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An anonymous reader writes: In a much celebrated launch, Google allowed early adopters to shell out $1,500 get an early version of Glass and be part of its “Explorer Program.” But this wasn’t so much a product rollout as it was a social experiment. Through this strategy, Google was able to get thousands of people to challenge society’s conventions on privacy and connectedness without having to address it directly.
MojoKid writes: A new website sponsored by Ubisoft as part of its advertising campaign for the upcoming hacking-themed game Watch Dogs isn't just a plug for the title — it's a chilling example of exactly how easy it is for companies to mine your data. While most folks are normally averse to giving any application or service access to their Facebook account, the app can come back with some interesting results if you dare. Facebook's claims that it can identify you with 98.3% accuracy based on images.The Datashadow app also offers the ability to compare various character traits and gives a great deal of information about total number of posts, post times and inferred values about income, location, and lifestyle. Is Ubisoft actually performing some kind of data analysis? Almost certainly not. This is far from an exhaustive, comprehensive examination of someone's personality or FB posting habits. The companies that actually perform that kind of data analysis are anything but cheap. The point Ubisoft is making, however, is that your FB profile contains enormous amounts of information in a single place that can be mined in any number of ways. All of this information absolutely is combined and collated to create detailed digital profiles of all of us, and the more we engage with various online services (from Facebook to Google Plus), the larger the data pool becomes.
JG0LD writes: Vic Gundotra, the man behind Google Plus and one of Google’s most prominent executives, announced today that he will leave the company “effective immediately.” Gundotra made the announcement, appropriately enough, in a lengthy Google Plus post, praising his co-workers and saying that he is “excited about what’s next.” However, he did not further outline his future plans, saying that “this isn't the day to talk about that.”
mdsolar writes: "Insider threats are the most serious challenge confronting nuclear facilities in today's world, a Stanford political scientist says.
In every case of theft of nuclear materials where the circumstances of the theft are known, the perpetrators were either insiders or had help from insiders, according to Scott Sagan and his co-author, Matthew Bunn of Harvard University, in a research paper published this month by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
"Given that the other cases involve bulk material stolen covertly without anyone being aware the material was missing, there is every reason to believe that they were perpetrated by insiders as well," they wrote.
And theft is not the only danger facing facility operators; sabotage is a risk as well, said Sagan, who is a senior fellow at Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation and the Caroline S.G. Munro Professor in Political Science.
While there have been sabotage attempts in the United States and elsewhere against nuclear facilities conducted by insiders, the truth may be hard to decipher in an industry shrouded in security, he said.
"We usually lack good and unclassified information about the details of such nuclear incidents," Sagan said.
The most recent known example occurred in 2012 – an apparent insider sabotage of a diesel generator at the San Onofre nuclear facility in California. Arguably the most spectacular incident happened at South Africa's Koeberg nuclear power plant (then under construction) in South Africa in 1982 when someone detonated explosives directly on a nuclear reactor."
rofkool writes: Scientists at the University of California Santa Barbara have demonstrated a new level of qubit reliability that could herald the dawn of commercial quantum computing. Their research demonstrated a 99% level of qubit reliability, addressing one of the fundamental problems faced in the development of quantum computers for practical purposes. The findings could prove useful in furthering the applications of quantum computing for a variety of purposes, including economic systems, the environment, medicine and even space exploration.
ClownPenis writes: Hewlett-Packard has admitted to creating and using slush funds for bribes, money laundering, and clandestine “bag of cash” handoffs in order to profiteer off of lucrative government contracts in Russia, Poland, and Mexico, according to court documents.
HP’s guilty plea carries with it a $108 million penalty — a combination of SEC penalties, as well as criminal fines and forfeitures paid out to the Department of Justice. Thus far no criminal charges have been brought against American HP executives. The multi-agency investigation, which was conducted by multi-national law enforcement partners, the FBI, IRS, and SEC, has revealed kleptocracies in the three foreign governments and corruption and dishonesty among HP corporate fat cats.
An anonymous reader writes: Inventor Jeff Guida has come up with a way to turn any Citibike into an electric scooter. His ShareRoller is about the size of a small briefcase, weighs just seven pounds, and has a 12- to 20-mile range. From the article: '"Years ago, I would've needed a giant engineering company and several million dollars in development research and it still would've taken two years or more," Guida said. But 3D printing has changed all that. In the coming months, Guida hopes to design a universal bracket so that the ShareRoller can be used on any bike. He has some competition there, as there are a few companies that make wheels that convert regular bikes into electric bikes, but he says the ShareRoller is more convenient.'
alphadogg writes: Security and how to protect users from pervasive monitoring will dominate the proceedings when members of Internet Engineering Task Force meet in London starting Sunday. For an organization that develops the standards we all depend on for the Internet to work, the continued revelations made by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden have had wide-ranging repercussions. "It wasn't a surprise that some activities like this are going on. I think that the scale and some of the tactics surprised the community a little bit.... You could also argue that maybe we needed the wake-up call," said IETF Chairman Jari Arkko. Part of that work will also be to make security features easier to use and for the standards organization to think of security from day one when developing new protocols.
jfruh writes: Steven R. Spriggs was ticketed and fined $165 for violating California's law on cell phone use while operating a motor vehicle, which states that you can only use a phone while driving if you have a hands-free device. But he appealed the judgement, arguing that the law only applied to actually talking on the phone, whereas he had been caught checking his GPS app. Now an appeals court has agreed with him. The law in question was enacted in 2006, before the smartphone boom.
