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Submission + - The NSA's next move: silencing university professors? (theguardian.com) 2

Submitted by wabrandsma
wabrandsma writes: From the Guardian:

A Johns Hopkins computer science professor blogs on the NSA and is asked to take it down.

A professor in the computer science department at Johns Hopkins, a leading American university, had written a post on his blog, hosted on the university's servers, focused on his area of expertise, which is cryptography. The post was highly critical of the government, specifically the National Security Agency, whose reckless behavior in attacking online security astonished him.

On Monday, he gets a note from the acting dean of the engineering school asking him to take the post down and stop using the NSA logo as clip art in his posts. The email also informs him that if he resists he will need a lawyer.

Why would an academic dean cave under pressure and send the takedown request without careful review, which would have easily discovered, for example, that the classified documents to which the blog post linked were widely available in the public domain?

Submission + - Fake Grand Theft Auto 5 Torrent Spreads Trojan Virus Using Text Messages (ibtimes.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: If you're sifting through torrents in search of a free copy of the upcoming Grand Theft Auto 5, you may want to put on the breaks. One alleged GTA 5 torrent actually spreads a Trojan virus instead of giving you access to Rockstar Games' next installment of the open-world sandbox series.

Submission + - Jury finds Google guilty of standards-essential patents abuse against MS

Submitted by recoiledsnake
recoiledsnake writes: A federal jury in Seattle ordered Google to pay Microsoft $14.5 million in damages for breach of contract for failing to license at reasonable terms standard essential patents covering wireless and video technology used in the Xbox game console. Motorola had demanded Microsoft pay annual royalties of up to $4 billion for use of patents that are part of the H.264 video and 802.11 wireless standards, which are baked into Windows and the Xbox video game console. Microsoft said it was willing to pay royalties but not at the 2.25 percent of the product price that Motorola sought. We previously covered Motorola's exorbitant demands.

Submission + - Miniature 'human brain' grown in the lab using skin stem cells (nature.com)

Submitted by ananyo
ananyo writes: With the right mix of nutrients and a little bit of coaxing, human stem cells derived from skin can assemble spontaneously into brain-like chunks of tissue, researchers report in the journal Nature. A fully formed artificial brain might still be years away, but the pea-sized neural clumps developed in this work could prove useful for researching human neurological diseases.

Submission + - Stainless Magnesium Breakthrough Bodes Well For Manufacturing 1

Submitted by fergus07
fergus07 writes: Magnesium alloys are very attractive to the aerospace and automotive industries due to their light weight, specific strength and easy machinability ... but they corrode easily. A team at Monash University in Australia has now discovered a novel and potentially game-changing approach to the problem: poisoning the chemical reactions leading to corrosion of magnesium alloys by adding a dash of arsenic to the recipe.

Submission + - DARPA release requirements for drone launching drone submarine Hydra (suasnews.com)

Submitted by garymortimer
garymortimer writes: Hydra aims to develop a distributed undersea network of UUVs and UAVs able to operate independently for weeks or months at a time to complement manned ships, submarines, and aircraft as an alternate means of delivering various capabilities above, on, and below the ocean’s surface.

The UAV payload will feature encapsulated air vehicles that fit into the standard Hydra modular enclosure. The air vehicle payload that will be ejected from the mothership, float to the surface, launch, fly a minimum range, and conduct several different types of missions.

Undersea payloads will launch, dock, and recharge from the mothership and collect intelligence information. After their missions they will download information to the mothership, which will communicate it to command authorities.

Submission + - US manufacturing adds only $4 to handset costs .. (theregister.co.uk)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Motorola has been heavily marketing the "Made in the USA" credentials of the Moto X, and is assembling the handsets in its Fort Worth, Texas facility. Doing so allows the company to customize handsets individually for each customer and ship them out within four days of ordering. IHS estimates this adds around $4 extra to Motorola's costs, but makes the company more responsive and brings PR benefits.

Submission + - USPTO Publishes Suggestions for Intellectual Property Enforcement (uspto.gov) 1

Submitted by rjkimble
rjkimble writes: In June, the USPTO solicited proposals for voluntary best practices supporting intellectual property enforcement, especially against infringement that occurs online. It received 23 responses from individuals and organizations, including Google, the EFF, and the MPAA and RIAA. Today they were posted to the USPTO web site.

Submission + - U.S. Surveillance Fallout Costing Third-Party Providers (darkreading.com)

Submitted by CowboyRobot
CowboyRobot writes: E-mail encryption provider Lavabit shuts down, Silent Circle shutters its own service, and analysts are forecasting tens of billions of lost revenue for cloud and service providers. Snowden's revelations of NSA surveillance have damaged the interests of U.S. cloud and managed-service providers in other countries. Many European nations had already taken a political stance against handing their data over to U.S. companies; the fact that the U.S. government can demand access to that data has only increased concerns. While much of the criticism of U.S. companies was initially made to justify a preference for local cloud providers, the revelations have given the concerns a basis in fact. In an analysis of the worse-case impact of the loss of confidence in U.S. cloud providers, the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) estimated that U.S. businesses could stand to lose $22 billion to $35 billion over three years from a decline of business from foreign firms. When adding the potential costs of all outsourced business, Forrester found that the worse case could be $180 billion in losses over three years, or about 25 percent of provider revenue.

Submission + - France to open preliminary investigation about PRISM program (lefigaro.fr)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Paris' prosecutor office opened a preliminary investigation after a complaint by two associations of human rights who hope to determine the roles played by companies in the context of espionage. Two million communications (phone calls, SMS ans mails) are said to have been intercepted in France by US agencies.
Idle

Submission + - Formulaic Cheese on Toast

Submitted by SleazyRidr
SleazyRidr writes: As a lover of cheese on toast, I know I am always sorely disappointed when my cheese on toast doesn't come out right. Fortunately, the Royal Society of Chemistry and the British Cheese Board have come together to determine the science behind this culinary masterpiece. Their formula relates the thickness of the bread, the thickness of the cheese, and the time required under the grill to perfect your tasty snack.

Submission + - The Last GUADEC? 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: How can we ensure, together, that this will not be the last GUADEC? Last year, during GUADEC, there was that running joke amongst some participants that this was the last GUADEC. It was, of course, a joke. Everybody was expecting to see each other in Brno, in 2013. One year later, most of those who were joking are not coming to GUADEC. For them, the joke became a reality.

People are increasingly leaving the desktop computer to use phones, tablets and services in the cloud. The switch is deeper and quicker than anything we imagined. Projects are also leaving GTK+ for QT. Unity abandoned GTK+, Linus Torvald's Subsurface is switching from GTK+ to Qt. If you spot a GNOME desktop in a conference, chances are that you are dealing with a Red Hat employee. That's it. According to Google Trends, interest in GNOME and GTK+ is soon to be extinct.

Submission + - 97-year-old Uses Windows 95's Paint to Create Amazing Art

Submitted by SmartAboutThings
SmartAboutThings writes: Paint was probably the first fun program that I started using when I was given my first computer. Probably, like most of you out there, I remember that I used to draw stupid and ugly flowers and modify pictures, adding funny text on them. But never did I imagine that someone could create such amazing art, using Microsoft Paint in Windows 95, which is definitely not a professional drawing tools. And when that someone is a 97-year-old person that is also legally blind, meaning he almost can’t see, you just stand in awe.

Submission + - NSA Says It Can't Search Its Own Emails (propublica.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Responding to a Freedom of Information Act request by Justin Elliot, blogger and journalist at ProPublica.com, the NSA regretfully informed him:

"There's no central method to search an email at this time with the way our records are set up, unfortunately," NSA Freedom of Information Act officer Cindy Blacker told me last week. The system is “a little antiquated and archaic," she added.

Maybe a little extra could be included in the next NSA budget for an Outlook license?

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