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Submission + - Feedly is hijacking shared links and cutting out the original sources (the-digital-reader.com)

Submitted by Nate the greatest
Nate the greatest writes: Remember last year when Readability was spanked for letting users only share links to content in Readability and not to the original source of the content? Feedly seems to have forgotten about that, because they just pulled the same trick. Earlier today Twitter users noticed that links shared from the news reader service Feedly suddenly started acting funny. The links no longer led to whichever website had posted the content but instead went to a page on the Feedly website. According to Feedly, they made this unannounced change as way of boosting engagement, but if you ask me I don't see how cutting publishers off from their readers helps publishers engage with that readers.

Submission + - Digital Textbook Startup Kno Was Sold for $15 Million (the-digital-reader.com)

Submitted by Nate the greatest
Nate the greatest writes: Intel didn't mention how much they paid for digital textbook startup Kno when they announced the acquisition last week but inside sources are now saying that the digital textbook startup was picked up for a song. GigaOm reported earlier today that their sources told them that Kno sold effectively for pennies on the dollar:

Well placed sources who were in the know told us that the company sold for $15 million with some retention bonuses for the employees. Intel bought the company mostly for its hardware-related intellectual property and the employees. Intel also was one of the largest investors in the company — having pumped in $20 million via its Intel Capital arm.

Kno had raised $73 million in venture capital since it was founded 4 years ago, and it picked up another $20 million in debt. This deal was nothing less than a fire sale, and that does not bode well for the digital textbook market or other startups in this niche. Inkling, for example, just raised $20 million dollars this summer in order to compete in a market that where one of their competitors failed.

Submission + - Self-pub erotica is being deleted from ebookstores in sweeping ban (the-digital-reader.com)

Submitted by Nate the greatest
Nate the greatest writes: The Kernel started an uproar last week when they "discovered" that the Kindle Store and other ebookstores sell adult content in the erotica category. None of the content is actually illegal, but it is icky enough that the major ebookstores decided to respond by removing anything even vaguely questionable. Unfortunately, they went to far, resulting in an act of censorship the likes of which we haven't seen since Paypal went after the indie ebook distributor Smashwords. The Daily Mail reports that WH Smith went so far as to shut down their website with the promise that it won't reopen until all self-published titles have been removed, and according to BBC News B&N is also deleting content. But that's not the whole story.

Numerous authors have reported on KBoards that Amazon and B&N have removed far more than just the titles that feature questionable content like pseudo-incest; they appear to be running keyword searches and removing any title that mentions innocuous words like babysitter, sister, or teenager. And they're not the only ones; there's a new report that Kobo has jumped on the ban wagon as well.

Submission + - NC school district recalls its Amplify tablets after 10% break in under a month (the-digital-reader.com)

Submitted by Nate the greatest
Nate the greatest writes: Guilford County Schools' headline grabbing tablet program is back in the news again. The program came to an abrupt end last Friday when the school district announced that they were recalling all of the Amplify tablets. GCS had leased over 15 thousand of the tablets (at a cost of $200 a year) for its middle school students, but decided to recall the tablets just one month into the school year after some 1500 students reported a broken screen. Around 2 thousand complained of improperly fitting cases, and there were also 175 reports of malfunctioning power supplies. There's currently no explanation for the cases or power supplies, but GCS has stated that the tablets broke because they lacked a layer of Gorilla Glass. This was listed in the contract, but the school district did not confirm the condition of the tablets before accepting them.

This program was the poster child for Newscorps' entry into the educational market. It was the single largest program to use the Amplify tablet, and its failure represents a serious setback. The Amplify tablet now has a record for poor construction quality and a breakage rate that is 12 times higher than what Squaretrade reported in early 2012 for the iPad 2.

Submission + - "Snowden and the Future" is about more than just whistleblowing 1

Submitted by foregather
foregather writes: 20 years ago the Federal government treated encryption as a weapon and arrested Phil Zimmerman for making software that let people send private email. Back then they targeted individuals for surveillance. Thanks to Edward Snowden we know they have spent the intervening years building tools that target all of us at once. What does it mean that we are all now targets in this government war on privacy? One of the veterans in this struggle — lawyer, historian, and technology freedom advocate Eben Moglen (seen on Slashdot here) — shares his views on what this all means and what we can do about it in a series of talks called "Snowden and the Future" starting on October 9th in New York and online at snowdenandthefuture.info.

Submission + - Researchers show how easy it is to manipulate online opinions (ieee.org)

Submitted by jcatcw
jcatcw writes: A recent study shows that a single random up-vote, randomly chosen, created a herding behavior in ratings that resulted in a 25% increase in the ratings but the negative manipulation had no effect. An intuitive explanation for this asymmetry is that we tend to go along with the positive opinions of others, but we tend to be skeptical of the negative opinions of others, and so we go in and correct what we think is an injustice. The third major result was that these effects varied by topic. So in business and society, culture, politics, we found substantial susceptibility to positive herding, whereas in general news, economics, IT, we found no such herding effects in the positive or negative direction.

Submission + - Ancient supervolcanoes revealed on Mars (nature.com)

Submitted by ananyo
ananyo writes: A series of Martian craters assumed to have been formed by meteorites may actually be extinct volcanoes so massive that, when they were active billions of years ago, they could have buried Mars in ash.
The craters pepper the surface of Arabia Terra, a geologically ancient region of northern Mars. They appear as several huge circular pits that resemble Earth's calderas, in which magma beneath a volcano drains after a volcanic eruption, causing the ground above the magma chamber to collapse. Using data from several satellites orbiting Mars, researchers mapped Eden patera in detail. In a report in Nature today (abstract), they describe three separate calderas within the depression, along with possible signs of a lake of solidified lava and a volcanic vent where lava could have oozed out.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Can Valve's Steam Machines Compete Against New Xbox, PS4? (slashdot.org) 1

Submitted by Nerval's Lobster
Nerval's Lobster writes: Valve has announced SteamOS, Steam Machines, and a Steam controller — the components necessary for it to create a viable living-room gaming experience. Valve’s strategy with these releases seems pretty clear: create a platform based on openness (SteamOS is a Linux-based operating system), in contrast to the closed systems pushed by console rivals such as Sony and Microsoft. If Valve chooses to release "Half-Life 3" in conjunction with its Steam Machines' rollout, it could help create further buzz for the system, given the years' worth of pent-up demand for the next chapter in the popular FPS saga. But can Valve's moves allow it to actually compete against Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony on equal terms? What do you think?

Submission + - Japan's Nuclear Refugees, Still Stuck in Limbo (nytimes.com)

Submitted by mdsolar
mdsolar writes: "Every month, Hiroko Watabe, 74, returns for a few hours to her abandoned house near the damaged Fukushima nuclear plant to engage in her own small act of defiance against fate. She dons a surgical mask, hangs two radiation-measuring devices around her neck and crouches down to pull weeds.

She is desperate to keep her small yard clean to prove she has not given up on her home, which she and her family evacuated two years ago after a 9.0 earthquake and a tsunami devastated the plant five miles away. Not all her neighbors are willing to take the risk; chest-high weeds now block the doorways of their once-tidy homes.

“In my heart, I know we can never live here again,” said Ms. Watabe, who drove here with her husband from Koriyama, the city an hour away where they have lived since the disaster. “But doing this gives us a purpose. We are saying that this is still our home.”

While the continuing environmental disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi plant has grabbed world headlines — with hundreds of tons of contaminated water flowing into the Pacific Ocean daily — a human crisis has been quietly unfolding. Two and a half years after the plant belched plumes of radioactive materials over northeast Japan, the almost 83,000 nuclear refugees evacuated from the worst-hit areas are still unable to go home."

Submission + - Silk Road shut down, founder arrested (orlandosentinel.com)

Submitted by u38cg
u38cg writes: Ross William Ulbricht, known as "Dread Pirate Roberts," was arrested in San Francisco yesterday and has been charged with one count each of narcotics trafficking conspiracy, computer hacking conspiracy and money laundering conspiracy, according to a court filing. Silk Road has been shut down and some $3.6m in Bitcoin seized.

The question is — how?

Submission + - Online "revenge porn" gets a smack-down. More on the way? (networkworld.com)

Submitted by coondoggie
coondoggie writes: Call it a modern day love story: Boy meets girl; they "like" each other; they privately sext naked pics of each other to celebrate; girl loses interest, breaks it off; guy responds by posting previously private pics to Internet site specializing in revenge; girl has little recourse, suffers much humiliation, ridicule.

There is a lot of pressure to change the outcome of such wretched stories — which seem to be pervasive these days. And some relief is on the way the way, at least in California where this week the governor signed one of the nation's first laws making so called "revenge porn" illegal. Specifically the bill prevents people from "electronically distributing or post naked pictures of ex-romantic partners after a break-up with designs shaming the person publically."

Submission + - Pentagon Spent $5 Billion for Weapons on Day Before Shutdown 2

Submitted by Hugh Pickens DOT Com
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: Foreign Policy reports that the Pentagon awarded 94 contracts Monday evening on its annual end-of-the-fiscal-year spending spree, spending more than five billion dollars on everything from robot submarines to Finnish hand grenades and a radar base mounted on an offshore oil platform. To put things in perspective, the Pentagon gave out only 14 contracts on September 3, the first workday of the month. Some of the more interesting purchases from Monday's dollar-dump include the $2.5 billion award the Defense Logistics Agency gave to aircraft engine-maker Pratt & Whitney for "various weapons system spare parts" used by the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines, $65 million for military helmets from BAE Systems, $24 million for "traveling wave tubes" to amplify radio signals from Thales, $17 million for liquid nitrogen, $15 million for helium and $19 million on cots. The Air Force, traditionally DOD's biggest spender, was relatively restrained; it dished out only 17 contracts including $49 million to help France buy 16 MQ-9 Reaper drones, $64 million to Lockheed for help operating spy satellites that are equipped with infrared cameras, and $9 million to URS Corp. for maintenance work on the Air National Guard's fleet of RC-26B spyplanes that help domestic law enforcement agencies catch drug dealers. The air service also spent $9 million on a new gym at the Air Force Academy that includes areas for CrossFit training, space for the academy's Triathlon Club and a "television studio." It just goes to show says Reed that "even when the federal government is shutdown and the military has temporarily lost half its civilian workforce, the Pentagon can spend money like almost no one else."

Submission + - Teaching Fractions: The Tootsie Roll is the New Pie

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Following up on a WSJ story, data visualization author Stephen Few illustrates why using lines or bars may be sweeter than pie when it comes to teaching kids fractions. "Although the metaphor is easy to grasp (the slices add up to an entire pie)," explains Few, "we know that visual perception does a poor job of comparing the sizes of slices, which is essential for learning to compare fractions. Learning that one-fifth is larger than one-sixth, which is counter-intuitive in the beginning, becomes further complicated when the individual slices of two pies—one divided into five slices and other into six—look roughly the same. Might it make more sense to use two lines divided into sections instead, which are quite easy to compare when placed near one another?" So, is the Tootsie Roll the new pie?

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