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Submission + - Ask Jennifer Granick What You Will

Submitted by samzenpus
samzenpus writes: Jennifer Granick was one of the primary crafters of a 2006 exception to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and served as the EFF's Civil Liberties Director. She has represented many high profile hackers during her career and was sought out by Aaron Swartz after his arrest. She currently serves as the Director of Civil Liberties for the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School. Jennifer has agreed to answer your questions about security, electronic surveillance, data protection, copyright, and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Please limit yourself to one question per post.

Submission + - Interviews: Ask Travis Kalanick About Startups and Uber

Submitted by samzenpus
samzenpus writes: Travis Kalanick founded Scour, where he had the distinction of being sued for $250 billion by more than 30 media companies, and peer-to-peer file-sharing company Red Swoosh, but he is probably best known for cofounding transportation network company Uber. Seeking to be “Everyone’s Private Driver”, Uber operates in a number of cities world-wide but has met with some regulation issues, and controversy. Travis has agreed to take a break from arranging rides and answer your questions. Normal Slashdot interview rules apply.

Submission + - Bosch and Siemens Want To Control All Appliances (eetimes.com)

Submitted by Full_Privacy
Full_Privacy writes: Bosch’s Home Connect app, expected to be available later this year, will control appliances, not only from Bosch and Siemens but from other brands as well, according to Claudia Häpp, digital transition project leader for Home Connect at the BSH group, the holding company that owns Bosch and Siemens.

Submission + - Florida driver arrested for cell phone jamming on commute (yahoo.com)

Submitted by Mentate
Mentate writes: A 60 year old Florida resident was recently arrested for signal jamming FCC violations. Permanently unable to stand the thought of people talking or texting while on the road, The man used a signal jamming device to prevent any cell phone calls from being made or texts from being sent from cars near him. He did this every day on his morning commute, for 2 years! He was caught when a local phone company noticed the odd service drop on the same stretch of highway every day at the same time and reported this to the FCC. Local police knew that his car was the guilty one because as they approached it their radio contact with the dispatcher cut out due to his jammer. He has been fined 48,000 dollars due to these violations.

Submission + - New Cologne Answers the Question: "What Does A Bitcoin Smell Like?"

Submitted by samzenpus
samzenpus writes: You may not be Satoshi Nakamoto, but thanks to Virginia-based eco-products company Eruditium, you can now smell like him, her, or them. They claim Bitcologne is "made for peer-to-peer interaction” adding, "It's an aromatic blend of spicy, floral, oak and citrus notes your 'partner' may find it hard to resist initiating a more private transaction.’” A bottle costs about $26 or 0.0608 Bitcoin.

Submission + - China Using Troop of Trained Monkeys to Guard Air Base

Submitted by samzenpus
samzenpus writes: No, they don't have guns and they're not trained to call down airstrikes. Instead the small troop of macaques have been trained to guard air bases from birds who often get caught in aircraft engines. Government sources say the monkeys have proven more effective than netting, scarecrows, firecrackers and soldiers with live ammunition in dealing with birds. From the article: 'The macaques are trained to respond to precise whistle commands from their handlers, according to the Chinese military, leaping into action, clambering up trees to destroy nests and scare away birds, according to an account on China’s Air Force News Web site on Sunday. The particular air force base employing the monkeys was left unidentified, described simply as being in the Beijing military zone. Base commanders in the account said the monkeys have destroyed more than 180 nests, at a pace of six to eight nests per monkey per day.'

Submission + - Richard Stallman Answers Your Questions

Submitted by samzenpus
samzenpus writes: A while ago you had the chance to ask GNU and Free Software Foundation founder Richard Stallman about GNU, copyright laws, digital restrictions management, and software patents. Below you'll find his answers to those questions.

Submission + - Ask Stewart Brand About Protecting Resources and Reviving Extinct Species

Submitted by samzenpus
samzenpus writes: Stewart Brand trained as a biologist at Stanford, was associated with Ken Kesey and the "Merry Pranksters", and served as an Infantry officer in the U.S. Army. His books include Whole Earth Discipline: The Rise of Ecopragmatism, The Clock of the Long Now, How Buildings Learn, and The Media Lab. He is the founder/editor of the Whole Earth Catalog, the co-founder of The Long Now Foundation, The WELL, and the Global Business Network. His latest project, Revive & Restore, may be his most ambitious yet. Revive and Restore aims to bring back extinct species and provide genetic rescue for endangered species that are spiraling down with inbreeding problems. Mr. Brand has agreed to answer any questions you may have but please limit yourself to one question per post.

Submission + - Interview: Ask Ben Starr About the future of food

Submitted by samzenpus
samzenpus writes: Ben Starr is a chef, travel writer, reality TV star, wine and beer brewer, cheesemaker,and ultimate food geek. Ben traveled all 7 continents in his early 20s, staying with local families and learning to cook the cuisines of the world in home kitchens and local markets. FRANK, his underground Dallas restaurant, has a waitlist of 3,000 and reservations are selected by random lottery. He is a passionate local and sustainable food advocate. Ben is a flag waver for the new generation of chefs who embrace modern technology, and his Camp Potluck feeds hundreds of hungry Burning Man attendees every year. Ben has agreed to put down his chef's knife and answer your questions. As usual, ask as many as you'd like, but please, one question per post.

Submission + - Ask Team Trying To return 36-year-old spacecraft from space about their project

Submitted by samzenpus
samzenpus writes: Last week we told you about a group that was trying to recover the 36-year-old ISEE-3 spacecraft from deep space. Led by CEO and founder of Skycorp, Dennis Wingo, and astrobiologist and editor of NASA Watch, Keith Cowing, the crowdfunded project plans to steer ISEE-3 back into an Earth orbit and return it to scientific operations. The team has agreed to take some time from lassoing spacecraft from deep space in order to answer your questions. As usual, ask as many as you'd like, but please, one question per post. Hopefully the plan goes better than xkcd predicts.

Submission + - Reinventing the Axe (geek.com)

Submitted by Nerval's Lobster
Nerval's Lobster writes: The axe has been with us for thousands of years, with its design changing very little during that time. After all, how much can you really alter a basic blade-and-handle? Well, Finnish inventor Heikki Karna has tried to change it a whole lot, with a new, oddly-shaped axe that he claims is a whole lot safer because it transfers a percentage of downward force into rotational energy, cutting down on deflections. "The Vipukirves [as the axe is called] still has a sharpened blade at the end, but it has a projection coming off the side that shifts the center of gravity away from the middle. At the point of impact, the edge is driven into the wood and slows down, but the kinetic energy contained in the 1.9 kilogram axe head continues down and to the side (because of the odd center of gravity)," is how Geek.com describes the design. "The rotational energy actually pushes the wood apart like a lever." The question is, will everyone pick up on this new way of doing things?

Submission + - 1Password (Agilebits) was affected by Heartbleed

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: They claim on their blog that they were not affected by Heartbleed unlike their competitor (LastPass) but in fact they were.

Going to https://agilebits.com/onepassw... and looking at the certificate issue date (4/10/2014) indicates they reissued it recently.

Additionally their own discussion forum admin admits they had to patch their OpenSSL on their website. http://discussions.agilebits.c...

So a malicious attacker could have stolen their main websites wild-card key and certificate to impersonate their website and trick people into downloading software with malware instead.

They were the same as LastPass in that user password data wasn't compromised, but LastPass was more transparent about it.

http://discussions.agilebits.c...

Hi @Quantumpanda,

Our website (agilebits.com) has been fixed with the patched version of OpenSSL, and is using a newly issued SSL certificate.

The forum (discussions.agilebits.com) does not use SSL (as you can see by looking at the URL, it's http), thus is not affected. With that said, we should be using SSL on the forum as well, and we're looking into it.

http://blog.agilebits.com/2014...

Submission + - The FBI Gamified the Hunt For One of Its Most Wanted (vice.com)

Submitted by Daniel_Stuckey
Daniel_Stuckey writes: The FBI just gamified its latest manhunt. As I was just scanning the bureau's many twitter feeds, I saw a couple of fresh tweets reporting that William Bradford Bishop, Jr. had just been added to the bureau's most wanted list.

When I clicked on the tweet that offered a photo gallery of Bishop, the 'Family Annihilator,' some studio-lit photos of this gallery-quality clay bust were far beyond the everyday mug shots I'd expected.

"Am I'm picking out which glasses my character in GTA will wear?" I thought as I looked at artist Karen Taylor's masterful 3D rendering of Bishop. Bishop is a man who has been a fugitive for almost 40 years (he's 77 now, and Taylor age-processed him to look that old) after allegedly killing his mother, his wife, and their three sons in Bethesda, Md. Bishop, a former Foreign Service officer for the State Department, is described by the FBI as "highly intelligent," and investigators on his case believe he could be hiding in plain sight.

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