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Submission + - Is Advertising Morally Justifiable? The Importance of Protecting Our Attention

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: With Is Advertising Morally Justifiable?, philosopher Thomas Wells is out to change the way you think about Google and its ilk. Wells begins: "Advertising is a natural resource extraction industry, like a fishery. Its business is the harvest and sale of human attention. We are the fish and we are not consulted. Two problems result from this. The solution to both requires legal recognition of the property rights of human beings over our attention. First, advertising imposes costs on individuals without permission or compensation. It extracts our precious attention and emits toxic by-products, such as the sale of our personal information to dodgy third parties. Second, you may have noticed that the world's fisheries are not in great shape. They are a standard example for explaining the theoretical concept of a tragedy of the commons, where rational maximising behaviour by individual harvesters leads to the unsustainable overexploitation of a resource. Expensively trained human attention is the fuel of twenty-first century capitalism. We are allowing a single industry to slash and burn vast amounts of this productive resource in search of a quick buck." Hey, you don't get a $470B market cap by passing on chances to monetize infants in hospital beds with contextual ads for mattresses!

Submission + - UK government proposes 10-year copyright infringement jail term (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: According the the BBC, the UK government is proposing increasing the jail term for copyright infringement from the current 2 years to 10 years, which they say would "act as a significant deterrent." They claim this will "mainly" be aimed at "distributors of pirated content". If you live in the UK, please let your MP know if it's appropriate for a teenager to go to jail for 10 years for torrenting the latest Taylor Swift album.

Submission + - Data Store and Spying Laws Found Illegal by EU Court (theguardian.com)

Submitted by WillAffleckUW
WillAffleckUW writes: The EU High Court found the United Kingdom's data retention (and subsequent storage and analysis) and surveillance laws to be illegal throughout the EU, which subsequently would be an argument in courts in Australia and Canada against their own Spy laws. This effectively brings back the Rule of Law that all EU citizens have a Right to Privacy that is at the Bill of Rights level, not an easily short-circuited legal basis.

It is uncertain that this would apply to US spy laws, as a Right of Privacy is only inferred by US high courts and is not written into constitutions as it is in the EU, Australia, New Zealand and Canada.

Submission + - British data retention and surveillance act ruled illegal under European law (ibtimes.co.uk)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The UK's High Court has ruled the government's new data surveillance law is "inconsistent with EU law" following an appeal by politicians.

The Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act (Dripa) gave the police and security services the right to access phone and internet records in the interest of public safety.

is not compatible with a section of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) which gives the right to respect privacy as well as the protection of personal data.

The High Court has now ruled in favor of the politicians, who were also backed by human rights group Liberty, and declared that Dripa is inconsistent with EU law. the government now has until March 2016 to change the legislation.

Submission + - Open Document Format 1.2 Published as ISO/IEC Standard (documentfoundation.org)

Submitted by jrepin
jrepin writes: The Open Document Format for Office Applications (ODF) Version 1.2, the native file format of LibreOffice and many other office applications, has been published as International Standard 26300:2015 by ISO/IEC. ODF defines a technical schema for office documents including text documents, spreadsheets, charts and graphical documents like drawings or presentations. The current version of the standard was published in 2011, and then was submitted to ISO/IEC in 2014.

Submission + - New Unicode bug discovered for common Japanese character "no"

Submitted by AmiMoJo
AmiMoJo writes: Some users have noticed that the Japanese character "no", which is extremely common in the Japanese language (forming parts of many words, or meaning something similar to the English word "of" on its own). The Unicode standard has apparently marked the character as sometimes being used in mathematical formulae, causing it to be rendering in a different font to the surrounding text in certain applications. Similar but more widespread issues have plagued Unicode for decades due to the decision to unify dissimilar characters in Chinese, Japanese and Korean.

Submission + - Elite Frontier Orchestral Remake in the works (kickstarter.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In the beginning there was Elite. A game that defined a Genre. It's sequel Frontier was a game people either loved or hated. What cannot be denied was that the music brought an extra dimension to space battles. Careening towards planet earth at millions of kilometers a second, pursuing a military target, accompanied by a rousing rendition of Marvellous Mussorgsky's "Night on Bald Mountain".

The person responsible for this, David Lowe aka "Uncle Art", was somewhat of a musical legend in his era. Previously responsible for music on a rift of classic games such as IK+, StarGlider, Turbo Outrun just to name a few.

Recently his daughter Holly set up a kickstarter to get him out of retirement and back in the studio. Abbey Road to be precise. To remaster the Elite II: Frontier score with a full orchestra. If the target is reached this would be an an awesome piece of musical nostalgia.

Submission + - Adblock Plus Reduces University Network Bandwidth Use By 40 Percent

Submitted by Mickeycaskill
Mickeycaskill writes: Simon Fraser University in British Colombia, Canada claims it saved between 25 and 40 percent of its network bandwidth by deploying Adblock Plus across its internal network.

The study tested the ability of the Adblock Plus browser extension in reducing IP traffic when installed in a large enterprise network environment, and found that huge amounts of bandwidth was saved by blocking web-based advertisements and video trailers.

The experiment carried out over a period of six week, and involved 100 volunteers in an active enterprise computing environment at the university. The study’s main conclusions were that Adblock Plus was not only effective in blocking online advertisements, but that it “significantly” reduced network data usage.

Although the university admits there are some limitations of the study, it suggests that the reduced network data demand would lead to lower infrastructure costs than a comparable network without Adblock Plus.

Submission + - A reimplementation of NetBSD using a MicroKernel

Submitted by cen1
cen1 writes: In his talk at BSDCan 2015, Andrew S. Tanenbaum explains the design and implementation of Minix 3 operating system and usage of NetBSD userland on top of it. The kernel is written in 15000 lines of code and has reliability, modularity, small size, self-healing and security as it's primary goals. Kernel has no malloc, uses fixed size data structures and has all the drivers in user space, restricting their access and isolating them in the process.

Submission + - UK Student's Dissertation Redacted Thanks to Wassenaar Rules

Submitted by Trailrunner7
Trailrunner7 writes: U.S.-based security researchers may soon be championing the case of Grant Wilcox, a young U.K. university student whose work is one of the few publicly reported casualties of the Wassenaar Arrangement.

Wilcox last week published his university dissertation, presented earlier this spring for an ethical hacking degree at the University of Northumbria in Newcastle, England. The work expands on existing bypasses for Microsoft’s Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit (EMET), free software that includes a dozen mitigations against memory-based exploits. Microsoft has on more than one occasion recommended use of EMET as a temporary stopgap against publicly available zero-day exploits.

Wilcox’s published dissertation, however, is missing several pages that describe proof-of-concept exploits, including one that completely bypasses a current EMET 5.1 installation running on a fully patched Windows computer. He said last Wednesday in a blogpost that the missing pages and redactions within the text happened partly because of the Wassenaar Arrangement.

“Whilst it has impacted the release of my research it has not impacted my passion and I plan to continue researching such material as and when I feel like, though in an ideal world I would like clearer instructions so I can figure out how to do this appropriately (of which there seems to be some confusion),” Wilcox said in an email to Threatpost.

Submission + - Test Pilot Admits the F-35 Can't Dogfight (medium.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: A test pilot has some very, very bad news about the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. The pricey new stealth jet can't turn or climb fast enough to hit an enemy plane during a dogfight or to dodge the enemy's own gunfire, the pilot reported following a day of mock air battles back in January.

And to add insult to injury, the JSF flier discovered he couldn't even comfortably move his head inside the radar-evading jet's cramped cockpit. "The helmet was too large for the space inside the canopy to adequately see behind the aircraft." That allowed the F-16 to sneak up on him.

The test pilot's report is the latest evidence of fundamental problems with the design of the F-35 — which, at a total program cost of more than a trillion dollars, is history's most expensive weapon.

Your tax dollars at work.

Submission + - Bruce Schneier says: "Encryption should be enabled for everything by default." (schneier.com)

Submitted by snowder
snowder writes: This is important. If we only use encryption when we're working with important data, then encryption signals that data's importance. If only dissidents use encryption in a country, that country's authorities have an easy way of identifying them. But if everyone uses it all of the time, encryption ceases to be a signal. No one can distinguish simple chatting from deeply private conversation. The government can't tell the dissidents from the rest of the population. Every time you use encryption, you're protecting someone who needs to use it to stay alive.

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And it should be the law: If you use the word `paradigm' without knowing what the dictionary says it means, you go to jail. No exceptions. -- David Jones

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