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Submission + - U.S. Mobile Internet Traffic Nearly Doubled This Year (nytimes.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Two big shifts happened in the American cellphone industry over the past year: Cellular networks got faster, and smartphone screens got bigger. In the United States, consumers used an average of 1.2 gigabytes a month over cellular networks this year, up from 690 megabytes a month in 2012, according to Chetan Sharma, a consultant for wireless carriers, who published a new report on industry trends on Monday. Worldwide, the average consumption was 240 megabytes a month this year, up from 140 megabytes last year, he said.

Comment Re:NSA Key (Score 1) 464

by RKloti (#45757801) Attached to: Reuters: RSA Weakened Encryption For $10M From NSA

Remember the Windows "NSA Key" flip a few years ago. You think Microsoft DIDN'T add a key for the NSA now?

I suspect that, if Microsoft had covertly added a key to Windows on behalf of the NSA - or any other government agency, for that matter - it would not have been labelled as _NSAKEY. Suffice to say, if the NSA had subverted the security of Windows (which no longer seems entirely unreasonable), they would have done so in a rather more subtle manner.

The Wikipedia article provides more information on the issue.

Submission + - Google Patents Fooling Friends with Snooping, Chatbots

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Google takes Scroogling to new heights with its just-patented Automated Generation of Suggestions for Personalized Reactions in a Social Network, which not only data mines "e-mail systems, SMS/MMS systems, micro blogging systems, social networks or other systems" to get the buzz on your social circle, but also uses the data it collects to make like ELIZA and formulate appropriate responses for you to send as if they were your own (e.g., 'Happy Birthday, Mom!). Wouldn't Turing be so proud! From the patent: "In a third example, a friend, David, sends Alice public or private message of a particular but regularly encountered message type (e.g., 'how are you doing?' a common way to greet someone in the United States). The suggestion generation module suggest a good set of reactions to David, for example, based on the professional profile of David from the social network indicating that David has changed employers. The suggestion generation module generates a reply message such as 'Hey David, I am fine, You were in ABC corp. for 3 years and you recently moved to XYZ corp., how do you feel about the difference, enjoying your new workplace?' The content of this suggestion are based on 1) prior conversations between Alice and David, 2) previous messages sent by Alice to other friends and 3) messages (sent by other connections in Alice's friend circle to David) which are either publicly or privately accessible to Alice, or some combination of these. Thus, the suggestion generation module generates messages that are personalized based upon both the sender and recipient using information that is accessible (public or private) to the sender." Looks like Facebook may not be the only one strip-mining human society!

Submission + - Mathematicians Team Up to Close the Prime Gap

Submitted by Hugh Pickens DOT Com
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: On May 13, an obscure mathematician garnered worldwide attention and accolades from the mathematics community for settling a long-standing open question about prime numbers. Yitang Zhang showed that even though primes get increasingly rare as you go further out along the number line, you will never stop finding pairs of primes separated by at most 70 million. His finding was the first time anyone had managed to put a finite bound on the gaps between prime numbers, representing a major leap toward proving the centuries-old twin primes conjecture, which posits that there are infinitely many pairs of primes separated by only two (such as 11 and 13). Now Erica Klarreich reports at Quanta Magazine that there is nothing magical about 70 million — it served Zhang’s purposes and simplified his proof but other mathematicians quickly realized that it should be possible to push this separation bound quite a bit lower. By the end of May, mathematicians had uncovered simple tweaks to Zhang’s argument that brought the bound below 60 million. Then Terence Tao, a winner of the Fields Medal, mathematics’ highest honor, created a “Polymath project,” an open, online collaboration to improve the bound that attracted dozens of participants and by July 27, the team had succeeded in reducing the proven bound on prime gaps from 70 million to 4,680. Now James Maynard has upped the ante by presenting an independent proof that pushes the gap down to 600. A new Polymath project is in the planning stages, to try to combine the collaboration’s techniques with Maynard’s approach to push this bound even lower. Zhang’s work and, to a lesser degree, Maynard’s fits the archetype of the solitary mathematical genius, working for years in the proverbial garret until he is ready to dazzle the world with a great discovery. The Polymath project couldn’t be more different — fast and furious, massively collaborative, fueled by the instant gratification of setting a new world record. “It’s important to have people who are willing to work in isolation and buck the conventional wisdom,” says Tao. Polymath, by contrast, is “entirely groupthink.” Not every math problem would lend itself to such collaboration, but this one did.

Submission + - Warning at SC13 that supercomputing will plateau without a disruptive technology (computerworld.com)

Submitted by dcblogs
dcblogs writes: At this year's supercomputing conference, SC13, there is worry that supercomputing faces a performance plateau unless a disruptive processing tech emerges. "We have reached the end of the technological era" of CMOS, said William Gropp, chairman of the SC13 conference and a computer science professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Gropp likened the supercomputer development terrain today to the advent of CMOS (complementary metal oxide semiconductor), the foundation of today's standard semiconductor technology. The arrival of CMOS was disruptive, but it fostered an expansive age of computing. The problem is "we don't have a technology that is ready to be adopted as a replacement for CMOS," said Gropp. "We don't have anything at the level of maturity that allows you to bet your company on." Peter Beckman, a top computer scientist at the Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory, and head of an international exascale software effort, said large supercomputer system prices have topped off at about $100 million "so performance gains are not going to come from getting more expensive machines, because these are already incredibly expensive and powerful. So unless the technology really has some breakthroughs, we are imagining a slowing down."

Submission + - Ubuntu Wants to Enable SSD TRIM by Default (phoronix.com)

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: During the first day of the latest virtual Ubuntu Developer Summit, Canonical developers finally plotted out the enabling of TRIM/DISCARD support by default for solid-state drives on Ubuntu 14.04. Ubuntu developers aren't looking to enable discard at the file-system level since it can slow down delete operations, so instead they're wanting to have their own cron job that routinely runs fstrim for TRIMing the system. In the past there has been talk about the TRIM implementation being unoptimized in the kernel. Around when Linux 3.0 was released, OpenSUSE noted that the kernel performs TRIM to a single range, instead of vectorized list of TRIM ranges, which is what the specification calls for. In some scenarios this results to lowered performance.

Submission + - And Now For Something Completely Different: Monty Python Reunion Planned (telegraph.co.uk)

Submitted by cold fjord
cold fjord writes: The Telegraph reports, "The original members of Monty Python will reunite more than 30 years after the comedy troupe last worked together. John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones, Eric Idle and Michael Palin will officially announce their reformation at a London press conference on Thursday. The five surviving members have reportedly been in months of secret talks about getting the Flying Circus back on the road. The reunion comes after several failed attempts to reform by the group. However, according to The Sun, the surviving members realised “it was now or never”, and had decided to embark upon “a fully-fledged reunion”. " — Related Telegraph stories: commentary, "best of", and a pan.

Submission + - How to kick Microsoft out of your organisation (techrepublic.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The story behind Munich City Council's decision to ditch Microsoft Windows and Office in favour of open source software. The project leader talks about why the shift was primarily about freedom, in this case freeing itself from being tied into Microsoft's infrastructure and having control over the software it uses. He talks about how the council managed to keep on track such a large project, affecting 15,000 people and spanning nine years. He also warns against organisations justifying the shift to open source software on the grounds that it will save money, arguing this approach is always likely to fail.
Image

Stats Show iPhone Owners Get More Sex 397

Posted by samzenpus from the there's-a-lap-for-that dept.
An anonymous reader writes "According to OK Cupid's survey of 552,000 user pictures iPhone users have more sexual partners than BlackBerry or Android owners. By age 30, the average male iPhone user has had about 10 partners while female iPhone users have had 12. By contrast, BlackBerry users hover around 8 partners and Android users have a mere 6. As the blog's author's wryly observe: 'Finally, statistical proof that iPhone users aren't just getting f*@ked by Apple.'"
Science

Lasers Approach Their Ultimate Intensity Limit 384

Posted by samzenpus from the biggest-pointer dept.
Flash Modin writes "Death Star style superlasers? Don't bet on it. High-power lasers currently in development appear to be nearing the theoretical laser intensity limit, according to new research set to be published in the journal Physical Review Letters. Ultra-high-energy laser fields can actually convert their light into matter as shown in the late '90s at the Stanford Linear Accelerator (SLAC). This process creates an 'avalanche-like electromagnetic cascade' (also known as sparking the vacuum) capable of destroying a laser field. Physicists thought it might be a problem for lasers eventually, but this work indicates the technology is much closer to its limit than researchers believed. A preprint is available here."
Space

Submission + - Antarctica Experiment Discovers Puzzling Space Ray (livescience.com)

Submitted by pitchpipe
pitchpipe writes: A puzzling pattern in the cosmic rays bombarding Earth from space has been discovered by an experiment buried deep under the ice of Antarctica.

[...]it turns out these particles are not arriving uniformly from all directions. The new study detected an overabundance of cosmic rays coming from one part of the sky, and a lack of cosmic rays coming from another.
Hardware Hacking

Submission + - TI Calculator DRM Defeated (ticalc.org)

Submitted by josath
josath writes: Texas Instrument's flagship calculator, the Nspire, was hacked to allow user-written programs earlier this year. Earlier this month, TI released an update to the OS that runs on the calculator, providing no new features, but only blocking the previous hack. Now, just a few weeks later, Nleash has been released, which defeats this protection. The battle rages on as users fight for the right to run their own software on their own hardware...
Space

Submission + - Mars Rover Spirit May Never Wake from Deep Sleep (discovery.com)

Submitted by
astroengine
astroengine writes: "After repeated calls from NASA to wake up Mars Exploration Rover Spirit from its low-energy coma, mission control is beginning to realize the ill-fated robot may never wake up again. After getting stuck in a sand trap in Gusev Crater and then switching into hibernation in March, rover operators were hopeful that the beached Spirit might yet be saved. Alas, this is looking more and more unlikely. In a statement, NASA said: "Based on models of Mars' weather and its effect on available power, mission managers believe that if Spirit responds, it most likely will be in the next few months. However, there is a very distinct possibility Spirit may never respond.""
Privacy

Full Body Scanners Installed In 10 US Airports 454

Posted by Soulskill from the too-cheap-to-hire-superman dept.
Lapzilla brings word that airports around the US are beginning to use a new type of body-scanning machine which records pictures of travelers underneath their clothing. The process takes roughly 30 seconds, and the person viewing the pictures is located in a separate room. We've discussed similar scanners in the past. From USAToday: "[Barry Steinhardt, head of the ACLU technology project] said passengers would be alarmed if they saw the image of their body. 'It all seems very clinical and non-threatening -- you go through this portal and don't have any idea what's at the other end,' he said. Passengers scanned in Baltimore said they did not know what the scanner did and were not told why they were directed into the booth. Magazine-sized signs are posted around the checkpoint explaining the scanners, but passengers said they did not notice them."

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