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Submission + - Worker fired for disabling GPS app that tracked her 24 hours a day (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by sharkbiter
sharkbiter writes: "This intrusion would be highly offensive to a reasonable person," lawsuit says.

Southern California woman claims she was fired after uninstalling an app that her employer required her to run constantly on her mobile phone—an app that tracked her every move 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Submission + - Microsoft Invests In 3 Undersea Cable To Improve Its Data Center Connectivity (techcrunch.com)

Submitted by Errorcod3
Errorcod3 writes: Microsoft today announced that it is partnering with a consortium of telecom companies to build a new transpacific undersea cable that will connect a number of points in China, South Korea, Taiwan and Japan with the U.S. West Coast (or beautiful Hillsboro, OR — the home of the Hillsboro Hops — to be precise). Microsoft says the New Cross Pacific (NCP) Cable Network will provide faster connections for its customers and help it compete on cloud cost.

Submission + - World Health Organization wants more neutral (and blander) disease names (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: The World Health Organization (WHO) mostly works to reduce the physical toll of disease. But last week it turned to another kind of harm: the insult and stigma inflicted by diseases named for people, places, and animals. Among the existing monikers that its new guidelines “for the Naming of New Human Infectious Diseases” would discourage: Ebola, swine flu, Rift valley Fever, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, and monkey pox. Instead, WHO says researchers, health officials, and journalists should use more neutral, generic terms, such as severe respiratory disease or novel neurologic syndrome.

Comment Job vs global population (Score 1) 420

by mrflash818 (#49659451) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Moving To an Offshore-Proof Career?

I enjoyed reading all the offshore proof ideas people posted.

I get the sinking feeling, "there is no sanctuary" for most of us. The offshore proof 'good' jobs are only a few, and once a city has X many plumbers, or lawyers, or nurses, doctors, mechanics, ...then what about everyone else?

It seems that there may be a finite reservoir of total possible jobs all of humanity can do, they seem a resource to think about like we do for drinking water, farm-able land, and such.

With the constant upward growth of global population from 7B ==> 9B, it looks like it is a race to the bottom for most of us. Too many people chasing too few 'good' jobs, and every year the odds less in our favor.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Submission + - What to Say When the Police Tell You to Stop Filming Them 3

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Robinson Meyer writes in The Atlantic that first of all, police shouldn’t ask. “As a basic principle, we can’t tell you to stop recording,” says Delroy Burton, a 21-year veteran of DC's police force. “If you’re standing across the street videotaping, and I’m in a public place, carrying out my public functions, [then] I’m subject to recording, and there’s nothing legally the police officer can do to stop you from recording.” What you don’t have a right to do is interfere with an officer's work. "“Police officers may legitimately order citizens to cease activities that are truly interfering with legitimate law enforcement operations,” according to Jay Stanley who wrote the ACLU’s “Know Your Rights” guide for photographers, which lays out in plain language the legal protections that are assured people filming in public. Police officers may not confiscate or demand to view your digital photographs or video without a warrant and police may not delete your photographs or video under any circumstances.

What if an officer says you are interfering with legitimate law enforcement operations and you disagree with the officer? “If it were me, and an officer came up and said, ‘You need to turn that camera off, sir,’ I would strive to calmly and politely yet firmly remind the officer of my rights while continuing to record the interaction, and not turn the camera off," says Stanley. The ACLU guide also supplies the one question those stopped for taking photos or video may ask an officer: "The right question to ask is, ‘am I free to go?’ If the officer says no, then you are being detained, something that under the law an officer cannot do without reasonable suspicion that you have or are about to commit a crime or are in the process of doing so. Until you ask to leave, your being stopped is considered voluntary under the law and is legal."

Submission + - LinkedIn used to create database of 27,000 US Intelligence personnel (zdnet.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A new group, Transparency Toolkit, has mined LinkedIn to reveal and analyse the resumes of over 27,000 people in the US intelligence community. In the process, Transparency Toolkit said it found previously unknown secret codewords and references to surveillance technologies and projects. It aims to use the database for crowd-sourced data mining to "watch the watchers".

Submission + - Carbon dioxide hits 400ppm

Submitted by mrflash818
mrflash818 writes: For the first time since we began tracking carbon dioxide in the global atmosphere, the monthly global average concentration of this greenhouse gas surpassed 400 parts per million in March 2015, according to NOAA’s latest results.

http://research.noaa.gov/News/...

Submission + - Satellite debris in space ups collision risk for other spacecrafts (techienews.co.uk)

Submitted by hypnosec
hypnosec writes: Researchers at University of Southampton have put forward an analytical model based on which they claim that there is a possibility that debris from the recently exploded US Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) F13 satellite could pose a threat to other spacecraft and missions. According to European Space Agency (ESA) and other satellite operators, the 100 odd pieces of debris resulting from the explosion of DMSP F13 satellite on February 3, 2015 pose little risk to their missions. The debris were detected by ground based radar and according to scientists from the Astronautics Research Group at the University of Southampton, because of smaller debris, which were not accounted for, the risk from debris is much higher than previously thought.

Submission + - AMD outlines plans for Zen-based processors, first due in 2016

Submitted by crookedvulture
crookedvulture writes: AMD laid out its plans for processors based on its all-new Zen microarchitecture today, promising 40% higher performance-per-clock from from the x86 CPU core. Zen will use simultaneous multithreading to execute two threads per core, and it will be built using "3D" FinFETs. The first chips are due to hit high-end desktops and servers next year. In 2017, Zen will combine with integrated graphics in smaller APUs designed for desktops and notebooks. AMD also plans to produce a high-performance server APU with a "transformational memory architecture" likely similar to the on-package DRAM being developed for the company's discrete graphics processors. This chip could give AMD a credible challenger in the HPC and supercomputing markets—and it could also make its way into laptops and desktops.

Submission + - Self-destructing virus kills off PCs (bbc.com)

Submitted by mpicpp
mpicpp writes: A computer virus that tries to avoid detection by making the machine it infects unusable has been found.

If Rombertik's evasion techniques are triggered, it deletes key files on a computer, making it constantly restart.

Analysts said Rombertik was "unique" among malware samples for resisting capture so aggressively.

On Windows machines where it goes unnoticed, the malware steals login data and other confidential information.

Rombertik typically infected a vulnerable machine after a booby-trapped attachment on a phishing message had been opened, security researchers Ben Baker and Alex Chiu, from Cisco, said in a blogpost.

Some of the messages Rombertik travels with pose as business enquiry letters from Microsoft.

The malware "indiscriminately" stole data entered by victims on any website, the researchers said.
And it got even nastier when it spotted someone was trying to understand how it worked.

"Rombertik is unique in that it actively attempts to destroy the computer if it detects certain attributes associated with malware analysis," the researchers said.

Submission + - C Code On GitHub Has the Most 'Ugly Hacks' (itworld.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: An analysis of GitHub data shows that C developers are creating the most ugly hacks — or are at least the most willing to admit to it. To answer the question of which programming language produces the most ugly hacks, ITworld's Phil Johnson first used the search feature on GitHub, looking for code files that contained the string 'ugly hack'. In that case, C comes up first by a wide margin, with over 181,000 code files containing that string. The rest of the top ten languages were PHP (79k files), JavaScript (38k), C++ (22k), Python (19k), Text (11k), Makefile (11k), HTML, (10k), Java (7k), and Perl (4k). Even when controlling for the number of repositories, C wins the ugly-hack-athon by a landslide, Johnson found.

Submission + - Ancestery.com caught sharing DNA database with government (eff.org)

Submitted by SonicSpike
SonicSpike writes: In 1996, a young woman named Angie Dodge was murdered in her apartment in a small town in Idaho. Although the police collected DNA from semen left at the crime scene, they haven’t been able to match the DNA to existing profiles in any criminal database, and the murder has never been solved.

Fast forward to 2014. The Idaho police sent the semen sample to a private lab to extract a DNA profile that included YSTR and mtDNA—the two genetic markers used to determine patrilineal and matrilineal relationships (it’s unclear why they reopened the case after nearly 20 years). These markers would allow investigators to search some existing databases to try to find a match between the sample and genetic relatives.

The cops chose to use a lab linked to a private collection of genetic genealogical data called the Sorenson Database (now owned by Ancestry.com), which claims it’s “the foremost collection of genetic genealogy data in the world.” The reason the Sorenson Database can make such an audacious claim is because it has obtained its more than 100,000 DNA samples and documented multi-generational family histories from “volunteers in more than 100 countries around the world.”

Sorenson promised volunteers their genetic data would only be used for “genealogical services, including the determination of family migration patterns and geographic origins” and would not be shared outside Sorenson.

Despite this promise, Sorenson shared its vast collection of data with the Idaho police. Without a warrant or court order, investigators asked the lab to run the crime scene DNA against Sorenson’s private genealogical DNA database. Sorenson found 41 potential familial matches, one of which matched on 34 out of 35 alleles—a very close match that would generally indicate a close familial relationship. The cops then asked, not only for the “protected” name associated with that profile, but also for all “all information including full names, date of births, date and other information pertaining to the original donor to the Sorenson Molecular Genealogy project.”

Submission + - Mysterious X-rays at the center of the galaxy

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: The x-ray space telescope NuSTAR has detected high energy x-rays at the center of the Milky Way coming from no obvious source.

In and of themselves, X-rays from the galactic center aren't unusual. But the X-rays NuSTAR detects don't seem to be associated with structures already known to exist. For example, a supernova remnant named Sgr A East emits low-energy X-rays but not high-energy X-rays. The high-energy blotch doesn't correlate with structures seen in radio images either, such as the dust and gas clouds of Sgr A West that are falling toward the supermassive black hole.

Instead, Perez and her colleagues propose that thousands of stellar corpses could be responsible for the high-energy X-rays: massive (and still-growing) white dwarfs, spun-up pulsars, or black holes or neutrons stars feeding on low-mass companion stars.

All of their proposed solutions, however, have serious problems explaining all of the data.

Submission + - Leaked Files Contradict CBP Polygraph Chief (antipolygraph.org)

Submitted by George Maschke
George Maschke writes: In January 2014, the chief of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection polygraph unit claimed that a criminal investigation he led, dubbed Operation Lie Busters, had revealed that sophisticated polygraph countermeasures can be routinely detected. However, an archive of CBP "confirmed countermeasure" case files leaked to AntiPolygraph.org contradicts this claim. In the representative sample of 65 such cases, none can be considered "sophisticated." Instead, as with the 18 DIA cases published earlier, they constituted crude efforts by people who didn't know what they were doing.

Jury selection in the trial of Doug Williams, who has been indicted for teaching two undercover federal agents how to pass a polygraph test begins on Wednesday, May 6th. It appears the government will seek to exclude jurors with polygraph experience or concerns.

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