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Submission + - The Rise of Chemophobia in the News (plos.org)

Submitted by eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes: American news outlets like The New York Times seem to thrive on chemophobia — consumer fear of the ambiguous concept of 'chemicals.' As a result, Pulitzer-prize winning science writer Deborah Blum has decided to call out New York Times journalist Nicholas Kirstof for his secondary crusade (she notes he is an admirable journalist in other realms) against chemicals. She's quick to point out the absurdity of fearing chemicals like Hydrogen which could be a puzzler considering its integral role played in live-giving water as well as life-destroying hydrogen cyanide. Another example is O2 versus O3. Blum calls upon journalists to be more specific, to avoid the use of vague terms like 'toxin' let alone 'chemical' and instead inform the public with lengthy chemical names like perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) instead of omitting the actual culprit altogether. Kristof has, of course, resorted to calling makers of these specific compounds "Big Chem" and Blum chastises his poorly researched reporting along with chemophobic lingo. Chemists of Slashdot, have you found reporting on "chemicals" to be as poor as Blum alleges or is this no more erroneous than any scare tactic used to move newspapers and garner eyeballs?
Facebook

Submission + - NY Times: Microsoft Tried to Unload Bing on Facebook (nytimes.com)

Submitted by
benfrog
benfrog writes: "According to a blog posting on the New York Times site, Microsoft tried to sell the perpetual money-losing Bing to Facebook "over a year ago" (the article cites "several people with knowledge of the discussions who didn’t want to be identified talking about internal deliberations"). Steve Ballmer, apparently, was not involved or consulted. Facebook politely declined. Neither Microsoft or Facebook would comment on the rumors."
Math

Submission + - Statistical Analysis Raises Civil War Dead by 20%

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "For more than a century it has been accepted that about 620,000 Americans died in the the bloodiest, most devastating conflict in American history, but now BBC reports that historian J David Hacker has used sophisticated statistical software to determine the war's death toll and found that civil war dead may have been undercounted by as many as 130,000. "I have been waiting more than 25 years for an article like this one," writes historian James McPherson. Hacker began by taking digitized samples from the decennial census counts taken 1850-1880. Using statistical package SPSS, Hacker counted the number of native-born white men of military age in 1860 and determined how many of that group were still alive in 1870 and compared that survival rate with the survival rates of the men of the same ages from 1850-1860, and from 1870-1880 — the 10-year census periods before and after the Civil War. The calculations yielded the number of "excess" deaths of military-age men between 1860-1870 — the number who died in the war or in the five subsequent years from causes related to the war. Hacker's findings, published in the December 2011 issue of Civil War History, have been endorsed by some of the leading historians of the conflict but do the numbers, equivalent to about 7.5 million US deaths in proportion to America's current population, really matter? "The difference between the two estimates is large enough to change the way we look at the war," writes Hacker. "The war touched more lives and communities more deeply than we thought, and thus shaped the course of the ensuing decades of American history in ways we have not yet fully grasped. True, the war was terrible in either case. But just how terrible, and just how extensive its consequences, can only be known when we have a better count of the Civil War dead.""

Submission + - At what point has a Kickstarter project failed? 2

Submitted by skywiseguy
skywiseguy writes: I have only used Kickstarter to back a single project so far, but one of the backers of that project pointed us to a project promising video capable glasses which was once one of the top 10 highest funded projects in Kickstarter history. After reading through the comments, it is obvious that the project has not met its expected deadline of "Winter 2011" but the project team rarely gives any updates with concrete information, all emails sent to them by backers get a form letter in reply, they routinely delete negative comments from their Facebook page, and apparently very soon after the project was funded, they posted pictures of themselves on a tropical beach with the tagline "We are not on a beach in Thailand." Their early promotions were featured on Engadget and other tech sites but since the project was funded they've rarely, if ever, communicated in more than a form letter. So at what point can a project like this be considered to have failed? And if you had backed a project with this kind of lack of communication from the project team, what would you consider to be the best course of action? Disclaimer: I have not backed this project, but I am very interested in funding Kickstarter projects and I do not want to get caught sending money to a less than reputable project. According to the above project's backers, Kickstarter claims to have no mechanism for refunding money to backers of failed projects and no way to hold the project team accountable to their backers. This does not seem like a healthy environment for someone who is averse to giving their money to scam artists.

Submission + - Everything we know about cybercrime is wrong (theregister.co.uk)

Submitted by isoloisti
isoloisti writes: Two interesting piece in the Register explode several cybercrime myths. Study of criminal demographics by a criminologist finds "cybercrime is far from the preserve of tech-savvy youths — nearly half (43 per cent) of cyber-crooks are over 35 years old, and less than a third (29 per cent) are under 25."
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/03/29/cybercrime_myths_exploded/

Study by Microsoft finds that "money mules, and not bank customers are the real victims when money is stolen" and that "passwords are not the bottleneck in the cybercrime pipeline." http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/03/30/ms_money_mule_victims/
Crime

Submission + - Visa and MasterCard warn of "Massive" Breach at Card Processor (majorgeeks.com) 1

Submitted by
concealment
concealment writes: "Visa and MasterCard are warning of what they call a “massive breach” that could involve as many as 10 million compromised credit card numbers.

The breach occurred between January 21, 2012 and February 25th 2012. They say that this information, known as full Track 1 and Track 2 data, could be used to counterfeit new cards."
Businesses

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: How Have You Handled Illegal Interview Topics (salary.com) 1

Submitted by kodiaktau
kodiaktau writes: Salary.com profiles 14 questions that interviewers may or may not ask during the interview process such as the standards of age, gender and sexual orientation. They also profile several lesser known illegal or border line questions like height/weight, military background, country of origin and family status.

With the recent flap over companies asking potential employees for passwords during the interview process it is important to know and review your legal rights before entering the interview.

Have you been confronted with borderline or illegal interview questions in the past? How have you responded to those questions?
Games

Submission + - Prince of Persia creator finds lost source code (geek.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Jordan Mechner may not be a name many of you know unless you are up-to-date with your video gaming history. He’s probably better known as the creator of Prince of Persia back in 1989.

Since that release 23 years ago on the Apple II, Mechner has gone on to develop the sequel, Prince of Persia 2: The Shadow and the Flame and then joined Ubisoft to reinvigorate the series for a new audience in 2001. Along the way, he managed to misplace the original source code for that first Prince of Persia game and has been searching for it ever since.

Yesterday he found it, and the discovery is all thanks to his father. The three packs of 3.5 Apple ProDOS disks had been safely stored away in a brown box along with a load of Amstrad copies of his 1984 game Karateka.
Ubuntu

Submission + - The world's slowest Linux PC (extremetech.com)

Submitted by
MrSeb
MrSeb writes: "Hackers are masochists. Almost by definition, hackers push hardware and software (and themselves) beyond breaking point to find out, once and for all, whether something is possible or not. In Dmitry Grinberg’s case, he decided to find out the lowest spec possible for a Linux PC. Barring exceptional circumstances, Linux generally requires a 32-bit processor with a modern memory management unit (MMU) and more than 1MB of RAM — Grinberg, obviously not a fan of excess bits, has successfully booted Ubuntu Linux (Jaunty) with an ATmega1284p, 8-bit RISC microcontroller clocked at 24MHz and equipped with no less than 16KB of SRAM and 128KB of flash storage. Of course, Ubuntu wouldn't boot on an 8-bit RISC chip, so Grinberg had to write an ARMv5 emulator. The effective speed of the computer, after emulation, is just 6.5KHz. It takes 2 hours to boot to command line, a further 4 hours to load Ubuntu, and if you want to open an actual window manager, Grinberg simply says 'starting X takes a lot longer.'"

Comment Bad idea (Score 3, Insightful) 106

by wired_parrot (#39440473) Attached to: When Social Media Meets TV, Are the Results Worth Watching?
Letting fans take control of tv shows is a bad idea, and will make tv scripts be written like so much bad fan fiction. The key issue for me is that the crowdsourcing of fans tends to favour the familiar and desirable. This discourages creativity, as you can't introduce new characters and situations without removing the familiar first, and fans will always agitate to maintain the familiar. What you get in the end is a melow saccharinne version of the show, with no unexpected twists that might shake the diehard fan's loyalty, but that ends up alienating those very same fans

Submission + - Growth of pseudoscience harming Australian universities (theconversation.edu.au)

Submitted by wired_parrot
wired_parrot writes: The international credibility of Australia’s universities is being undermined by the increase in the “pseudoscientific” health courses they offer, two academics write in a recent article decrying that a third of australian universities now offer courses in such subjects as homeopathy and traditional chinese medicine, which undermines science based medicine. "As the number of alternative practitioners graduating from tertiary education institutions increases, further health-care resources are wasted, while the potential for harm increases."
Privacy

Submission + - FOIA Request Shows Which Printer Companies Cooperated With U.S. Government (scribd.com)

Submitted by
Dave_Minsky
Dave_Minsky writes: "The U.S. Secret Service responded to a FOIA request on Monday that reveals the names of the printer companies that cooperate with the government to identify and track potential counterfeiters. The Electronic Frontier Foundation revealed in 2005 that the U.S. Secret Service was in cahoots with selected laser printer companies to identify and track printer paper using tiny microscopic dots encoded into the paper.

The tiny, yellow dots--less than a millimeter each--are printed in a pattern over each page and are only viewable with a blue light, a magnifying glass or a microscope. The pattern of dots is encodes identifiable information including printer model, and time and location where the document was printed."
Security

Submission + - Adobe's strategy for Vulnerability Management (darkreading.com)

Submitted by
EliSowash
EliSowash writes: "Adobe's head of product security, Brad Arkin, had an opportunity to discuss his firm's approach to vulnerability management at Kaspersky's
Security Analyst Summit 2012. He's urging fellow security researchers to adopt a similar strategy, namely: Focus less on finding and exploiting vulnerabilities, and more on defensive mechanisms like DEP, ASLR, and sandboxing.

His argument is that security researchers are doing half the work for attackers — that by finding vulnerabilities in the software, we're making the job of writing exploit code easier.

To me, it comes of a little like sour grapes: Adobe's products are regularly exploited. Is Arkin trying to deflect some of the responsibility of a developer to produce safe product?"
Android

Submission + - Google Starts Scanning Android Apps (blogspot.com)

Submitted by eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes: A recent blog post has Android developers talking about Google finally scanning third party applications for malware. Oddly enough, Google claims this service (codenamed 'Bouncer') has been active for some time: 'The service has been looking for malicious apps in Market for a while now, and between the first and second halves of 2011, we saw a 40% decrease in the number of potentially-malicious downloads from Android Market. This drop occurred at the same time that companies who market and sell anti-malware and security software have been reporting that malicious applications are on the rise.' So it appears that they allow the software to be sold even before it is scanned and it also appears that no one has been bitten by a false positive from this software. Apparently Bouncer is not as oppressive as Apple's solution although given recent news its effectiveness must be questioned. Have any readers had their apps flagged or pulled by Bouncer?

Submission + - Dutch Supreme Court sees game objects as goods (newser.com)

Submitted by thrill12
thrill12 writes: The Dutch Supreme Court ruled on January 31st that the taking away of possessions in the game Runescape from a 13-year-old boy was in fact theft because the possessions could be seen as actual goods. The highest court explained this not by arguing it was software that was copied, but by stating that the game data were real goods that were acquired through "effort and time investment" and "the principal had the actual and exclusive dominion of the goods" — up until the moment the other guy took them away, that is.

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So you think that money is the root of all evil. Have you ever asked what is the root of money? -- Ayn Rand

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