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Submission + - Computer Glitch Creates Voting Precinct With No Residents (startribune.com)

Submitted by
phishead
phishead writes: "Barry Clegg, who chairs the line-drawing Charter Commission elaborated that the software "could not draw the line around the edge of the lake without putting a census block in the wrong ward; it would just connect along the shortest distance between two points, which meant a line across the lake.""
Apple

Submission + - Steve Wozniak exclusive online interview (techcentral.co.za)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In this special edition of TalkCentral’s podcast, TalkCentral, we bring you a special, half-hour interview with Apple co-founder and legendary computer industry figure Steve Wozniak.

TalkCentral editor Duncan McLeod asked Wozniak, who is in Johannesburg to speak at First National Bank’s leadership summit, for his views on the mobile platform wars, the patent disputes between Apple and Samsung, the emergence of the post-PC era and much more besides. It’s an interview you simply don’t want to miss.

Submission + - Intelligence agencies turn to crowdsourcing (bbc.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: IARPA — the sister agency to DARPA — is sponsoring researchers to examine crowdsourcing as a method to derive better intelligence predictions. The article says that this research will eventually be transitioned to the intelligence community to improve national intelligence estimates. Anyone can participate — even the general public. www.globalcrowd.com
Biotech

Submission + - Fathers bequeath more mutations as they age (nature.com)

Submitted by
ananyo
ananyo writes: "In the 1930s, the pioneering geneticist J. B. S. Haldane noticed a peculiar inheritance pattern in families with long histories of haemophilia. The faulty mutation responsible for the blood-clotting disorder tended to arise on the X chromosomes that fathers passed to their daughters, rather than on those that mothers passed down. Haldane subsequently proposed that children inherit more mutations from their fathers than their mothers, although he acknowledged that “it is difficult to see how this could be proved or disproved for many years to come”.
That year has finally arrived: whole-genome sequencing of dozens of Icelandic families has at last provided the evidence that eluded Haldane. Moreover, the study, published in Nature, finds that the age at which a father sires children determines how many mutations those offspring inherit. By starting families in their thirties, forties and beyond, men could be increasing the chances that their children will develop autism, schizophrenia and other diseases often linked to new mutations (abstract)."

Submission + - Near-Field Authentication over Avian Carrier (varonis.com)

Submitted by FreaKBeaNie
FreaKBeaNie writes: Audible range as an authentication mechanism? Chirp is an app to share images and urls using audible tones. It seems easier than joining a wifi network or pairing with blue-tooth, and trades the visual ick of a QR code for an audible intrusion in the form of a bird chirp. It's easier than whispering a link.
Hardware

Submission + - TV with 16 times resolution of HDTV passed by UN standards body (techworld.com) 1

Submitted by Qedward
Qedward writes: A new television format that has 16 times the resolution of current High Definition TV has been approved by an international standards body, Japanese sources said earlier today.

UHDTV, or Ultra High Definition Television, allows for programming and broadcasts at resolutions of up to 7680 by 4320, along with frame refresh rates of up to 120Hz, double that of most current HDTV broadcasts. The format also calls for a broader palette of colours that can be displayed on screen.

The video format was approved earlier this month by member nations of the International Telecommunication Union, a standards and regulatory body agency of the United Nations, according to an official at NHK, Japan's public broadcasting station, and another at the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications. Both spoke on condition of anonymity.
Security

Submission + - After Hacker Exposes Hotel Lock Insecurity, Lock Firm Asks Hotels To Pay For Fix (forbes.com)

Submitted by Sparrowvsrevolution
Sparrowvsrevolution writes: In an update to an earlier story on Slashdot, hotel lock company Onity is now offering a hardware fix for the millions of hotel keycard locks that hacker Cody Brocious demonstrated at Black Hat were vulnerable to being opened by a sub-$50 Arduino device. Unfortunately, Onity wants the hotels who already bought the company's insecure product to pay for the fix.

Onity is actually offering two different mitigations: The first is a plug that blocks the port that Brocious used to gain access to the locks' data, as well as more-obscure Torx screws to prevent intruders from opening the lock's case and removing the plug. That band-aid style fix is free. A second, more rigorous fix requires changing the locks' circuit boards manually. In that case, Onity is offering "special pricing programs" for the new circuit boards customers need to secure their doors, and requiring them to also pay the shipping and labor costs.
Google

Submission + - The Worst Job at Google: A Year of Watching Child Porn and other trash (gizmodo.com)

Submitted by
Cutting_Crew
Cutting_Crew writes: "Gizmodo puts a story together that describes the worst job that you can get at google , including watching decapitations and beastiality.

A google ex-employee who did just that tells his own story of a year long stint of looking at the most horrible things on the internet and in the end needed therapy and since he was a contractor he was let go and was not rolled over into a full time employee."
Government

Submission + - CIA: Five particularly timeless tips from the Simple Sabotage Field Manual (networkworld.com)

Submitted by
coondoggie
coondoggie writes: "The CIA today published a very interesting piece of its history, the once classified "Simple Sabotage Field Manual," which defines how the ordinary person could disrupt an ordinary environment, say an office "in such a way as to involve a minimum danger of injury, detection, and reprisal." The booklet was at the time of its distribution, aimed at defining ways to "sabotage the US' World War II enemies," the CIA said."
IT

Submission + - IT salaries and hiring are up - but just to 2008 levels (infoworld.com)

Submitted by
tsamsoniw
tsamsoniw writes: "A mid-year salary survey has a mix of good and bad news for IT professionals: The good news, hiring is slowly increasing as companies bring more IT operations back in house and salaries are creeping up a bit. But compensation (including benefits) are just now reaching 2008 levels — and hiring will remain soft, at least until the presidential election is over."

Submission + - Sub-microsecond photography on a tiny budget (njnoordhoek.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Conventional Xenon-based photographic flash systems produce millesecond duration light pulses, way to slow to stop even a golf ball in flight. For less than two hundred dollars in electronic parts you can build a sub-microsecond flash that is capable of topping even the fastest supersonic bullet in mid-air. Commercial systems that achieve the same start at about 5000$.
Facebook

Submission + - Facebook invests in 55-terabit intra-Asia submarine cable system (extremetech.com) 1

Submitted by
MrSeb
MrSeb writes: "Facebook has joined a consortium that will build by far the fastest intra-Asia submarine fiber optic network, the Asia Pacific Gateway (APG). Facebook is the only American company involved with the venture, which will see 10,000km (6,000 miles) of prime fiber laid between Malaysia and Japan (pictured above), with branches landing in almost every country along the way (Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, China, Taiwan, and South Korea). When the cable goes online in 2014, at a cost of around $450 million, it is slated to use 40Gbps channels, for a total capacity of 55 terabits per second, or a transfer speed of 6.9 terabytes (138 Blu-ray discs) per second. When the various routers and repeaters are upgraded to 100Gbps-per-channel, the cable will have a total capacity of well over 100Tbps. The prime reason for building the cable, other than making money, is to provide more redundancy between the US and Asia. Currently, almost every connection from Asia to the US is routed through Singapore or Japan. If there is congestion at one of these sites, or a cable is cut, then the other (highly populous) countries in south east Asia are in trouble. It is perhaps no surprise that China Telecom and China Unicom, two of the world’s largest telecoms companies, are involved in the laying of APG. Facebook's involvement is almost certainly due to the fact that the social network's growth has almost stagnated in Europe and North America, while Asia is only just starting to climb on the Facebook bandwagon."
Android

Submission + - on{X} an Easy way to Program (i-programmer.info)

Submitted by mikejuk
mikejuk writes: on{X} is a very simple rule-trigger programming tool. What is surprising about on{X} is that it is for Android and it is created by Microsoft — so it puts Android ahead of Windows Phone. As a system intended to make it easy for the non-programmer to create useful apps, it is also of value if you can program and might even encourage some to learn how.
If you don't program then its just a matter of picking a recipe and customizing it by selecting options. For example you can customize a recipe to produce:
Show me the weather forcast every day at 8:00 AM if the expected temperature is below 50F.
If you are a JavaScript programmer then it is easy to create new recipies that make use of the phone's internal sensors. . For example, you can discover the battery state, network connection, location and so on. You can't get at every sensor the phone has and some of the sensor data is prepackaged. For example, the accelerometer is provided only as the modeOfTransport trigger — walking, car etc.
This is an easy to use way of creating the sort of micro app that is just too personal and custom for a developer to bother with. It is a great idea but surely Microsoft should have done it for their own phone first?

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