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Submission + - Dogecache Is Geocaching for Dogecoins (vice.com)

Submitted by Daniel_Stuckey
Daniel_Stuckey writes: In 2000, a post on Slashdot introduced the concept of a new GPS-infused sport for nerds and hikers called geocaching. "Take some item and hide it somewhere in the world," the poster explained, "record the latitude and longitude using your GPS receiver, post the location to the Web so that others can find your stash." I've passively stumbled upon a couple of geocaches while walking on trails in the Czech Republic and Northern California, but wasn't actually engaged in the coordinate-hunting sport. But a group of hackathon-winning students from New Jersey might have just changed geocaching forever—with dogecoin. Yes, the meme-based virtual currency bearing the image of a Shiba-Inu is the central object of Dogecache.

Submission + - The Graffiti Drone (vice.com)

Submitted by tedlistens
tedlistens writes: KATSU is known for his adventurous and speculative vandalism, but his new project is not fake or hypothetical, though it does elevate his work to new heights. He has developed a system to attach a spray can to a quadcopter, creating one of the world's first graffiti drones. The drone is capable of spraying canvases or walls hundreds of feet high, granting the artist access to spaces that were previously inaccessible. At the Silicon Valley Contemporary art fair, which opened Thursday, KATSU is showing a series of drone-painted canvasses—and preparing to take the drone out on the town. "There are a lot of disadvantages to drones, you know. It’s not like, ‘oh, I’ll slip off the edge of this bridge and die’," he tells the Center for the Study of the Drone at Motherboard, which also has a video. "Its like, ‘I might have the drone drift off and I might kill someone.’"

Comment Re:The "level playing field" taxi companies demand (Score 1) 72

by tedlistens (#46596373) Attached to: Taxis By Algorithm: Streamlining City Transport With Graph Theory
Yep. I think as other people have pointed out, solving these problems always depends upon thinking about the context, the benefits and the costs involved.

In situations where people are a lot of people are waiting for not many taxis—like the airport—sharing doesn't just mean a cost incentive but a time incentive too. Sharing in these situations is beneficial to both passengers and taxis, who spend less time waiting in long lines, and it benefits the transportation hub and the city as a whole. People get moving cheaper and faster, using what already exists.

(I know this works because I'm working on it now at the NYC-based taxi-sharing company Bandwagon—http://www.bandwagon.io)

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.

Submission + - Regulation of Surveillance Tech Exports On the Table

Submitted by Trailrunner7
Trailrunner7 writes: The long shadow cast by the use of surveillance technology and so-called lawful intercept tools has spread across much of the globe and has sparked a renewed push in some quarters for restrictions on the export of these systems. Politicians and policy analysts, discussing the issue in a panel Monday, said that there is room for sensible regulation without repeating the mistakes of the Crypto Wars of the 1990s.

“There’s virtually no accountability or transparency, while he technologies are getting faster, smaller and cheaper,” Marietje Schaake, a Dutch member of the European Parliament, said during a panel discussion put on by the New America Foundation. “We’re often accused of over-regulating everything, so it’s ironic that there’s no regulation here. And the reason is that the member states [of the EU] are major players in this. The incentives to regulate are hampered by the incentives to purchase.

“There has been a lot of skepticism about how to regulate and it’s very difficult to get it right. There are traumas from the Crypto Wars. Many of these companies are modern-day arms dealers. The status quo is unacceptable and criticizing every proposed regulation isn’t moving us forward.”

Submission + - MIT Researchers Create Platform To Build Secure Web Apps That Never Leak Data

Submitted by rjmarvin
rjmarvin writes: Researchers in the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory have developed a platform for building secure web applications and services that never decrypt or leak data http://sdt.bz/68972. MIT researcher Raluca Ada Popa, who previously worked on the Google and SAP-adopted CryptoDB, and her team have put a longstanding philosophy into practice: to never store unencrypted data on servers. They've redesigned the entire approach to securing online data by creating Mylar http://css.csail.mit.edu/mylar..., which builds and updates applications to keep data secure from server breaches with constant encryption during storage, only decrypting the data in the user's browser. Integrated with the open-source Meteor https://www.meteor.com/ framework, a Mylar prototype has already secured six application by changing only 35 lines of code.

Submission + - Famous Paintings Hold Clues to Past Climate (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: The scorching colors of a large volcanic blast can stain sunsets around the world for years after the initial eruption cools down. Now researchers have shown that artist's inspired by these scenes may have left clues to past climate in their paintings. Scientists compared the proportion of red and green hues in the skies of hundreds of sunset paintings produced between 1500 and 2000. Regardless of artistic style, paintings created soon after volcanic eruptions had redder skies than those painted during periods of low volcanic activity. The researchers say their results agree with other indicators of historic atmospheric pollutant levels, such as ice cores. Because these existing indicators provide limited evidence for short-term trends due to their scarcity, the scientists hope their work provides climate scientists a colorful new spectrum of data to fill in the gaps.

Submission + - How Bitcoin Cyberpunk'd Us (vice.com)

Submitted by Daniel_Stuckey
Daniel_Stuckey writes: On paper, the technology is as elegant as it is promising. Bitcoin's big innovation is that it offers a system of verification that relies on math, not middlemen, to broker trust. That's a big deal, but it's also a little bewildering.

Among other things, Bitcoin undoes the internet's logic of copying and pasting: it proves that transactions have happened through math alone, which can, among other things, obviate the need for central financial institutions. It may not turn out to be a very good currency, but it's already looking like an interesting way to change the way we handle and send money.

Some regulators and banks are now taking it very seriously. A report out today from Goldman Sachs says Bitcoin isn't a very good store of value, but its payment technology could force "existing players to adapt or coopt it." In a December report, Bank of America Merrill Lynch predicted that Bitcoin could “become a major means of payment for e-commerce and may emerge as a serious competitor to traditional money transfer providers.” Other industry stalwarts remain puzzled: “Wow... It’s totally surreal," was how James P. Gorman, the head of Morgan Stanley, put it the other day. And yet, for all of its futuristic mystery, the technology rests on self-evidence and hard logic. It aims to replace messy human trust with rigid mathematical proof.

Submission + - Rosetta comet-chasing spacecraft wakes up after 2.5-year hibernation (cbsnews.com)

Submitted by mpicpp
mpicpp writes: After hibernating for 31 months in the cold of deep space, the European Space Agency's solar powered Rosetta probe, finally returning to the light and warmth of the inner solar system, woke itself up and phoned home Monday, a major milestone in a $1.7 billion attempt to orbit a comet and place an instrumented lander on its icy surface.

More than 400 million miles from the sun, Rosetta's flight computer responded to a countdown timer that signaled the end of hibernation, triggering a complex sequence of events to slow the spacecraft's spin and warm its star trackers so it could determine its position and orientation in space.

Submission + - YouTube Thinks "I Have a Dream" Is Lounge Music (vice.com)

Submitted by Daniel_Stuckey
Daniel_Stuckey writes: For decades the "I Have a Dream" speech has been a rallying cry for civil rights everywhere. It's also been the centerpiece in a quiet, long and unfortunate copyright war, caught between those who might argue it belongs in the public domain and those who insist that it's in the private ownership of the King family. In the process, videos of the speech have disappeared from YouTube, under a copyright controlled by the music publisher EMI, and a system charged with robotically policing copyright on all of YouTube's videos.

In the latest chapter in the speech's copyright morass, that system, Content ID, has decided that at least some of the rights to the speech—and the profits it generates from each view—belong to a company called GR8 AL Music. At some point in the past few months, Content ID has decided that the video contains a lounge song titled "Our Dream," from an album called Lounge Cocktails, Vol.1 (Delicious Grooves for Café Bar and Hotel Suites).

Algorithms work in mysterious ways. The video doesn't contain that song. In this peculiar case, "I Have a Dream" has likely been confused with the song because the song itself contains an excerpt of King's speech.

Submission + - Canadian health scientists resort to sneaker net after funding slashed (www.cbc.ca)

Submitted by sandbagger
sandbagger writes: Health Canada scientists are so concerned about losing access to their research library that they're finding workarounds, with one squirrelling away journals and books in his basement for colleagues to consult, says a report obtained by CBC News. The report said the number of in-house librarians went from 40 in 2007 to just six in April 2013. "I look at it as an insidious plan to discourage people from using libraries," said Dr. Rudi Mueller, who left the department in 2012. "If you want to justify closing a library, you make access difficult and then you say it is hardly used."

This is hardly new for Stephen Harper's Conservative government. Over the Christmas holidays, several scientific libraries were closed and their contents taken to the dump.

Submission + - Dark Wallet Will Make Bitcoin Accessible for All—Except the Feds (vice.com)

Submitted by Daniel_Stuckey
Daniel_Stuckey writes: The group, called UnSystem, are self-proclaimed cryto-anarchists led by Cody Wilson—who you may remember as the creator of the controversial 3D-printed gun. After getting himself in hot water with the government for making the digital files to print an unregulated weapon freely available on the internet, Wilson's now endeavoring to bring bitcoin back to its anarchist roots. Like other bitcoin wallets, you'll be able to store, send, and receive coins, and interact with block chain, the bitcoin public ledger. But Dark Wallet will include extra protections to make sure transactions are secure, anonymous, and hard to trace—including a protocol called "trustless mixing” that combines users' coins together before encoding it into the ledger.

Submission + - Even the Author of the Patriot Act Is Trying to Stop the NSA (vice.com)

Submitted by Daniel_Stuckey
Daniel_Stuckey writes: Republican Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner will introduce an anti-NSA bill tomorrow in the House, and if it makes its winding way to becoming law, it will be a big step towards curtailing the NSA's bulk metadata collection. Wisconsin Rep. Sensenbrenner, along with 60 co-sponsors, aims to amend one section of the Patriot Act, Section 215, in a bill known as the United and Strengthening America by Fulfilling Rights and Ending Eavesdropping, Dragnet Collection, and Online Monitoring Act—also known by its less-clunky acronym version, the USA Freedom Act.

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