Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Submission + - Number of billionaires globally doubles since start of financial crisis (westmeathexaminer.ie)

Submitted by monkeyFuzz
monkeyFuzz writes: According to the article, since the financial crisis began, the number of billionaires worldwide has more than doubled and interestingly enough apparently, if the world's three richest people were to spend $1m every single day each, it would take each one of them around 200 years to exhaust all of their wealth

Submission + - Facebook Wants You to Vote Tuesday

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Six years in the making, Facebook's get-out-the-vote tool — a high-profile button that proclaims "I'm Voting" or "I'm a Voter" — will on Tuesday give many of the social network's more than 150 million American users a gentle but effective nudge to vote. "If past research is any guide," writes Micah L. Sifry in Mother Jones, "up to a few million more people will head to the polls partly because their Facebook friends encouraged them. Yet the process by which Facebook has developed this tool — what the firm calls the 'voter megaphone' — has not been very transparent, raising questions about its use and Facebook's ability to influence elections. Moreover, while Facebook has been developing and promoting this tool, it has also been quietly conducting experiments on how the company's actions can affect the voting behavior of its users." Sifry adds, "There may be another reason for Facebook's lack of transparency regarding its voting promotion experiments: politics. Facebook officials likely do not want Republicans on Capitol Hill to realize that their voter megaphone isn't a neutral get-out-the-vote mechanism. It's not that Facebook uses this tool to remind only users who identify themselves as Democrats to vote — though the company certainly has the technical means to do so. But the Facebook user base tilts Democratic." So, it's probably worth mentioning again that Facebook caught flack last summer for deliberately experimenting on users' emotions without their consent. And just last June, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's FWD.us PAC put out a call for "pissed off Data Scientists" to data mine critical legislative districts and "growth hack" ways to motivate "registered voters who are registered Republicans who we think are likely to support immigration reform."

Submission + - Can doctors be trained to use open source to save hospitals from bankruptcy? (opensource.com)

Submitted by jenwike
jenwike writes: Luis Ibanez is a software engineer at Google and before that worked on open science at Kitware. He lays out the financial crisis many US hospitals are in after they have purchased closed, proprietary Electronic Health Records systems they cannot maintain and do not understand. So, how much would it cost to implement VistaA, an open source software EHR system developed by the VA? Zero dollars. And, how many developers would it take to employ to run and maintain VistA in hospitals across the country? Four. Do the math.

Submission + - Say Something Nice About systemd 4

Submitted by ewhac
ewhac writes: I'm probably going to deeply deeply regret this, but every time a story appears here mentioning systemd, a 700-comment thread of back-and-forth bickering breaks out which is about as informative as an old Bud Light commercial, and I don't really learn anything new about the subject. My gut reaction to systemd is (currently) a negative one, and it's very easy to find screeds decrying systemd on the net. However, said screeds haven't been enough to prevent its adoption by several distros, which leads me to suspect that maybe there's something worthwhile there that I haven't discovered yet. So I thought it might be instructive to turn the question around and ask the membership about what makes systemd good. However, before you stab at the "Post" button, there are some rules...

Bias Disclosure: I currently dislike systemd because — without diving very deeply into the documentation, mind — it looks and feels like a poorly-described, gigantic mess I know nothing about that seeks to replace other poorly-described, smaller messes which I know a little bit about. So you will be arguing in that environment.

Nice Things About systemd Rules:
  1. Post each new Nice Thing as a new post, not as a reply to another post. This will let visitors skim the base level of comments for things that interest them, rather than have to dive through a fractally expanding tree of comments looking for things to support/oppose. It will also make it easier to follow the next rule:
  2. Avoid duplication; read the entire base-level of comments before adding a new Nice Thing. Someone may already have mentioned your Nice Thing. Add your support/opposition to that Nice Thing there, rather than as a new post.
  3. Only one concrete Nice Thing about systemd per base-level post. Keep the post focused on a single Nice Thing systemd does. If you know of multiple distinct things, write multiple distinct posts.
  4. Describe the Nice Thing in some detail. Don't assume, for example, that merely saying "Supports Linux cgroups" will be immediately persuasive.
  5. Describe how the Nice Thing is better than existing, less controversial solutions. systemd is allegedly better at some things than sysvinit or upstart or inetd. Why? Why is the Nice Thing possible in systemd, and impossible (or extremely difficult) with anything else? (In some cases, the Nice Thing will be a completely new thing that's never existed before; describe why it's good thing.)

Bonus points are awarded for:

  • Personal Experience. "I actually did this," counts for way more than, "The docs claim you can do this."
  • Working Examples. Corollary to the above — if you did a Nice Thing with systemd, consider also posting the code/script/service file you wrote to accomplish it.
  • Links to Supporting Documentation. If you leveraged a Nice Thing, furnish a link to the docs you used that describe the Nice Thing and its usage.

We will assume out of the gate that systemd boots your system faster than ${SOMETHING_ELSE}, so no points for bringing that up.

Submission + - Brazil Is Keeping Its Promise to Avoid the U.S. Internet - US to lose 35 Billion (gizmodo.com) 1

Submitted by bricko
bricko writes: Brazil Is Keeping Its Promise to Avoid the U.S. Internet

http://gizmodo.com/brazils-kee...

Brazil was not bluffing last year, when it said that it wanted to disconnect from the United States-controlled internet due to the NSA's obscenely invasive surveillance tactics. The country is about to stretch a cable from the northern city of Fortaleza all the way to Portugal, and they've vowed not to use a single U.S. vendor to do it.

Brazil made a bunch of bold promises, ranging in severity from forcing companies like Facebook and Google to move their servers inside Brazilian borders, to building a new all-Brazilian email system—which they've already done. But the first actionable opportunity the country was presented with is this transatlantic cable, which had been in the works since 2012 but is only just now seeing construction begin. And with news that the cable plan will not include American vendors, it looks like Brazil is serious; it's investing $185 million on the cable project alone. And not a penny of that sum will go to an American company.

The implications of Brazil distancing itself from the US internet are huge. It's not necessarily a big deal politically, but the economic consequences could be tremendously destructive. Brazil has the seventh largest economy in the world, and it continues to grow. So when Brazil finally does divorce Uncle Sam—assuming things continue at this rate—a huge number of contracts between American companies and Brazil will simply disappear.

On the whole, researchers estimate that the United States could lose about $35 billion due to security fears. That's a lot of money.

Submission + - First Detailed Data Analysis Shows Exactly How Comcast Jammed Netflix

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: John Oliver calls it "cable company fuckery" and we've all suspected it happens. Now on Steven Levy's new Backchannel publication on Medium, Susan Crawford delivers decisive proof, expertly dissecting the Comcast-Netflix network congestion controversy. Her source material is a detailed traffic measurement report (.pdf) released this week by Google-backed M-Lab — the first of its kind — showing severe degradation of service at interconnection points between Comcast, Verizon and other monopoly "eyeball networks" and "transit networks" such as Cogent, which was contracted by Netflix to deliver its bits. The report shows that interconnection points give monopoly ISPs all the leverage they need to discriminate against companies like Netflix, which compete with them in video services, simply by refusing to relieve network congestion caused by external traffic requested by their very own ISP customers. And the effects victimize not only companies targeted but ALL incoming traffic from the affected transit network. The report proves the problem is not technical, but rather a result of business decisions. This is not technically a Net neutrality problem, but it creates the very same headaches for consumers, and unfair business advantages for ISPs. In an accompanying article, Crawford makes a compelling case for FCC intervention.

Submission + - Secret manuals show the spyware sold to despots and cops worldwide (firstlook.org)

Submitted by Advocatus Diaboli
Advocatus Diaboli writes: The manuals describe Hacking Team’s software for government technicians and analysts, showing how it can activate cameras, exfiltrate emails, record Skype calls, log typing, and collect passwords on targeted devices. They also catalog a range of pre-bottled techniques for infecting those devices using wifi networks, USB sticks, streaming video, and email attachments to deliver viral installers. With a few clicks of a mouse, even a lightly trained technician can build a software agent that can infect and monitor a device, then upload captured data at unobtrusive times using a stealthy network of proxy servers, all without leaving a trace. That, at least, is what Hacking Team’s manuals claim as the company tries to distinguish its offerings in the global marketplace for government hacking software.

Submission + - British Spies Allowed to Access U.S. Data Without a Warrant (nationaljournal.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: British authorities are capable of tapping into bulk communications data collected by other countries' intelligence services—including the National Security Agency—without a warrant, according to secret government documents released Tuesday.

The agreement between the NSA and Britain's equivalent, GCHQ, potentially puts the Internet and phone data of Americans in the hands of another country without legal oversight when obtaining a warrant is "not technically feasible.

Submission + - Highly Educated Foreign Workers Treated Like Indentured Servants

Submitted by sabri
sabri writes: NBC Bay Area reports about indentured servants in Silicon Valley, primarily H1-B visa holders. NBC Bay Area and CIR’s team discovered an organized system that supplies cheap labor made up of highly-educated and highly-skilled foreign workers who come to the US via H-1B visas.

It virtually makes these employees a slave,” said one worker who came from India more than a decade ago.

Submission + - Verizon Launches Tech News Site That Bans Stories On U.S. Spying 2

Submitted by blottsie
blottsie writes: The most-valuable, second-richest telecommunications company in the world is bankrolling a technology news site called SugarString.com. The publication, which is now hiring its first full-time editors and reporters, is meant to rival major tech websites like Wired and the Verge while bringing in a potentially giant mainstream audience to beat those competitors at their own game.

There’s just one catch: In exchange for the major corporate backing, tech reporters at SugarString are expressly forbidden from writing about American spying or net neutrality around the world, two of the biggest issues in tech and politics today.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Is large scale video for entertainment a wise use of the internet? 1

Submitted by LessThanObvious
LessThanObvious writes: In today's world services like Netflix, Youtube, Hulu and Amazon Instant Video are ubiquitous and generate a large amount of real time video traffic on the web. The question I put to you is whether or not this activity is a reasonable and healthy use of internet resources and is it a healthy social trend for the evolution of the internet? Is the internet to become a national or global replacement for broadcast television? Do massive video providers have any social obligation to cache content close to the users the serve to save WAN bandwidth? Do you believe the internet is prepared to absorb exponential growth in real time video along with traditional data traffic? Does there ever come a point when the internet has to split into functional zones whatever those may be (i.e. Business, Entertainment, Public, Government, Domestic, International, etc)? I do not mean for this to be a discussion of Net Neutrality, please set that aside in as much as it is possible in such a debate.

Slashdot Top Deals

Living on Earth may be expensive, but it includes an annual free trip around the Sun.

Close