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Submission + - Facebook to include profile photos in its facial recognition database? (sophos.com)

Submitted by Em Adespoton
Em Adespoton writes: Facebook has published a summary of the updates it's proposing to make to its Data Use Policy and Statement of Rights and Responsibilities which shows a large volume of rewriting.

Most of the changes are minimal, but one area has caught people's attention — photo tagging.

Facebook has highlighted how it plans to use members' profile pictures as an identification tool to allow their friends to tag them in photos.

NakedSecurity's Lee Munson has more details, including comments from Facebook's chief privacy officer Erin Egan on why this is a "good thing".

Submission + - Extra life: The amazing fan-made game revivals (redbull.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Sometimes games don't get the sequels that they deserve — unless their fans have a say. In a new article published today, the author takes a look at some of the best homebrew sequels and open source clones, from the blockbuster Half Life reimagining Black Mesa to OpenTTD, the fan-made version of Transport Tycoon. StepMania might just be the most remarkable of them all: originally built as means to open Dance Dance Revolution files, it's evolved into a rhythm game engine in its own right, powering iPhone games and arcade cabinets alike. The creator, meanwhile, has landed a job as a software engineer at Pinterest. Not bad for an open source clone.

Submission + - Quantum Cryptography Is Safe Again (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: In theory, so-called quantum cryptography provides a totally secure way of sending information. In practice, maybe not. But now physicists have demonstrated how to close a technological loophole that could have left secrets open to eavesdroppers.

Submission + - US uncorks $16M for 17 projects to capture wave energy (networkworld.com)

Submitted by coondoggie
coondoggie writes: The US Energy Department this week said it would spend $16 million for seventeen projects to help research and develop energy generating systems from waves, tides and currents. The energy agency says the US could generate up to 1,400 terawatt hours of potential power per year. One terawatt-hour of electricity is enough to power 85,000 homes, according to the agency.

Submission + - Stand-Up Comedy at the LHC Today (physicscentral.com)

Submitted by BuzzSkyline
BuzzSkyline writes: Some physicists at the Large Hadron Collider are about to embark on a completely different sort of experiment. What they will discover today may rival the detection of the Higgs particle in, well, in no way whatsoever. Unlike most high energy physics experiments, you won't need countless hours on a massive computer farm to tell if the experiment is a success. You should know pretty quickly by tuning into CERN's After Dark Stand-Up Comedy Evening taking place today at 20:00 in Europe/Zurich time, (2:00 PM Eastern time).

Submission + - Tradehill Bitcoin Exchange Suspends Trading As Regulatory Concerns Rumble On (ibtimes.co.uk)

Submitted by AlistairCharlton
AlistairCharlton writes: Popular US Bitcoin exchange Tradehill has suspended all trading of the virtual online currency, as financial regulators continue to grapple with the legalities of Bitcoin.

In a message on the site's homepage, Tradehill cites "banking and regulatory issues" for its closure, which it assures users will be temporary.

Submission + - They found the God particle--what now? (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by Jim_Austin
Jim_Austin writes: Teams of hundreds of young scientists--including many grad students and postdocs--staffed the Large Hadron Collider and helped make one of the most important scientific discoveries in recent decades. Now they must compete for just a handful of jobs.

Submission + - UK High Court Gives OK To Investigation Of Data Siezed From David Miranda (theguardian.com)

Submitted by cold fjord
cold fjord writes: The Guardian reports, "The high court has granted the Metropolitan police extended powers to investigate whether crimes related to terrorism and breaches of the Official Secrets Act have been committed following the seizure of data at Heathrow from David Miranda... At a hearing ... lawyers for Miranda said they had agreed to the terms of wider police powers to investigate a hard drive and memory sticks containing encrypted material that were seized on 18 August. Previously the inspection had been conducted on the narrower grounds of national security. Following the court ruling, the police will now be allowed to examine the material to investigate whether a crime of "communication of material to an enemy" has been committed as well as possible crimes of communication of material about members of the military and intelligence services that could be useful to terrorists."

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Hands-on Activity for IT Career Fair

Submitted by MConnolly
MConnolly writes: I participate in an annual career fair for High School Sophomores. I have groups of 10 — 20 students for 40 minutes a piece.
In previous years, we've brought a bunch of retired PCs and challenged the groups to disassemble (down to the motherboard) and reassemble them in working order. Many processors and motherboards died, but everyone had fun.
Most students today only have laptops and tablets. As a result, this knowledge doesn't translate into the real world anymore (perhaps you disagree).
I'm looking for suggestions for an activity that will give the students some hands-on, real world experience that will benefit them immediately.

Submission + - XPrize Pulls Plug on $10 Million Genomics Competition (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: The XPrize Foundation has scrapped its high-profile $10 million genomics challenge set for next month after attracting only two competitors to the sequencing contest.

The Archon Genomics XPRIZE began with much fanfare 7 years ago with the aim of boosting medical genomics by offering a $10 million award to the first team to sequence 100 human genomes in 10 days for no more than $10,000 each. After complaints about the tight deadline and unclear judging criteria, the foundation revised the rules in October 2011: The objective was to sequence the genomes of 100 centenarians with high accuracy and 98% completeness within 30 days for $1000 or less. Interest was tepid, however, and only two of the eight contenders in the original contest registered by the 31 May deadline—the company Ion Torrent, and George Church’s lab at Harvard University.

Submission + - Researchers reverse-engineer Dropbox cracking heavily obfuscated Python app

Submitted by rjmarvin
rjmarvin writes: Two developers were able to successfully reverse-engineer Dropbox http://sdt.bz/64049 to intercept SSL traffic, bypass two-factor authentication and create open-source clients. They presented their paper, "Looking inside the (drop) box" at USENIX 2013, explaining step-by-step how they were able to succeed where others failed in reverse-engineering a heavily obfuscated application written in Python. They also claimed the generic techniques they used could be applied to reverse-engineer other Frozen python applications: OpenStack, NASA, and a host of Google apps, just to name a few...

Submission + - Why I had to quit using Chromium (blogspot.com) 1

Submitted by lads
lads writes: Firefox or Chromium, which is better? I like both, and have used both in parallel for years. Chromium's interface is slightly more appealing, lean and easy to use. But Firefox has all those useful extensions, most especially Firebug, and other utilities like BYM. I got used to do programming related stuff on Firefox, like web app debugging, and leaving the personal or recreational stuff for Chromium. I was quite happy with this, until one day.

Submission + - Discover Inspiration

Submitted by sw1205
sw1205 writes: An industry has blossomed around people hungry for a quick hit of motivation. TED talks, Do Lectures and sites like Brainy Quote all exist to provide inspirational content for the time-strapped. GetInspired365 wants to draw visitors by showcasing upbeat videos sourced from around the Internet.

Submission + - 55-Character Passwords Aren't Safe Anymore (vice.com)

Submitted by Daniel_Stuckey
Daniel_Stuckey writes: This weekend, the popular password cracker software Hashcat rolled out an update that makes it possible to break passwords up to 55 characters long—a big leap from the previous 15-character limit. To retrieve the original word, password recovery systems run millions of guesses through the same cryptographic function that first generated the hash value, and wait for a match. As you can imagine, the longer and more complicated the sequence, the more time this takes. But the process is advancing rapidly—now, the new version of Hashcat can conduct 8 billion guesses per second, with an unlimited number of tries.

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