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Submission + - Been groped by TSA agents? Former DHS official blames privacy advocates (networkworld.com)

Submitted by colinneagle
colinneagle writes: Yesterday, on the 12th anniversary of those attacks, a Senate panel heard expert testimony about "The Department of Homeland Security at 10 Years: Examining Challenges and Achievements and Addressing Emerging Threats." Stewart Baker formerly served as DHS Assistant Secretary and NSA General Counsel, and gave his opinion on the source of the real problems within the TSA:

"Unlike border officials, though, TSA ended up taking more time to inspect everyone, treating all travelers as potential terrorists, and subjecting many to whole-body imaging and enhanced pat-downs. We can't blame TSA for this wrong turn, though. Privacy lobbies persuaded Congress that TSA couldn't be trusted with data about the travelers it was screening. With no information about travelers, TSA had no choice but to treat them all alike, sending us down a long blind alley that has inconvenienced billions."

Submission + - Marissa Mayer is too Busy to Lock Her iPhone (securityweek.com)

Submitted by wiredmikey
wiredmikey writes: Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer admitted to a large audience at Tech Crunch Disrupt that she does not protect access to her smartphone with a passcode. "I don't have a passcode on my phone," she told Arrington on Wednesday.

Apparently, the former Google-exec who has since taken the top spot at Yahoo!, is too busy to be bothered with security.

“I just can’t do this passcode thing like 15 times a day,” she said. Mayer, who is said to be an iPhone user, hinted at the fact that she may soon be an iPhone 5S customer. Commenting on the new biometric security feature in the iPhone 5S, Mayer added, “When I saw the finger print thing I was like, now I don’t have to.”

Submission + - Researchers Debut Software That Extract 3D Objects From Photos (singularityhub.com)

Submitted by kkleiner
kkleiner writes: Forget about CAD — software developed by researchers at Tel Aviv University called 3-Sweep allows the extraction of 3D objects from regular photographs rapidly and intuitively. Using standard drawing tools, 3D objects are defined by starting with a basic shape and drawing a line through each axis. The software then builds the model allowing the user to transform the object in a variety of ways. When coupled with 3D printing, this method could lead to the ability to create physical 3D models of objects in regular photographs with ease.

Submission + - New Brain-to-Brain Interface Allows Human to Control Another's Movements

Submitted by barlevg
barlevg writes: Earlier this year, researchers at Harvard devised a system by which a human could control a rat's tail using only the person's thoughts. Now a team at the University of Washington have demonstrated that the same principle can be applied to human-to-human control. The Washington Post reports: "First, they placed electronic probes against their heads. Then one man looked at a computer game on a screen and thought about what move he wanted to make. Sure enough, the other man, who was across campus with no view of the screen, almost instantaneously moved his right index finger to make that move. He said it had the sensation of a nervous tic."

Submission + - Indian Government to ban use of US email services for official communications (paritynews.com)

Submitted by hypnosec
hypnosec writes: The Government of India is planning to ban the use of US based email services like Gmail for official communications and is soon going to send out a formal notification to it half a million officials across the country asking them to use official email addresses and services provided by National Informatics Centre. The move is intended to increase the security of confidential government data and information and protect it from overseas surveillance.

Submission + - Raspberry Pi, Smart Highways Win World's Biggest Design Prize (inhabitat.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Last night the €500,000 INDEX: Award was awarded to 5 designs that can improve life for millions of people around the world — including high-tech highways that light up at night, the $25 Raspberry Pi computer, and a simple piece of paper that can cut food waste by extending the life of fresh produce by 2-4 weeks.

Submission + - MobileIron unveils Anyware: Mobile management with no IT department required (citeworld.com)

Submitted by rjupstate
rjupstate writes: Anyware makes end-to-end mobile device and app management easy non-technical administrators, integrates with Salesforce, and offers a new model of mobile content management that functions like an enterprise app store. Its consumer-like management experience also points to a future when technology management can be done without an IT department.

Submission + - US electrical grid on the edge of failure (nature.com)

Submitted by ananyo
ananyo writes: Facebook can lose a few users and remain a perfectly stable network, but where the national grid is concerned simple geography dictates that it is always just a few transmission lines from collapse, according to a mathematical study of spatial networks. The upshot of the study is that spatial networks are necessarily dependent on any number of critical nodes whose failure can lead to abrupt — and unpredictable — collapse.
The warning comes ten years after a blackout that crippled parts of the midwest and northeastern United States and parts of Canada. In that case, a series of errors resulted in the loss of three transmission lines in Ohio over the course of about an hour. Once the third line went down, the outage cascaded towards the coast, cutting power to some 50 million people. The authors say that this outage is an example of the inherent instability the study describes. But others question whether the team’s conclusions can really be extrapolated to the real world. “The problem is that this doesn’t reflect the physics of how the power grid operates,” says Jeff Dagle, an electrical engineer at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington, who served on the government task force that investigated the 2003 outage.

Submission + - Google's Director of Regime Change (cryptome.org)

Submitted by Memroid
Memroid writes: 'It has been revealed today, thanks to Edward Snowden, that Google and other US tech companies received millions of dollars from the NSA [...] Documents published last year by WikiLeaks obtained from the US intelligence contractor Stratfor, show that in 2011 Jared Cohen, then (as he is now) Director of Google Ideas, was off running secret missions to the edge of Iran in Azerbaijan. In these internal emails, Fred Burton, Stratfor’s Vice President for Intelligence and a former senior State Department official, describes Google as follows:

"Google is getting WH [White House] and State Dept support and air cover. In reality they are doing things the CIA cannot do... [Cohen] is going to get himself kidnapped or killed. Might be the best thing to happen to expose Google’s covert role in foaming up-risings, to be blunt. The US Gov’t can then disavow knowledge and Google is left holding the shit-bag."'

Submission + - Secure Email in Dark Age of PRISM .. (wired.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: With the specter of government surveillance hanging over this post-PRISM world, people are beginning to wonder if the idea of secure email is complete nonsense.

  “E-mail is going to be with us for a long time,” says Bjarni Rúnar Einarsson, a software developer and member of the Icelandic Pirate Party. “We need to do what we can to make it more secure.”

Submission + - NSA Shuts down critics under guise of copyright violations (infowars.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: “Can a government agency block criticism by claiming copyright infringement? Sounds a bit ridiculous but it is happening. The NSA is effectively stopping one small business owner from criticism, claiming that by using its name he has infringed on their copyright,” according to a report by Infowars guest and investigative journalist Ben Swann.

Submission + - Boyfriend tracker app pulled from Google App store on privacy concerns (ibtimes.com) 1

Submitted by twitnutttt
twitnutttt writes: The NSA may be monitoring your phone and email, and retailers may be striving to automatically recognize you in their stores, but your girlfriend may be your biggest privacy threat right now. After 50,000 downloads since launch, the Brazilian "Boyfriend Tracker" app has been pulled from Google Play. It allows suspicious girlfriends to "obtain a call history, receive any incoming or outgoing text messages, identify a partner’s location on a map using GPS, and can [sic] turn on the phone to listen in to the surrounding environment. The app also lets users know when a phone is turned off or set to Airplane Mode." The various options are controlled via text message codes. If you have to track him, you probably should dump him.

Submission + - What's Causing the Rise In Obesity? Everything. (thesocietypages.org)

Submitted by Mr_Blank
Mr_Blank writes: We all know — because we are being constantly reminded — that we are getting fat. Americans are at the forefront of the trend, but it is a transnational one. Apparently, it is also trans-species: Over the past 20 years, as the American people were getting fatter, so were America’s laboratory macaques, chimpanzees, vervet monkeys and mice, as well as domestic dogs, domestic cats, and domestic and feral rats from both rural and urban areas. Researchers examined records on those eight species and found that average weight for every one had increased. The marmosets gained an average of 9% per decade. Lab mice gained about 11% per decade. Chimps are doing especially badly: their average body weight had risen 35% per decade. What is causing the obesity era? Everything.

Submission + - Magma can survive in upper crust for hundreds of millennia (washington.edu)

Submitted by vinces99
vinces99 writes: Reservoirs of silica-rich magma – the kind that causes the most explosive volcanic eruptions – can persist in Earth’s upper crust for hundreds of thousands of years without triggering an eruption, according to new University of Washington modeling research. That means an area known to have experienced a massive volcanic eruption in the past, such as Yellowstone National Park, could have a large pool of magma festering beneath it and still not be close to going off as it did 600,000 years ago. Recent research models have suggested that reservoirs of silica-rich magma, or molten rock, form on and survive for geologically short time scales – in the tens of thousands of years – in the Earth’s cold upper crust before they solidify. They also suggested that the magma had to be injected into the Earth’s crust at a high rate to reach a large enough volume and pressure to cause an eruption. But new research by UW doctoral student Sarah Gelman and colleagues took the models further and found that the magma could accumulate more slowly and remain molten for a much longer period than the models previously suggested.

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