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Submission + - Norway scraps online voting (bbc.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The BBC writes that Norway will no longer experiment with online voting.

Submission + - CEOs who make outragous pecentages of company revenues (dailyfinance.com)

Submitted by bizwriter
bizwriter writes: Top earning Charif Souki of Cheniere Energy had a compensation package last year of almost $142 million, even as company revenue was $267 million with a loss of $554 million. His pay package was more than half company revenue. It turns out that hundreds of companies devote 1 percent or more — sometimes a lot more — of their revenue to pay their CEOs, including heads of such tech companies as Zynga, Splunk, TripAdvisor, Progress Software, and zulily.

Submission + - HackingTeam Mobile Malware, Infrastructure Uncovered (threatpost.com)

Submitted by msm1267
msm1267 writes: Controversial spyware commercially developed by Italy’s HackingTeam and sold to governments and law enforcement for the purpose of surveillance, has a global command and control infrastructure and for the first time, security experts have insight into how its mobile malware components work.

Collaborating teams of researchers from Kaspersky Lab and Citizen Lab at the Monk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto today reported on their findings during an event in London. The breadth of the command infrastructure supporting HackingTeam’s Remote Control System (RCS) is extensive, with 326 servers outed in more than 40 countries; the report also provides the first details on the inner workings of the RCS mobile components for Apple iOS and Android devices.

Submission + - What businesses need to know about OS X Yosemite (citeworld.com)

Submitted by Copy that 2
Copy that 2 writes: The big news about the upcoming OS X Yosemite at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conferencefocused on two primary areas — the visual overhaul that makes Apple's desktop OS look and feel much more like iOS 7 (and iOS 8), and a new set of features called Apple Continuity that delivers tightly integrated user experiences when moving between iOS devices and Macs. Here's a rundown of some of the known Yosemite features and functionality that apply to enterprise environments.

Submission + - UK Solar Farms to Welcome Visitors on Solar Independence Day (renewableenergymagazine.com)

Submitted by MatthewConnery
MatthewConnery writes: A number of Solar farms in the UK will throw open their doors to members of the public on 4th July as part of Solar Independence Day, a nationwide event organized by the Solar Trade Association(STA). The STA has designed the event to show how solar farms can benefit local environments while reducing the UK’s dependence on fossil fuels.

Submission + - US Court Rules Against Government for Using Seized Data Beyond Scope of Warrant

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit last week reversed a tax evasion conviction against an accountant because the government had used data from his computers that were seized under a warrant targeting different suspects. The Fourth Amendment, the court pointed out, 'prevents the seizure of one thing under a warrant describing another.' Law enforcement originally made copies of his hard drives and during off-site processing, separated his personal files from data related to the original warrant. However, 1.5 years later, the government sifted through his personal files and used what it found to build a case against him. The appeals court held that '[i]f the Government could seize and retain non-responsive electronic records indefinitely, so it could search them whenever it later developed probable cause, every warrant to search for particular electronic data would become, in essence, a general warrant', which the Fourth Amendment protects against. The EFF hopes that the outcome of this appeal will have implications for the NSA's dragnet surveillance practice.

Submission + - Emails Show Feds Asking Florida Cops to Deceive Judges (wired.com) 1

Submitted by Advocatus Diaboli
Advocatus Diaboli writes: Police in Florida have, at the request of the U.S. Marshals Service, been deliberately deceiving judges and defendants about their use of a controversial surveillance tool to track suspects, according to newly obtained emails. At the request of the Marshals Service, the officers using so-called stingrays have been routinely telling judges, in applications for warrants, that they obtained knowledge of a suspect’s location from a “confidential source” rather than disclosing that the information was gleaned using a stingray.

Submission + - NIgerian born UK TV repairman sentenced 16 months prison for 91% reuse (theguardian.com) 1

Submitted by retroworks
retroworks writes: The Guardian uses a stock photo of obvious electronic junk in its coverage of the sentencing of Joseph Benson of BJ Electronics. But film of the actual containers showed fairly uniform, sorted televisions which typically work for 20 years. In 2013, the Basel Convention Secretariat released findings on a two-year study of the seized sea containers containing the alleged "e-waste", including Benson's in Nigeria, and found 91% working and repaired product. The study, covered in Slashdot last February, declared the shipments legal, and further reported that they were more likely to work than new product sent to Africa (which may be shelf returns from bad lots, part of the reason Africans prefer used TVs from nations with strong warranty laws).

Director of regulated industry Harvey Bradshaw of the UK tells the Guardian: "This sentence is a landmark ruling because it's the first time anyone has been sent to prison for illegal waste exports." But 5 separate university research projects question what the crime was, and whether prohibition in trade is really the best way to reduce the percentage of bad product (less than 100% waste). Admittedly, I have been following this case from the beginning and interviewed both Benson and the Basel Secretariat Executive Director, and am shocked that the UK judge went ahead with the sentencing following the publication of the E-Waste Assessment Study last year. http://retroworks.blogspot.com... But what do Nerds at Slashdot think about the campaign to arrest African geeks who pay 10 times the value of scrap for used products replaced in rich nations?

Submission + - Congress's Scientific Illiterates Are Resigning the World to Ruin (vice.com) 1

Submitted by Lasrick
Lasrick writes: Brian Merchant at Motherboard examines the March 26th at the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology's 2015 budget request hearing...the one White House adviser Dr. John Holdren addressed to defend funding for science programs. Video clips prove the comments that are difficult to believe, when you read them. It's pretty appalling, and it isn't any better in the US Senate, as Merchant points out.

Submission + - Saturn's Moon Enceladus Has Underground Ocean (discovery.com)

Submitted by astroengine
astroengine writes: Gravity measurements made with the Saturn-orbiting Cassini spacecraft indicate the small moon Enceladus has an ocean sandwiched between its rocky core and icy shell, a finding that raises the prospects of a niche for life beyond Earth. The Cassini data shows the body of water, which is in the moon’s southern hemisphere, must be as large or larger than Lake Superior and sitting on top of the moon’s rocky core at a depth of about 31 miles. "The ocean may extend halfway or more toward the equator in every direction," said planetary scientist David Stevenson, with the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

Submission + - ZunZuneo: USAID funded "Cuban Twitter" to undermine Communist regime (washingtonpost.com)

Submitted by barlevg
barlevg writes: In a country where the government severely limits access to the world wide web, ZunZeneo, an anonymous SMS-based social network, drew more than 40,000 Cuban users at its peak, the Associated Press reports. On it, people shared news and opinions about music and culture. But what none of its subscribers knew was that the project was secretly funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), though a series of shell corporations and foreign bank accounts, and that its stated goal was “renegotiate the balance of power between the state and society” in the Communist stronghold, hopefully leading to a "Cuban Spring."

Submission + - Mt. Gox Questioned by Employees for at Least 2-years

Submitted by Rambo Tribble
Rambo Tribble writes: Reuters reports that Mt. Gox employees began to question the handling of funds at least two years ago. Although only CEO Mark Karpeles had full access to financial records, a group of a half-dozen employees began to suspect client funds were being diverted to cover operating costs, which included Karpeles' toys, such as 'racing version of the Honda Civic imported from Britain'. Employees confronted Karpeles in early 2012, only to be given vague assurances with a "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain" ring. Unfortunately, since Mt. Gox was not regulated as a financial institution under Japanese law, it is unclear what recourse might be gained in pursuing this question.

Submission + - 500GB To 1TB On An mSATA Stick - Samsung SSD 840 EVO mSATA Tested (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: Shortly after 2.5-inch versions of Samsung's SSD 840 EVO drives hit the market, the company prepared an array of mSATA drives featuring the same controller and NAND flash. The Samsung SSD 840 EVO mSATA series of drives are essentially identical to their 2.5" counterparts, save for the mSATA drives' much smaller form factor. Like their 2.5" counterparts, Samsung's mSATA 840 EVO series of drives feature an updated, triple-core Samsung MEX controller, which operates at 400MHz. The 840 EVO's MEX controller has also been updated to support the SATA 3.1 spec, which incorporates a few new features, like support for queued TRIM commands. Along with the MEX controller, all of the Samsung 840 EVO mSATA series drives feature LPDDR2-1066 DRAM cache memory. The 120GB drive sports 256MB of cache, the 250GB and 500GB drive have 512MB of cache, and the 750GB and 1TB drives have 1GB of cache. Performance-wise, SSD 840 EVO series of mSATA solid state drives performs extremely well, whether using synthetic benchmarks, trace-based tests like PCMark, or highly-compressible or incompressible data.

Submission + - Software upgrade at 655 million kilometers (esa.int)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Rosetta probe was launched in 2004 with a mission that required incredible planning and precision: land on a comet. After a decade in space, the woke from hibernation in January. Now, Rosetta has spotted its target. 'Rosetta is currently around 5 million kilometres from the comet, and at this distance it is still too far away to resolve – its light is seen in less than a pixel and required a series of 60–300 second exposures taken with the wide-angle and narrow-angle camera. The data then travelled 37 minutes through space to reach Earth, with the download taking about an hour per image.' Now it's time to upgrade the probe's software. Since it's currently 655,000,000 kilometers from Earth, the operation needs to be flawless. 'When MIDAS is first powered up, it boots into "kernel mode" – the kernel manages a very robust set of basic operations for communicating with the spacecraft and the ground and for managing the more complex main program. From kernel mode we can upload patches to the main software, verify the current contents, or even load an entirely new version.' The Rosetta blog is coninually being updated with progress on the mission, and the Planetary Society has more information as well. The probe will arrived at the comet in August, and will attempt landing in November.

Submission + - Crows Complete Basic Aesop's Fable Task (phys.org)

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: New Caledonian crows — already known to be smart — may also understand how to displace water to receive a reward, with the causal understanding level of a 5-7 year-old child, according to results published in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Sarah Jelbert from University of Auckland and colleagues. As demonstrated in the included video, Scientists used the Aesop's fable riddle — in which subjects drop stones into water to raise the water level and obtain an out-of reach-reward — to assess New Caledonian crows' causal understanding of water displacement. Crows completed 4 of 6 water displacement tasks, including preferentially dropping stones into a water-filled tube instead of a sand-filled tube, dropping sinking objects rather than floating objects, using solid objects rather than hollow objects, and dropping objects into a tube with a high water level rather than a low one. However, they failed two more challenging tasks, one that required understanding of the width of the tube, and one that required understanding of counterintuitive cues for a U-shaped displacement task. The authors note that these tasks did not test insightful problem solving, but were directed at the birds' understanding of volume displacement.

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