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Comment Re:Can someone remind me? (Score 2) 321

While it is true that the original scope of the intelligence community were not to enforce the law, that role is increasingly becoming part of their previously secret budget. Or that budget just increases with the collaboration between the different alphabet soup agencies. A microscopic gap indeed. That gap is non-existent to foreigners especially if you are in certain regions of Pakistan and Yemen under a CIA drone.
Firefox

Emscripten and New Javascript Engine Bring Unreal Engine To Firefox 124

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the cycle-is-nearly-complete dept.
MojoKid writes "There's no doubt that gaming on the Web has improved dramatically in recent years, but Mozilla believes it has developed new technology that will deliver a big leap in what browser-based gaming can become. The company developed a highly-optimized version of Javascript that's designed to 'supercharge' a game's code to deliver near-native performance. And now that innovation has enabled Mozilla to bring Epic's Unreal Engine 3 to the browser. As a sort of proof of concept, Mozilla debuted this BananaBread game demo that was built using WebGL, Emscripten, and the new JavaScript version called 'asm.js.' Mozilla says that it's working with the likes of EA, Disney, and ZeptoLab to optimize games for the mobile Web, as well." Emscripten was previously used to port Doom to the browser.
Electronic Frontier Foundation

DOJ Often Used Cell Tower Impersonating Devices Without Explicit Warrants 146

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the bending-the-rules dept.
Via the EFF comes news that, during a case involving the use of a Stingray device, the DOJ revealed that it was standard practice to use the devices without explicitly requesting permission in warrants. "When Rigmaiden filed a motion to suppress the Stingray evidence as a warrantless search in violation of the Fourth Amendment, the government responded that this order was a search warrant that authorized the government to use the Stingray. Together with the ACLU of Northern California and the ACLU, we filed an amicus brief in support of Rigmaiden, noting that this 'order' wasn't a search warrant because it was directed towards Verizon, made no mention of an IMSI catcher or Stingray and didn't authorize the government — rather than Verizon — to do anything. Plus to the extent it captured loads of information from other people not suspected of criminal activity it was a 'general warrant,' the precise evil the Fourth Amendment was designed to prevent. ... The emails make clear that U.S. Attorneys in the Northern California were using Stingrays but not informing magistrates of what exactly they were doing. And once the judges got wind of what was actually going on, they were none too pleased:"
Networking

Misconfigured Open DNS Resolvers Key To Massive DDoS Attacks 179

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the check-your-sources dept.
msm1267 writes with an excerpt From Threat Post: "While the big traffic numbers and the spat between Spamhaus and illicit webhost Cyberbunker are grabbing big headlines, the underlying and percolating issue at play here has to do with the open DNS resolvers being used to DDoS the spam-fighters from Switzerland. Open resolvers do not authenticate a packet-sender's IP address before a DNS reply is sent back. Therefore, an attacker that is able to spoof a victim's IP address can have a DNS request bombard the victim with a 100-to-1 ratio of traffic coming back to them versus what was requested. DNS amplification attacks such as these have been used lately by hacktivists, extortionists and blacklisted webhosts to great success." Running an open DNS resolver isn't itself always a problem, but it looks like people are enabling neither source address verification nor rate limiting.
Google

Google Pledges Not To Sue Any Open Source Projects Using Their Patents 153

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the now-and-forever dept.
sfcrazy writes "Google has announced the Open Patent Non-Assertion (OPN) Pledge. In the pledge Google says that they will not sue any user, distributor, or developer of Open Source software on specified patents, unless first attacked. Under this pledge, Google is starting off with 10 patents relating to MapReduce, a computing model for processing large data sets first developed at Google. Google says that over time they intend to expand the set of Google's patents covered by the pledge to other technologies." This is in addition to the Open Invention Network, and their general work toward reforming the patent system. The patents covered in the OPN will be free to use in Free/Open Source software for the life of the patent, even if Google should transfer ownership to another party. Read the text of the pledge. It appears that interaction with non-copyleft licenses (MIT/BSD/Apache) is a bit weird: if you create a non-free fork it appears you are no longer covered under the pledge.
The Media

What Does It Actually Cost To Publish a Scientific Paper? 166

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the one-trillion-dollars dept.
ananyo writes "Nature has published an investigation into the real costs of publishing research after delving into the secretive, murky world of science publishing. Few publishers (open access or otherwise-including Nature Publishing Group) would reveal their profit margins, but they've pieced together a picture of how much it really costs to publish a paper by talking to analysts and insiders. Quoting from the piece: '"The costs of research publishing can be much lower than people think," agrees Peter Binfield, co-founder of one of the newest open-access journals, PeerJ, and formerly a publisher at PLoS. But publishers of subscription journals insist that such views are misguided — born of a failure to appreciate the value they add to the papers they publish, and to the research community as a whole. They say that their commercial operations are in fact quite efficient, so that if a switch to open-access publishing led scientists to drive down fees by choosing cheaper journals, it would undermine important values such as editorial quality.' There's also a comment piece by three open access advocates setting out what they think needs to happen next to push forward the movement as well as a piece arguing that 'Objections to the Creative Commons attribution license are straw men raised by parties who want open access to be as closed as possible.'"
Chrome

Submission + - Bad Piggies Fake App Spreads Adware | debrained.com (debrained.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A certain Bad Piggies app that you can find available on Chrome Web Store is the culprit that’s creating the buzz. It’s proven that once downloaded and installed, the app diffuses adwares. It’s quite confusing too because the app itself adapted the same game branding as Bad Piggies. Definitely, this isn’t Rovio’s official game app since after you’ve got it installed it will de-morph as a cloaked adware. | http://debrained.com/
Science

Submission + - Stem Cells Safe for Rare Brain Disorder (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Four young boys with a rare, fatal brain condition have made it through a dangerous ordeal. Scientists have safely transplanted human neural stem cells into their brains. Twelve months after the surgeries, the boys have more myelin—a fatty insulating protein that coats nerve fibers and speeds up electric signals between neurons—and show improved brain function, a new study in Science Translational Medicine reports. The preliminary trial paves the way for future research into potential stem cell treatments for the disorder, which overlaps with more common diseases such as Parkinson's disease and multiple sclerosis.
Math

Submission + - Mathematicians Extend Einstein's Special Relativity Beyond Speed of Light 1

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "The Christian Science Monitor reports that despite an apparent prohibition on faster-than-light travel by Einstein’s theory of special relativity, applied mathematician James Hill and his colleague Barry Cox say the theory actually lends itself easily to a description of velocities that exceed the speed of light. "The actual business of going through the speed of light is not defined," says Hill whose research has been published in the prestigious Proceedings of the Royal Society A. "The theory we've come up with is simply for velocities greater than the speed of light." In effect, the singularity at the speed of light divides the universe into two: a world where everything moves slower than the speed of light, and a world where everything moves faster. The laws of physics in these two realms could turn out to be quite different. In some ways, the hidden world beyond the speed of light looks to be a strange one. Hill and Cox's equations suggest, for example, that as a spaceship traveling at super-light speeds accelerated faster and faster, it would lose more and more mass, until at infinite velocity, its mass became zero. "We are mathematicians, not physicists, so we've approached this problem from a theoretical mathematical perspective," says Dr Cox. "Should it, however, be proven that motion faster than light is possible, then that would be game changing. Our paper doesn't try and explain how this could be achieved, just how equations of motion might operate in such regimes.""

Comment Re:CItation Needed (Score 1) 1181

by penandpaper (#39687481) Attached to: Losing the Public Debate On Global Warming

Here are your citations! plantsneedco2.org says warmer is better then colder. They have lots of facts that seem logical and scientifically sound. Like this bit:

We have determined that CO2 's influence, while significant at low concentrations in the atmosphere, is of minor impact as more and more is added to the atmosphere...

It must be true because that is what I have been saying all along without any research or experimentation. [end sarcasm]

Honestly, what is even more troubling to me is other potential problems that might be caused by co2 like the acidity of the oceans.

Yet, when I talk to a self-identified Conservative that denies global warming and I mention other potential risks of co2 (such as the aforementioned) the response is childish at best. We can agree humans are putting a lot of c02 in the atmosphere at unprecedented rates. Yet, global climate change is outside of our influence.

How many papers have been published and peer reviewed in journals that support the current consensus of the scientific community? Isn't it like 97-98% of all papers submitted in regards to global warming have verifiable data to reach the conclusion that we are indeed impacting the climate in a warming sort of way. How many for the deniers???

I will just leave with this quote from plantsneedco2.org and let your head explode.

CO2 (carbon dioxide) is one of the drivers and while everyone agrees that CO2 does contribute to climate change as a greenhouse gas, the magnitude of CO2 's influence has not been settled within the overall scientific community, the political systems, the media or the population in general.

--
I like my coal smug cloud.

Comment Re:Meh (Score 1) 969

by penandpaper (#39383095) Attached to: Bring Back the 40-Hour Work Week

employer started demanding constant unpaid overtime

There is a difference between your employer demanding OT and you feel obligated/want to put in additional OT. Either because you have a vested interest in the project your working on or your the only one putting in the minimum when everyone else (including the founders/owners who are developers) put in OT.

Similar situation as you (4 years experience with undergrad). I love my job and the company/people I work with, however, I feel I do not carry my weight if I do not put in at least 45-50 hours a week. The job market is strong enough to easily relocate. But the OT is a small price to pay for who I work with, where I work, and what I work on.

I only have 4 years in the workforce and in that time I had a few bad places to work that had a direct effect on my health. I can only imagine after 20 years of crappy jobs you finally find one that is what you have been looking for. The only thing, OT is an unwritten rule. I already made the choice to go with OT to at least have the satisfaction and enjoyment of the work I do with the people I work with.

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