60407895
submission
reifman writes:
Last night at Ignite Seattle, the fifteenth and final five minute presentation "A Geek's Guide to Wedding Planning" turned into a huge surprise for the audience as what began as a normal talk turned into a full blown wedding. Teresa Valdez Klein & Noah Iliinsky, who'd met at earlier Ignites decided to bring their A game and get married in their five minute timeslot. Props and best wishes to the bride & groom. If they give a talk on "A Geek's Guide to Pregnancy", I will definitely skip it.
60046441
submission
reifman writes:
San Francisco's gender imbalance is so bad that a startup recently proposed flying women in from New York City for dates, but Seattle’s gender ratio is even more imbalanced. Amazon is building out enough space to employ 5% of the city population and its workforce is 75 percent male. By the end of 2014, Seattle will have 130 single men for every 100 single women.
60025017
submission
reifman writes:
San Francisco's gender imbalance is so bad that a startup recently proposed flying women in from New York City for dates. But, if you’re a straight male thinking of moving to Seattle to work in technology, think again. Seattle’s gender ratio is even more imbalanced and it’s about to get much worse for men. Amazon is building out enough space to employ 5% of the city population and its workforce is 75 percent male. By the end of 2014, Seattle will have 130 single men for every 100 single women.
58370433
submission
reifman writes:
From the apparently not April Fools department: Anders Helstrup went skydiving nearly two years ago near Hedmark, Norway and while he didn’t realize it at the time, when he reviewed the footage taken by two cameras fixed to his helmet during the dive, he saw a rock plummet past him. He took it to experts and they realized he had captured a meteorite falling during its dark flight — when it has been slowed by atmospheric braking, and has cooled and is no longer luminous.
58103721
submission
reifman writes:
Amazon's outsourced, semi-automated customer service makes it easy for unscrupulous buyers to prey on its marketplace sellers. Buyers just need to 1) request a return and then 2) file a claim alleging that the item was different than described. While Amazon says it retains emails between buyer and sellers 'to help arbitrate disputes and preserve trust and safety', it ignores the content of most email exchanges as it sends automated emails to sellers instructing them to issue refunds and threatening to withdraw the funds from their account. File this under 'our investigation team does not work according to case numbers.'
57062145
submission
reifman writes:
Recently my house was robbed and two Macs taken. Over the past week, I've learned a few things that I hadn't been aware of. Apple has a few helpful features that aren't enabled by default in OS X: primarily setting a firmware password and hard drive encryption. Here are a few simple steps you can take now to minimize the damage from theft of your Macs and to increase the likelihood they might return to you.
55550973
submission
reifman writes:
In a follow up to this 2011 Ask Slashdot post on self-hosted Gmail alternatives and recent NSA wiretapping revelations, I wrote this guided tutorial for running your own email server in the cloud. The emergence of iRedMail and Roundcube are great offerings but end to end encrypted privacy remains an afterthought. Self-hosting remains quite complex for even average techies; combining out of country mail services with GPG may be the best approach for most folks, at least until more sophisticated encryption-based services emerge. The Indiegogo-funded Mailpile client may also interest people.
55446167
submission
reifman writes:
Filtered is a new open source IMAP mail filtering application which lets you train, route and experiment with your email. Filtered can learn from the contents of your existing folders, respond to drag and drop events and be trained via the web. But, it's also a platform which programmers can use to create new features for email such as quiet hours which shuts off your inbox on a schedule, whitelisting, which challenges new senders to authenticate themselves as human and a secure folders which delete messages from your NSA-accessible Gmail account and stores an encrypted version on your server. Filtered is written in PHP and is available now on Github. There's a detailed installation guide for trying out the app with a cloud-based Linux server. You can also request a droplet for Digital Ocean for a faster start.
55440383
submission
ananyo writes:
Physicists have tracked electrons crossing a semiconductor chip one at a time — an experiment that should at last enable a rational definition of the ampere, the unit of electrical current.
At present, an ampere is defined as the amount of charge flowing per second through two infinitely long wires one metre apart, such that the wires attract each other with a force of 2×107 newtons per metre of length. That definition, adopted in 1948 and based on a thought experiment that can at best be approximated in the laboratory, is clumsy — almost as much of an embarrassment as the definition of the kilogram, which relies on the fluctuating mass of a 125-year-old platinum-and-iridium cylinder stored at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in Paris.
The new approach, described in a paper posted onto the arXiv server on 19 December, would redefine the amp on the basis of e, a physical constant representing the charge of an electron.
55292659
submission
55263947
submission
Fnord666 writes:
Another day another data breach. Apparently high end retailer Neiman Marcus has also suffered a breach of credit card data. Krebs on Security has the news:.
"Responding to inquiries about a possible data breach involving customer credit and debit card information, upscale retailer Neiman Marcus acknowledged today that it is working with the U.S. Secret Service to investigate a hacker break-in that has exposed an unknown number of customer cards."
55228705
submission
reifman writes:
Email innovation often lags other services because the big players (Google, Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo) control the client. Filtered is a new, open source server side mail filtering applet which provides a platform for evolving email. For example, Filter offers Do Not Disturb, which can delay email delivery during evenings and weekends (favorite contacts can be excluded), Secure Folders, which can delete messages from specific people from your NSA-accessible Gmail account and place encrypted versions on your server and Whitelisting, which sends challenge emails to unknown senders. Download at Github or test drive it in the cloud.
55225679
submission
Nerval's Lobster writes:
Retail giant Target continues to drastically downplay the impact of the massive data breach it suffered during December, even while admitting the number of customers affected is nearly twice as large as it had previously estimated. Target admitted today the massive data breach it suffered during the Christmas shopping season was more than twice as large and far more serious than previously disclosed. A Jan. 10 press release admits the number of customers affected by the second-largest corporate data breach in history had increased from 40 million to 70 million, and that the data stolen included emails, phone numbers, street addresses and other information absent from the stolen transactional data that netted thieves 40 million debit- and credit-card numbers and PINs. “As part of Target’s ongoing forensic investigation, it has been determined that certain guest information — separate from the payment card data previously disclosed — was taken during the data breach” according to Target’s statement. “This theft is not a new breach, but was uncovered as part of the ongoing investigation.” The new revalation does represent a new breach, however, or at least the breach of an unrelated system during the period covered during the same attack, according to the few details Target has released. Most analysts and news outlets have blamed the breach on either the security of Target’s Windows-based Point-of-Sale systems or the company’s failure to fulfill its security obligations under the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS).
55172597
submission
reifman writes:
Email innovation often lags other services because the big players (Google, Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo) are cloud client gatekeepers with few incremental profit incentives. Filtered is a new, open source IMAP mail filtering application which provides a platform for experimenting with email. For example, Filter offers Quiet Hours, which can delay email delivery during evenings and weekends (favorite contacts can be excluded), and Secure Folders, which can delete messages from specific people from your NSA-accessible Gmail account and place encrypted versions on your server. Filtered is available now at Github. There's also a detailed installation recipe for Linux.
55167825
submission
Science_afficionado writes:
Astronomers have discovered a surprising new class of “hypervelocity stars” that are moving at more than a million miles per hour, fast enough to escape the gravitational grasp of the Milky Way galaxy. The 20 hyper stars are about the same size as the sun and, other than their extreme speed, have the same composition as the stars in the galactic disk. The big surprise is that they don't seem to come from the galaxy's center. The generally accepted mechanism for producing hypervelocity stars relies on the extreme gravitational field of the supermassive black hole that resides in the galaxy's core. So the discovery means that astrophysicists must come up with an entirely new method for speeding stars to hypervelocities.
