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Submission + - Is Lily a Drone? Or Is It a Camera? (ieee.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Antoine Balaresque and Henry Bradlow have developed an autonomous flying video camera for use in filming action sports on land and water, capturing scenery while hiking and sightseeing, and covering family events (so everyone gets in the picture). They think they’ve made it simple enough that a parent could just toss it in the air and forget about it while coaxing a child to take her first steps. They have enough seed money ($1 million in investment) to get the prototype they’ve been developing for the past year into production. The technology is coming along nicely; they’ve been able to hire the experts in computer vision, controls, and industrial design that they need, and they’re on track to ship in February 2016.

But they have a problem. Their product looks an awful lot like a drone—and they don’t want to be a drone company, they want to be a camera company. Has drone technology evolved to the point that it's not a drone--in the same way a smart coffeemaker is not a computer--and they really can call this a camera, not a drone?

Submission + - Firefox 38 Arrives With DRM Tech Required To Watch Netflix Video

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Mozilla today launched Firefox 38 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. Notable additions to the browser include Digital Rights Management (DRM) tech for playing protected content in the HTML5 video tag on Windows, Ruby annotation support, and improved user interfaces on Android. Firefox 38 for the desktop is available for download now on Firefox.com, and all existing users should be able to upgrade to it automatically. As always, the Android version is trickling out slowly on Google Play. Release notes are here: desktop and Android.

Submission + - Music streaming is killing digital downloads faster than we thought (bgr.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Even though we don’t need more proof that music streaming is the wave of the future, recent comments made by Warner Music Group CEO Stephen Cooper really underscore just how fast the transition from digital downloads to music streaming is happening.

During an earnings conference call on Monday, Cooper said that Warner Music, the third largest recording company on the planet, generated more money from streaming than they did from digital downloads, representing the first time this has ever happened at a big music label.

Submission + - Dissolvable Electronic Stent Can Monitor Blocked Arteries (acs.org)

Submitted by ckwu
ckwu writes: To restore blood flow in a narrowed or blocked artery, doctors can implant a metal stent to hold open the vessel. But over time, stents can cause inflammation and turbulent blood flow that lead to new blockages. Now, researchers have designed a stent carrying a suite of onboard electronic blood-flow and temperature sensors, drug delivery particles, data storage, and communication capabilities to detect and overcome these problems. The entire device is designed to dissolve as the artery heals. Medical device companies and cardiologists could look at this electronic stent as a kind of menu from which they can pick whatever components are most promising for treating certain kinds of cardiovascular disease, the researchers say.

Submission + - US Passport Agency Contractor Stole Applicants' Data To Steal Their Identities

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Three women from Houston, Texas, stand accusedof engaging in an identity theft scheme in which one of them, a contract employee of the Department of State Passport Agency, was in charge of stealing personally identifiable information of persons applying for a passport. The information was then used to create counterfeit identification documents, which the other two women would use to successfully impersonate the affected individuals in order to fraudulently obtain commercial lines of credit and to purchase iPhones, iPads and other electronic merchandise.

Submission + - MIT Algorithm Banishes Window Reflections In Photos (itworld.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: Researchers at MIT and Google Research have developed a method to automatically remove reflections that appear when shooting photos through glass. The technique finds glass reflections in photos by using the fact that they're usually made up of two reflections, one slightly offset from the other. Since the second reflection is a set distance from the first, the researchers used an algorithm to distinguish the reflections from all the other data in the image.

Submission + - Google Confirms Cops Can Wiretap Your Hangouts (vice.com)

Submitted by Errorcod3
Errorcod3 writes: In the wake of all the Edward Snowden revelations, a seemingly endless series of encryption apps, all promising some degree “NSA-proof” security, have come out trying to take advantage of this new anti-surveillance business opportunity.

But despite some apps’ relative success, the reality is that most people probably just use mainstream messaging apps like iMessage or Google Hangouts.

Apple has long maintained that conversations over iMessage and Facetime use end-to-end encryption, meaning “no one but the sender and receiver can see or read them,” as the company said after the PRISM revelations. That claim has turned out to be partly true: normally, Apple can’t read your iMessages, but they can if they really want to.

Submission + - Warrantless airport seizure of laptop "cannot be justified," judge rules (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by SonicSpike
SonicSpike writes: The US government's prosecution of a South Korean businessman accused of illegally selling technology used in aircraft and missiles to Iran was dealt a devastating blow by a federal judge. The judge ruled Friday that the authorities illegally seized the businessman's computer at Los Angeles International Airport as he was to board a flight home.

The authorities who were investigating Jae Shik Kim exercised the border exception rule that allows the authorities to seize and search goods and people—without court warrants—along the border and at airport international terminals. US District Court judge Amy Berman Jackson of the District of Columbia noted that the Supreme Court has never directly addressed the issue of warrantless computer searches at an international border crossing, but she ruled (PDF) the government used Kim's flight home as an illegal pretext to seize his computer. Authorities then shipped it 150 miles south to San Diego where the hard drive was copied and examined for weeks, but the judge said the initial seizure "surely cannot be justified."

Submission + - One of the Strongest, Lightest Metals Ever Made Is Less Dense Than Water

Submitted by Jason Koebler
Jason Koebler writes: A new class of magnesium-alloy syntactic foam, which is made out of hollow particles to lower its weight and density is one of the strongest metals for its weight and density ever developed, which makes it ideal for use in boats.
Developed by Nikhil Gupta at NYU Polytechnic University, the alloy is 44 percent stronger than similar, aluminum-based foams, and each individual sphere within the foam can withstand pressure of more than 25,000 pounds per square inch before breaking, which is roughly 100 times the pressure exerted by water coming out of a firehose. Gupta's foams are currently used by the Navy and he suspects this one will be ready for use in warships within three years.

Submission + - World Health Organization wants more neutral (and blander) disease names (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: The World Health Organization (WHO) mostly works to reduce the physical toll of disease. But last week it turned to another kind of harm: the insult and stigma inflicted by diseases named for people, places, and animals. Among the existing monikers that its new guidelines “for the Naming of New Human Infectious Diseases” would discourage: Ebola, swine flu, Rift valley Fever, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, and monkey pox. Instead, WHO says researchers, health officials, and journalists should use more neutral, generic terms, such as severe respiratory disease or novel neurologic syndrome.

Submission + - 3-D Printed Gun Lawsuit Starts the War Between Arms Control and Free Speech (wired.com)

Submitted by SonicSpike
SonicSpike writes: This week marks the two-year anniversary since Cody Wilson, the inventor of the world’s first 3-D printable gun, received a letter from the State Department demanding that he remove the blueprints for his plastic-printed firearm from the internet. The alternative: face possible prosecution for violating regulations that forbid the international export of unapproved arms.

Now Wilson is challenging that letter. And in doing so, he’s picking a fight that could pit proponents of gun control and defenders of free speech against each other in an age when the line between a lethal weapon and a collection of bits is blurrier than ever before.

Wilson’s gun manufacturing advocacy group Defense Distributed, along with the gun rights group the Second Amendment Foundation, on Wednesday filed a lawsuit against the State Department and several of its officials, including Secretary of State John Kerry. In their complaint, they claim that a State Department agency called the Directorate of Defense Trade Controls (DDTC) violated their first amendment right to free speech by telling Defense Distributed that it couldn’t publish a 3-D printable file for its one-shot plastic pistol known as the Liberator, along with a collection of other printable gun parts, on its website.

Submission + - Carbon dioxide hits 400ppm

Submitted by mrflash818
mrflash818 writes: For the first time since we began tracking carbon dioxide in the global atmosphere, the monthly global average concentration of this greenhouse gas surpassed 400 parts per million in March 2015, according to NOAA’s latest results.

http://research.noaa.gov/News/...

Submission + - Sorority Files Lawsuit After Sacred Secrets Posted on Penny Arcade Forums (seattlepi.com) 1

Submitted by Limekiller42
Limekiller42 writes: Lawyers for the Phi Sigma Sigma sorority have filed suit in Seattle's King County Superior Court against an unidentified person for "publicizing the sorority’s secret handshake, robe colors and other practices." The well-written article is by Levi Pulkkinen of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and states that the sorority is seeking a restraining order and financial compensation for damages.

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