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Submission + - Court Rules Parents May Be Liable for What Their Kids Post on Facebook (wsj.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Parents can be held liable for what their kids post on Facebook, a Georgia appellate court ruled in a decision that lawyers said marked a legal precedent on the issue of parental responsibility over their children’s online activity.

The Georgia Court of Appeals ruled that the parents of a seventh-grade student may be negligent for failing to get their son to delete a fake Facebook profile that allegedly defamed a female classmate.

Submission + - Keystone Be D-mned: Canada Finds Oil Route To Atlantic

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Bloomberg reports that Canadians have come up with an all-Canadian route to get crude oil sands from Alberta to a refinery in Saint John, New Brunswick, operated by a reclusive Canadian billionaire family, that would give Canada’s oil-sands crude supertanker access to the same Louisiana and Texas refineries Keystone was meant to supply. The pipeline, built by Energy East, will cost $10.7 billion and could be up and running by 2018. Its 4,600-kilometer path, taking advantage of a vast length of existing and underused natural gas pipeline, would wend through six provinces and four time zones. "It would be Keystone on steroids, more than twice as long and carrying a third more crude," writes Bloomberg. "And if you’re a fed-up Canadian, like Prime Minister Stephen Harper, there’s a bonus: Obama can’t do a single thing about it." So confident is TransCanada Corp., the chief backer of both Keystone and Energy East, of success that Alex Pourbaix, the executive in charge, spoke of the cross-Canada line as virtually a done deal. “With one project,” Energy East will give Alberta’s oil sands not only an outlet to “eastern Canadian markets but to global markets,” says Pourbaix. “And we’ve done so at scale, with a 1.1 million barrel per day pipeline, which will go a long way to removing the specter of those big differentials for many years to come.”

The pipeline will also prove a blow to environmentalists who have made central to the anti-Keystone arguments the concept that if Keystone can be stopped, most of that polluting heavy crude will stay in the ground. With 168 billion proven barrels of oil, though, Canada’s oil sands represent the third-largest oil reserves in the world, and that oil is likely to find its way to shore one way or another. “It’s always been clear that denying it or slowing Keystone wasn’t going to stop the flow of Canadian oil,” says Michael Levi. What Energy East means for the Keystone XL pipeline remains to be seen. “Maybe this will be a wake up call to President Obama and U.S. policymakers to say ‘Hmmm we’re going to get shut out of not just the energy, but all those jobs that are going to go into building that pipeline. Now they are all going to go into Canada," says Aaron Task. “This is all about ‘You snooze, you lose.’”

Submission + - X-37B to land on Tuesday

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: After twenty-two months in orbit, on its second space mission, the Air Force plans to bring the X-37B back to Earth this coming Tuesday.

The exact time and date will depend on weather and technical factors, the Air Force said in a statement released on Friday. The X-37B space plane, also known as the Orbital Test Vehicle, blasted off for its second mission aboard an unmanned Atlas 5 rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida on Dec. 11, 2012. The 29-foot-long (9-meter) robotic spaceship, which resembles a miniature space shuttle, is an experimental vehicle that first flew in April 2010. It returned after eight months. A second vehicle blasted off in March 2011 and stayed in orbit for 15 months.

Submission + - The remains of Alexander the Great's father believed found

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Greek archeologists exhuming a set of three giant tombs have found what they believe to be the remains of King Philip II, Alexander the Great’s father.

Fascinating research, though a close read of the article reveals many uncertainties with this conclusion.

Submission + - "Phony Cell Phone Tower" Stories Were PR For A Secure Cell Phone Company (itworld.com) 1

Submitted by jfruh
jfruh writes: Last month, a spooky story was making the rounds on tech news sites: mysterious cell phone towers popping up all over the country claimed by nobody. In fact, the towers are almost certainly run by law enforcement agencies, while unsettling, aren't new; and almost every story includes quotes from Les Goldsmith, the CEO of ESD America, the company that sells the phones that detected the towers — stock Galaxy S IIIs turned into hardened phones with numerous exploits removed and all kinds of security added. Was the whole kerfuffle a masterful act of PR?

Submission + - The CDC Is Carefully Controlling How Scared You Are About Ebola 2

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Russell Berman writes in the Atlantic that the Obama administration is trying to navigate a tricky course: Can officials increase public vigilance about the deadly virus without inciting a panic? "Ebola is scary. It's a deadly disease. But we know how to stop it," says Dr. Thomas Frieden, the CDC director. speaking "calmly and clearly, sticking to an even pitch and avoiding the familiar political image of the whip-smart fast-talker." International groups wanted the US to step in sooner to help fight the outbreak in west Africa, while more recently some Republicans have called on the administration to ban travel from the most affected countries but Frieden and other officials say such a move would be counterproductive, citing lessons learned from the SARS outbreak a decade ago. "The SARS outbreak cost the world more than $40 billion, but it wasn't to control the outbreak," says Frieden. "Those were costs from unnecessary and ineffective travel restrictions and trade changes that could have been avoided." The government announced Wednesday that it was stepping up protective measures at five airports, where authorities will screen travelers from Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea with targeted questions and fever checks, an action, officials acknowledge that was taken not only to stop the spread of the disease but simply to make people feel safer. According to Berman the message, it seems to be, is this: Be afraid of Ebola. Just not too afraid.

Submission + - Air Force to take over two ex-shuttle hangers in Florida for its X-37B program

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: In an effort to find tenants for its facilities, the Kennedy Space Center is going to rent two former shuttle processing hangers to Boeing for the Air Force’s X-37B program.

NASA built three Orbiter Processing Facilities, or OPFs, to service its space shuttle fleet between missions. All three are located next to the iconic Vehicle Assembly Building at the Florida spaceport where Apollo Saturn 5 moon rockets and space shuttles were “stacked” for launch. Under an agreement with NASA, Boeing will modify OPF bays 1 and 2 for the X-37B program, completing upgrades by the end of the year.

The company already has an agreement with NASA to use OPF-3 and the shuttle engine shop in the VAB to assemble its CST-100 commercial crew craft being built to ferry astronauts to and from the International Space Station. The company says up to six capsules can be processed in the facility at the same time.

The most important take-away from this news is that it strongly suggests the Air Force now intends to expand the X-37B program. They will not only be flying both X37B’s again, they might even planning to increase the fleet’s size from two ships.

Submission + - Multitasking Damages Your Brain And Career (forbes.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: You’ve likely heard that multitasking is problematic, but new studies show that it kills your performance and may even damage your brain.

Research conducted at Stanford University found that multitasking is less productive than doing a single thing at a time. The researchers also found that people who are regularly bombarded with several streams of electronic information cannot pay attention, recall information, or switch from one job to another as well as those who complete one task at a time.

A Special Skill?

But what if some people have a special gift for multitasking? The Stanford researchers compared groups of people based on their tendency to multitask and their belief that it helps their performance. They found that heavy multitaskers—those who multitask a lot and feel that it boosts their performance—were actually worse at multitasking than those who like to do a single thing at a time. The frequent multitaskers performed worse because they had more trouble organizing their thoughts and filtering out irrelevant information, and they were slower at switching from one task to another. Ouch.

Multitasking reduces your efficiency and performance because your brain can only focus on one thing at a time. When you try to do two things at once, your brain lacks the capacity to perform both tasks successfully.

Submission + - SWAT teams kill another innocent citizen in raid

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Another late night raid of a citizen’s home, based on the lies of a drug user, has resulted in the death of that innocent citizen.

The police entered the home without knocking or identifying themselves. Their warrant apparently required them to knock first. The home had been burglered two nights earlier by the drug user, so the homeowner’s were understandably on edge.

This is nothing more than murder. It is also unconstitutional. Every police SWAT team in the nation should be dismantled now. We managed for 200 years without them, and can do so again.

Submission + - Texas Ebola patient dies.

Submitted by BarbaraHudson
BarbaraHudson writes: Thomas Duncan, the ebola patient being treated in Texas, has died.

Liberian national Thomas Eric Duncan, the first person diagnosed with the deadly virus on U.S. soil, was given the experimental medication brincidofovir. A hospital in Nebraska said it is using the same drug to treat an American journalist who was airlifted from Liberia and arrived Monday.

If he had survived, he could have faced criminal charges in both the US and Liberia,

“We are looking at whether he intentionally and knowingly exposed the public to the virus,” said Debbie Denmon, a spokesperson for the Dallas County prosecutor’s office.

“It’s the issue of holding someone accountable, that you can’t just get on an airplane and lie on a travel document and get to the United States and lie on a hospital document,” she said.

Neighbors in Liberia said that Duncan had been in direct contact with a woman, who later died of Ebola. Duncan reportedly helped carry the 19-year-old woman, who was convulsing, to a nearby hospital. They said it was not clear whether Duncan knew the woman had Ebola before he left Liberia.

According to officials, Duncan reported on an airport screening questionnaire that he had had no contact with an Ebola patient. Before he left Liberia, officials checked his temperature at the airport. He had no fever. Authorities in Liberia said last week that they plan to prosecute Duncan for lying on the questionnaire.

The question has been mooted in his case, but with people willing to try to do anything to get to a country where they have a better chance of getting treatment, we're going to see a lot more of this.

Submission + - US says it can hack into foreign-based servers without warrants (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Advocatus Diaboli
Advocatus Diaboli writes: The US government may hack into servers outside the country without a warrant, the Justice Department said in a new legal filling in the ongoing prosecution of Ross Ulbricht. The government believes that Ulbricht is the operator of the Silk Road illicit drug website. Monday's filing in New York federal court centers on the legal brouhaha of how the government found the Silk Road servers in Iceland. Ulbricht said last week that the government's position—that a leaky CAPTCHA on the site's login led them to the IP address—was "implausible" and that the government (perhaps the National Security Agency) may have unlawfully hacked into the site to discover its whereabouts

Submission + - DHS has Blank Check to Scan Other Civilian Agencies for Network Vulnerabilities (nextgov.com) 1

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: The Department of Homeland Security has spelled out its intentions to proactively monitor all civilian agency networks for signs of threats, after agencies arguably dropped the ball this spring in detecting federal websites potentially harboring the Heartbleed superbug.

In May, Homeland Security officials told House lawmakers at a hearing that the department planned to expand Einstein's capabilities and deployment. At the time, Einstein's latest iteration, EINSTEIN 3 Accelerated, only covered seven departments and agencies. Extending coverage "has been significantly delayed by the lack of clear authorities for DHS," National Cybersecurity Communications Integration Center Director Larry Zelvin testified.

The new formalized process for vulnerability scans pertains only to public-facing civilian agency networks. The procedures involve surveilling Internet-accessible addresses and segments of agency systems for weaknesses on an ongoing basis, "without prior agency authorization on an emergency basis where not prohibited by law."

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