62325803
submission
mpicpp writes:
Dell’s only Chromebook is at least temporarily unavailable for online purchase through the company’s website, only seven months after the model started shipping.
Facing rising commercial demand for the devices, Dell has not been able to keep up with orders.
The Chromebook 11, which shipped in December, is listed as unavailable on Dell’s Chromebook website, and the company is asking potential buyers to call in orders.
“Due to strong demand, the Dell Chromebook 11 is currently not available for order on Dell.com. It continues to be available for our education customers and can be ordered through their sales representative,” said Ellen Murphy, a Dell spokeswoman, in an email.
The laptop will eventually come online again, though the company did not provide a specific date.
With Dell keeping Chromebook purchases open mainly to commercial customers, individual buyers may have to turn to competitive products from Samsung, Toshiba, Lenovo and Hewlett-Packard, which are available online starting at under $200.
62325677
submission
mpicpp writes:
Patrick Sensburg, chairman of the German parliament's National Security Agency investigative committee, now says he’s considering expanding the use of manual typewriters to carry out his group's work.
In an appearance (German language) Monday morning on German public television, Sensburg said that the committee is taking its operational security very seriously. "In fact, we already have [a typewriter], and it’s even a non-electronic typewriter," he said.
If Sensburg’s suggestion takes flight, the country would be taking a page out of the Russian playbook. Last year, the agency in charge of securing communications from the Kremlin announced that it wanted to spend 486,000 rubles (about $14,800) to buy 20 electric typewriters as a way to avoid digital leaks.
62325633
submission
mpicpp writes:
Babak Parviz, who also created the Google Contact lens, is off to Amazon.
Google Glass has been struggling a bit lately: Android Wear showed up to eat the product's lunch, and there was almost no mention of Glass at the company's recent I/O conference. To make matters worse, The Glass KitKat update made the device slow and buggy, and it removed video chat, one of Glass' highlight features.
Now the founder and former head of Google Glass, Babak Parviz, is leaving Google for Amazon. Parviz announced the move on his Google+ page, updating the "About" section to say:
62284263
submission
mpicpp writes:
An app for Google Glass provides real-time updates on missile attacks against Israel. Does this mean Israelis really are safe under that Iron Dome?
The Times of Israel says The Rustybrick is offering them.
“The alerts will provide the (predicted) time and location of the attack, giving Israeli Glass users time to head for shelter,” said Barry Schwartz, CEO of RustyBrick Software, author of the app and a pioneer in Jewish and Israel-oriented Google Glass apps. “Be it bomb shelters, safe rooms or covering up on the highway as they drive home from work, this app will allow them to get notifications of those missile attacks so they can seek shelter.”
Shouldn’t android phones offer them?
62262633
submission
mpicpp writes:
Ed Summers, an open source Web developer, recently saw a friend tweet about Parliament WikiEdits, a UK Twitter “bot” that watched for anonymous Wikipedia edits coming from within the British Parliament’s internal networks. Summers was immediately inspired to do the same thing for the US Congress.
“The simplicity of combining Wikipedia and Twitter in this way immediately struck me as a potentially useful transparency tool,” Summers wrote in his personal blog. “So using my experience on a previous side project [Wikistream, a Web application that watches Wikipedia editing activity], I quickly put together a short program that listens to all major language Wikipedias for anonymous edits from Congressional IP address ranges and tweets them.”
The stream for the bot, @congressedits, went live a day later, and it now provides real-time tweets when anonymous edits of Wikipedia pages are made. Summers also posted the code to GitHub so that others interested in creating similar Twitter bots can riff on his work.
So far, @congressedits hasn’t caught anything scandalous; most of the edits caught have been stylistic changes rather than factual ones. The most interesting edit found so far was to the Wikipedia article on horse head masks—adding a reference to President Obama shaking hands with a man in such a mask on a recent trip to Denver.
62262455
submission
mpicpp writes:
Seattle City Light worked really hard to quash 2008 article, may sue Brand.com.
Seattle’s publicly-owned electrical utility, City Light, is now demanding a refund for the $17,500 that it paid to Brand.com in a botched effort to boost the online reputation of its highly-paid chief executive, Jorge Carrasco.
Brand.com "enhances online branding and clears negatives by blanketing search results with positive content" in an attempt to counteract unwanted search engine results. City Light signed a contract with the company in October 2013 and extended it in February 2014. The contracts authorized payments of up to $47,500.
Hamilton said that he first raised the issue of the utility’s online reputation when he was interviewing for the chief of staff job in early 2013.
“All I saw were negative stories about storms, outages and pay increases and I raised it as a concern during that interview,” he said. “And then after I started, [CEO Jorge Carrasco] and I discussed what we could do to more accurately represent the utility and what the utility is all about, because we didn't feel it was well represented online.”
Thus, the Brand.com contract. City Light says that it only ever thought Brand.com would help it place legitimate material in legitimate outlets—talking up some of the positive changes that have taken place at City Light during Carrasco's tenure. Instead, it appears to have received mostly bogus blog posts.
62262335
submission
mpicpp writes:
A federal judge has granted a nutritional supplement firm's request to help it learn the identities of those who allegedly left "phony negative" reviews of its products on Amazon.com.
The decision means that Ubervita may issue subpoena's to Amazon.com and Cragslist to cough up the identities of those behind a "campaign of dirty tricks against Ubervita in a wrongful effort to put Ubervita at a competitive disadvantage in the marketplace" (PDF).
62194665
submission
mpicpp writes:
Authorities planned to chemically induce an erection in a 17-year-old boy.
Local Virginia police have abandoned plans to photograph a 17-year-old boy's erection in connection with his felony prosecution for child pornography after he allegedly sexted his 15-year old girlfriend. The decision was made yesterday following a global outcry.
The brouhaha began earlier this week when Prince William County prosecutors obtained a search warrant from a juvenile court judge allowing them to photograph the boy's erection for evidentiary reasons (apparently to compare the photo with a video sent to the girlfriend's phone). The story, which included details that the authorities would chemically induce an erection in the boy, went viral.
In response, the Manassas City police department—which is investigating the case—said Thursday that it would let the search warrant expire.
In a statement, the department said, "It is not the policy of the Manassas City Police or the Commonwealth Attorney’s Office to authorize invasive search procedures of suspects in cases of this nature and no such procedures have been conducted in this case."
If found guilty, the teen could be jailed until his 21st birthday and be forced to register as a sex offender.
62194591
submission
mpicpp writes:
Thanks to a small problem in data formatting, the US Selective Service System recently sent notices to more than 14,000 Pennsylvania men who were most likely eligible for military service... during World War I. The error came thanks to a Pennsylvania Department of Transportation (PennDOT) clerk’s failure to include the century when exporting data from a drivers’ license database for transfer to the Selective Service.
According to an Associated Press report, the error wasn’t caught because the Selective Service System’s database only uses two-digit codes for birth years—so records from men born between 1893 and 1897 were flagged by the system as being from 1993 to 1997. As a result, men born over 117 years ago received notices that they would face imprisonment and fines if they did not immediately register for the draft.
PennDOT spokesperson Jan McKnight told the AP, "We made a mistake, a quite serious selection error."
62194337
submission
mpicpp writes:
For months, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has been investigating realtors who use drones to film their properties. Now, Forbes has learned that the FAA’s investigations have succeeded in intimidating NRT —the nation’s largest residential real estate brokerage company — into advising their members to not only cease flying drones as part of their work, but to also cease using drone footage.
This is a troubling development in an ongoing saga over the FAA’s rules which punish the safe commercial use of drones. Currently, the FAA does not prohibit the use of drones for a hobby — flying over your home and taking pictures of it for fun is allowed, but because real estate drones take pictures for a commercial purpose, the FAA prohibits their use.
62085677
submission
mpicpp writes:
Two men were arrested early Monday morning for flying a small drone too close to a New York Police Department (NYPD) helicopter.
Detective Mark Nell, an NYPD spokesman, told Ars that a police helicopter was on routine patrol near the George Washington Bridge in the northwestern part of Manhattan when the pilot spotted the drone orbiting above the bridge.
“During that time, the drone ascended approximately 2,000 feet into the air and came close to the aviation unit, causing it to veer off of its flight pattern,” Nell said, noting that the officers radioed down to ground units. “There were two individuals that were arrested after the drone landed.”
61983797
submission
mpicpp writes:
Remember the kid who tried to cheat off you by looking over your shoulder to copy your test answers? He's baaaack.
But this time he's wearing Google Glass — and he's after your iPad PIN.
Cyber forensics experts at the University of Massachusetts in Lowell have developed a way to steal passwords entered on a smartphone or tablet using video from Google's face-mounted gadget and other video-capturing devices. The thief can be nearly ten feet away and doesn't even need to be able to read the screen — meaning glare is not an antidote.
The security researchers created software that maps the shadows from fingertips typing on a tablet or smartphone. Their algorithm then converts those touch points into the actual keys they were touching, enabling the researchers to crack the passcode.
They tested the algorithm on passwords entered on an Apple iPad, Google's Nexus 7 tablet, and an iPhone 5.
Why should you be worried?
"We could get your bank account password," researcher Xinwen Fu said.
61815069
submission
mpicpp writes:
Physicists summon up their courage and go after the nature of reality.
At the very heart of quantum mechanics lies a monster waiting to consume unwary minds. This monster goes by the name The Nature of Reality. The greatest of physicists have taken one look into its mouth, saw the size of its teeth, and were consumed. Niels Bohr denied the existence of the monster after he nonchalantly (and very quietly) exited the monster's lair muttering "shut up and calculate." Einstein caught a glimpse of the teeth and fainted. He was reportedly rescued by Erwin Schrödinger at great personal risk, but neither really recovered from their encounter with the beast.
The upshot is that we had a group of physicists and philosophers who didn't believe that quantum mechanics represents reality but that it was all we could see of some deeper, more fundamental theory. A subclass of these scientists believed that the randomness of quantum mechanics would eventually be explained by some non-random, deterministic property that we simply couldn't directly observe (otherwise known as a hidden variable). Another group ended up believing that quantum mechanics did represent reality, and that, yes, reality was non-local, and possibly not very real either.
To one extent or another, these two groups are still around and still generate a fair amount of heat when they are in proximity to each other. Over the years, you would have to say that the scales have been slowly tipping in favor of the latter group. Experiments and theory have largely eliminated hidden variables. Bohm's pilot wave, a type of hidden variable, has to be pretty extraordinary to be real.
61814831
submission
mpicpp writes:
ONLINE BOOKSELLER Amazon is not keen on making changes to the operation of freemium in-app charging software sold through its application stores, according to reports.
The FTC has a good history of looking at kids and apps and separating technology firms from their money, and has recently taken Apple to task for $30m over in-app payments.
61744577
submission
mpicpp writes:
For all the flash of Apple buying Beats, Google's purchase of Songza gives it an online music service focused on anticipatory contextual playlists — key to an "Internet of Things" future.
Songza focuses on playlists curated by music experts that are designed for specific activities or ocassions and then suggested to specific listeners based on seven points of context: day of week, time of day, the device used being used, weather, location, what the particular listener has done before with the service considering those previous five points and then what all other Songza listeners have done before given the first five context points.
The prompts that Songza puts in front of listeners — looking for a playlist while working in an office or while driving home during a hot summer day? — mean Songza users volunteer information about what their doing for Songza to digest about future habits.
"There are very few services that people want to tell exactly what they're doing at any given moment," Roman said. "The thing that's really important is the ability to use data in a way that makes people's lives better."
