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Submission + - James Dyson: We Should Pay Students to Study Engineering (ibtimes.co.uk)

Submitted by DavidGilbert99
DavidGilbert99 writes: The inventor of the bagless vacuum cleaner believes there is an engineering crisis in the UK and that 61,000 vacancies in the area will go unfilled in 2014. TO address this Dyson believes says he wants the UK government to offer monetary incentives to students with an interest and aptitude in science — as well as changing the current visa system to make it easier for foreign students to remain in the country and get work once they have completed their education in the UK.

Submission + - Apple Offers No Solution for iPhone 4S Wifi Breakdowns

Submitted by crywalt
crywalt writes: It seems that thousands of iPhone 4S owners around the world have encountered a problem where their phone can no longer connect to any wifi. They find their wifi options grayed out in the phone's settings. This has been going on since at least last September as owners upgraded to iOS 7; the current hypotheses are that iOS 7 either overheats the Broadcom wifi chip or uncovers some hitherto unknown bug in the chip. Apple's response to the many comments in their support community and elsewhere is to list some possible software fixes which don't help many people and basically amount to "Have you tried turning it off and on again?" Most owners report this is occurring with phones slightly older than the one year warranty — a perfect storm considering the age of the 4S and the iOS 7 update which is breaking them. Most users report both Apple and their carriers are essentially telling them to buy a new phone. Taking matters into their own hands some DIY owners are going to extremes to fix their phones, including heating them with hair dryers and then sticking them in the freezer. There's a Change.org petition with a paltry number of signatures on it; one wonders how long it will take before Apple addresses this problem.

Submission + - HealthCare.gov Can't Handle Appeals of Errors

Submitted by PapayaSF
PapayaSF writes: The Washington Post reports that roughly 22,000 people have claimed they were charged too much, steered into the wrong insurance program, or denied coverage, but the website cannot handle appeals. They've filled out seven-page forms and mailed them to a federal contractor’s office in Kentucky, where they were scanned and entered, but workers at CMS cannot read them because that part of the system has not been built. Other missing aspects are said to have higher priorities: completing the electronic payment system for insurers, the connections with state Medicaid programs, and the ability to adjust coverage to accommodate major changes such as new babies. People with complaints about mistakes have been told to "return to the Web site and start over."

Earlier coverage of this saga includes Slashdot's discussion of the recent TheHill.com report that Accenture Faces Mid-March Healthcare.gov Deadline Or 'Disaster'.

Submission + - Pope Says the Internet is a 'Gift From God' 1

Submitted by SmartAboutThings
SmartAboutThings writes: You’d think that religion and science have separate ways, but there are certain points where these two intertwine. And here’s one such good example. With the occasion of the 48th World Communications Day, Pope Francis issued an official statement, calling the Internet a “gift from God” and a facilitator of communications between people of different faiths and backgrounds.

Submission + - Lenovo buys IBM mid-range server business for $2.3bn (v3.co.uk)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In what is believed to be China's largest IT acquisition, IBM has dumped its mid-range server business on Lenovo. Big Blue's mid-range server business has seen a steady decline in recent quarters as demand for physical products are being superseded by off-site, on-demand cloud services.

IBM has been focusing its attention on high-end hardware and cloud products in recent months, buying out cloud platform SoftLayer in June 2013 and investing $1bn in a business unit based on its Watson supercomputer and $1.2bn in a range of data centres around the world earlier in January.

Submission + - Mother Calls for End to Tumblr 'Suicide Blogs' Following Daughter's Death (ibtimes.co.uk)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The mother of a teenage girl who committed suicide has said more action needs to be taken to stop vulnerable people viewing self-harm or 'suicide blogs' online.

Sarah Wilson, whose 15-year-old daughter Tallulah died after being hit by a train, said she felt she was unable to help her daughter after she had fallen into the "clutches of a toxic digital world". An inquest into the teenager's death said Tallulah, from West Hampstead, north west London, died after she had an argument with her mother when she deleted her Tumblr account, where she would post pictures of her self-harming.

Submission + - Events Calendar for Local Community

Submitted by hughbar
hughbar writes: I live in a London suburb that has many activities and classes, yoga, IT [of course], running, art, assorted volunteering and many others. With the help of the local council, we'd now like to make a centralised, searchable database of these, with a number of helpful features:
  • Easy to make submissions, otherwise the whole thing will always be out of date
  • Web accessible [obviously] but mobile phone friendly as well
  • Maybe, publish and subscribe, so people can 'subscribe' to yoga listings for example
  • Handles repeating events, like a classical web calendar
  • Maybe, can be consolidate with nearby events calendars

I'm aware of http://mrbs.sourceforge.net/ and webcalendar: http://www.k5n.us/webcalendar.... for example. But I'm wondering whether there are other suggestions, especially as this is a useful social application. And, yes, I'd like it done with open source, then we can tailor it.

Submission + - Making rare metal by mixing the two metals on both sides of the periodic table (google.com) 1

Submitted by wingwatcher
wingwatcher writes: Prof. Hiroshi Kitagawa in Kyoto Univ made artificial Rhodium (45) by mixing Ruthenium (44) and Palladium (46). The price of artificial Rhodium is US $4-14 per gram, and the price of natural Rhodium is US $40 per gram. Kitagawa said "It was a simple idea. We want to make other rare metals by the same way". This is alchemy.

Submission + - EU: Google should face $1bn privacy fine, not 'pocket money' amounts (v3.co.uk) 1

Submitted by DW100
DW100 writes: Despite Google being fined €900,000 by Spanish authorities and €150,000 in France for its controversial privacy policies in recent months, the EU has admitted this is mere 'pocket money' to the company. Instead, a new legal regime that would have seen Google fined $1bn for breaching data protection laws is needed to make US companies fear and respect the law in Europe.

Submission + - Exclusive: U.S. geneticist discusses North Korea trip with Dennis Rodman (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: If you happened to catch any of the news coverage of Dennis Rodman’s trip to North Korea last week, you might have spotted in the big man’s entourage a white guy with an Amish-style beard, as in clean-shaven cheeks and no moustache. That’s Joseph Terwilliger, 48, a statistical geneticist who splits his time at Columbia University and the University of Helsinki. He's now visited North Korea three times with the basketball star. He sat down with Science Magazine for a Q and A about how he got involved with Rodman and whether the trips are helping--or hurting--U.S. relations with the country.

Submission + - Congressmen Invite Schneier to Brief them on the NSA (schneier.com)

Submitted by saccade.com
saccade.com writes: Six members of Congress invited security expert Bruce Schneier to brief them on the NSA. Why Bruce? Because, with access to the Snowden documents, he's more forthcoming about the NSA's activities than anybody at the NSA itself. He writes:

Rep. Lofgren asked me to brief her and a few Representatives on the NSA. She said that the NSA wasn't forthcoming about their activities, and they wanted me — as someone with access to the Snowden documents — to explain to them what the NSA was doing. Of course I'm not going to give details on the meeting, except to say that it was candid and interesting. And that it's extremely freaky that Congress has such a difficult time getting information out of the NSA that they have to ask me. I really want oversight to work better in this country.

Ironic: Even though the contents of top-secret, unpublished documents was discussed, the meeting was held in a regular conference room, because Bruce didn't have the necessary security clearance to enter a secure government facility.

Submission + - Network Time Protocol Used to Amplify DDoS Attacks (techweekeurope.co.uk)

Submitted by judgecorp
judgecorp writes: The US CERT has warned that the Network Time Protocol (NTP) is being used to amplify Denial of Service attacks. The attack uses a monitoring service, part of NTP, which allows a site to query the NTP server about who else is using the service. One NTP request with a spoofed return address can generate a much larger return (a list of the last 600 sites to ask the time) and NTP packets look innocuous, says the warning.

Submission + - Ad blockers: A solution or a problem? (computerworld.com)

Submitted by bsk_cw
bsk_cw writes: It's individual rights vs. the capitalistic system: What do you do about advertising on sites? A lot of users dislike advertising (much of which isn't only an annoyance, but actively slows down their systems) and are offended by tracking software (which pulls and uses private data). So they use ad blockers and other applications. However, if you talk to the site publishers — especially the smaller sites who don't have large corporate entities behind them — ad blockers could, if more widely used, mean a disastrous loss of revenue. When offered an alternative — paying a fee for an ad-free site — publishers say that most users prefer to surf free of charge, but without either ads or fees, how are they supposed to support their content? Computerworld's Rob Mitchell talks to site publishers and the creators of ad blocking applications, and tries to unravel the issue.

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