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The Military

Submission + - Blimps to Help Protect Washington DC From Air Attack

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Reuters reports that pair of bulbous, helium-filled "aerostats" — each at 243 feet more than three quarters the length of a football field at will be moored to the ground and fly as high as 10,000 feet, as part of a high-tech shield designed to protect the Washington D.C. area from an air attack like the one that took place on September 11, 2001, when Al Qaeda militants hijacked American Airlines Flight 77, a Boeing 757, and crashed it into the Pentagon. One of the aerostats carries a powerful long-range surveillance radar with a 360-degree look-around capability that can reach out to 340 miles. The other carries a radar used for targeting. Operating for up to 30 days at a time, JLENS is meant to give the military more time to detect and react to threats (PDF), including cruise missiles and manned and unmanned aircraft, compared with ground-based radar and is also designed to defend against tactical ballistic missiles, large caliber rockets and moving vehicles that could be used for attacks, including boats, cars and trucks. "We're trying to determine how the surveillance radar information from the JLENS platforms can be integrated with existing systems in the National Capital Region," says Michael Kucharek, a spokesman for the North American Aerospace Defense Command. Washington is currently guarded by an air-defense system that includes Federal Aviation Administration radars and Department of Homeland Security helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft on alert at Reagan National Airport to intercept slow, low-flying aircraft."
Spam

Submission + - Sender Policy Framework for spam filtering - too soon?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Our organization had had a decent SPF record of our own for a long time. Recently, we decided to try using SPF for filtering inbound mail. On the up side, a lot of bad mail was being caught. On the down side, it seems like there is always a "very important" message being caught in the filter because the sender has failed to consider all mail sources in writing their record. At first, I tried to assist sending parties with correcting their records out of hope that it was isolated. This quickly started to consume far too much time. I'm learning that many have set up inaccurate but syntactically valid SPF records and forgotten about them, which is probably the worst outcome for SPF as a standard. Are you using SPF? How are you handling false positives caused by inaccurate SPF records?
The Internet

Submission + - "We the People" API to be released (whitehouse.gov)

Submitted by Kwyj1b0
Kwyj1b0 writes: The Whitehouse plans to open up the APIs to its "We the People" initiative. The first set of Read APIs (allowing anyone to read data on petitions) will be released in March 2013. In addition, selected people will be invited to attend the White House Open Data Day Hackathon on February 22nd. Write APIs will follow, allowing people to extend petition capabilities to their own sites.
Privacy, of course, should be an important concern that needs to be addressed.
It's funny. Laugh.

Submission + - Anti-Drone Clothing

Submitted by
fermion
fermion writes: "Given that the Obama Administration now has the power to Terminate Americans on Demand, it might be time to think about defending ourselves from such a near term scenario. One might think that a Stinger would be the ideal defense, but radical gun control promoted by the liberal government makes that a difficult option at best. Therefore we are forced to execute a more passive defense in the form of anti-dron apparel from Adam Harvey. I am sure this will become the new little black dress."
Apple

Submission + - Raspberry Pi in iPod (tumblr.com)

Submitted by
peterburkimsher
peterburkimsher writes: "The Original PiPod!
I thought that the Raspberry Pi was too bulky for my pockets. So I soldered some new connectors, and put it inside the shell of an original first-generation iPod!
Hopefully a Model C will be released so that the Pi can be compatible with iPod cases in future.
Peter"
Government

Submission + - Amsterdam using Airbnb listing service to identify illegal rentals (itworld.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In a move that might dampen the popularity of Airbnb's site for Amsterdam, the city government is now using the accommodation listing service as a source of tips about illegal rental property.

"Airbnb is never a smoking gun," said Jan-Jaap Eikelboom, spokesman for the city of Amsterdam, regarding use of the service. But the government does use Airbnb and its competitors to compare its own nuisance data with street listings on sites like Airbnb, and has been doing so for a while, he said. This combined information can come in handy when investigating suspicious buildings and can help with spotting illegal activity, he said.
Piracy

Submission + - Russian eBookseller LitRes Gets Competing eBook Apps Booted from Google Play (the-digital-reader.com)

Submitted by Nate the greatest
Nate the greatest writes: The developer of the popular Android app Moon+ Reader was surprised to discover this weekend that he is a filthy stinking pirate. Google informed him via an automated email that Moon+ Reader had been removed from Google Play because the app had switched to using pirate sites as the main sources of ebooks. Or at least, that's what LitRes claims, but when they complained to Google LitRes didn't tell the whole truth. What was really happening is that users of the app are enabling piracy, not the app itself. Thanks to the way Moon+ Reader is designed to let users share links to ebook sources some of the sources are indeed pirate sites (less than your average Google Search). In reality the app was no more a source of pirated content than your average web browser. What do you say when an ebook distributor's anti-piracy plan involves going after app developers rather than pirate sites? Something printable, IMO.

Comment Re:Reform plea bargaining. (Score 2) 443

It's worse than you might think.

All of those minor infractions are already just bench trials, unless you lose and appeal. At least around these parts, however, you end up with around a year of continuances because the prosecution is never ready to go to trial, forcing you to appear six or more times (for up to the full court session... you can't leave until they get around to telling you they aren't ready for you, and they will purposefully make you wait there until the very end) before having your 15 minute trial. Of course, if you just plead guilty to foo, we'll recommend you only be fined bar and you won't have to suffer the shame of needing to skip out on work for a day at court every other month for a year...

You also have to pay for the jury trial, and all of your public defender time at something like $40/h if you lose. And if you lose and can't pay you are in contempt of the court...

A huge problem (at least here) is that traffic cases often escalate into new crimes... if you e.g. are ticketed for a headlight being out and fix it... to avoid paying the fine, you have to go to court! And if you miss the court date, your license is automatically suspended and you are charged with failure to appear (a warrant is then issued). And then you get pulled over again, this time arrested for driving while having a revoked license and evading an outstanding warrant, and failure to appear before the court, and you sassed that officer a bit so let's throw in resisting-delaying-or-obstructing an officer... I watched this absurd cycle dozens of times in my year waiting to be cleared for Thoughtcrime.

The emperor's legal code allows him to prosecute anyone, any time.

Comment Re:There are many reasons to use M-x shell (Score 1) 127

by Unknown Lamer (#42728177) Attached to: After A Year, Emacswiki Alternative Shutting Down

The big shame here is that ... the reason we need Emacs is that X (well, and UNIX) sucks. All of these things should work everywhere.

A Lisp listener and UNIX shell are roughly equivalent; except the language provided by the Lisp shell is far more expressive. Instead of hundreds of blobs you call with arbitrary switches, piping around streams of bits disguised as strings... you have a library of tens of thousands of functions, with a sane calling convention, that document themselves interactively, etc. It just completely breaks down the barrier between programming and using the machine.
EU

Submission + - US prepares privacy trade war on Europe (heise.de)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A new study of the European Parliament outlined how the United States access European cloud data. In Berlin a high ranking diplomate John Rodgers shocked the data protection supervisors with an announcement of a transatlantic trade war on privacy.
Programming

Submission + - Book Review: The New Apple II User's Guide by David Finnigan

Submitted by
wclarke
wclarke writes: "It's not often that a book is published with the goal of instructing readers thoroughly in the use of a particular 8-bit computer in a contemporary setting, but The New Apple II User's Guide by David Finnigan is such a book. Released in 2012 and immediately the talk of the town in Apple II circles (yes, these circles exist,) this sturdy 774 page paperback sets out its twin goals in its introduction: (A) To enable anyone who is a newcomer to the Apple II computer to acquire a mastery of the machine, and (B) To serve as a reference book and refresher for those who are already experienced with Apple IIs, or indeed, experts. The book is named after the original The Apple II User's Guide (1981) by Lon Poole et al, which was very popular in its day. The scope of Finnigan's book encompasses the entire range of Apple II models, from the original II of 1977 right through to the 8/16-bit Apple IIGS (1986), though the last computer's 16-bit persona, comparable to that of the Amiga and Atari ST in behaviour, is a world unto itself and not a focus of the book.

Of the A and B camps described above, I claim to hail from the Expert end of camp B, and to bring some context to my review I should first say something about myself. I was born with an Apple II+ in my mouth, or rather my dad placed one there in 1981, when I was six years old, by buying one of these then still-new marvels of technology. This was a time when having 48KB of on-board RAM would draw an admiring whistle from the service guy at Computerland. My family upgraded to an Apple IIGS in 1990 which then continued to be my principal computer until 1996. So for a solid fifteen years, the Apple II was my sole gaming and programming home, and I grew to know its ways like the back of my hand. I was surprised by the liveliness of the Apple II community when I encountered it anew online in the Noughties. It's a community which continues to produce new products for the II, whether software (EG a Twitter client) or hardware (EG a flash storage card) on an almost monthly basis. The first line of The New Apple II User's Guide rhetorically asks "Why still use the Apple?" and supplies this answer: ". . . after three decades, it's still not finished yet. Or in other words, not everything that can be accomplished, has been accomplished." This state of affairs is what makes the arrival of such a book today a viable proposition, as well as a novel one. In his author's bio, Finnigan declares only eight years' experience with Apple IIs prior to writing the book, demonstrating that he could have benefited from its contents back in 2004 if only it had existed at the time.

Chapter 1, "Meeting Your Apple", begins with an overview of the nature of the Apple II's longevity, then moves into an explicit "Who This Book Is For" section, anticipating the various relationships the reader might have with the Apple II (ranging from "I just got one off ebay!" to "I am a grizzled veteran" – my words) and advising them in turn on how best to make use of the book. It also makes the important statement that the book assumes no prior knowledge of Apple IIs on the reader's part. If you did just score an Apple II off ebay, at a garage sale, through inheritance or from a spooky attic, the book will guide you through the process of getting it up and running from absolute first principles, beginning with identifying which model of Apple II you have acquired. The book's text is of a good size and generously spaced, and Finnigan is a clear communicator. Concise descriptions and occasional original black and white photos ensure that important features of the computer are always clearly identified when you are being walked through hands-on technical tasks. This is particularly important when the guide later turns its attention to the interior of the computer and its expansion slots; how and where to connect the various cards which support features like printing or telecommunications, or what to plug into the equivalent ports found on the back of later Apple models. The book's completist approach allows it to stand in for any original manuals that might be missing when you acquire a second-hand Apple II.

In its third chapter, the book opens onto the enormous subject of the BASIC environment and BASIC programming. It is worth pointing out for those unfamiliar with the computer that the Apple II's BASIC prompt is a genuine gateway to all its capabilities. Apple II BASIC programs can utilise both main graphics modes (lo-res and high-res), produce noise from the speaker, read input from peripherals (paddles, joysticks, mice), send output to printers and other hardware, and address any memory location in the computer. For anything that you might like to try to do with the machine, the BASIC environment is where you can instantly explore your ideas, switching between editing and execution in a single environment without any time spent compiling code. This is obviously why the bulk of The New Apple II User's Guide – roughly half of it, though not consecutively – concentrates on this environment. Chapter 3 begins by describing the use and syntaxes of BASIC, and introduces procedural programming concepts in a manner appropriate for folks who might never have encountered them before. The logical progression of the lessons and demonstrations has been carefully plotted. They start with a one line program producing ye olde "HELLO WORLD!" and build the reader's skill set up to such complex projects as the development of a basic but functional word processor, a database which can read and write text records from disk, and ultimately a few programs which demonstrate the Apple's sprite and audio features with the aid of a dash of assembly language.

In the case of the shortest code examples, the reader will have no trouble typing them in and will appreciate each example as a result. But the most substantial program listings, such as that for the word processor, can run up to eight pages in length. Digital copies of all the program listings are freely available for download at the author's companion website which is rich with many other Apple II links and resources in general. However, the digital program listings can obviously only be copy-pasted into Apple II emulators, meaning that if you're working with real hardware, you will indeed have to type them in if you want to run them. Those of us who lived through the days when magazines and books routinely published multi-page listings for readers to type in might experience a twinge of nostalgia at the recollection, but the romance of the experience was definitely outweighed by the fact that you would often end up with a program that didn't work, and no way of tracing your mistakes. Mercifully, the biggest program listing in The New Apple II User's Guide is still an easy to read baby compared to the average hobbyist listing from the 1980s, but I'm still surprised that the author hasn't made a disk image available containing all the programs from the book.

Then again, not disseminating such an image may have been a deliberate choice. The book's belief in building up the reader's understanding of each new topic from first principles means that Apple II newbies will emerge from The New Apple II User's Guide with a great sense of self-reliance. From my Grizzled Veteran perspective, I can confirm that there are no oversights which would result in a newbie having to look anywhere else for information; the book is indeed the one-stop shop of practicality that it claims to be, obviating the need to go trawling around the Internet for the thousands of slices of information which have been collated here. The same observation is relevant for veterans with regards to using this volume as a reference. The last third of the guide consists of appendices, including a complete BASIC/DOS/ProDOS command reference and a list of important memory addresses. This is the kind of detailed information which Apple II programmers usually have to look up in one of numerous 20 to 30-year-old reference books (which they also have to keep handy while they're working) or which has to be extracted from the higgledy-piggledy of the web.

Understandably, the guide doesn't enter into a discussion of which commercial Apple II software products from back in the day might make a lot of workaday tasks easier, thus avoiding the legal, ethical and logistical minefields related to the varying copyright statuses of these programs. To veteran eyes, there's a slight element of frustration in imagining having to go back and use the simplest file maintenance tools included on the vanilla DOS 3.3 and ProDOS system master disks (tools necessarily described in the book) while knowing that stuff like Copy II Plus is out there. It is similarly difficult for me to contemplate manually coding up a shape table (the Apple II's built-in sprite container system) today, an arduous process fully demonstrated in the book, when so many utilities can expedite that process. Only in the case of tasks which are thoroughly beyond the terrain of rolling-your-own is third party software mentioned, and these tasks tend to coincide with the modern era in which suites of free software have been produced by Apple II enthusiasts to tackle them. For instance the tenth chapter, on the subject of networking, offers explicit instruction in the use of several free modern programs for the purposes of getting an Apple II online, or connecting it to other PCs.

Nevertheless, I find it hard to argue against any of the book's first-principles-first stance. The guide works with the reader at the level of the metal. Even in the uncommon circumstance in which you had only the Apple II computer itself to work with – no disk drives or other storage media or operating systems in sight – you could flip its power switch, be greeted by the BASIC prompt and proceed from there to code, test, explore or produce whatever other effects you wanted to, armed only with knowledge gained from The New Apple II User's Guide. Ultimately, the nature of the book complements the nature of 8-bit computers in general, and reminds us what is so attractive about them compared to today's powerful but largely impenetrable boxes. The 8-bit machines represent self-contained worlds which are immediately accessible to users and infinitely flexible, but still simple enough to be understood or controlled by a single person.

I can highly recommend The New Apple II User's Guide to all newcomers who have a practical interest in the Apple II (the book is 100% practical – it contains no history) and to readers who already have a degree of interest in the machine, whether that interest stems from a past acquaintance they may seek to reignite or from ongoing Grizzled Veteran status. The newcomer can start at the front of the book and develop their skills in the chronological order of the chapters, working towards the back where the solid reference section stands in for numerous reference tomes from the Apple II's heyday. Another advantage of this being a 2012 book is that the reader can be sure they're getting the best version of each piece of information. The Apple II community has had a long time to track down any bugs and discrepancies in the computer itself, its tools, operating systems and the vast body of historical documentation about all of these things. The trouble with relying on random online reference materials for the Apple II is that they often consist of ancient scans of already ancient pieces of paper, and even veterans can get caught out by, for instance, googling up information from 1981 that ended up being corrected in 1983. Finally, in the course of reading The New Apple II User's Guide, I even learned some things I didn't know about the computer's commands and features, and I've had the Apple II in my life for over 30 years.

The New Apple II User's Guide is available from Amazon and Createspace

Disclosure: I was given a copy of this book free of charge by the publisher for review purposes. There was no discussion of what I might say about it and this review is my honest assessment.

About the reviewer: Wade Clarke is a Sydney-based musician, artist, game author and Apple II head. His website is wadeclarke.com"
Linux

Submission + - New Secure Boot Patches Break Hibernate, Kexec Support on Linux (paritynews.com)

Submitted by hypnosec
hypnosec writes: Matthew Garrett has published some patches today out of which few break hibernate and kexec support on Linux when secure boot is running. The reason behind disabling hibernate functionalities is that currently the Linux kernel doesn’t have the capability of verifying the resume image when returning from hibernation, which compromises the Secure Boot trust model. The reason for disabling the kexec support while running in Secure Boot is that the kernel execution mechanism may be used to attack the system by a malicious user such as disabling of swap, writing of a pre-formed resume image to swap, etc. Kexec can be used to load a modified kernel thus bypassing the trust model of Secure Boot.

Submission + - You killed my father, prepare to die (stuff.co.nz)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A clear case of "too much political correctness"...

"In hindsight, Mr Mullins says his T-shirt ... may not have been the best clothing choice for a flight, but he believes the reaction of Qantas was over the top."

Submission + - Engineers are cold and dead inside (theregister.co.uk) 3

Submitted by
JThaddeus
JThaddeus writes: "From The Register comes a report on a study by Swedish researches claiming "that people who go into engineering are less caring and empathetic than those who enter professions such as medicine." The study claims to account for the fact that women--who are assumed to be more empathetic--enter medicine at a great rate than enter engineering."

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