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Submission + - Top NSA official raised alarm about metadata program in 2009 (sltrib.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Dissenters within the National Security Agency, led by a senior agency executive, warned in 2009 that the program to secretly collect American phone records wasnâ(TM)t providing enough intelligence to justify the backlash it would cause if revealed, current and former intelligence officials say.

The NSA took the concerns seriously, and many senior officials shared them. But after an internal debate that has not been previously reported, NSA leaders, White House officials and key lawmakers opted to continue the collection and storage of American calling records, a domestic surveillance program without parallel in the agencyâ(TM)s recent history.

Submission + - Amazon's Manhattan Retail Store is Actually an Office, Not a Store (the-digital-reader.com)

Submitted by Nate the greatest
Nate the greatest writes: It looks like all that talk last month of Amazon opening a brick and mortar store in New York City may be coming to naught. A new report reveals that Amazon is renting 470,000 sq. ft of office space in Manhattan at 7 West 34th St. That's a huge amount of space which will take up the entirety of the 12-story building. That's far more space than Amazon would need for a store (it's 3 times the size of a Walmart store), so it looks like those rumors about Amazon opening a brick and mortar store are still rumors.

Submission + - Obama offer to 5m illegal migrants

Submitted by mrspoonsi
mrspoonsi writes: Nearly five million people living illegally in the US can escape deportation under sweeping changes to the US immigration system. US President Barack Obama will unveil his plan, which he is enacting without Congress, in a televised address. Republicans have argued the action is beyond his authority and will fight it. There are about 11m illegal immigrants in the US and this year unaccompanied children coming across the Mexico border prompted a humanitarian crisis. "The president is taking an important step to fix our broken immigration system," said a White House statement before Mr Obama's speech, due at 2000EST (0100GMT).

Submission + - Greenwald Advises Market-Based Solution to Mass Surveillance (firstlook.org)

Submitted by Nicola Hahn
Nicola Hahn writes: In his latest Intercept piece Glenn Greenwald considers the recent defeat of the Senate's USA Freedom Act. He remarks that governments "don’t walk around trying to figure out how to limit their own power." Instead of appealing to an allegedly irrelevant Congress Greenwald advocates utilizing the power of consumer demand to address the failings of cyber security. Specifically he argues that companies care about their bottom line and that the trend of customers refusing to tolerate insecure products will force companies to protect user privacy, implement encryption, etc.

All told Greenwald’s argument is very telling: that society can rely on corporate interests for protection. Is it true that representative government is a lost cause and that lawmakers would never knowingly yield authority? Looking back at the past couple of decades have Silicon Valley companies demonstrated that they view security as anything other than a marketing scheme? Noise for rubes. After all of the lies can we trust hi-tech vendors to be honest? There are people who think that advising citizens to devolve into consumers is a dubious proposition.

Submission + - Open air laser communication at up to 2.5tb/s speed (gizmag.com)

Submitted by Taco Cowboy
Taco Cowboy writes: A proof of concept open-air data-transmission experiment using laser beam was run at Vienna, Austria just the other day

Researchers from the University of Vienna beamed a green laser mounted on a radar tower at the Central Institute for Meteorology and Geodynamics, which was aimed at a receiver at the University of Vienna 3 km (1.8 mi) away, with a twist

The latest twist is based on the Orbital Angular Momentum of light or OAM, which allows a beam of a particular color – or wavelength – to be twisted into a corkscrew shape to increase the number of potential communication channels available. So rather than one wavelength of light serving as a single channel, each of the theoretically infinite number of turns acts as a separate communication channel

The light beam was configured into 16 patterns corresponding to binary numbers. These were used to encode grey-scale images of Wolfgang-Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig Boltzmann, and Erwin Schrödinger, which were the subjects of the transmission. At the receiver, a camera picked up the beam, which was fed into an artificial neural network to filter out atmospheric interference. In terms of individual photons of light, it means that instead of spinning like the Earth around its own axis, their energy traces out a spiral. It is the same sort of momentum that sees the Earth orbit the sun, but the photons are also moving forward at the speed of light. That corkscrew-like motion is useful because instead of just having two possible directions like polarisation (clockwise or anticlockwise), it can turn in either direction with a potentially infinite number of twists — much like a screw with multiple threads. This is why physicists have been investigating whether twisted light could help transmit information very quickly: each twist configuration could be its own channel, just like different colours of light inside an optical fiber

The team sees a number of applications for the technology, including satellite and other open air channels. In addition, the quantum nature of the light twists would make eavesdropping very difficult. Encryption keys, for example, could be sent securely because trying to read the beam in flight would alter its quantum state and destroy the data. "We have shown for the first time that information can be encoded onto twisted light and sent through a 3 km intra-city link with strong turbulences," says team member Mario Krenn. "The OAM of light is theoretically unbounded, meaning that one has, in theory, an unlimited amount of different distinguishable states in which light can be encoded. It is envisaged that this additional degree of freedom could significantly increase data-rates in classical communication”

BBC also carries the news @ http://www.bbc.com/news/scienc...

Submission + - fake Price Comparison fools Walmart (clarkhoward.com)

Submitted by turkeydance
turkeydance writes: People are reportedly creating fake Amazon pages to show fake prices on electronics and other items. In the most heavily publicized cases, Walmart was reportedly duped into selling $400 PlayStation 4 consoles for under $100.

Here's how this scam has played out: The perpetrators create fake Amazon pages and show these fake listings to Walmart cashiers (and ultimately to store managers) in an attempt to con them into matching the phantom prices.

Submission + - Intel planning thumb-sized PCs for next year (computerworld.com.au)

Submitted by angry tapir
angry tapir writes: Intel is shrinking PCs to thumb-sized "compute sticks" that will be out next year. The stick will plug into the back of a smart TV or monitor "and bring intelligence to that," said Kirk Skaugen, senior vice president and general manager of the PC Client Group at Intel, during the Intel investor conference in Santa Clara, California.

Submission + - Arctic faces an ice-pocalypse (sciencemag.org) 1

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Thick sheets of ice coating roads, homes, and pastures. Dead reindeer, no radio transmissions, and flights canceled for days. When ice came to this Arctic mining outpost on the Svalbard archipelago two winters ago, it crippled the community for weeks and devastated wildlife for months. Now, scientists are saying such weather extremes in the Arctic—known as rain-on-snow events—may become more frequent in the future.

Comment Re:So close, so far (Score 1) 561

by BarbaraHudson (#48427453) Attached to: "Barbie: I Can Be a Computer Engineer" Pulled From Amazon

Barbie is in decline world-wide.

For nearly 70 years, Barbie has ruled the dollhouse. But Mattel’s star may now be a relic of the past. Mattel shares sank slightly on Thursday morning after the company announced a net loss of $11.2 million and shrinking sales – $946 million, down 5% compared last year. The company’s biggest problem was its declining Barbie sales. Worldwide gross sales for the brand were down 14%.

... and ...

The sharp decline was especially disappointing as Barbie is still Mattel’s biggest single brand, generating $1.15 billion in 2013 sales, according to Needham & Co. analyst Sean McGowan.

Barbie’s North American sales have now fallen for eight straight quarters, and worldwide sales have dropped in eight of the past 10 quarters, according to McGowan.

Barbie’s popularity slide has come at a time of shifting demographics.

"Barbie is sort of stuck with its own fame as a blond girl, which just doesn’t resonate with girls anymore," said Matthew Hudak, an analyst in toys and games at research firm Euromonitor.

Mattel has tried to address the issue with Barbies from different ethnic backgrounds, but it’s difficult to change consumer perception of the doll, he said.

"Barbie is just going to continue to be hard to relate to. It doesn’t look like it’s in for a fun ride the next few years," Hudak said.

Barbie also has been hurt by the marketing to girls of toys that were once geared only toward boys, such as Hasbro’s Nerf Rebelle, a feminine spin on the classic Nerf foam-dart shooter.

"Maybe Mattel should be more conscious of gender neutrality?" said Jamie Gutfreund, chief marketing officer at Noise and The Intelligence Group, adding the majority of young parents it surveyed are okay with boys playing with dolls.

While over a billion in sales is nothing to sneeze at, the fact that it's declining despite attempts to enlarge and diversify the market is significant. Mattel is now marketling Barbies to the parents, not the kids - kids just aren't asking for them any more. They want an iPod, an iPad, a Nerf gun, a Smartphone ...

Submission + - Thousands of Compromised Joomla, WordPress Plugins and Themes Used in Attack

Submitted by Trailrunner7
Trailrunner7 writes: Researchers have discovered a group of attackers who have published a variety of compromised WordPress themes and plug-ins on legitimate-looking sites, tricking developers into downloading and installing them on their own sites. The components then give the attackers remote control of the compromised sites and researchers say the attack may have been ongoing since September 2013.

CryptoPHP is the name the researchers have given to the malware that’s delivered with the compromised components, and the backdoor has a number of capabilities. It carries with it several hardcoded domains for command-and-control communications and uses RSA encryption to protect its communications with the C2 servers. Some versions also have a backup ability to communicate over email if the C2 domains are taken down. The PHPCrypto malware can update itself, inject content into the compromised sites it sits on and perform several other functions.

But the main purpose of the malware is to conduct blackhat SEO operations. The goal of these campaigns is to jack up the rank of sites controlled by the attackers, or their customers, which helps them look legitimate. This is done sometimes for gambling sites or similar sites and can also be tied to other scams.

The researchers have traced the attack to an IP address in Moldova, and the C2 servers are located in the Netherlands, Germany, Poland and the United States. Fox-IT said that they have identified thousands of plug-ins that have been backdoored, including both WordPress and Joomla plug-ins and themes and Drupal themes.

Submission + - Connecting The Next 1.5 Billion People by 2020 On Mobile Internet Won't Be Easy

Submitted by dkatana
dkatana writes: While the number of Internet users in the wealthy world will rise slowly, in developing countries, the number will double from 1.5 billion to 3 billion connected users by 2020.

This is an opportunity companies such as Facebook, Twitter and Google are eager to take, some with controversial marketing tactics, like giving "free rides" to users that can't afford data plans.

While bringing Internet to half the world's population will improve their quality of life we need new business models, such as cheap smartphones, decent infrastructure, and free WiFi for everyone.

Comment Re:Or... (Score 1) 114

by BarbaraHudson (#48423653) Attached to: Blowing On Money To Tell If It Is Counterfeit

Or you could just use plastic money like we developed here in Australia. Either way.

... and Canada ...

As long as you use paper instead of polymer, anyone with a printer will try to make fakes. Plus the plastic bills last longer, saving money in the long run.

Of course, we replaced the $1 and $2 bills with coins ages ago, and will probably replace the $5 bill as well at some point ...

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