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Government

Woman Behind Pakistan's First Hackathon, Sabeen Mahmud, Shot Dead 494

Posted by samzenpus from the trying-to-silence-the-future dept.
An anonymous reader sends word that Sabeen Mahmud, a prominent Pakistani social and human rights activist, has been shot dead. The progressive activist and organizer who ran Pakistan's first-ever hackathon and led a human rights and a peace-focused nonprofit known as The Second Floor (T2F) was shot dead by unidentified gunmen in Karachi. Sabeen Mahmud was leaving the T2F offices with her mother some time after 9pm on Friday evening, reports the Pakistani newspaper Dawn. She was on her way home when she was shot, the paper reports. Her mother also sustained bullet wounds and is currently being treated at a hospital; she is said to be in critical condition.

Comment The things that scares the bejeesus out of me... (Score 1) 477

...is that people like this don't realize the implications of technology on his 'fantasy' of how things could be.

I don't want my autonomous car talking to ANYTHING that I don't control/manage/filter. I don't care what some unknown car reported, I don't trust that car. I'm no member of the tinfoil hat brigade, but I do work in software security and I assure you - IT IS INSANE to presume that ANY automaker is going to produce software that isn't trivially easy to pwn in the next decade. They all roll their own solutions (or have someone produce a custom solution) and using cryptography as an example - don't roll your own, even if you *really* know what you're doing, you're likely to regret it.
Software

Developers and the Fear of Apple 269

Posted by Soulskill from the think-different-except-about-us dept.
An anonymous reader writes: UI designer Eli Schiff has posted an article about the "climate of fear" surrounding Apple in the software development community. He points out how developers who express criticism in an informal setting often recant when their words are being recorded, and how even moderate public criticism is often prefaced by flattery and endorsements.

Beyond that, the industry has learned that they can't rely on Apple's walled garden to make a profit. The opaque app review process, the race to the bottom on pricing, and Apple's resistance to curation of the App Store are driving "independent app developers into larger organizations and venture-backed startups." Apple is also known to cut contact with developers if they release for Android first. The "climate of fear" even affects journalists, who face not only stonewalling from Apple after negative reporting, but also a brigade of Apple fans and even other journalists trying to paint them as anti-Apple.
Facebook

Man Claiming Half Ownership of Facebook Is Now a Fugitive 163

Posted by samzenpus from the poke-on-the-run dept.
alphadogg writes Paul D. Ceglia, who was arrested in 2012 for defrauding Facebook on the claim that he owns half the company, is now a fugitive. Ceglia cut off his electronic monitoring bracelet some time around last Friday and left home in violation of the conditions of his bail, court papers said. Ceglia claimed in a 2010 lawsuit that he was entitled to half ownership of Facebook under a 2003 contract with Mark Zuckerberg, who had done programming work for Ceglia's StreetFax.com.
Space

NASA's Spitzer Team Releases Highest-resolution View of the Full Galactic Plane 38

Posted by samzenpus from the we're-going-to-need-a-bigger-screen dept.
StartsWithABang writes From our vantage point within the Milky Way, most of our 200-400 billion stars are obscured by the dust lanes present within. But thanks to its views in infrared light, the Spitzer Space Telescope can glimpse not only all of the stars and the dust simultaneously, it can do it at an alarming resolution. Recently, NASA has put together a 360 panorama of more than 2,000,000 Spitzer images taken from 2003-2014, and one astrophysicist has gone and stitched them together into a single, 180,000-pixel-long viewable experience that shows less than 3% of the sky, but nearly 50% of its stars.
Biotech

New Advance Confines GMOs To the Lab Instead of Living In the Wild 130

Posted by timothy from the we've-decided-to-put-this-in-everyone dept.
BarbaraHudson (3785311) writes In Jurassic Park, scientists tweak dinosaur DNA so that the dinosaurs were lysine-deficient in order to keep them from spreading in the wild. Scientists have taken this one step further as a way to keep genetically modified E. coli from surviving outside the lab. In modifying the bacteria's DNA to thwart escape, two teams altered the genetic code to require amino acids not found in nature. One team modified the genes that coded for proteins crucial to cell functions so that that produced proteins required the presence of the synthetic amino acid in the protein itself. The other team focused on 22 genes deemed essential to a bacterial cell's functions and tied the genes' expression to the presence of synthetic amino acids. For the bacteria to survive, these synthetic amino acids had to be present in the medium on which the bacteria fed. In both cases, the number of escapees was so small as to be undetectable."

Comment Re:Just keep it away from Gentoo and I'm good (Score 1) 551

by Assmasher (#48829687) Attached to: Systemd's Lennart Poettering: 'We Do Listen To Users'

No he doesn't. He addresses a specific negative attribution about systemd in that it is anti-UNIX because it keeps everything in one repository. He doesn't claim that this is the only reason anyone states it is anti-UNIX.

He's certainly being selective in what he is addressing, but surely he can't be expected to discuss everything anyone ever complained about involving systemd in this interview...?

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