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Submission + - British Spy Chiefs Secretly Begged to Play in NSA's Data Pools (firstlook.org)

Submitted by Advocatus Diaboli
Advocatus Diaboli writes: Britain’s electronic surveillance agency, Government Communications Headquarters, has long presented its collaboration with the National Security Agency’s massive electronic spying efforts as proportionate, carefully monitored, and well within the bounds of privacy laws. But according to a top-secret document in the archive of material provided to The Intercept by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, GCHQ secretly coveted the NSA’s vast troves of private communications and sought “unsupervised access” to its data as recently as last year – essentially begging to feast at the NSA’s table while insisting that it only nibbles on the occasional crumb.
GNOME

The GNOME Foundation Is Running Out of Money 693

Posted by samzenpus from the coffers-are-bare dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The GNOME Foundation is running out of money. The foundation no longer has any cash reserves so they have voted to freeze non-essential funding for running the foundation. They are also hunting down sponsors and unpaid invoices to regain some delayed revenue. Those wishing to support the GNOME Foundation can become a friend of GNOME."

Comment Banks deflecting attention from themselves (Score 2) 342

by FreeUser (#46683107) Attached to: Australia May 'Pause' Trades To Tackle High-Frequency Trading

High frequency trading isn't the issue. The banks are the real "insiders", and are pointing fingers at small, high frequency prop shops to deflect attention from themselves, and to get back to the bad old days when they could really gouge their customers with wide spreads.

High frequency traders make their money by having better pricing models, narrowing spreads in the market, and being able to execute and then get out of a position quickly to lock in their profits and eliminate risk. The banks like to be the middleman, with wide spreads, so that they can pocket the difference.

The net result of high frequency traders is that the rest of us can get a stock much closer to their actual value (due to narrow spreads). Yes, the high freqency traders make good money by selling the stock $0.005 off the "real" value to me and then immediately getting out of the position by reselling it a millisecond later and locking in that $0.005 profit, but I have only paid a premium of $0.005 instad of the $0.35 or worse the banks would love to gouge me for (and used to, a few short years ago).

We get rid of high freqency trading and we'll be back to the bad old days, when the real insiders really did gouge us, and we all paid far too much for our investments, and were able to sell at far too little, with the likes of Goldman Sachs pocketing the enormous difference.

As for the front-running nonsense on 60 Minutes, that's always been illegal (contrary to what we're being told), and it is not at all how high frequency trading works. If someone was in fact doing that, then they're in a whole world of hurt with the SEC (and rightly so), but this entire exercise appears much more like a distraction: blame small outsider firms who've made the marketplace more effecient and tightened spreads for problems created by corruption within the big banks, and hope no one notices...at least until the next bank-induced crash.

Submission + - Apple buys iFixit, declares repairable devices "antiquated". (ifixit.com) 2

Submitted by ErichTheRed
ErichTheRed writes: Apparently, Apple is buying iFixit. iFixit is (was?) a website that posted teardown photos of gadgets and offered repair advice. According to the website: "Apple is working hard to make devices last long enough to be upgraded or irrelevant, making repairability an antiquated notion." It's all clear now — I can't replace the batteries, hard drives or RAM in new Macs because I'm expected to throw them in the landfill every 2 years!

It made it to CNN, so it has to be true, right?

Submission + - Experience with Free To Air

Submitted by Dishwasha
Dishwasha writes: Just a few days ago I incidentally discovered a little known secret called free-to-air. Amazingly enough even in the depths of /., there appears to have been no postings or discussions about it. Just like over-the-air programming, there is free programming available via various satellite systems that only requires a one-time cost of getting a dish and receiver. Both Amazon and Ebay appear to have a plethora of hardware out there. I personally settled on the Geosatpro MicroHD system with a 90cm 26lbs light-weight dish (queue lots of comments about my describing 26 lbs as being light-weight) and I should be receiving that in just a few days.

I'm curious, who else is using satellite FTA on /.? What are your setups? Has anyone hacked on any of the DVR/PVR devices available? Besides greater access to international programming, what are your channel experiences?

Submission + - Subversion project migrates to Git (apache.org)

Submitted by gitficionado
gitficionado writes: The Apache Subversion project has begun migrating its source code from the ASF Subversion repo to git. Last week, the Subversion PMC (project management committee) voted to to migrate, and the migration has already begun.

Although there was strong opposition to the move from the older and more conservative SVN devs, and reportedly a lot of grumbling and ranting when the vote was tallied, a member of the PMC (who asked to remain anonymous) told the author that "this [migration] will finally let us get rid of the current broken design to a decentralized source control model [and we'll get] merge and rename done right after all this time."

Submission + - Google+ Introduces Auto Awesome

Submitted by Nashirak
Nashirak writes: Google+ Auto Awesome is all about fun surprises that bring your photos to life. And whether it’s Benedict Cumberbatch at the Oscars or Michelle Obama at the White House, a celebrity photobomb is the ultimate surprise, turning an ordinary photo into something extraordinary.

Now with Auto Awesome Photobombs, you too can get a celebrity photobomb—no red carpet required. We’re starting with surprise appearances by +David Hasselhoff, everyone’s favorite crime-fighting rockstar lifeguard.

Submission + - Slashdot Design Changes for Wider Appeal (slashdot.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Our marketing department has done extensive research over the last 8 years and discovered that our audience is strangely disproportionately skewed towards males. Like, 98.3% males to be precise. To correct this oversight, we have decided to subtly tweak Slashdot's design and content to widen our appeal to these less active demographics. Don't worry! We'll still continue to serve our core audience, but we hope you'll work with us as we try to find a balance that will work for all.

Submission + - Vaadin switches to C# overnight (vaadin.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The popular Java UI Framework Vaadin (using GWT under the hood) switches to C# over night in a bold move. All the tools go commercial through Microsoft and MSWTF framework is used underneath.

Submission + - The inside story of Gmail on its tenth anniversary (time.com)

Submitted by harrymcc
harrymcc writes: Google officially--and mischievously--unveiled Gmail on April Fools' Day 2004. That makes this its tenth birthday, which I celebrated by talking to a bunch of the people who created the service for TIME.com. It's an amazing story: The service was in the works for almost three years before the announcement, and faced so much opposition from within Google that it wasn't clear it would ever reach consumers.

Submission + - Foxconn to Restaff Entirely with US Adjunct Professors

Submitted by Applehu Akbar
Applehu Akbar writes: (Xinhua) Foxconn Technology Group, the world’s largest electronics contract manufacturer, announced today its response to the increasing cost of local labor: by 2Q 2015, it will have completed replacement of its assembly staff with American adjunct professors. Said an executive who did not wish to be named, “Adjunct professors are not only highly educated but are used to working for nothing more than ramen and a basement cot. They are not spoiled like our local Chinese assembly workers.” They are for the most part docile, and used to operating within rigid bureaucracies.

The US educational system turns out far larger numbers of adjuncts, especially in the humanities, than can ever hope to be employed by academe. The excess adjuncts live on the streets of major American cities, but, after being pushed aside by the tougher and crazier traditional homeless, gravitate to the more congenial west coast, where roving bands of them subsist on odd jobs and shoplifting. Here they are easily picked up by Foxconn raiding parties, which dicker with what we know in China as People’s Shining Path Moral Guidance Cadres. In the US these are called “Homeowner Associations,” and they gratefully cooperate to turn in bands of feral adjuncts, whose constant bickering and messy campsites are an ongoing annoyance to the people of America’s West Coast.

Once captured, the adjuncts are loaded into Foxconn’s fleet of wind-powered EcoFreighters and sedated for the slow sea voyage on the “Central Passage” from Long Beach to the Shanghai labor auction docks. Now that there is human cargo to bring back to China, the EcoFreighters no longer have to return empty after unloading their troves of consumer goods in Los Angeles.

Foxconn has been anxious to grab the most easily trainable workers before more Chinese companies take an interest in American adjunct professor labor. “At first we tried a breeding program for even greater long term savings,” said the Foxconn exec, “But the males, raised as they have been in western academic culture, have developed such a deep-seated fear of their own females that fertile matings were rare, even when naked, unchained females were placed right in males' dormitory cells.” But why fight to change an alien culture, the thinking now goes, when fresh adjuncts are so easily hunted down on the California/Oregon coast? So long as this situation persists, the EcoFreighters will sail full and world’s supply of low-cost products will not be in danger.

Submission + - EA to buy out Chris Robert's Star Citizen. (themittani.com)

Submitted by E-Sabbath
E-Sabbath writes: In the first major purchase by EA since Popcap in 2011, Chris Roberts announced his acquisition by the publishing giant on Monday, March 31st. EA CEO Andrew Wilson is quoted as saying,

CIG's proven track record and original IP add to EA’s momentum and accelerate our drive towards a multi-billion dollar digital business. With EA’s global reach and publishing network through Origin, Star Citizen is getting the bump it needs to compete with other FPS Space Sim Semi-Sandbox Role Playing Action Games out there in the market.

Submission + - Judge Again Denies Government Digital Search Warrant for Being Too Broad

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Judge John Faccioli, federal magistrate judge of D.C., has once again denied a government request for a search warrant for a suspect's electronic data on the grounds that the request is too broad. In this latest case, the judge has denied the government access to a suspect's iPhone, stating that 'the government fails to articulate how it will limit the possibility that data outside the scope of the warrant will be searched.' He specifically asked for a search protocol which would address not only 'how [the government] will determine which blocks [of the flash drive] should be searched for data within the scope of the warrant' but also how the government would handle data that it may find outside the scope of the warrant. In a similar case earlier this March, Judge Faccioli denied a government request for a warrant to search a suspect's email account for also being too broad.

Submission + - The Mystery of the 'Only Camera to Come Back from the Moon' (vice.com)

Submitted by Daniel_Stuckey
Daniel_Stuckey writes: After a furious bidding war in Vienna on Saturday, a Japanese camera collector has bought a Hasselblad camera for $910,000 in a record-setting auction of what's been widely called the "only camera to come back from the moon."

But contrary to claims repeated across the Internet on Monday, this isn't the only camera to come back from the moon. In fact, some think it may have never landed on the moon at all. And because of rules surrounding most NASA property, its sale may actually violate US law.

One thing we know for sure, maybe: the 70mm Hasselblad 500 is one of fourteen cutting-edge cameras that astronauts used in orbit around the moon and on the lunar surface during the Apollo program. All of the images we have from those moon missions were taken by these machines, which were either mounted inside the command module that circled the moon or were attached to space suits at the chest.

This particular camera was, reports the Verge, among many other sources, "used on the moon during the Apollo 15 mission in 1971," and "is special in the fact that it's returned to Earth." That's because astronauts were often instructed to jettison their cameras on the lunar surface in order to save precious kilograms during the return trip.

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Stellar rays prove fibbing never pays. Embezzlement is another matter.

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