59547405
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
Edward Snowden's NSA revelations will likely cost the US tech sector tens of billions of dollars. The same anxieties causing foreign clients to pull out of contracts with American tech companies, are also fueling a wave of venture capital investment in Silicon Valley into anonymity apps like Whisper and Secret. But whether or not they can deliver on either promise—profits and privacy—remains in question. Whisper, released two years ago, has led the charge of anonymity apps that now include Secret, Rumr, Backchat, and Yik Yak, which is already ruining lives across middle schools everywhere. The precocious app has been wildly successful in growing its userbase—it has millions of users and billions of monthly pageviews—and in raising funds. “There is a real desire to be more authentic online,” Roelof Botha, a partner at Sequoia Capital, which led a $21 million investment into Whisper last fall, told Business Week . “Most people have more to say than just, ‘Here I am not the beach looking great.’”
59522147
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
The state of Oklahoma had scheduled two executions for Tuesday, April 29th. This in spite of myriad objections that the drugs being used for both lethal injections had not been tested, and thus could violate the constitutional right to the courts, as well as the 8th Amendment: protection from cruel and unusual punishment. After much legal and political wrangling, the state proceeded with the executions anyway. It soon became clear that the critics' worst case scenarios were coming true—Oklahoma violently botched the first execution. The inmate "blew" a vein and had a heart attack. The state quickly postponed the second one. "After weeks of Oklahoma refusing to disclose basic information about the drugs for tonight's lethal injection procedures, tonight, Clayton Lockett was tortured to death," Madeline Cohen, the attorney of Charles Warner, the second man scheduled for execution, said in a statement. Katie Fretland at The Guardian reported from the scene of the botched attempt to execute Lockett using the untested, unvetted, and therefore potentially unconstitutional lethal injection drugs.
59505453
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
CISPA is back for a third time—it has lost the 'P,' but it's just as bad for civil liberties as ever. The Senate Intelligence Committee is considering a new cybersecurity bill that contains many of the provisions that civil liberties groups hated about the Cybersecurity Information Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA). Most notably, under the proposed bill companies could not be sued for incorrectly sharing too much customer information with the federal government, and broad law enforcement sharing could allow for the creation of backdoor wiretaps. The bill, called the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2014 (embedded below), was written by Senate Intelligence Chair Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) and is currently circulating around the committee right now but has not yet been introduced. Right now, the bill is only a “discussion draft,” and the committee is still looking to make revisions to the bill before it is officially introduced.
59501191
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
If the Silk Road was a “crack house,” Ross Ulbricht, or “Dread Pirate Roberts," was the kingpin, not a mere "digital landlord," the Federal Government charged in new documents relating to his case. Last year, Ulbricht was indicted on charges of conspiracy to distribute narcotics, operating a continuing criminal enterprise, conspiracy to commit computer hacking, and money laundering, all based on his alleged position as owner and operator of the deep web’s Silk Road drug marketplace. Last month, Ulbricht and his attorney, Joshua Dratel, filed a motion to dismiss all charges based on the argument that Ulbricht operated as a “digital landlord” who is not liable for what was happening in his digital house—in this case, Silk Road. US District Attorney Preet Bharara just filed his opposition to the motion to dismiss, and Ulbricht's defense does not look sturdy, provided the government actually has the evidence it alleges.
59452123
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
If you were anywhere near the internet last week, you would have come across reports of 'DarkMarket', a new system being touted as a Silk Road the FBI could never seize. Although running in a similar fashion on the face of things—some users buy drugs, other sell them—DarkMarket works in a fundamentally different way to Silk Road or any other online marketplace. Instead of being hosted off a server like a normal website, it runs in a decentralized manner: Users download a piece of software onto their device, which allows them to access the DarkMarket site. The really clever part is how the system incorporates data with the blockchain, the part of Bitcoin that everybody can see. Rather than just carrying the currency from buyer to seller, data such as user names are added to the blockchain by including it in very small transactions, meaning that its impossible to impersonate someone else because their pseudonymous identity is preserved in the ledger. Andy Greenberg has a good explanation of how it works over at Wired . The prototype includes nearly everything needed for a working marketplace: private communications between buyers and sellers, Bitcoin transfers to make purchases, and an escrow system that protects the cash until it is confirmed that the buyer has received their product. Theoretically, being a decentralized and thus autonomous network, it would still run without any assistance from site administrators, and would certainly make seizing a central server, as was the case with the original Silk Road, impossible.
59448939
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
At the digital currency Dogecoin’s first ever conference, a 14-year-old girl explained how she’d gone from rags to riches, and back to rags, all in Dogecoin. After her witty comments on Reddit generated dogecoin tips—usually in the 100s, or about five cents a time—she bet her fortune on a League of Legends battle waged against a friend. And lost. Much sadness. The girl, Victoria, was attending Dogecon San Francisco to see what the hoopla over the meme-themed digital currency actually was (other than tipping people on Reddit). “[My family] thinks it’s weird, but it’s serious business,” she told me. And from the looks of things at the conference, Victoria is right. Dogecoin is for real. Back in February we wrote that Dogecoin is worth taking seriously, and it's been more successful than Bitcoin’s first several years, at least if you measure it by market capitalization (the total dollar value of the currency). Now, the digital currency based on a dog meme distinguished by grammatically absurd broken phrases in the Comic Sans font is the fifth largest digital currency in the world (with a market cap of about $33 million). It was touted at the conference as the most “widely traded virtual currency in the world,” and it’s not hard to see why.
59304683
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
You stand in the dark facing a mirror; before you appears a digitized reflection. As you move, the reflection moves with you. It is you, but as you have never been seen before. Skin removed, the image shows the organs, muscles, and bone structures that lie beneath. It’s an experience that leaves you feeling utterly exposed and redefines what it means to be naked: You are seeing yourself inside-out for the very first time. This was the reality presented to participants at the trial of an interactive artwork called Primary Intimacy of Being. Developed by Xavier Maître, a medical imaging researcher at the University of Paris South, the mirror makes use of the university's latest technology in imaging and processing. It combines information from a series of PET/ MRI scans and x-rays with Microsoft Kinect motion capture technology to produce a mirror that seems to reflect the individual without skin. It moves with them and appears to be a true reflection.
59258437
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
In 2000, a post on Slashdot introduced the concept of a new GPS-infused sport for nerds and hikers called geocaching. "Take some item and hide it somewhere in the world," the poster explained, "record the latitude and longitude using your GPS receiver, post the location to the Web so that others can find your stash." I've passively stumbled upon a couple of geocaches while walking on trails in the Czech Republic and Northern California, but wasn't actually engaged in the coordinate-hunting sport. But a group of hackathon-winning students from New Jersey might have just changed geocaching forever—with dogecoin. Yes, the meme-based virtual currency bearing the image of a Shiba-Inu is the central object of Dogecache.
59227337
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
US Attorneys originally motioned and were granted an order to prohibit Brown's communications with members of the press. They claimed if he were to do so, he could “impair the rights of the Defendant, the Government, and the public to a fair trial by an impartial jury.” Of course, there's not going to be a trial for Brown any more. He recently struck a sealed plea deal, that would “obviate the need” for such a gag, US attorneys wrote in a motion filed Monday—which hinted the unsealing of the plea agreement, and other sealed court filings. We knew that the gag order was being lifted after learning three weeks ago (due to electronic court filings) that Brown and the prosecution had agreed to a sealed plea deal. Today, the documents are unsealed and available, including the plea agreement, a factual resume, and the “government's opposition to motion to dismiss” two indictments CR-317, CR-030. “A veil of unnecessary secrecy that loomed over this case has finally been lifted,” wrote Kevin Gallagher, the director of the Free Barrett Brown organization. He introduced the freshly unsealed documents in a Tumblr post.
59215547
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
Today, it's the looming advancements in artificial intelligence that promise to create programs with superhuman intelligence—the infamous singularity—that are starting to weigh on the public consciousness, as blockbuster ‘netsploitation flick Transcendence illustrates. There’s a danger that sci-fi pulp like Transcendence is watering down the real risks of artificial intelligence in public discourse. But these threats are being taken very seriously by researchers who are studying the existential threat of AI on the human race. Dismissing hyper-intelligent machines as mere science fiction “would be a mistake, and potentially our worst mistake ever,” wrote Stephen Hawking in an article he recently penned for the Huffington Post alongside some other leading physicists. They claim we need to seriously research the existential risks and ethical concerns surrounding the future of AI, because the survival of the human species could depend on it.
59176701
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
“I am sweating as I write this I must utter words all too familiar to this scarred community: We have been hacked.” That is what Defcon, the current administrator of the infamous black market site Silk Road (the 2.0 version), wrote back in February on the site’s forums. In total, an estimated $2.7 million worth of bitcoin belonging to users and staff of the site was stolen. Some in the Silk Road community suspected that the hack might have involved staff members of the site itself, echoing scams on other sites. Project Black Flag closed down after its owner scampered with all of their customers' bitcoin, and after that users of Sheep Marketplace had their funds stolen, in an incident that has never been conclusively proven as an inside job or otherwise. Many site owners would probably have given up at this point, and perhaps attempted to join another site, or start up a new one under a different alias. Why would you bother to pay back millions of dollars when you could just disappear into the digital ether? But Silk Road appears to be trying to rebuild, and to repay users' lost bitcoins.
59148041
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
Last week, the US Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau approved Palcohol, a powdered alcohol product that you can either use to turn water into a presumably not-that-delicious marg or to snort if you don’t care too much about your brain cells. It’s the first time a powdered alcohol product has been approved for sale in the US, but not the first time someone has devised one, and such products have been available in parts of Europe for a few years now. Now you may be wondering, as I was, how the heck do you go about powdering alcohol? As you might expect, there’s quite a bit of chemistry involved, but the process doesn’t seem overly difficult; we’ve known how to do it since the early 1970s, when researchers at the General Foods Corporation (now a subsidiary of Kraft) applied for a patent for an “alcohol-containing powder.”
59144451
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
The first of at least six commercial drone test sites has officially opened in North Dakota, the Federal Aviation Administration announced Monday. The site opens the door for officially-sanctioned FAA drone testing, which is the first step towards starting a government-approved drone company. Companies that use drones have been operating in legal limbo over the past few years, a situation that became a little more clear last month, when a federal judge ruled that there are no official laws against operating a drone for profit. That’s not the way the FAA has looked at it, however, as the agency still insists that the commercial use of a drone without FAA permission is illegal. The FAA’s test sites have always been part of its plan to officially integrate drones into American skies. The plan, according to Larry Brinker, who will operate a test site in Rome, New York, is to allow anyone to test their drones at the sites.
59017883
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
Neotrogla, a cave insect that lives in Brazil, has completely reversed genitalia—the first time that’s ever been seen in an animal. It works about how you might expect, if you were asked to wonder about such things. The female has a penis that enters the male, literally grabs the sperm out of it, and returns it to her body. Neotrogla sex lasts, on average, between 40 and 70 hours. The female penis, called a gynosome, is “erectile, basally membranous, and apically sclerotized [hardened]. Its sclerotized part consists of a proximal rod-like extension and penis-like distal prominence. The latter encloses a duct leading to the sperm storage organ,” reports Kazunori Yoshizawa, a researcher at Hokkaido University in Japan. He published his findings in Current Biology .
58972753
submission
An anonymous reader writes:
The FBI insists that it uses drone technology to conduct surveillance in “very limited circumstances.” What those particular circumstances are remain a mystery, particularly since the Bureau refuses to identify instances where agents deployed unmanned aerial vehicles, even as far back as 2006.
In a letter to Senator Ron Paul last July, the FBI indicated that it had used drones a total of ten times since late 2006—eight criminal cases and two national security cases—and had authorized drone deployments in three additional cases, but did not actually fly them. The sole specific case where the FBI is willing to confirm using a drone was in February 2013, as surveillance support for a child kidnapping case in Alabama.
New documents obtained by MuckRock as part of the Drone Census flesh out the timeline of FBI drone deployments in detail that was previously unavailable. While heavily redacted—censors deemed even basic facts that were already public about the Alabama case to be too sensitive for release, apparently—these flight orders, after action reviews and mission reports contain new details of FBI drone flights.
