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Technology

Submission + - Fighting for the Amazon can still get you killed ( (vice.com)

Submitted by HansonMB
HansonMB writes: On May 24, 2011—the same day Brazil's Parliament voted to decrease logging restrictions in the country's Forest Code—married environmental activists Zé Cláudio Ribeiro and Maria do Espirito Santo were shot to death outside their house in the Amazonian state of Para. A month later we traveled to Zé Cláudio's hometown of Marabá, which was once in the middle of the rainforest and is now surrounded by miles and miles of clearcut cattle land. As the investigation into Zé and Maria's murders went nowhere, we drove into the forest to the site of the killings, followed the heavily armed men of Brazil's environmental protection agency as they busted up illegal timber mills, visited the militant squatters of Brazil's Landless Movement, met modern day slaves, and marveled at the lawless, violent atmosphere that permeates the town locals call Marabála (that means Mara-bullets).
Japan

Submission + - Thorium, the forgotten green nuclear fuel that alm (motherboard.tv)

Submitted by HansonMB
HansonMB writes: While the idea of building small, thorium-based nuclear reactors – thought to be dramatically safer, cheaper, cleaner and terror-proof than our current catalog of reactors – can be shooed away as fringe by some, the germ of the idea began in the U.S. government’s major atomic lab, at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, in the 1960s. It’s only in the past half-decade that the idea has picked up steam again on the Internet, thanks to enterprising enthusiasts who have chronicled the early experiments, distributed documents, and posted YouTube videos. But if thorium’s second life on the Internet has grown the flock of adherents exponentially, it’s also pulled in more than a few people whose nuclear expertise doesn’t extend far past Wikipedia, adding a sheen of hype to the proceedings.
News

Submission + - New Concept Video Shows How The Recycled Island Mi (motherboard.tv)

Submitted by
CoveredTrax
CoveredTrax writes: "Flooding the ocean with plastic that won’t ever really go away (aside from breaking down into plastic molecules that are working their way through the oceanic food chain) is a serious problem. Ramon Knoester of WHIM architecture, says he’s designed the solution: Recycled Island, a proposed 10,000 square kilometer floating piece of land built right on top of the Pacific garbage patch. According to Knoester, that’s an island the size of the Big Island of Hawaii built on top of bundled-up floating garbage."
Democrats

Submission + - New Independent Analysis Says Global Warming Is To (motherboard.tv)

Submitted by HansonMB
HansonMB writes: The planet is heating up. Three big projects from NASA, NOAA, and a collaboration between Britain’s Met Office and the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK, all confirm that the surface of the planet on which we reside and depend upon is heating up and heating up at an increasing rate. This is, of course, not enough for a small but influential crowd that would prefer to not admit that a planet of nearly 7 billion terribly inefficient, rapidly consuming human beings can knock Earth out of stasis.

So, the University of California’s Richard Muller launched the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature study, yet another analysis, this one independent and aimed at the skeptics. Muller’s crew devised a new statistical method that allowed them to use nearly every land temperature station on the planet, some 39,000 of them, rather than having to use subsets as used by the other groups. The group also used some different statistical techniques to help eliminate data skewing from things like the urban heat island effect, something used often as a counter-argument against climate change.
Science

Submission + - Creating robot boats that suck up oil spills (motherboard.tv)

Submitted by
HansonMB
HansonMB writes: "In April of last year the Deepwater Horizon semi-submersible Mobile Offshore Drilling Unit exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, killing 11 men, injuring 17 others and triggering what is generally recognized as one of the greatest human errors ever made and officially the largest unforeseen marine oil catastrophe since people started drilling for oil. By the time the leak was capped in July, 2010, enough oil to fill 4.9 million barrels covered the Gulf in a toxic slick.

Enter Cesar Harada. After visiting the oil spill, in June of 2010, the young engineer decided to leave MIT in Boston to develop an open source oil spill cleaning robot, Protei. Our current array of oil spill skimming technologies — mostly private boats retrofitted with skimming equipment and skimmers maintained by the U.S. Coast Guard — are only able to collect 3 percent of the oil in the Gulf of Mexico and carry health risks to humans and heavy economic costs. Protei is unmanned, autonomous, relatively inexpensive and open hardware (anybody can use, modify and distribute its designs), making it a potentially powerful weapon in the battle to clean up the Gulf of Mexico, while preserving the safety of the workers who would otherwise be exposed to the toxic mess. Already Harada imagines other uses for the sailboat drone, like oceanography and surveillance."
Security

Submission + - Remember when hackers were good guys? (VIDEO) (motherboard.tv)

Submitted by HansonMB
HansonMB writes: “They are shy, sweet, incredibly brilliant and, I think, more effective in pushing the culture around now in good ways than almost any group I can think of.”

A lot has changed about hackers and how people perceive them. But at least the last part of the above description, uttered by Whole Earth Catalog editor Stewart Brand in this 1984 TV special, still holds true. It hearkens back to when the term “hacker” took its most literal definition: A devoted computer hobbyist who ‘hacked’ away at a computer keyboard to make something work, or work better.
Advertising

Submission + - Ghostery: Spy on those who spy on your web history (motherboard.tv)

Submitted by HansonMB
HansonMB writes: Surfing the web these days isn’t the same as it was 10 year ago. And it’s not just because there are less websites with HTML frames and ‘under construction’ GIFs. The fact of the matter is that everywhere you go on the web is being tracked, and the ability of sites and services to benefit from this is becoming the accepted norm. It’s the lifeblood of companies like Google and Facebook, whose embedded elements allow any site to send data about your browsing habits back to the great data processing center in the cloud.
Earth

Submission + - NASA's Sky Crane - So Crazy It Just Might Work (motherboard.tv) 1

Submitted by HansonMB
HansonMB writes: Aside from the Earth, Mars is the easiest planet in our solar system on which to land; there isn’t a crushing superheated atmosphere like on Venus, and there is a solid surface, unlike gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn. That said, it’s still pretty tough. More than half of all missions sent to land on the red planet have merely made craters. Spacecraft on Mars have used some pretty inventive methods to reach the surface unscathed, and the next system is by far the most intricate and insane: a novel device called the Sky Crane will lower the Mars Science Laboratory’s rover Curiosity to the red planet’s surface next summer. It’s the kind of solution that, once you really think about it, realize that it’s so crazy it just might work.

The main challenge of landing on Mars is that it isn’t Earth. With one-third the gravity and an atmosphere one percent as thick as Earth’s, a spacecraft falling to the surface doesn’t meet much resistance. As so, engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory have come up with some creative solutions to effect a soft landing on Mars.
Patents

Submission + - Intellectual Property Rights VS Innovation (motherboard.tv)

Submitted by HansonMB
HansonMB writes: If there’s a single issue aside from net neutrality that will profoundly affect the future of innovation, it’s software patents. As average people become increasingly dependent on the intangible algorithms that give life and purpose to the CPUs inside their various electronic tools, the debate over software patents brings into question the very nature of human ideas — Can a configuration of numbers be owned? Or does innovation need to take physical form to be given legal substance?
Security

Submission + - A Chat With Zavilia, a tool for ID'ing Rioters (motherboard.tv)

Submitted by HansonMB
HansonMB writes: Social media isn’t just great for starting "social unrest,” it’s proving to be quite helpful for quashing it too. Not long after the bricks began to fly in London’s latest kerfuffle, locals angry over raging mobs scrambled to assist the police in their attempt to identify street-fighters and free-for-all hooligans. Swarms of rioters are being summoned to courts while police work to hush the streets and refurbish neighborhoods.

Now with more than 1,000 people charged over the chaos, a few citizen groups continue to provide web-based rioter identification platforms, in hopes of being good subjects, maintaining the country’s pursuit of order, and keeping their neighborhoods safe.

Consider, for example, Zavilia.com, a team comprised of British natives roused by the public’s response to the riots. As an organization, this is its first foray online, and certainly not its last. I connected with the managing director of Zavilia.com, Matthew, who prefers not to reveal his full identity, to get his take on this trendy tactic.
Privacy

Submission + - Sending you to Jail?: There's an app for that (motherboard.tv)

Submitted by HansonMB
HansonMB writes: Before we talk about the facial recognition technology thats being rolled out to police stations nationwide next month, here’s a question for you: Who would you rather have access to face recognition tech: cops or that weird heavy-breather on the subway? Do you want it? You know, to check out that weird heavy-breather on the subway: what’s his deal? Maybe you are the heavy-breather. In the beginning, that face recognition app might just send you to some photos on Picasa or Facebook—but that’s all it takes to get to the top of the hill in figuring out a whole lot of stuff about someone.

That app doesn’t exist yet for civilians. Bossman Eric Schmidt is already on record saying that Google’s got the tech nailed. "We built that technology and withheld it [because] people could use it in a very bad way,” he said earlier this summer at the D9 conference. That’s nice and not evil, I guess, but Slate tech thinker Farhad Manjoo writes that Google reps have told him “face to face” that customers want face recognition on Google’s Goggles visual search app.
Security

Submission + - Will lazy, careless computers save us from us? (motherboard.tv)

Submitted by HansonMB
HansonMB writes: Can lazy machines cruising a synthetic internet defend against sloppy humans?

Researchers at the University of Southern California led by Jim Blythe hope so. They’ve devised a system to test computer-security networks by having machines themselves mimic man’s mistakes. These “seemingly innocuous actions” – users downloading files, or IT personnel ditching security features that can bog down machines – can leave networks exposed to nefarious activity.
Privacy

Submission + - Would you share your online history with friends? (motherboard.tv) 1

Submitted by HansonMB
HansonMB writes: There’s a pretty good chance you don’t think about your clickstream too often, that trail of visited URLs that in total paint an entirely unique picture of you as a citizen of the Internet. Early last spring, a somewhat strange web app called Voyurl launched, presenting its users with one mega-clickstream of all of its users, a constantly-updating list of websites visited and by whom (most use screen names). There was also, necessarily, an anonymous option.

It wasn’t scary so much as it was very real and, well, audacious in a time of increasing awareness — and fear — of being watched online; the dawning of the realization that you are being watched all of the time and by many different parties. The OG Voyurl was that laid totally bare.

The site relaunched last week as a bold, potentially revolutionary take on recommendation engines. I talked to Voyurl’s founder, Adam Leibsohn, as he took a break from four nearly sleepless days and nights in front of a computer guiding his creation back into the public.

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