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Submission + - NSA Shuts down critics under guise of copyright violations (infowars.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: “Can a government agency block criticism by claiming copyright infringement? Sounds a bit ridiculous but it is happening. The NSA is effectively stopping one small business owner from criticism, claiming that by using its name he has infringed on their copyright,” according to a report by Infowars guest and investigative journalist Ben Swann.

Submission + - Boyfriend tracker app pulled from Google App store on privacy concerns (ibtimes.com) 1

Submitted by twitnutttt
twitnutttt writes: The NSA may be monitoring your phone and email, and retailers may be striving to automatically recognize you in their stores, but your girlfriend may be your biggest privacy threat right now. After 50,000 downloads since launch, the Brazilian "Boyfriend Tracker" app has been pulled from Google Play. It allows suspicious girlfriends to "obtain a call history, receive any incoming or outgoing text messages, identify a partner’s location on a map using GPS, and can [sic] turn on the phone to listen in to the surrounding environment. The app also lets users know when a phone is turned off or set to Airplane Mode." The various options are controlled via text message codes. If you have to track him, you probably should dump him.

Submission + - Bionic Skin: The Killer App for Flexible Electronics (ieee.org)

Submitted by the_newsbeagle
the_newsbeagle writes: Most of the researchers who work on flexible electronics imagine putting their materials to use in flexible displays, like a rollable, foldable iPad that you could cram in your pocket. And I'm not saying that wouldn't be cool. But researcher Takao Someya of the University of Tokyo has a different idea: He wants his ultra-thin, ultra-flexible electronics to be used as bionic skin.

Someya and other researchers have created circuits that stick to your skin, and that can stretch and bend as you move your body. These materials are still in the labs, but the scientists imagine many uses for them. For example, if a synthetic skin is studded with pressure and heat sensors, it could be used as a lifelike covering for prosthetic limbs. There are also potential biomedical applications: The e-skin could discreetly monitor an outpatient's vital signs, and send the data to a nearby computer.

The article includes a short vid showing Someya's material in action.

Submission + - Lord Blair: we need laws to stop 'principled' leaking of state secrets (theguardian.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Tougher laws are needed to prevent members of the public from revealing official secrets, former Metropolitan police commissioner Lord Blair has said.

The peer insisted there was material the state had to keep secret, and powers had to be in place to protect it.

The intervention comes after police seized what they said were thousands of classified documents from David Miranda – the partner of Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, who has been reporting leaks from the former US intelligence officer Edward Snowden.

The Home Office has defended the use of anti-terrorism laws to detain and question Miranda at Heathrow airport earlier this month.
Privacy

Submission + - Mega, A Secure Megaupload Replacement, To Launch Saturday (ibtimes.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Kim Dotcom has announced that he will launch "Mega," a secure, encrypted file-sharing site to replace his Megaupload.com, which was shut down last year by U.S. authorities.

"In the past, securely storing and transferring confidential information required the installation of dedicated software," Kim Dotcom's website states. "The new Mega encrypts and decrypts your data transparently in your browser, on the fly. You hold the keys to what you store in the cloud, not us."
Medicine

Submission + - Australian scientists discover potential aids cure

Submitted by smi.james.th
smi.james.th writes: Several sites report that Australian researcher David Harrich and his team have potentially discovered a way to stop HIV becoming AIDS and ultimately cure the disease. From the article: "What we've actually done is taken a normal virus protein that the virus needs to grow, and we've changed this protein, so that instead of assisting the virus, it actually impedes virus replication and does it quite strongly." This could potentially hail one of modern medicine's greatest victories.
Firefox

Submission + - Health Reports Headed to Firefox (ostatic.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Firefox Health Report (FHR) is a prototype Firefox feature that enables users to optimize their Firefox configuration and get reports on Firefox's status similar to the kinds of diagnostic information that many cars provide.
Science

Submission + - "Superomniphobic" nanoscale coating repels almost any liquid (gizmag.com) 1

Submitted by cylonlover
cylonlover writes: A team of engineering researchers at the University of Michigan has developed a nanoscale coating that causes almost all liquids to bounce off surfaces treated with it. Creating a surface structure that is least 95 percent air, the new "superomniphobic" coating is claimed to repel the broadest range of liquids of any material in its class, opening up the possibility of super stain-resistant clothing, drag-reducing waterproof paints for ship hulls, breathable garments that provide protection from harmful chemicals, and touchscreens resistant to fingerprint smudges.
Security

Submission + - New Phishing Toolkit Uses Whitelisting To 'Bounce' Non-Victims (securityledger.com)

Submitted by
chicksdaddy
chicksdaddy writes: "Researchers at RSA say that a new phishing toolkit allows attackers to put a velvet rope around scam web pages – bouncing all but the intended victims.

The new toolkit, dubbed “Bouncer,” was discovered in an analysis of attacks on financial institutions in South Africa, Australia and Malaysia in recent weeks. It allows attackers to generate a unique ID for each intended victim, then embed that in a URL that is sent to the victim. Outsiders attempting to access the phishing page are redirected to a “404 page not found” error message.

Other phishing kits have used IP address blacklists to block anti malware companies from viewing their malicious pages, but this is the first known use of whitelisting, RSA said.

The phishing attacks that RSA technicians discovered that used the Bouncer kit were designed to harvest login credentials from financial services firms. The whitelisting feature may well work, especially given the volume of potential phishing pages that security companies review each day. Getting a 404 message may be enough to get a forensic investigator or security researcher to move on to the next phishing site, rather than investigating."
China

Submission + - NASA releases orbital photos of Beijing's air polution (washingtonpost.com)

Submitted by skade88
skade88 writes: This story should remind all of us that air pollution controls are not just about addressing global warming. They also help us have cleaner air and fewer health problems resulting from smog and haze. Starting earlier this month, Beijing, China started having worse than normal air pollution issues. On Jan 14, 2013 the US Embassy's air pollution sensors in Beijing found the density of the most dangerous small air particles, PM 2.5, at 291 micrograms per cubic meter of air. The world Health Organization's guidelines for air pollution state that PM 2.5 above 25 micrograms per cubic meter of air is dangerous to a person's health.

To put the problem into perspective for anyone not living in Cloud City..... I mean Beijing, NASA has released two orbital photos of Beijing showing a before and during photo of the air pollution. The photo from Jan 4 shows parts of the Beijing still visible from space. The photo from Jan 14 shows nothing but a huge, thick cloud of haze with no buildings visible.
Twitter

Submission + - Judge Rules Twitter Images Cannot be used Commercially (reuters.com)

Submitted by trekkie314
trekkie314 writes: Reuters reports that a Manhattan District Judge has ruled that AFP and the Washington Post infringed a photographer's copyright by re-using photos he posted on his Twitter account. The judge rejected AFP's claim that a Twitter post was equivalent to making the images available for anyone to use (drawing a distinction between allowing users to re-tweet within the social network and the commercial use of content). The judge also ruled against the photographer's request that he be compensated for each person that viewed the photos, ruling instead that damages would be granted once per infringing image only. This last point should might interesting implications in file-sharing cases--can it set a precedent against massive judgements against peer-to-peer file-sharers?

From the article: "The case is Agence France Presse v. Morel, U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, No. 10-02730."

Submission + - Mac or PC? A developer's viewpoint (varonis.com)

Submitted by FreaKBeaNie
FreaKBeaNie writes: An enterprise developers' take on what it is like to develop for OSX compared with developing for Windows in .Net. "Since Mac OS X is based on the NeXTStep operating system which is a UNIX-like operating system based on the Mach Kernel and BSD, you might expect that the development environment would be very barebones. The opposite is true – we have been extremely pleased with the maturity and robustness of OS X, Xcode, Objective C and Cocoa...Cocoa is at least as powerful as .NET, if not more powerful in some aspects. As in .NET, support for common things like UI, file management, localization and multi-threading are built into the framework and are very easy to make use of. "
AI

Submission + - IBM's Watson Gets A 'Swear Filter' After Learning The Urban Dictionary (ibtimes.com) 1

Submitted by
redletterdave
redletterdave writes: "IBM's super-computer Watson briefly went from "smart" to "smart ass" with the help of the Urban Dictionary. According to Eric Brown, an IBM research assistant, he and his 35-person team wanted to get Watson to sound more like a real human. After teaching IBM's super-computer the entire Urban Dictionary, however, Watson simply couldn't distinguish polite discourse from profanity. Watson unfortunately learned all of the Urban Dictionary's bad habits, including throwing in overly-crass language at random points in its responses; in answering one question, Watson even reportedly used the word "bullshit" within an answer to one researcher's question. In the end, Brown and his team were forced to remove the Urban Dictionary from Watson's vocabulary, and additionally developed a smart filter to keep Watson from swearing in the future."
Windows

Submission + - Symbian Sells Millions, Despite Nokia Pushing Windows Phone (slashdot.org)

Submitted by
Nerval's Lobster
Nerval's Lobster writes: "During the fourth quarter of 2012, Nokia sold 4.4 million Lumia smartphones—a significant rise from the previous quarter, which featured sales of 2.9 million Lumia devices. The Lumia line runs Microsoft’s Windows Phone operating system, which largely replaced Symbian as Nokia’s smartphone software of choice. Despite that shift and Nokia's emphasis on Windows Phone, however, the company still sold 2.2 million Symbian smartphones during the quarter. The question remains whether Nokia should have gone with Windows Phone in the first place, or embraced an alternate platform such as Android; an anti-Elop camp has emerged in recent months, arguing that Symbian was still a viable platform before Elop consigned it to the dustbin of tech history. For now at least, both sides seem to be right: Symbian still sells despite Nokia’s attempts to take it increasingly offline, and Lumia phones are selling well. It’ll take more time—perhaps a lot more time—before the ramifications of Elop’s bet become clear."
Science

Submission + - Sniffing Out Signs of Life After Disasters (acs.org)

Submitted by
MTorrice
MTorrice writes: "With every breath, people exhale a plume of chemicals. Now German researchers have developed a method to quickly and easily detect this chemical signature of life with a portable device. The team hopes that the approach can help firefighters and other first responders find people trapped inside rubble after earthquakes, terrorist attacks, or other calamities."

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