occupied since 1989 and served as a social senter for the local community in addition to serving as a haven to technological and libertarian projects.

Submission + - Electric eel shocks like a Taser (vanderbilt.edu)

Science_afficionado writes: After a nine month study, a Vanderbilt biologist has determined that the electric eel emits series of millisecond, high-voltage pulses to paralyze its prey just before it attacks. The high-voltage pulses cause the motor neurons in its target to violently contract, leaving it temporarily immobilized in the same fashion as the high-voltage pulses produced by a Taser. He documented this effect using high-speed video. The eel, which is nocturnal and has very poor eyesight, also uses closely spaced pairs of high-voltage pulses when hunting for hidden prey. He determined that the pulses cause the prey's body to twitch which produces water movements that the eel uses to locate its position even when it's hidden from view.

Submission + - Nanny State Bans Many Porn Acts in UK

DigitAl56K writes: The Independent reports that the UK's Audiovisual Media Services Regulations 2014 has banned a long list of sex acts from Video-On-Demand pornography produced in the UK, many with no obvious reason. The restrictions "appear to make no distinction between consensual and non-consensual practices between adults".

A list of banned acts can be found in TFA, and include use of physical restraints, spanking, and humiliation. I wonder how long it will be before sites hosting content featuring such terrible, heinous, immoral acts are permanently blocked by the UK's net filter.

Submission + - What gets little girls interested in science? (slate.com) 1

nbauman writes: Programmer David Auerbach is dismayed that, at a critical developmental age, his 4-year-old daughter wants to be a princess, not a scientist or engineer, he writes in Slate. The larger society keeps forcing sexist stereotypes on her, in every book and toy store. (Et tu, Lego?) How do you non-coercively inspire girls that age to go down the STEM path? What actually works?

If you are a little girl, or once were a little girl, or were the parent of a little girl, what worked for you?

Submission + - Why Pluto Still Matters

StartsWithABang writes: Nearly a century ago, Pluto was discovered, and for 48 years it remained the only known object whose orbit takes it beyond the gravitational pull of Neptune. In a single generation, we've now discovered more than 1,000 additional objects in the Kuiper Belt, but does that make Pluto any less special? A strong argument for why Pluto might matter now more than ever.

Submission + - Comcast Forgets To Delete Revealing Note From Blog Post

An anonymous reader writes: Earlier today, Comcast published a blog post to criticize the newly announced coalition opposing its merger with Time Warner Cable and to cheer about the FCC’s decision to restart the “shot clock” on that deal. But someone at Kabletown is probably getting a stern talking-to right now, after an accidental nugget of honesty made its way into that post. Comcast posted to their corporate blog today about the merger review process, reminding everyone why they think it will be so awesome and pointing to the pro-merger comments that have come in to the FCC. But they also left something else in. Near the end, the blog post reads, “Comcast and Time Warner Cable do not currently compete for customers anywhere in America. That means that if the proposed transaction goes through, consumers will not lose a choice of cable companies. Consumers will not lose a choice of broadband providers. And not a single market will see a reduction in competition. Those are simply the facts.” The first version of the blog post, which was also sent out in an e-mail blast, then continues: “We are still working with a vendor to analyze the FCC spreadsheet but in case it shows that there are any consumers in census blocks that may lose a broadband choice, want to make sure these sentences are more nuanced.” After that strange little note, the blog post carries on in praise of competition, saying, “There is a reason we want to provide our customers with better service, faster speeds, and a diverse choice of programming: we don’t want to lose them.”

Submission + - AK-47 Gets The Designer Treatment

Rambo Tribble writes: In a bid to make the venerable AK-47 assault rifle more appealing to a wider segment of the market, Kalashnikov has given its cornerstone product a makeover. No longer the exclusive province of Communists and revolutionaries, the AK-47 is now found in the sporting market, worldwide. Kalashnikov's move, which includes a new logo, is said to stem from a desire to appeal to more foreign buyers. As Kalashnikov CEO Alexei Krivoruchko said, "The US market was very important for us." The new look was rolled out in a glitzy event in Moscow.

Submission + - FBI Seizes Los Angeles Schools' iPad Documents (go.com)

An anonymous reader writes: The Los Angeles Unified School District had a bold (and expensive) plan to outfit its students with top-of-the-line technology: at 650,000 students would be outfitted with an Apple iPad. The cost? $1 billion. Unfortunately for them, the project has been plagued with problems. Now, the FBI has seized 20 boxes of documents regarding their procurement practices and confirmed an investigation into the school district. "Hundreds of students initially given the iPads last school year found ways to bypass security installations, downloading games and freely surfing the Web. Teachers complained they were not properly trained to instruct students with the new technology. And questions were raised after emails were disclosed showing that then-Superintendent John Deasy had been in communication with vendors Apple and Pearson before the contracts were put to bid."

Submission + - Child abuse database containing millions of images to launch 1

mrspoonsi writes: Data taken from tens of millions of child abuse photos and videos will shortly be used as part of a new police system to aid investigations into suspected paedophiles across the UK. The obscene material was seized during previous operations. The project, called the Child Abuse Image Database (Caid), will be launched by the Prime Minister at an internet safety event on Thursday 11 December. To help compare the images, Caid makes use of a unique signature assigned to each one — known as a hash value — the equivalent of a "digital fingerprint". Detectives will be able to plug seized hard drives into the system so they can be scanned and their contents similarly encoded to see if the resulting signatures match. Other techniques, including object matching and visual similarity analysis, are also employed. Caid will also be able to use GPS data from photographs to pinpoint where they were taken. Detectives will also be able to upload new, unfamiliar images of child abuse to a central computer server so that colleagues elsewhere in the UK can help try and identify those involved.

Submission + - GTK+ Developers Call for Help to Finish OpenGL Support

jones_supa writes: OpenGL support under GTK is getting into good shape for providing a nice, out-of-the-box experience by default on key platforms for the GTK+ 3.16 / GNOME 3.16 release in March. For a few weeks now within mainline GTK+ has been native OpenGL support and as part of that a new GtkGLArea widget for allowing OpenGL drawing within GTK applications. Since that initial work landed, there's been more GTK+ OpenGL code progressing that right now primarily benefits Linux X11 and Wayland users. While good progress is being made and improvements still ongoing to the GNOME toolkit, GNOME developers are requesting help in ensuring other GTK+ backends can benefit from this OpenGL support. If you are using or planning to use GTK+ 3 on Windows or OS X, and you know how to use OpenGL on those two platforms, please consider helping out the GTK+ developers by implementing the GdkGLContext API using WGL and AppleGL.

Submission + - Tor: This Onion Smells (qntra.net)

MrBingoBoingo writes: After the backlash to Yasha Levine's original report on the monetary connection between Tor developers and the United States Government is it time for privacy activists to consider depreciating the frequent recommendation that the privacy conscious should use Tor? Between Darkmarket busts and and the Tor project's history perhaps it is time to consider the Tor network as controlled by the United States law enforcement and intelligence communities.

Submission + - Is slashdot.org/palm dead forever? (slashdot.org) 1

gatzke writes: The cleanest interface for slashdot for years has been http://slashdot.org/palm but it now has not updated since Friday. It allows users to read articles and see five top comments. Is it dead forever, or just temporarily down? Should sites support small / simple interfaces? Are we being forced to beta?

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