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Submission + - On Learning to Think Like A Programmer

Submitted by danspalding
danspalding writes: I'm an adult educator who's posted here before, about my book "How to Teach Adults". Now I'm learning to code to (hopefully) make quality adult ed available to more people around the world. And it's been hard. But I recently used my adult learning expertise to make a breakthrough in my ability to think like a programmer. So what does Slashdot think? What does thinking like a programmer mean to you — and how did you learn to do so?

Submission + - The Misleading Fliers Comcast Used to Kill Off a Local Internet Competitor

Submitted by Jason Koebler
Jason Koebler writes: In the months and weeks leading up to a referendum vote that would have established a locally owned fiber network in three small Illinois cities, Comcast and SBC (now AT&T) bombarded residents and city council members with disinformation, exaggerations, and outright lies to ensure the measure failed.
The series of two-sided postcards painted municipal broadband as a foolhardy endeavor unfit for adults, responsible people, and perhaps as not something a smart woman would do. Municipal fiber was a gamble, a high-wire act, a game, something as "SCARY" as a ghost. Why build a municipal fiber network, one asked, when "internet service [is] already offered by two respectable private businesses?" In the corner, in tiny print, each postcard said "paid for by SBC" or "paid for by Comcast."

Submission + - Cellphone Unlocking Bill Has One Big Gotcha (itworld.com) 2

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: The cellphone unlocking bill that passed in the House of Representatives on Friday, and which President Obama said he would sign, comes with a catch that will likely prevent you from switching carriers — at least right away: Your existing wireless contract takes precedence over the law. So if your wireless contract says that you can't unlock your phone until your contract expires, you can't do it.

Submission + - U.S. Coastal Flooding on the Rise, Government Study Finds (nytimes.com)

Submitted by mdsolar
mdsolar writes: Flooding is increasing in frequency along much of the U.S. coast, and the rate of increase is accelerating along the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic coasts, a team of federal government scientists found in a study released Monday.

The study examined how often 45 tide gauges along the country’s shore exceeded National Weather Service flood thresholds across several decades. The researchers found that the frequency of flooding increased at 41 locations. Moreover, they found that the rate of increase was accelerating at 28 of those locations. The highest rates of increase were concentrated along the mid-Atlantic coast.

Submission + - Better Living Through Data (ifweassume.com)

Submitted by jradavenport
jradavenport writes: Using 2 years of continuous (every 1 minute) monitoring of my MacBook Air battery usage, I have been able to study my own computer use patterns in amazing detail. This dataset includes 293k measurements, or more than 204 days of use over 2 years. I use the laptop more than 50hours per week on average, and my most productive day is Tuesday. Changes in my work/life balance have begun to appear over the 2 year span, and I am curious if such data can help inform how much computer use is healthy/effective.

Submission + - A 24-Year-Old Scammed Apple 42 Times In 16 Different States (businessinsider.com) 1

Submitted by redletterdave
redletterdave writes: Sharron Laverne Parrish Jr., 24, allegedly scammed Apple not once, but 42 times, cheating the company out of more than $300,000 — and his scam was breathtakingly simple. According to a Secret Service criminal complaint, Parrish allegedly visited Apple Stores and tried to buy products with four different debit cards, which were all closed by his respective financial institutions. When his debit card was inevitably declined by the Apple Store, he would protest and offer to call his bank — except, he wasn’t really calling his bank. So he would allegedly offer the Apple Store employees a fake authorization code with a certain number of digits, which is normally provided by credit card issuers to create a record of the credit or debit override. But that’s the problem with this system: as long as the number of digits is correct, the override code itself doesn’t matter.

Submission + - Free Active Phishing Sites Repository Launched (softpedia.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A new source for checking the latest active phishing websites, called OpenPhish, has become available online, from FraudSense, a company that offers anti-phishing intelligence services. OpenPhish is similar to PhishTank in that it provides real-time information about the URLs that have been identified as phishing. But the difference consists in the fact that it provides the targeted brand on the main page and, more importantly, it offers intelligence about the cyber crooks, collected from FraudSense’s systems.

Submission + - A Fictional Compression Metric Moves Into the Real World (ieee.org)

Submitted by Tekla Perry
Tekla Perry writes: The "Weissman Score"—created for HBO's Silicon Valley to add dramatic flair to the show's race to build the best compression algorithm—creates a single score by considering both the amount of compression and the compression speed. While it was created for a TV show, it does really work, and it's quickly migrating into academia. Computer science and engineering students will begin to encounter the Weissman Score in the classroom this fall.

Submission + - New Findings On Graphene As A Conductor With IC Components

Submitted by ClockEndGooner
ClockEndGooner writes: Philadelphia's NPR affiliate, WHYY FM, reported today on their Newsworks program that a research team at the University of Pennsylvania have released their preliminary findings on the use of graphene as a conductor in the next generation of computer chips. "It's very, very strong mechanically, and it is an excellent electronic material that might be used in future computer chips," said Charlie Johnson, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Pennsylvania. From the article: Future graphene transistors, Johnson said, are likely to be only tens of atoms across.

Submission + - A Personal Electronic Aura Could be the Answer to Password Hell (ibtimes.co.uk)

Submitted by DavidGilbert99
DavidGilbert99 writes: Imagine using chips implanted in accessories like glasses, shoes and belts — or even under your skin — to generate a personal electronic aura. This would be your own personal safe zone, and only inside this would your electronics work, including a device which logs and stores thousands of passwords. This is the vision of a Cambridge University professor who wants to create an Electronic Aura for everyone.

Submission + - State governments consider regulating digital currency (pewtrusts.org) 1

Submitted by SonicSpike
SonicSpike writes: Now that consumers can use digital currencies like bitcoin to buy rugs from Overstock.com, pay for Peruvian pork sandwiches from a food truck in Washington, D.C. and even make donations to political action committees, states are beginning to explore how to regulate the emerging industry.

Digital currencies — also known as virtual currencies or cash for the Internet —allow people to transfer value over the Internet, but are not legal tender. Because they don’t require third-party intermediaries such as credit card companies or PayPal, merchants and consumers can avoid the fees typically associated with traditional payment systems.

Advocates of virtual currencies also say that because personal information is not tied to transactions, digital currencies are less prone to identity theft.

With about $7.8 billion in circulation, bitcoin is the most widely used digital currency; others include Litecoin and Peercoin. All are examples of cryptocurrencies, a subset of digital currencies that rely on cryptography to function.

“As far as we know, most state laws are completely silent on this topic,” said David J. Cotney, chairman of the Conference of State Bank Supervisors’ Emerging Payments Task Force, which in March began exploring virtual currency.

Among the questions the task force will consider, Cotney said, is whether bitcoins should be classified as currencies, investment securities or commodities, which could determine which regulators should apply.

New York became the first state to propose regulations for the digital currency industry when it unveiled earlier this month a broad-ranging proposal that aims to address consumer protection, money laundering and cybersecurity.

Until recently, California prohibited the use of alternative currencies. Last month, Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown signed legislation to allow the use of alternative currencies, including digital currencies.

The Texas Department of Banking said in April Texas will not treat bitcoin and other digital currencies as money. “What it means, from our perspective, is just simply that it’s not money for the purposes of money transmission or currency exchange,” said Daniel Wood, an assistant general counsel in the department. “A bitcoin is basically property.” However, most bitcoin exchanges would be considered money transmitters and exchanging digital currency for sovereign currency would in most cases be considered money transmission.

Last month, the Kansas Office of the State Bank Commissioner issued a guidance that, like Texas, concluded that digital currencies are not considered money under the Kansas Money Transmitter Act.

Submission + - Internet Census 2012 Data Examined: Authentic but Chaotic and Unetical (sigcomm.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A team of researchers at the TU Berlin and RWTH Aachen presented an analysis of the Internet Census 2012 data set in the July edition of the ACM Sigcomm Computer Communication Review journal. After its release on March 17, 2013 by an anonymous author, the Internet Census data created an immediate media buzz, mainly due to its unethical data collection methodology that exploited default passwords to form the Carna botnet.
The now published analysis suggests that the released data set is authentic and not faked, but also reveals a rather chaotic picture. The Census suffers from a number of methodological flaws and also lacks meta-data information, which renders the data unusable for many further analyses. As a result, the researchers have not been able to verify several claims that the anonymous author(s) made in the published Internet Census report. The researchers also point to similar but legal efforts measuring the Internet and remark that the illegally measured Internet Census 2012 is not only unethical but might have been overrated by the press.

Submission + - U.K. team claims breakthrough in universal cancer test (scienceblog.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: U.K. researchers say they've devised a simple blood test that can be used to diagnose whether people have cancer or not. The Lymphocyte Genome Sensitivity (LGS) test looks at white blood cells and measures the damage caused to their DNA when subjected to different intensities of ultraviolet light (UVA), which is known to damage DNA. The results of the empirical study show a distinction between the damage to the white blood cells from patients with cancer, with pre-cancerous conditions and from healthy patients. “Whilst the numbers of people we tested are, in epidemiological terms, quite small (208), in molecular epidemiological terms, the results are powerful," said the team's lead researcher. "We’ve identified significant differences between the healthy volunteers, suspected cancer patients and confirmed cancer patients of mixed ages at a statistically significant level .... This means that the possibility of these results happening by chance is 1 in 1000." The research is published online in the FASEB Journal, the US Journal of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology.

Submission + - Attackers Install DDoS Bots On Amazon Cloud (itworld.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: Attackers are exploiting a vulnerability in distributed search engine software Elasticsearch to install DDoS malware on Amazon and possibly other cloud servers. Last week security researchers from Kaspersky Lab found new variants of Mayday, a Trojan program for Linux that's used to launch distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. The malware supports several DDoS techniques, including DNS amplification. One of the new Mayday variants was found running on compromised Amazon EC2 server instances, but this is not the only platform being misused, said Kaspersky Lab researcher Kurt Baumgartner Friday in a blog post.

Submission + - Google's mapping service under scanner in India (thenewsreports.com)

Submitted by hypnosec
hypnosec writes: The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), India has ordered for a preliminary enquiry (PE) against Google for violating Indian laws by mapping sensitive areas and defence installations in the country. As per the PE, registered on the basis of a complaint made by Surveyor General of India’s office to the Union Home Ministry, Google has been accused of organizing a mapping competition dubbed ‘Mapathon’ in February-March 2013 without taking prior permission from Survey of India, country’s official mapping agency. The mapping competition required citizens to map their neighbourhoods, especially details related to hospitals and restaurants. The Survey of India (SoI), alarmed by the event, asked the company to share its event details. While going through the details the watch dog found that there were several coordinates having details of sensitive defence installations which are out of the public domain.

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The only possible interpretation of any research whatever in the `social sciences' is: some do, some don't. -- Ernest Rutherford

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