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Comment re:what's the benefit of privacy from the governme (Score 1) 505

by ed.han (#44477515) Attached to: Snowden and the Fate of the Internet As a Global Network
this is absolutely the wrong question to ask, though: have you never heard of innocent people being convicted of serious crimes? mistakes happen all the time. when governments make mistakes, the consequences are a whole lot more severe than when an individual does, acting on his or her own. someone seriously arguing--especially in this day & age--that having nothing to hide means the US government should be able to see anything & everything a US citizen reads/writes online betrays a fantastically naive view of governments and how they use power, irrespective of his or her particular political ideology.

Comment re: more details (Score 1) 92

by ed.han (#36995042) Attached to: Hundreds of Bank Account Details Left In London Pub
this is normal in the case of data breaches. usually, an investigation is done to determine scope/size of privacy breach. and remember the sony "what outage" story from earlier this year.

i'm mystified as to why the contractor in question isn't being named. that is an absolutely inexcusable lapse in judgment.
Iphone

Submission + - The new week likely to bring a new iPhone (skunkpost.com)

Submitted by crimeandpunishment
crimeandpunishment writes: All signs point toward Apple unveiling its newest version of the iPhone during its annual software developers conference, which begins Monday. Apple has used this conference to reveal the last two generations of the smart phone, and a lot of things have already been leaked online. But we might not get the answer to another big question this week: what is Apple's new music service?
Space

Submission + - Space X's Falcon 9 appears as UFO in Australia (abc.net.au) 1

Submitted by RobHart
RobHart writes: ABC (the Australian Broadcasting Commission) has reported extensively on a bright spiraling light that was seen in Eastern Australia just before dawn. They have just broadcast a report from an Australian astronomer who has suggested that the light was probably the successful Falcon 9 launch, which would have been over Australia at that time on its launch trajectory.

Submission + - $11 Mistake Costs Couple Slot Machine Jackpot (kdvr.com)

Submitted by ainandil
ainandil writes: Engineering mistakes, while frustrating, seldom definitively alter the end user's life. Not so in Cripple Creek Colorado — MaryAnn and Jim McMahon thought their money troubles were over when they hit an $11 million jackpot at a casino Tuesday. Before paying the jackpot, the Wildwood Casino turned the machine over to the Colorado Gaming Division for inspection. A glitch was found, aha! The Wildwood Casino blamed a slot machine malfunction for the $11 million jackpot. Total actually won by the McMahons? $1627.82. ...and you thought you had a bad day.

Submission + - How to learn data structures? 2

Submitted by stm2
stm2 writes: I have more than 15 years of programming experience with high level languages (mostly VB, PHP, Python) and most things I learned were "on the field" working solving client needs (my major is not in CS) and by self-learning. So I not a newbie but my formal education on this area is not strong (to say the least). I want to learn more on data structures (such as binary trees, composites), from a formal point of view. What book or website do you recommend for this task?

Submission + - Best way to effectively write an API

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: I began my career as a software engineer a few years ago and as my responsibilities increase i'm getting more and more requests for API's to be designed from the ground up. I work with c# as my primary language and I can design API's but its a trial and error type thing and always very awkward. What are some good practices to take into account when designing an API on paper and if there are any good books on these types of subjects and project management recommendations would be great.
Security

Submission + - Adobe Warns of Flash, PDF Zero-Day Attacks

Submitted by InfosecWarrior
InfosecWarrior writes: Adobe issued an alert late Friday night to warn about zero-day attacks against an unpatched vulnerability in its Reader and Flash Player software products. The vulnerability, described as critical, affects Adobe Flash Player 10.0.45.2 and earlier versions for Windows, Macintosh, Linux and Solaris operating systems. It also affects the authplay.dll component that ships with Adobe Reader and Acrobat 9.x for Windows, Macintosh and UNIX operating systems
Government

Submission + - U.S. Climate Satellite Capabilities in Jeopardy (wired.com)

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: The United States is in danger of losing its ability to monitor key climate variables from satellites, according to a new Government Accountability Office report.

The country’s Earth-observing satellite program has been underfunded for a decade, and the impact of the lack of funds is finally hitting home. The GAO report found that capabilities originally slated for two new Earth-monitoring programs, NPOESS and GOES-R, run by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Department of Defense have been cut and adequate plans to replace them do not exist.

Meanwhile, up until six months ago, NASA had 15 functional Earth-sensing satellites. Two of them went down in the past year, and of the remaining 13, 12 are past their design lifetimes. Only seven may be functional by 2016, said Waleed Abdalati, a longtime NASA satellite scientist now teaching at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Taken together, American scientists will soon find themselves without the ability to monitor changes to key Earth systems at a time when such measurements could help determine the paths of the world’s energy and transportation systems.
IBM

Submission + - Chip Companies Form Company to Develop Linux (xbitlabs.com)

Submitted by Nunavut
Nunavut writes: ARM, Freescale Semiconductor, IBM, Samsung, ST-Ericsson and Texas Instruments (TI), this week announced the formation of Linaro, a not-for-profit open source software engineering company dedicated to enhancing open source innovation for the next wave of always-connected, always-on computing... Linaro was formed to increase investment in open source, address the challenges in developing products for sophisticated consumer markets and provide the support of a broad array of semiconductor products from multiple companies... Linaro will work with the growing number of Linux distributions to create regular releases of optimized tools and foundation software that can be used widely by the industry, increasing compatibility across semiconductors from multiple suppliers.

Submission + - Mcdonalds, Cadmium, and Thermo Electron Niton guns (npr.org)

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: How did the Consumer Products Safety Commission find out that cadmium, a toxic metal, was present on millions of Shrek drinking glasses now being recalled by McDonald's?
  Well, an anonymous person with access to some pretty slick testing equipment tipped off Rep. Jackie Speier (D-CA) about the problem.
Her office confirmed that somebody using a Thermo Electron Niton XRF testing gun found a lot of cadmium, sometimes used in yellow pigments, on the surface of the glasses. By law, no more than 75 parts per million of cadmium is supposed to be present in paint on kids toys. Speier's office said the amount found on the glasses was quite a bit higher than that. The source overnighted glasses to Speier's office last week, which then turned over the test results and specimens to the CPSC. She got several readings of more than 1,000 ppm cadmium on her XRF gun.
Seems like the answer to a previous question about at-home science — this blogger http://www.thesmartmama.com/toxic-cadmium-prompts-cpsc-recall-of-mcdonalds-shrek-forever-after-promotional-glasses/ seems to have been one of the anonomous sources.

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