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Submission + - Tor Browser Security Under Scrutiny (threatpost.com)

Submitted by msm1267
msm1267 writes: The keepers of Tor commissioned a study testing the defenses and viability of their Firefox-based browser as a privacy tool. The results were a bit eye-opening since the report’s recommendations don’t favor Firefox as a baseline for Tor, rather Google Chrome. But Tor’s handlers concede that budget constraints and Chrome’s limitations on proxy support make a switch or a fork impossible.

Submission + - Linus Torvalds Want to Dominate the Desktop (eweek.com)

Submitted by darthcamaro
darthcamaro writes: Linux is everywhere or is it? At the LinuxCon conference in Chicago today Linus Torvalds was asked where Linux should go next. Torvalds didn't hesitate with his reply.

"I still want the desktop," Torvalds said as the audience erupted into boisterous applause.

Torvalds doesn't see the desktop as being a kernel problem at this point either, but rather one about infrastructure. While not ready to declare a 'Year of the Linux Desktop' he does expect that to happen — one day.

Submission + - Do readers absorb less on Kindles than on paper? Not necessarily

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: eBooks are great and wonderful, but as The Guardian reports they might not be as good for readers paper books. Results from a new study shows that test subjects who read a story on a Kindle had trouble recalling the right order of the plot points. Out of 50 test subjects,half read a 28-page story on the Kindle, while half read the same story on paper. The Kindle group scored about the same on comprehension as the control group, but when they were asked to put the plot points in the proper order the Kindle group was about twice as likely to put them in the wrong order.

So is this bad news for ebooks? Have we reached the limits of their usefulness? Not necessarily.

While there is evidence that enhanced ebooks don't enhance education, an older study from 2012 has shown that students who study with an e-textbook on an ebook reader actually scored as well or higher on tests than a control group who did not. While that doesn't prove the newer study wrong, it does suggest that further study is required.

Comment Re:Selling Free Software (Score 3, Informative) 188

by Himmy32 (#47697897) Attached to: Microsoft's Windows 8 App Store Is Full of Scamware
If I remember correctly, the issue with VLC on the Apple store was that the GPL allows charging for the software but does not allow charging for the license. Since Apple doesn't charge for the software but instead charges for a license to the software on behalf of a third party. So you can put free GPL on the Apple store but not pay for, even though GPL allows for it.

I actually had to read about the Wii store issue. The issue there seems to be that a subcontractor used both ScummVM and Nintendo's SDK. Nintendo explictly prohibits use of open source software together with their Wii SDK. Again nothing have to do with keys. Use of the Wii SDK forbids Open Source, so it doesn't what the terms of the GPL are, no GPL at all on the Wii Store.

Submission + - Solar plant scorches birds in mid air (foxnews.com) 4

Submitted by Obscene_CNN
Obscene_CNN writes: The new solar energy plant that is owned by Google and two energy companies is killing birds in mid air. The plant which works by concentrating the suns rays is killing and igniting the birds as they fall out of the sky. BrightSource Energy, NRG Solar, and Google say they are studying methods of reducing the bird deaths.

Submission + - Women Founders Outpace Male Counterparts in Certain Types of Kickstarter Funding (dice.com)

Submitted by Nerval's Lobster
Nerval's Lobster writes: Women outpace men when it comes to raising money for technology projects through crowdfunding sites such as Kickstarter, according to a new study by researchers at New York University and the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Jason Greenberg (NYC) and Ethan Mollick (Wharton/UPenn) chose 1,250 Kickstarter projects in five categories: games and technology, where founders were predominantly male; film, with an even gender distribution; and fashion and children’s books, both populated with more female founders and backers. They analyzed additional factors such as 'industry typing' (a theory in which people 'often hold conscious or unconscious biases about what gender is the archetype employee in a particular occupation or industry') and restricted the data set by geography and how much money each Kickstarter project wanted (a project aiming for less than $5,000 may attract an inordinate percentage of family and friends as funders, skewing results). After crunching the data, they found that female founders of technology projects were more likely than males to achieve their Kickstarter goals, a finding that didn’t extend to the other four categories. 'It appears female backers are responsible for helping female founders succeed in specific industry categories that women backers generally disfavor,' they theorized, adding a little later: 'The value of crowdfunding is that it enables access to a pool of potential female backers particularly inclined to support women in industry categories in which they believe women to be underrepresented.'

Submission + - Software Combines Thousands of Online Images Into One That Represents Them All (gizmag.com) 1

Submitted by Zothecula
Zothecula writes: If you're trying to find out what the common features of tabby cats are, a Google image search will likely yield more results than you'd ever have the time or inclination to look over. New software created at the University of California, Berkeley, however, is designed to make such quests considerably easier. Known as AverageExplorer, it searches out thousands of images of a given subject, then amalgamates them into one composite "average" image.

Comment Re:String theory is voodoo physics (Score 2) 259

by Himmy32 (#47607387) Attached to: The Man Who Invented the 26th Dimension
I know I shouldn't feed the trolls, but it deserves to be said.

In no way is String Theory anything like Phrenology. Trying to develop a model that unites both the large scale and the small scale is incredibly difficult. Quantum mechanics and relativity are complex enough without trying to unify them. String theory and super-symmetrical models have a basis in advanced mathematics, but the question is whether or not the model matches the immensely complex reality.

Even if it doesn't work out, studying the problem advances our knowledge of the known universe and modelling it in mathematics. That's how science works, you make a hypothesis and you attempt to test it and then you reform your hypothesis. The current problem right now is finding a way to test it. A failed hypothesis is not something to laugh at, because what you learn from that failure helps you forms a new and more accurate model.

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