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China

Submission + - Yes, China Does Dirty Business—Just Like We Taught It To (cio.com)

Submitted by
Curseyoukhan
Curseyoukhan writes: ""China is evil, lawless, corrupt and a threat to the world/capitalism." That’s the unstated assumption in much of what is currently written and said in the United States about the world’s most populous nation – especially its cyber espionage efforts.

What other reason could there be for China's ongoing efforts (many of them successful) to steal the plans, patents, designs and what-have-you from foreign companies? Well, one reason is that China is practicing capitalism just as America taught it to."

Submission + - DOJ admits Aaron's prosecution was political (tumblr.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The DOJ has told Congressional investigators that Aaron’s prosecution was motivated by his political views on copyright.
I was going to start that last paragraph with “In a stunning turn of events,” but I realized that would be inaccurate — because it’s really not that surprising. Many people speculated throughout the whole ordeal that this was a political prosecution, motivated by anything/everything from Aaron’s effective campaigning against SOPA to his run-ins with the FBI over the PACER database. But Aaron actually didn’t believe it was — he thought it was overreach by some local prosecutors who didn’t really understand the internet and just saw him as a high-profile scalp they could claim, facilitated by a criminal justice system and computer crime laws specifically designed to give prosecutors, however incompetent or malicious, all the wrong incentives and all the power they could ever want.
Entertainment

Submission + - Totoro rules: 90 percent of Japanese have seen a Studio Ghibli movie (kotaku.com)

Submitted by
Curseyoukhan
Curseyoukhan writes: "According to the Shunkan News: Out of the 130,000-some people polled, 9.6 percent had never seen a Studio Ghibli film.

Also: Japan's nine favorite Miyazaki movies ranked by popularity. Totoro is, of course, #1 but Castle in the Sky ahead of Spirited Away or Princess Mononoke? I don't think so.

Discuss. Debate. Rinse. Repeat."
IT

Submission + - Alanta, GA: Where Mobility Meets the Real World (visual.ly)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Did you know that one of the world’s hottest boomtowns for mobile technology is Atlanta?

Consider the facts:
- All told, Atlanta has 24,000 jobs in mobile app development, creating an economic impact at just over $1 billion.
- Georgia ranks fifth in “App Intensity” according to the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association (CTIA) which measures the ratio of app developer jobs against overall tech jobs in an area.
- In the last year alone, nine mobile startups were launched here, creating nearly 1,000 jobs for metro Atlanta
- One of the hottest mobile startups – AirWatch – calls Atlanta home along with top mobile service provider AT&T, mobile marketing leaders CocaCola and the Home Depot, as well as some of the world’s largest mobile content providers like CNN, the Weather Channel and many others.
- Colleges like Georgia Tech, Emory University, and the University of Georgia turn out technology talent every year to go to work at Atlanta’s mobile technology companies.
- The city is poised to lead in mobile payments. 70 percent of all credit card transactions in the U.S. go through Atlanta

With smartphones projected to be in the hands of 1.279 billion people by 2016, companies in Atlanta are making bold moves to put their mark on the mobile future. Check out the attached infographic to see what we mean.

Representatives from CocaCola, AT&T and AirWatch spoke at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona yesterday about Atlanta’s wireless industry ecosystem and how it is on the forefront of driving mobile innovation.
Cloud

Submission + - Cloud-washing exposed: 70% of "prviate clouds" aren't actually clouds (networkworld.com)

Submitted by
Brandon Butler
Brandon Butler writes: "The line between virtualization and a private cloud can be a fuzzy one, and according to a new report by Forrester Research, up to 70% of what IT administrators claim are private clouds are not. "It's a huge problem," says Forrester cloud expert James Staten. "It's cloud-washing."

If an enterprise data center has a highly virtualized environment, a web portal for business users to request and access virtual machines and a method for tracking how many of those resources are being used... that's not quite a private cloud. If there is enough capacity to supply employees with almost any amount of compute resources they need, and scale that capacity up and down dynamically, but it requires IT workers to provision the systems, then sorry that's not a private cloud either.

Why's it such a big deal? Staten says if you call a highly virtualized environment a cloud, but it doesn't have one or more of the key characteristics of a private cloud, then the IT department is setting an unrealistic expectation for users. If users are disappointed when they find out the environment doesn't have self-provisioning, or an elastic resources pool, they can get discouraged. The next time they need a VM on the fly, where will they turn? The pseudo-private cloud IT has set up, or Amazon Web Services, which IT could have no control over."
China

Submission + - Why You Shouldn't Believe the Cyber-War Hype (cio.com)

Submitted by
Curseyoukhan
Curseyoukhan writes: "he United States is not at cyber war. There, I said it. Someone had to.

Don’t feel bad if this is news to you. It is also news to all the Congress-critters and nearly every journalist who has used the term. "But wait," you say. "What about all the reports and government screaming? Do they mean nothing?"

Pretty much, yes.

It is important to remember that no one really knows what cyber war is. One thing is for certain, though: Cyber war is not what the Chinese currently appear to be up to. That’s called spying.

If stealing secrets is an act of war then America is currently at war with all of its allies. Espionage is what governments do so they don’t have to go to war...directly. What appears to be upsetting people is that the Chinese are using espionage to make money in a way that the United States didn’t think of first."
Earth

Submission + - Global Warming Will Make the World Too Hot to Get Any Work Done (vice.com)

Submitted by
pigrabbitbear
pigrabbitbear writes: "It’s a good thing that robots are stealing our jobs, because in about thirty-five years, nobody in their right mind is going to want to do them.

Scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration just published a report in Nature Climate Change that details how a warming climate impacts the way we work, and the results are pretty clear—we do less of it. NOAA discovered that over the last 60 years, the hotter, wetter climate has decreased human labor capacity by 10%. And it projects that by 2050, that number will double."
The Military

Submission + - The military's medal for cyber-combat is a disservice to actual combat vets (cio.com) 2

Submitted by
Curseyoukhan
Curseyoukhan writes: "The Distinguished Warfare Medal will be awarded to members of the military engaged in computer security and flying drones. It is the first new "combat-related" award since the Bronze Star was created in 1944.

A friend of mine was a Bronze Star recipient. He received the medal for leading troops in combat in Vietnam. He knew by heart the names of the dozen or so men who died under his command during that engagement. He eventually died from poisoning due to prolonged exposure to Agent Orange during his service.

The Pentagon says, "Another example [of a potential recipient] is that of a soldier at Fort Meade, Md., who detects and thwarts a cyberattack on a DOD computer system."

Other than carpal-tunnel syndrome what risk does our theoretical soldier face?

This stretches the term "combat-related" out of any recognizable shape."
EU

Submission + - US Lobbyists Writing EU Online-Privacy Law (cio.com)

Submitted by
Curseyoukhan
Curseyoukhan writes: "The European Union (EU) found a fast, cheap way to come up with a new online privacy law: Outsourcing much of the work to lobbyists, including the American Chamber of Commerce, Amazon, eBay and a few groups that are actually based in Europe.

The EU’s parliament–using a trick from Congress’s Guide to Destroying Institutional Credibility–is cutting and pasting the exact language used by the lobbyists into its law. The lobbyists are also doing an impressive job of getting rid of anything that might smack of actual consumer protection."
Government

Submission + - Secret Wars—Cyber or Otherwise—Destroy Democracies (cio.com)

Submitted by
Curseyoukhan
Curseyoukhan writes: "In the last week we learned that the Obama administration has given itself the power to both wage pre-emptive cyberwar and order the assassination of U.S. citizens—as long as they’re not in America. Add this to the long-standing ability of presidents to wage pre-emptive physical wars and you have to wonder why we even have a Congress.

What both the drone assassinations and cyberwar powers have in common is a total lack of outside review. The administration claims U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki was given "due process" before being killed in a drone strike. There is no definition of due process that fits the policies described in the just-released legal rationalization. No one—not the courts, not Congress—got to review the decision, even ex post facto."
China

Submission + - NYTimes, WSJournal use rumors as facts in stories on their getting hacked (cio.com)

Submitted by
Curseyoukhan
Curseyoukhan writes: "Both The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal were hacked last week, and the incidents made headlines not because they were a big deal but because the press loves to talk about itself. In this case, the talk came in the form of some appallingly bad reporting.

Both papers say China was to blame for the attacks without offering a single piece of evidence to support this claim. The only person who even raises the issue of how difficult it is to identify the culprits in attacks like these is a spokesman for the Chinese government.

"Cyber attacks are transnational and anonymous. It's very hard to trace the source of attack," he said. "To presume the source of a hacking attack based on speculation is irresponsible and unprofessional."

Not a good sign when an apparatchik has to remind the nation's two most powerful newspapers how to report the news."
The Internet

Submission + - The FCC Wants to Blanket the Country in Free Wi-Fi (vice.com)

Submitted by
pigrabbitbear
pigrabbitbear writes: "Internet access is an essential need on par with education access, but at what point do regulators recognize that? When will government officials acknowledge that widespread, guaranteed access is essential to fostering growth in the country? Somewhat surprisingly, that time is now, as the FCC is now calling for nationwide free wi-fi networks to be opened up to the public.

The FCC proposes buying back spectrum from TV stations that would allow for what the Washington Post is dubbing "super wi-fi," as the commission wants to cover the country with wide-ranging, highly-penetrative networks. Essentially, you can imagine the proposal as covering a majority of the country with open-access data networks, similar to cell networks now, that your car, tablet, or even phone could connect to. That means no one is ever disconnected, and some folks–especially light users and the poor–could likely ditch regular Internet and cell plans altogether."
Google

Submission + - Microsoft and Google push for FCC's public Wi-Fi for free networks (networkworld.com)

Submitted by colinneagle
colinneagle writes: How sweet would it be to dump that monthly cellphone bill in favor of making calls over free Wi-Fi networks, so powerful it would be like "Wi-Fi on steroids"? Microsoft and Google are working together to support the FCC's powerful Wi-Fi for free proposal.

Now, the Washington Post reports that Google, Microsoft and other tech giants "say a free-for-all WiFi service would spark an explosion of innovations and devices that would benefit most Americans, especially the poor."

Meanwhile, AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile and chip makers Intel and Qualcomm are lobbying hard against the FCC's proposal. These wireless carrier companies are opposed to using the spectrum for free Wi-Fi to the public and insist that the airwaves should instead be sold to businesses.

But FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski has designed the free Wi-Fi plan. If you are interested, you can read Genachowski's Presentation on White Spaces for Wireless Broadband and Genachowski's remarks to the President's Council of Advisors on Science & Technology.
Science

Submission + - Rumpelstiltskin Molecule Spins Toxic Ions Into Gold (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: A microbe called Delftia acidovorans manufactures and secretes delftibactin, which forces gold ions to precipitate out of solution. As the bacteria carry out this job, they not only remove highly toxic gold ions from their surroundings, but they also create the neutrally charged gold nuggets on which it then makes a home. Researchers say that they've now isolated delftibactin for the first time. If scientists isolate enough of the molecule, could they harvest gold from the oceans? Perhaps. But then again, delftibactin also carries out the same trick with iron ions. So if you tried it on a large scale you might get lumps of iron instead.
Government

Submission + - Stallman's solution to "Too big to fail" (reuters.com) 1

Submitted by lcam
lcam writes: Richard Stallman's opinion appears on Reuters.com addressing the "Too big to fail" view that has recently caused large corporations to be bailed out by taxpayer dollars. His solution is elegant however needs some refining, for example his measure would create a required minimum "Return on Investment" scale that corporations need to follow to be viable, these types of metrics are very industry specific. Another issue is that many large corporations don't fail because they don't take unnecessary risk; companies like Intel, Lockhead, Wallmart are very large and have a very low chance of failure and yet Stallman would have them be split up as a result of excessive risks that banks and insurance companies where seen to have taken.

And lastly, in a global market, the United States has the distinct advantage over countries like Brasil because they don't have as much government regulation/meddling that cuts into their competitively. If Stallman's idea should be taken seriously, it should not undermine competitive in the global market, else multinationals may find it better to simply "move out" to a country that doesn't compromise their business models.

How can this genious idea be made better?

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