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Comment: Re:Lots of false positives here (Score 1) 202

by cffrost (#44036343) Attached to: State Photo-ID Databases Mined By Police

[Facial recognition software] will probably NEVER achieve the reliability standard of a fingerprint, let alone DNA.

Fingerprint matching has no "reliability standard" to speak of, and is likely far less reliable than you may have been led to believe.

Actually, its far more reliable than you have been led to believe.

Whereas I gave you the benefit of the doubt, (and provided a source to support my position,) you've somehow definitively assessed the reliability of fingerprinting, and conclusively determined that I've been misled. As such, I provide the following sources discussing the poor reliability of fingerprinting (in chronological order, 2001-2013) so that others can steer clear and avoid being misled like I was:

Fingerprinting's Reliability Draws Growing Court Challenges
Will Fingerprinting Stand Up in Court?
Investigation: Forensic evidence in the dock
The Real Crime: 1,000 Errors in Fingerprint Matching Every Year
Study questions reliability of fingerprint evidence
Forensic Tools: What’s Reliable and What’s Not-So-Scientific
Deeper into forensic bias
Fingerprint [Validity]

Its just that the numbering system was only intended to allow a computer sort of likely
candidates for manual inspection, but because manual inspection takes some time
and training, some jurisdictions will go just by the numeric analysis, and further
they will accept fewer and fewer actual features to match, especially when partial
prints are all they have.

It's "just that," hm? Sounds legit — though I fail to see how this demonstrates that fingerprinting is "far more reliable than [I've]have been led to believe."

Defense lawyers delight in bringing in their own fingerprint expert and showing up
the state, especially when its as easy as showing the jury two full sets of
prints. Things become very obvious very quickly.

What has this got to do with the reliability of fingerprinting? You wanna know what I'd delight in, is you providing some evidence that supports your claim that fingerprinting is far more reliable I've been led to believe.

Science

Trying To Learn a Foreign Language? Avoid Reminders of Home 192

Posted by Unknown Lamer
from the what-about-esperanto dept.
sciencehabit writes "Show a native-born Chinese person a picture of the Great Wall, and suddenly they'll have trouble speaking English, even if they usually speak it fluently. That's the conclusion of a new study, which finds that reminders of our home country can complicate our ability to speak a new language. The findings could help explain why cultural immersion is the most effective way to learn a foreign tongue and why immigrants who settle within an ethnic enclave acculturate more slowly than those who surround themselves with friends from their new country."

Comment: Re:+1, Flamebait (Score 1) 356

That's a great quote from a good movie. But there are other great takes on the Superman mythos in movies as well:

Grandpa: Superman isn't brave.

Angus: Did you take your pills this morning?

Grandpa: [chuckles] You don't understand. He's smart, handsome, even decent. But he's not brave. No, listen to me. Superman is indestructible, and you can't be brave if you're indestructible. It's people like you and your mother. People who are different, and can be crushed and know it. Yet they keep on going out there every time.

-Angus

Comment: Re:This is what I have to consider (Score 2) 202

by cffrost (#44034015) Attached to: State Photo-ID Databases Mined By Police

Now this is what I have to consider if I want to apply for a driver's license? Choosing between the privilege of travelling and being a false positive in some FBI chase?

Travel is a right not a "privilege," governments' opinion to the contrary notwithstanding. Those propaganda posters in your local DMV are just that — propaganda. Free travel included in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but considering how much weight even the Constitution has in this country, I don't expect the situation to change for the better.

Comment: Re:Lots of false positives here (Score 2) 202

by cffrost (#44033847) Attached to: State Photo-ID Databases Mined By Police

[Facial recognition software] will probably NEVER achieve the reliability standard of a fingerprint, let alone DNA.

Fingerprint matching has no "reliability standard" to speak of, and is likely far less reliable than you may have been led to believe.

Please see PBS's Frontline: The Real CSI for an overview of some of the terrible shit that happened (and is still happening) thanks for forensic "science" — to quote from Twelve Monkeys, "Science ain't an exact science with these clowns." I've provided links to the aforementioned documentary below:

https://video.pbs.org/video/2223977258
http://kickass.to/pbs-frontline-the-real-csi-2012-480p-hdtv-x264-karma-t6324747.html

Biotech

Teen's Biofuel Invention Turns Algae Into Fuel 110

Posted by samzenpus
from the muck-in-the-truck dept.
Lasrick writes "Evie Sobczak won a trip to Jet Propulsion Lab for her biofuel invention: 'For a fifth-grade science fair, Evie Sobczak found that the acid in fruit could power clocks; she connected a cut-up orange to a clock with wire and watched it tick. In seventh grade, she generated power by engineering paddles that could harness wind. And in eighth grade, she started a project that eventually would become her passion: She wanted to grow algae and turn it into biofuel.'"
Hardware

SanDisk Focusing More On Desktop and Mobile SATA SSDs, Extreme II Series Tested 71

Posted by samzenpus
from the trying-it-out dept.
MojoKid writes "Odds are, if you've purchased anything that uses Flash memory in the last 20 years or so, you already own a piece of SanDisk technology. The company has been in Flash storage since the late '80s and manufactures products used in everything from smartphones to digital cameras. Even though it enjoys a long history in the Flash memory business, SanDisk is perhaps not as well known for its Solid State Drive (SSD) solutions for desktop and mobile PCs. However, SanDisk recently expanded their product stack with new, high-performance SSDs that leverage the company's own NAND Flash memory and Marvell's popular 88SSS9187 controller. The new drives are SanDisk's Extreme II family of SSDs targeted performance enthusiasts, workstations professionals and gamers. The initial line-up of drives consists of 120GB, 240GB, and 480GB models. Performance specifications for the three drives come in at 545MB/s – 550MB/s for reads with write performance from 340MB/s to 510MB/s, depending on density. In the benchmarks, SanDisk's Extreme II SSD showed it has the chops to hang with some of the fastest drives on the market from Samsung, Corsair and OCZ."

Comment: Re:EFF Resources and Personal Defense (Score 1) 332

by cffrost (#44030255) Attached to: Snowden NSA Claims Partially Confirmed, Says Rep. Jerrold Nadler

Just a note on hushmail: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hushmail#Compromises_to_email_privacy

Thanks for that important tip.

I've been using Safe-Mail (on account of Hushmail's three-week inactive account deletion); so far I haven't been disappointed. Yes, it's run from USA's best pal Israel, but as far as I'm aware, Israel isn't shy about asserting sovereignty (though by no means would I count on that to keep a web-mail account private). I've been unable to find a private/secure web-mail provider located in a place with chilly US relations — Safe-Mail is the best I've come up with so far.

United States

Officials Say NSA Probed Fewer Than 300 Numbers - Broke Plots In 20 Nations 416

Posted by samzenpus
from the time-to-justify dept.
cold fjord writes "Yet more details about the controversy engulfing the NSA. From CNET: 'Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, explained how the program worked without violating individuals' civil rights. "We take the business records by a court order, and it's just phone numbers — no names, no addresses — put it in a lock box," Rogers told CBS News' "Face The Nation." "And if they get a foreign terrorist overseas that's dialing in to the United Sates, they take that phone number... they plug it into this big pile, if you will, of just phone numbers — it's like a phonebook without any names and any addresses with it — to see if there's a connection, a foreign terrorist connection to the United States." "When a number comes out of that lock box, it's just a phone number — no names, no addresses," he said. "If they think that's relevant to their counterterrorism investigation, they give that to the FBI. Then upon the FBI has to go out and meet all the legal standards to even get whose phone number that is."' From the AP: ' ... programs run by the National Security Agency thwarted potential terrorist plots in the U.S. and more than 20 other countries — and that gathered data is destroyed every five years. Last year, fewer than 300 phone numbers were checked against the database of millions of U.S. phone records ... the intelligence officials said in arguing that the programs are far less sweeping than their detractors allege.... both NSA programs are reviewed every 90 days by the secret court authorized by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Under the program, the records, showing things like time and length of call, can only be examined for suspected connections to terrorism, they said. The ... program helped the NSA stop a 2009 al-Qaida plot to blow up New York City subways.'"

Comment: EFF Resources and Personal Defense (Score 2) 332

by cffrost (#44023691) Attached to: Snowden NSA Claims Partially Confirmed, Says Rep. Jerrold Nadler

EFF Action: Demand Answers Now! [Direct e-mail form to contact POTUS and your senators+House rep]:
https://action.eff.org/o/9042/p/dia/action3/common/public/?action_KEY=9260
https://action.eff.org/o/9042/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=9297 [Form for non-US citizens; directed at implicated corporations]

The links below are to resources of the personal-privacy type, as opposed to the those intended to help bring about change:

EFF Surveillance Self-Defense Project [Guide to surveillance-avoidance tools and techniques for individuals]:
https://ssd.eff.org/

EFF's HTTPS Everywhere [Chrome/FF plug-in enforces HTTPS on compatible sites using rule-list (hundreds included)]:
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere

https-finder: Plug-in for HTTPS Everywhere users; auto-detects sites' HTTPS support and adds them to rule-list:
https://code.google.com/p/https-finder/

Privacy-oriented search engines:
https://duckduckgo.com/ [Only search engine on EFF's Organizational Member list]
https://ixquick.com/ [Provides HTTPS proxy through which search results may be accessed]

Privacy/security-oriented free web-mail providers:
https://www.safe-mail.net/
https://www.hushmail.com/

He keeps differentiating, flying off on a tangent.

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