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Submission + - DragonFly BSD 3.4 Released, with new packaging system

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: DragonFly BSD has released version 3.4. This version is the first BSD to support GCC 4.7, and contains a new experimental Aptitude-like binary package installed called DPorts, which uses the FreeBSD ports collection as a base.

Submission + - Zerocoin Extension To Bitcoin Would Make It Truly Anonymous (forbes.com)

Submitted by Sparrowvsrevolution
Sparrowvsrevolution writes: Bitcoin, despite what many users think, isn't really anonymous. Every transaction can be traced in the Bitcoin blockchain, making it in some ways even more difficult than traditional money to spend privately. But a group of cryptographers at Johns Hopkins University have come up with Zerocoin, an extension to the cryptographic currency that could make it truly anonymous and untraceable. If enough users adopted Zerocoin, it would represent an upgrade to Bitcoin's code that would allow any user to swap out his or her Bitcoins for Zerocoin tokens at any time and then redeem them for Bitcoins at will, using some clever cryptographic tricks to prevent anyone from tracing the tokens between those two transactions.

Until now, users who wanted to use Bitcoins for anonymous purposes (such as on the drug site Silk Road) have had to run them through a Bitcoin laundry service that mixes Bitcoins randomly to foil surveillance. But that's required depending on potentially shady third parties. Zerocoin would essentially build a laundry system into Bitcoin at the protocol level, without the need to trust anything other than the distributed code itself.

Submission + - How DraStic (DS Emulator for low-power ARM devices) was developped (pandoralive.info)

Submitted by ekianjo
ekianjo writes: This is an article based on an interview with Exophase (who previously developed gPSP, the famous GBA emulator for PSP) about his latest production: DraStic, a Nintendo DS Emulator working on Open Pandora (an open mini-computer running Linux, based on ARM hardware). It's impressive at many levels since noone thought this would be feasible on such a device until he released the first beta. In the articles he comes back on the development process, the problems with the DS hardware and further optimizations he is considering to reach full speed emulation for all games in the future.

Submission + - 'Focus Aware Marketing' Startup Helped Identify The Boston Bombers (securityledger.com)

Submitted by chicksdaddy
chicksdaddy writes: There was lots of buzz this week about how Redditors and 4Chan were crowdsourcing the identity of the Boston Marathon bombers. In the end though, those efforts didn't amount to much. Sure, the collective eyeballing and Google dorking of the Internet masses yielded some clues — once images of the bombers had been released. Folks identified the brand of clothing worn by the suspects, as well as new and unseen photos of the two at the scene of the bombing.

Mostly, though, they sowed chaos and confusion, accelerating the spread of inaccurate information and fingering innocent spectators as possible bombers. None of the “suspects” singled out by crowdsourced analysis as “suspicious” are believed to have played a role in the attack.

So how did authorities pick out the two bombers to begin with? That was accomplished, in no small part, with technology by the startup firm CrowdOptic (http://crowdoptic.com), a purveyor of what it describes as “focus-based services.”

CrowdOptic's software correlates geospatial and compass data from smart devices and combine that with photos and other metadata (i.e.photo EXIF information) associated with images. Built in analytics then use triangulation and other algorithms to identify “points of focus” in a crowd.
“Send me 100k images of the Super Bowl and in 1 second (of) server time I can send you the picture/s containing (for example) the halftime show wardrobe malfunction representing the most views,” CEO Jon Fisher told The Security Ledger back in October.

With the Boston bombings, CrowdOptic’s technology played a key role in helping authorities to sift through the photo evidence and metadata collected from the bombing scene. (http://technorati.com/technology/article/crowdsourcing-approach-leads-to-arrest-of/) In that situation, the bombs’ locations acted as a magnet for all other photos containing bomb location in the photographs of the area before and after the explosions. CrowdOptic’s technology was used to piece together that visual information and give investigators a time lapse not just of the scene, but of people who could have captured an image of the points of interest – even from some distance. That’s information that wouldn’t show up just by collecting geospatial data of those around the bombing site at the time of the blast. That, in turn, quickly revealed the figures of the alleged bombers: Dzhokhor A. Tsarnaev, 19 and his older brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26.

Submission + - Amazon nears debut of original TV shows (indystar.com)

Submitted by bakerharis
bakerharis writes: Amazon’s foray into TV production is unique in the way it saves money. Every spring, traditional TV networks like ABC, NBC, CBS and Fox order dozens of pilots and show them to focus groups. Executives pick just a handful to make into series. Then, they commission 13 episodes of each promising show, with each one potentially costing a few million dollars. Many episodes won’t ever air if the first few don’t attract big audiences.

Comment Re:You know... (Score 1) 351

by ron-l-j (#43501753) Attached to: Google Gets Consumer Service Ultimatum From German Consumer Groups
That is what I mean by not free, but I do not see anything of benefit from Google supporting a few million people that need the equivalent of "Where did my desktop shortcut's go? Now I cannot use my computer." questions answered. In your road analogy the road is paid with tax dollars. Which equates to Google's road being paid with free content. Such as Google plus profiles, and youtube channels that drive the page views for advertising. Gmail is constantly loading text ads when you are checking your mail.

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