52546135
submission
quantr writes:
The internet is not going to save the world, says the Microsoft co-founder, whatever Mark Zuckerberg and Silicon Valley's tech billionaires believe. But eradicating disease just might.
Bill Gates describes himself as a technocrat. But he does not believe that technology will save the world. Or, to be more precise, he does not believe it can solve a tangle of entrenched and interrelated problems that afflict humanity's most vulnerable: the spread of diseases in the developing world and the poverty, lack of opportunity and despair they engender. "I certainly love the IT thing," he says. "But when we want to improve lives, you've got to deal with more basic things like child survival, child nutrition."
These days, it seems that every West Coast billionaire has a vision for how technology can make the world a better place. A central part of this new consensus is that the internet is an inevitable force for social and economic improvement; that connectivity is a social good in itself. It was a view that recently led Mark Zuckerberg to outline a plan for getting the world's unconnected 5 billion people online, an effort the Facebook boss called "one of the greatest challenges of our generation". But asked whether giving the planet an internet connection is more important than finding a vaccination for malaria, the co-founder of Microsoft and world's second-richest man does not hide his irritation: "As a priority? It's a joke."
Then, slipping back into the sarcasm that often breaks through when he is at his most engaged, he adds: "Take this malaria vaccine, [this] weird thing that I'm thinking of. Hmm, which is more important, connectivity or malaria vaccine? If you think connectivity is the key thing, that's great. I don't."
52546111
submission
SanDogWeps writes:
Periodically viewed as copyright infringement by the media, the Department of Defense's "Early Bird" has been delivering applicable headlines to the Armed Forces since 1948. It stopped updating on October 1st, along with a number of other government products, but when the lights turned back on, The Early Bird remained dark. A number of reasons have been floated, including applicability in the internet age, cost, and a lack of interest. Others claim The Early Bird was nothing more than a propaganda machine, by culling articles that painted DoD in a favorable light.
52545907
submission
schweini writes:
Inmates in an Oklahoma prison programmed an app that attempts to streamline the prison's food logistics.
52545539
submission
The Grim Reefer writes:
Before the transcontinental race in "Cannonball Run," the starter tells the gathered racers, "You all are certainly the most distinguished group of highway scofflaws and degenerates ever gathered together in one place."
Ed Bolian prefers the term "fraternity of lunatics."
Where the 1981 Burt Reynolds classic was a comedic twist on a race inspired by real-life rebellion over the mandated 55-mph speed limits of the 1970s, Bolian set out on a serious mission to beat the record for driving from New York to Los Angeles.
The mark? Alex Roy and David Maher's cross-country record of 31 hours and 4 minutes, which they set in a modified BMW M5 in 2006.
Bolian, a 28-year-old Atlanta native, had long dreamed of racing from East Coast to West. A decade ago, for a high school assignment, Bolian interviewed Brock Yates, who conceived the Cannonball Baker Sea-To-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophy Dash, aka the Cannonball Run.
52286685
submission
chicksdaddy writes:
It's another day, another face-palm moment for the home surveillance camera industry.
Just one month after the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) settled a complaint (http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2013/09/trendnet.shtm) with the maker of SecurView, a line of poorly secured home surveillance cameras, a researcher at the firm Duo Security (http://www.duosecurity.com) has found a slew of even more serious security holes in the IZON Camera — a popular product that is sold in Apple Stores and Best Buy, among others. A review by The Security Ledger found dozens of such systems accessible via the public Internet, in some cases allowing anyone to peer into the interiors of private residences and businesses.
Mark Stanislav (@markstanislav), the Security Evangelist at the firm Duo Security conducted an audit of the IZON hardware and corresponding iOS mobile application software used to manage it. He documented a slew of troubling security lapses including an easily guessed, default user account for the Web-based GUI used to view live video streams, wide-open configuration with wide-open ports for accessing the device by Telnet and HTTP, unencrypted communications and video streaming to and from IZON devices and hard-coded, undocumented root account for the linux based devices.
Using the search engine Shodan.org, Stanislav compiled a list of scores of IP addresses of IZON cameras exposed on the Internet – some deployed behind simple DSL broadband connections. A review of that list by The Security Ledger revealed a handful of exposed Web interfaces that allow anyone with an Internet connection and knowledge of the default user name and password to take control of the camera: viewing a live video feed, making video recordings that can be automatically uploaded to YouTube or other cloud-based services, and even sounding audio alarms. In one case, the camera appeared to be deployed in a private residence in Kissimmee, Florida, where an elderly couple were seen caring for an infant. Others showed the interiors and exteriors of private residences – some occupied, others obviously vacant. (https://i1.wp.com/securityledger.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/IZON-Photos.jpg)
The CTO for Stem Innovation of Salt Lake City (http://steminnovation.com/), which makes the IZON cameras said that the IZON firmware, server system and iOS applications tested by Stanislav have been updated since the Summer, when Stanislav's research was conducted. He claims the research contains “inaccurate and misleading information.” Stem did not provide specific information about any inaccuracies.
52286605
submission
itwbennett writes:
Earlier this week, Microsoft rolled out a handful of hybrid cloud services that make it easy for businesses to start using Azure in a small way. What struck blogger Nancy Gohring about the announcement was 'how deeply Microsoft is integrating Azure into other products,' with the intention of moving long-time customers onto Azure in ways that are hardly perceptible to them.
52286331
submission
McGruber writes:
The Wall Street Journal (http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303672404579151440488919138) reports on the new level of surveillance available to bosses of blue collar workers.
Thanks to mobile devices and inexpensive monitoring software, managers can now know where workers are, eavesdrop on their phone calls, tell if a truck driver is wearing his seat belt and intervene if he is tailgating. "Twenty-five years ago this was pipe dream stuff," said Paul Sangster, CEO of JouBeh Technologies, a Canadian company that develops tracking, or "telematics," technology for businesses. "Now it is commonly accepted that you are being tracked."
In the US, workplace tracking technology is largely unregulated, and courts have found that employees have few rights to privacy on the job. No federal statutes restrict the use of GPS by employers, nor force them to disclose whether they are using it. Only two states, Delaware and Connecticut, require employers to tell workers that their electronic communications—anything from emails to instant messages to texts—are being monitored.
52285943
submission
rjmarvin writes:
HealthCare.gov developers are getting hit with a barrage of flak from President Obama, congress, the tech community, and the American people. But the problem is, when running into integrating problems with health care companies' hostile legacy systems, developers are essentially reduced to cats wearing cones of shame http://sdt.bz/65262. The front-end government-side developers were saddled with SLA-style agreements written by enterprise healthcare IT teams who probably wanted to write better code, but were constrained by the health care industry's cones of shame.
49518831
submission
jones_supa writes:
Bloomberg, WSJ and NYT cheered to report that the Euro Zone's economy has showed signs of recovery after two years of decline. They're all based on the news that Eurostat, the keeper of economic statistics for the European Union, says GDP grew 0.3 percent within the EU's borders from the end of March through June. As Olli Rehn, Eurostat's vice president, writes on his blog: 'I hope there will be no premature, self-congratulatory statements suggesting "the crisis is over."' He calls the GDP report only another sign of 'a potential turning point in the EU economy.' The quick conclusion by some economists and some in the news media that a slight rise in one quarter's GDP means a recession is over ignores how experts figure out when an economy is either in a significant downturn (a recession) or enjoying steady growth (an expansion).
49518741
submission
Freshly Exhumed writes:
Microsoft's Outlook email and SkyDrive cloud storage services have been experiencing an ongoing outage Wednesday morning, as of approximately 09:00ET on August 14, 2013. Their status page shows continuing outages as of 13:00ET.
49518481
submission
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes:
Gibby Zobel reports at BBC on Alfredo Moser, a Brazilian mechanic, whose invention illuminates over one million homes during the day without electricity — using nothing more than plastic bottles filled with water and a tiny bit of bleach. So how does it work? Simple refraction of sunlight, explains Moser, as he fills an empty two-liter plastic bottle. "Add two capfuls of bleach to protect the water so it doesn't turn green [with algae]. The cleaner the bottle, the better," Moser adds. "You fix the bottle in with polyester resin. Even when it rains, the roof never leaks — not one drop." While A 50 Watt light bulb running for 14 hours a day for a year has a carbon footprint of nearly 200kg CO2, Moser lamps emit no CO2 and the plastic bottles are up-cycled in the local community, so no energy is needed to gather, shred, manufacture and ship new bottles. Following the Moser method, MyShelter started making the lamps in June 2011. They now train people to create and install the bottles, in order to earn a small income. The idea has really taken off in the Philippines, where a quarter of the population lives below the poverty line, and electricity is unusually expensive, with 140,000 homes now fitted with Moser lamps. The idea has also caught on in about 15 other countries, from India and Bangladesh, to Tanzania, Argentina and Fiji. "Alfredo Moser has changed the lives of a tremendous number of people, I think forever," says Illac Angelo Diaz. "Whether or not he gets the Nobel Prize, we want him to know that there are a great number of people who admire what he is doing."
49518351
submission
dryriver writes:
Ubiquitous surveillance to 'detect your moods', 'pinpoint the sources of your stress', and 'present relevant information'. — The development of new smartphone technology that constantly records your private conversations in addition to all ambient background noise in order to 'detect your moods' could mean the NSA might not have to bother with tapping actual phone calls at all in future. A report by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology hails the era of 'technologies that emphasize listening to everything, all the time', ubiquitous surveillance aided by microphones installed on new smartphones, such as Google’s Moto X, that do not run off the main battery and can, 'continually monitor their auditory environment to detect the phone owner’s voice, discern what room or other setting the phone is in, or pick up other clues from background noise.' While the article fails to mention the nightmare privacy implications that this technology would engender, it focuses on the innumerable apparent benefits. The technology could, 'make it possible for software to detect your moods, know when you are talking and not to disturb you, and perhaps someday keep a running record of everything you hear.' It sounds like Big Brother and invasive Minority Report-style advertising rolled into one. Chris Schmandt, director of the speech and mobility group at MIT’s Media Lab, relates how “one of his grad students once recorded two years’ worth of all the sounds he was exposed to—capturing every conversation. While the speech-to-text conversions were rough, they were good enough that he could perform a keyword search and recover the actual recording of a months-old conversation.”
49518197
submission
bjhonermann writes:
The Zambian government (along with partners) are currently rolling out an electronic medical records (EMR) system in public health facilities. The project has been going on for some time and is already in 600+ facilities with more than 700,000 patient records. One problem we're facing is that most information is still being double entered in the EMR as well as on primary paper documents at the facility, and sometimes additionally transcribed to paper registers. This double/triple entry takes time away from nurses who are already in short supply. There's an inability to fully move away from partially paper based systems both because clients often move between ‘paper clinics’ and ‘electronic clinics’ in the same communities and for follow-up care, and because the power systems in many sites are unreliable and require that there be sufficient paper backups of records for operations during periods where power is unavailable — perhaps for weeks at a time. We're providing solar panels and battery backups for sites, which work increasingly well with newer low power cpu’s, but even if the power issue were solved this would not address the need for portable paper documents. The key objective of eliminating redundant manual entry of forms and paper registers by nurses might be accomplished if we had low cost low power B/W printers available at sites so that critical information could be entered electronically and then printed out as needed, either for client carried purposes (transfers/visits to ‘paper facilities’) or to serve as local backup when power is an issue. However, we've yet to find printing solutions that seem appropriate to the context and are hopeful the Slashdot crowd may have some ideas.
Criteria we're looking at:
1. Reliability: The printers need to be very low maintenance and be able to cope with dusty environments.
2. Cost: Obviously, costs need to be kept as low as possible. No cap on the cost of printers precisely, but the net cost per page over time is critical. More expensive printers with cheaper and standard consumables are likely to be preferred to cheaper printers with expensive consumables.
3. Ink duration/lifespan: While all sites would be printing at least weekly, the amount actually printed may vary between no more than a few pages each week to several hundreds of pages. This means that whatever ink/toner cartridge/etc needs to have a long shelf life as well as lifespan. Zambia is not terribly hot, but has a humid rainy season and no climate control can be expected.
4. Low power consumption: As stated, ~15% of sites (and growing) are operating only with solar panels.
5. Quality: The quality of the printing can be quite low. Must be legible but can be ugly. No need for color. However, the pages/text need to have approximately a 5yr duration before the ink is unreadable.
6. Label Printing: There is also a need to print labels for specimens (freezer tolerant) and for drug dispensations. This may well be a different product, and early implementations will be in higher volume facilities that might not be as sensitive to power, but there will be a need for a low-power version eventually.
Our instinct is that dot-matrix printers would fit the bill nicely, but the options there seem to be limited and the long-term sourcing of supplies (ribbons, perforated paper) isn't entirely clear. What other options would the Slashdot community recommend?
46782785
submission
mattydread23 writes:
Arduino, an open source platform for hardware development, has long been a star of the Maker community. But it's been hard to connect standalone Arduino devices to the Internet. At this year's Maker Faire, Arduino leader Massimo Banzi unveiled Yun, a $69 board that will make it easier to connect up. Soon, anybody will be able to participate in the Internet of Things.
46782763
submission
alphadogg writes:
A freelance Java developer claims it took him only 30 days to build and launch a basic open source office suite that runs on multiple OSes. Called Joeffice, it works on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux as well as in browsers, according to the developer, Anthony Goubard. It includes a very basic word processor, spreadsheet program, presentation program and database software, Goubard said. The office suite was built with NetBeans and uses many popular open source Java libraries, Goubard said. That allowed him to built the program in 30 days, he said, a process that he documented daily on YouTube. http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCSvFkO-6_DQlh5biXEs7JVw/videos?sort=dd&view=0&tag_id= The suite was released as an alpha version, which means that not everything works yet. Goubard's Amsterdam company, Japplis, launched the suite, which is available under an Apache 2.0 license. This license allows companies to change and redistribute the code internally without having to share the new code publicly, he said.
