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Submission + - Reddit Moderator Outs Reddit Admins (soundcloud.com) 8

Submitted by Khyber
Khyber writes: While the censorship is strong over at Reddit, details from a (former) moderator of one of the largest subreddits on the site have been leaked in the form of an an audio recording of a Skype conversation between an unidentified journalist and the moderator himself. User posts are being deleted rapidly from Reddit over in the /r/gaming subreddit, users are being shadowbanned, or hard-banned. (I've had my account dropped.) Really interesting parts of the 50-minute long audio sit around ~10:30 and ~26 minute marks, where the moderator details threats made against him and other moderators, and also a bit near the end regarding their censorship/spam control tools, and how anyone can effectively be banned for any made up reason, commonly-used ones being vote manipulation, brigading, and alt account creation. There is also talk about how subreddits for encryption get monitored much more closely and censored much more often than larger subreddits, such as /r/gaming.

As someone I know has put it, "...given that Reddit says that it views itself as a government for a new type of community, this is disturbing."

Submission + - Female Pedophila Far More Prevalent Than Commonly Thought (nationalpost.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The National Post reports, "Eight to 16% of the male population has been abused sexually in youth. Most at risk are poor, fatherless boys 13 and younger. A significant number of child sex abusers – estimates range between five and twenty percent – are women. ... But many people – even professional therapists – resist the very notion that women can harbor such instincts. A 1984 study reported that “pedophilia ... does not exist at all in women.” ... The instinctive discomfort people feel regarding female pedophilia can be located in two sources. One is the universal image of the female as the “nurturing” sex. But even harder to combat is an ideology, currently dominant in our culture, in which men are associated with violence and women with victimhood. Any suggestion that women are as capable of predatory sexual behavior as men is viewed as social heresy. The ramifications of this sex-specific dogma can be seen in the double standards for men and women – notably in cases of domestic violence, but also in cases of child abuse – routinely applied by law enforcement and social services in assessing the veracity of victims."

Feed Google News Sci Tech: NASA review panel criticizes Mars Curiosity rover, says it lacks 'scientific foc (google.com)

From feed by feedfeeder

WallStreet OTC
NASA review panel criticizes Mars Curiosity rover, says it lacks 'scientific focus'
WallStreet OTC
Troubles seem to be far from over for the Mars rover Curiosity which is exploring the Martian surface in search of life. A review panel for the US space agency National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has condemned the Rover Curiosity mission...
Mars Rover Curiosity Spots Cloud Formations in Martian SkyViral Global News
Curiosity finally succeeds in spotting clouds on MarsDelhi Daily News
Mars Curiosity finally succeeds in spotting cloudsNorthern Voices Online
Tech Times-iStreet Research-Florida Today
all 72 news articles

Submission + - The lies about the nessecity of a Big Rewrite (leaseweblabs.com)

Submitted by Maurits van der Schee
Maurits van der Schee writes: When a developer suggests a "complete rewrite" this should be a red flag to you. The developer is most probably lying about the justification. The real reasons the developer is suggesting Big Rewrite or "build from scratch" are:
  1. Hard-to-solve bugs (which are not fun working on)
  2. Technical depth, including depth caused by missing tests and documentation (which are not fun working on)
  3. The developer wants to work on a different technology (which is more fun working on)

Submission + - Stallman does slides and brevity for TEDx (gnu.org)

Submitted by ciaran2014
ciaran2014 writes: Richard Stallman's long-format talks are well-known — there are videos going back to 2001 and transcripts dating back to 1986 — but he recently condensed his free software talk down to 14 minutes and set it to hand-drawn slides for TEDxGeneva (video link). He introduces with the four freedoms, as always, and then moves on to spyware, surveillance, non-free drivers, free software in schools, non-free javascript, Service as a Software Substitute and how free software is today necessary for a strong democracy. As usual, the talk is suitable for non-techical audiences.

Submission + - Protesters Blockade Microsoft's Seattle Headquarters Over Tax Dodging (geekwire.com) 2

Submitted by reifman
reifman writes: A thousand unionized healthcare workers protested outside Microsoft's Seattle offices over its Nevada tax dodge on Friday. Microsoft shareholders have pocketed more than $5.34 billion in tax savings as Washington State social services and schools have taken huge cuts. In a hearing Wednesday, the Supreme Court suggested it may hold the Legislature in contempt and order it to repeal all tax breaks to restore proper funding to K-12 schools and universities.

Submission + - Core i7 5960X + X99 Motherboards Start Mysteriously Burning Up (phoronix.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Intel's Haswell-E Eight-Core CPU and X99 motherboards just debuted but it looks like there may be some early adoption troubles leading to the new, ultra-expensive X99 motherboards and processors burning up. Phoronix first ran a story about their X99 motherboard having a small flame and smoke when powering up for the first time and then Legit Reviews also ran an article about their motherboard going up in smoke for reasons unknown. The RAM, X99 motherboards, and power supplies were different in these two cases. Manufacturers are now investigating and in at least the case of LR their Core i7-5960X also fried in the process.

Submission + - FAA Scans the Internet For Drone Users; Sends Cease and Desist Letters (governmentattic.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The FAA has released a set of cease and desist letters sent in 2012 and 2013 to people operating drone vehicles for a variety of purposes including: tornado research, inspecting gas well stacks, aerial photography, journalism education, and other purposes. Drone cease and desist letters sent during 2014 are available from the FAA upon request.

Submission + - GPL risk shown when popular Minecraft plugins shut down by DMCA.

Submitted by Maxo-Texas
Maxo-Texas writes: One of the primary programmers, Wesley Wolfe (Wolvereness), who contributed over 23,000 lines of code to the Bukkit project which enhances Minecraft server performance and allows others to write "mods" and "plugins" submitted a DMCA request September 5th, preventing use of his code in the popular Bukkit or Spigot (and numerous other Minecraft plugins, mods, and other open source enhancements that depend on them). This has the effect of freezing all further development for multi-player server Minecraft based on these addons until the issue is resolved.

The programmer says that Mojang must release the Minecraft server code to the public domain since decompiled, deobfuscated versions of the java code are included in the Bukkit project before he will withdraw the DMCA. Mojang has never released the real source code and has stated they will not opensource the server code to meet the GPL and LGPL licensing requirements.

Read more here:
http://www.spigotmc.org/thread...

This approach might be a risk for other GPL and LGPL projects out there which are derivative of or enhance non GPL programs or products.

Submission + - Robot Dramas: Autonomous Machines in the Limelight on Stage and in Society

Submitted by aarondubrow
aarondubrow writes: We're entering an era where we'll increasingly coexist with robots and other intelligent machines — some of which may look like us. Not only is there a growing number of industrial robots (about 1.5 million today), there are 10 million Roombas in our homes, porter-bots in our hospitals and hotels, social robots in our nursing homes and even robot spectators at baseball games in Japan, tele-operated by remote fans.

Theater is not an arena that we typically associate with robots, however, artists, musicians and producers are often early adopters and innovative users of emerging technologies. In fact, robots got their name from the 1920 play, R.U.R., by the Czech playwright, Karel Capek. An article in the Huffington Post describes a panel discussion at the National Academy of Science in June that featured the producers of three recent plays that starred robots. The plays highlight our robot anxieties, while offering new visions for human-robot interactions in the future.

Submission + - You Have Your Windows In My Linux 1

Submitted by snydeq
snydeq writes: Ultimately, the schism over systemd could lead to a separation of desktop and server distros, or Linux server admins moving to FreeBSD, writes Deep End's Paul Venezia. 'Although there are those who think the systemd debate has been decided in favor of systemd, the exceedingly loud protests on message boards, forums, and the posts I wrote over the past two weeks would indicate otherwise. I've seen many declarations of victory for systemd, now that Red Hat has forced it into the enterprise with the release of RHEL 7. I don't think it's that easy. ... Go ahead, kids, spackle over all of that unsightly runlevel stuff. Paint over init and cron, pam and login. Put all of that into PID1 along with dbus. Make it all pretty and whisper sweet nothings about how it's all taken care of and you won't have to read a manual or learn any silly command-line stuff. Tune your distribution for desktop workloads. Go reinvent Windows.'

Submission + - Jennifer Lawrence/iCloud Hack and the Need for Zero-Knowledge Data Storage (calltheninja.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The recent hack of dozens of celebrity iCloud accounts and subsequent theft/posting of their private photos highlights the need for host-proof aka "zero-knowledge" data storage. Companies like SpiderOak have been using this technology for years so why are DropBox and Apple so far behind?

Submission + - NATO Set to Equate 'Cyberattacks' with Global Warfare (nytimes.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: At the upcoming NATO meeting, according to the New York Times, the 28 member States are expected to ratify "a far-reaching change in the organization’s mission of collective defense: For the first time, a cyberattack on any of the 28 NATO nations could be declared an attack on all of them, much like a ground invasion or an airborne bombing.”

A former NATO ambassador describes NATO's technological capability as "pretty basic" and suggests any counter-cyberattacks would likely be lodged by member states (meaning the US and maybe Britain). He opines, "It's a measure of how far we've come on this issue that there's now a consensus that a cyberattack could be as devastating as any other kind of attack, maybe even more so."

Helpfully, the agreement avoids defining what sort of 'cyberattack' would warrant an armed response. The Times describes the agreement as "deliberately unclear."

Submission + - AMD Launches Radeon R9 285 'Tonga' GPU And FX-8370E, FX-8370, FX-8320 Processors (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: AMD has launched two new products today for DIY enthusiasts and system integrators. The AMD Radeon R9 285 is a new mainstream GPU from AMD that is the first product built around AMD's new Tonga GPU, dubbed the Radeon R9 285. As its name suggests, this card falls into AMD's current line-up in between the Radeon R9 270X and R9 280X. It's essentially a tweak of the company's Hawaii architecture that actually drops in at a lower power envelope versus the Radeon R9 280X but with better performance and the latest features in AMD's architecture, like TrueAudio and FreeSync monitor sychronization technology. AMD has also launched the FX-8370E, FX-8370 and FX-8320E line of performance mainstream CPUs today as well, The new FX-8370, FX-8370E, and FX-8320E are familiar in many ways. These cores are still based on the older Piledriver architecture that debuted in 2012, they can still process two threads per module and four modules total for eight CPU cores, and they still rely on AMD's Socket AM3+. What these new chips do offer is an opportunity for enthusiasts in the mid-range category with 95W motherboards to step up to better processors. Before today, AMD didn't really have an eight-core option in the 95W range, which means a 95W motherboard topped out with a six-core FX-6300 with a 3.5GHz base clock and a 4.1GHz Turbo. Now, enthusiasts can step up to the FX-8370E with its 3.3GHz / 4.3GHz spread and eight cores, rather than just six.

Submission + - Would you sell YOUR privacy for $100 a month? (dailymail.co.uk)

Submitted by gunner_von_diamond
gunner_von_diamond writes: In order to use many websites and social networks, you have to forfeit a certain amount of your privacy.
But one San Diego firm is willing to pay you for the privilege of following you around as you browse the web, make searches and use social networks.
For $100 (£60) a month, Luth Research will track your every move online before selling it to the highest bidder, typically companies looking to advertise on the web.
As well as tracking browsing history, web searches, time spent on social networks and the user’s location, participants are also asked to complete survey questions about their behaviour.
This means clients can ask participants follow-up questions about why they choose to visit certain sites, or more details about their movements.
All the information is collected through a virtual private network connection, and the data is securely routed through Luth Research’s servers.

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