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+ - TSA agent tells 15 year-old girl: "Cover Up!"

Submitted by AdamnSelene
AdamnSelene writes "The daughter of Mark Frauenfelder, a founder of the website Boing Boing, was 'shamed' and 'humiliated' by a LAX Transportation Security Agency (TSA) officer who told her to 'cover up'. Frauenfelder detailed the story of his daughter’s experience with the TSA yesterday evening. The TSA is investigating the incident.

There is additional commentary on women's rights activist Maureen Herman's blog.

And we thought the TSA agents and scanning machines were there to grope and ogle fliers..."

+ - Archaeologists Discover Lost City In Cambodian Jungle->

Submitted by steve_mark66
steve_mark66 writes "Australian archaeologists using remote-sensing technology have uncovered an ancient city in Cambodia that has remained hidden for more than a millennium under dense jungle undergrowth. The discovery of Mahendraparvata, a 1,200-year-old lost city that predates Cambodia's famous Angkor Wat temple complex by 350 years, was part of the Hindu-Buddhist Khmer Empire that ruled much of Southeast Asia from about 800 to 1400 A.D., during a time that coincided with Europe's Middle Ages"
Link to Original Source

+ - Photographer Builds an Amazing DIY Digital Camera Stabilizer->

Submitted by Iddo Genuth
Iddo Genuth writes "Videographer Tom Antos developed an advanced DIY camera stabilizer which can hold almost any DSLR or mirrorless camera steady for video photography. Although this surly isn’t as sophisticated (and super expensive) as the professional MVI M10 handheld 3-axis digital stabilized camera gimbal, its still quite impressive especially when you consider it only cost a few hundred dollars rather then tens of thousands — that is if you feel like building it yourself."
Link to Original Source

+ - WiFi Light Bulbs Connect to the Internet->

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "Computerworld has an interview with an Australian startup called LIFX, producing WiFi-connected LED light bulbs. Each light bulb is a small computer running the Thingsquare distribution of the open source Contiki operating system that creates a low-power wireless mesh network between the light bulbs and connects them to the WiFi network. The wireless mesh network lets the light bulbs be controlled with a smartphone app. Through a Kickstarter project, the company has already raised a significant amount of money: over one million USD. The company recently opened up a second batch of pre-orders."
Link to Original Source

+ - Confirmed: CBS News Investigative Reporter Computer Compromised->

Submitted by RoccamOccam
RoccamOccam writes "Shortly after the news broke that the Department of Justice had been secretly monitoring the phones and email accounts of Associated Press and Fox News reporters (and the parents of Fox News Correspondent James Rosen), CBS News' Sharyl Attkisson said her computer seemed like it had been compromised. Turns out, it was.

'A cyber security firm hired by CBS News has determined through forensic analysis that Sharyl Attkisson’s computer was accessed by an unauthorized, external, unknown party on multiple occasions late in 2012. Evidence suggests this party performed all access remotely using Attkisson’s accounts. While no malicious code was found, forensic analysis revealed an intruder had executed commands that appeared to involve search and exfiltration of data.'"
Link to Original Source

+ - Cisco to double the speed of the Internet

Submitted by trazom28
trazom28 writes "As reported on CNN, Cisco is updating the core router technologies. From the article, "The new core router technology, known as "CRS-X," will provide speeds of 400 Gigabits per second — and that's just for one slot on the router's rack. Each rack is scalable up to 6.4 Terabits per second, and the entire CRS-X system is capable of nearly 1 Petabit per second if multiple racks are set up in tandem. " Units set to go on sale this fall."

+ - Corporate Death Penalty-> 1

Submitted by idbeholda
idbeholda writes "Alan Grayson passes a "Corporate Accountability" amendment into a federal spending bill that holds individuals accountable for the actions of the corporations they run. Further, Grayson vows to attach “this corporate death penalty amendment to every bill [he] can.”"
Link to Original Source

+ - NSA Scandal: Green Dam 2.0? 4

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes "In 2009, The Information Technology Industry Council, whose members included HP, Dell and Microsoft, was among 22 industry groups in North America, Europe and Japan that signed a letter urging the Chinese government to review its proposed Green Dam web-filtering software program. Separately, U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk and Commerce Secretary Gary Locke said in a joint letter to Chinese officials that the Green Dam mandate posed a "possible barrier to trade" that may violate World Trade Organization rules. Four years later, Popular Mechanics' Glenn Derene is warning that the NSA Prism Program could kill U.S. tech companies. 'Companies such as Microsoft, Apple, and Google are major exporters of information services,' explains Derene, 'through products such as Gmail, iCloud, Exchange, and Azure. Hundreds of millions of people use these services worldwide, and it has just been revealed to everybody outside the U.S. that our government reserves the right to look into their communications whenever it wants.' But, as in Green Dam, business interests may ultimately trump government interests. Derene concludes, 'I expect the Prism program to fall apart on its own, not because of public outcry but because the companies that participated will now see it as a toxic association that could threaten their status in fast-growing foreign markets. If U.S. intelligence agencies try to compel participation through the courts, I expect companies such as Apple and Google to start putting up a legal fight—not just because Prism is bad public relations, because it's bad for business.'"

+ - Proof of sweeping domestic phone surveillance by the NSA->

Submitted by Trashcan Romeo
Trashcan Romeo writes "The Guardian has obtained a court order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) requiring Verizon on an "ongoing, daily basis" to provide the National Security Agency (NSA) , for all domestic and international calls, the numbers of both parties, location data, call duration, time of day, and other unique identifiers."
Link to Original Source

+ - Researchers pull out of talks with publishers on text-mining->

Submitted by ananyo
ananyo writes "Disagreement between scientists and publishers has grown on a thorny issue: how to make it easier for computer programs to extract facts and data from online research papers. On 22 May, researchers, librarians and others pulled out of European Commission talks on how to encourage the techniques, known as text mining and data mining. The withdrawal has effectively ended the contentious discussions, although a formal abandonment can be decided only after a commission review in July. Scientists have chafed for years at limitations on computer-aided research. They would like to use computer programs to crawl over thousands or millions of articles and other online research content, extracting data to build up databases or to pick out patterns such as associations between genes and diseases. But in many parts of the world, including Europe (though perhaps not in the US-the situation is unclear), this sort of use currently requires permission from the content’s copyright owner. Even if an institution has paid to access a journal, its academics do not necessarily have permission to mine the text"
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+ - "Photosynthesis camera" is an open source version of the LANDSAT camera->

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "This camera is a modded conventional camera which can image in both infrared and visible light, then composite into photosynthesis "heat maps". It's from Public Lab, the folks who've mapped the BP oil spill with balloon-borne cameras and they're also behind that open source spectrometer from last year. This is going to change things for gardeners and farmers in a big way!"
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+ - Will users get paid for their slice of the "big data" economy?->

Submitted by curtwoodward
curtwoodward writes "Better healthcare, more efficient government, cheaper goods and services — it's all possible in the age of "big data." According to the big companies hoping to make a killing off all that information, anyway. But will the people generating that valuable data — Joe and Jane Consumer — ever get a piece of the action?
A few startups are trying to establish first-party marketplaces for personal data, compensating users directly for contributing high-quality information about themselves. The World Economic Forum is also involved, hoping that one day, "a person’s data would be equivalent to their money ... controlled, managed, exchanged and accounted for just like personal banking services operate today." But some entrepreneurs think it might be too late in the developed world, where a consumer's data fingerprint is already very well documented."
Link to Original Source

+ - Too Many Smart People Chasing Too Many Dumb Ideas 1

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes "In The Unexotic Underclass, C.Z. Nnaemeka argues that too many smart people are chasing too many dumb ideas. "What is shameful," writes Nnaemeka, "is that in a country with so many problems, with such a heaving underclass, we find the so-called 'best and brightest,' the 20-and 30-somethings who emerge from the top American graduate and undergraduate programs, abandoning their former hangout, Wall Street, to pile into anti-problem entrepreneurship." Nnaemeka adds, "It just looks like we’ve shifted the malpractice from feeding the money machine to making inane, self-centric apps. Worse, is that the power players, institutional and individual — the highflying VCs, the entrepreneurship incubators, the top-ranked MBA programs, the accelerators, the universities, the business plan competitions have been complicit in this nonsense." And while it may not get you invited to the White House, Nnaemeka advises entrepreneurs looking for ideas to "consider looking beyond the city-centric, navel-gazing, youth-obsessed mainstream" and instead focus on some groups that no one else is helping."

+ - Microsoft Launches Cloud-Based Program To Battle Botnets, Malware->

Submitted by coolnumbr12
coolnumbr12 writes "Microsoft launched the Cyber Threat Intelligence Program on Wednesday, a new system that uses the Windows Azure cloud computing platform to fight botnets and malware. The system will allow Microsoft to share information on computer virus infections with Internet Service Providers and Computer Emergency Response Teams in near real-time. Microsoft said in a blog post that it expects the program to dramatically increase the ability to keep up the changing cybercrime landscape."
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% "Every morning, I get up and look through the 'Forbes' list of the richest people in America. If I'm not there, I go to work" -- Robert Orben

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