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Submission + - Bose, founder of Bose Corporation has died at 83 (mit.edu)

Submitted by countach44
countach44 writes: “Dr. Bose founded Bose Corporation almost 50 years ago with a set of guiding principles centered on research and innovation. That focus has never changed, and never will,” said Bob Maresca, president of Bose Corporation. “Bose Corporation will remain privately held, and stay true to Dr. Bose’s ideals. We are as committed to this as he was to us. Today and every day going forward, our hearts are with Dr. Bose; and we will do everything we can to make him proud of the company he built.”

Submission + - Amazon one-click extension snoops on SSL traffic

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Amazon has their own PRISM program snooping on all your browser traffic, even SSL traffic through their one-click plugin.

As designed, the plugin reports every url you visit, including https ones to Amazon. It uses an XSS to provide some of its functionality. It also reports contents of some website visits to Alexa.

The Amazon plugin has also been exploited to allow an attacker to gain access to SSL traffic on browsers that have the plugin installed.

Submission + - Have You Ever Tried to Eat a Feral Pig (theatlantic.com) 1

Submitted by anlashok
anlashok writes: There is big problem out there troubling our environment, invasive species that are disrupting the balance. This story is about an innovative approach to battling them, by eating our way out of the problem.
"Chefs are serving up invasive species like knotweed and snakehead fish — and diners are enjoying them. How a growing food movement could also be good for the environment."
"Austin Murphy likes to hunt snakehead fish on the tidal waters of the Potomac River. The fish, native to China, have earned local renown for their horror flick-like ability to breathe air and survive for short periods on land, their sharp teeth, and their thick, mucus-secreting skin. They're voracious carnivores with no known predators except humans and are all too at home in their adopted waters. Hunting them in the shallow, aquatic-plant-choked mouths of creeks and tributaries is tricky work, most easily done at night with a light and archery gear, though some fishermen prefer the more challenging method of daytime fly fishing . If the conditions are right, a skilled hunter can bag 200 pounds of snakehead in a summer season outing, says Murphy."

Submission + - Container ship breaks in two, sinks

Submitted by Cliff Stoll
Cliff Stoll writes: Along with 7000 containers, ship MOL Comfort broke in half in high seas in the Indian Ocean. The aft section floated for a week, then sank on June 27th. The forward section was towed most of the way to port, but burned and sank on July 10th. This post-panamax ship was 316 meters long and only 5 years old. With a typical value of $40,000 per container, this amounts to a quarter billion dollar loss. The cause is unknown, but may be structural or perhaps due to overfilled containers that are declared as underweight. Of course, the software used to calculate ship stability relies upon these incorrect physical parameters.

Submission + - Concrete-Recycling Robot Can Erase Entire Buildings (inhabitat.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Building demolition is a messy business, which is why Omer Haciomeroglu designed ERO — a concrete-recycling robot that can erase entire buildings. The robot can efficiently disassemble concrete structures without any waste, dust or additional separation. After deconstructing a structure with high-pressure water and sucking and separating the aggregate, cement and water, the ERO robot recycles these materials. Clean aggregate is packed and labeled to be sent to concrete precast stations for reuse, while rebar is cleaned and cut, ready to be reused.

Submission + - Electrical engineering labor pool shrinking (computerworld.com)

Submitted by dcblogs
dcblogs writes: The number of electrical engineers in the workforce has declined over the last decade. It's not a steady decline, and it moves up and down, but the overall trend is not positive. In 2002 the U.S. had 385,000 employed electrical engineers; in 2004, post dot.com bubble, it was at 343,000. It reached 382,000 in 2006, but has not risen above 350,000 since then, according to U.S. Labor Data. In 2012, there were 335,000 electrical engineers in the workforce. Of the situation, one unemployed electrical engineer said: "I am getting interviews but, they have numerous candidates to choose from. The employers are very fussy. They are really only interested in a perfect match to their needs. They don't want the cost to develop talent internally. They are even trying to combine positions to save money. I came across one employer trying to combine a mechanical and electrical engineer."

Submission + - FBI Says Encryption Is Blinding Them. Don't Believe Them, Says Silent Circle CEO (securityledger.com)

Submitted by chicksdaddy
chicksdaddy writes: U.S. government and law enforcement officials have warned that advances in the use of encryption threaten to blind them to evil doings, depriving them of tools like lawful wiretaps and surveillance. (http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/06/encryption-foiled-wiretaps/)

Don't believe them, says Silent Circle CEO Mike Janke. Speaking with The Security Ledger, Janke (a former Navy Seal and sniper) said that warnings about the wide use of encryption hampering law enforcement are bogus. "They have so many tools available to them today that this cry "we're going dark" is hollow, he said.

Janke, whose company makes communications security products that are used by the government and private sector firms alike, said that the claim, originally made by senior officials at the FBI in May, 2012 (http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-57428067-83/fbi-we-need-wiretap-ready-web-sites-now/) came close on the heels of a visit by senior FBI staff to discuss Silent Circle's technology.

The FBI wants Congress to adopt legislation that requires social-networking Web sites and providers of VoIP, instant messaging, and Web e-mail alter their code to ensure their products are wiretap-friendly. But Janke said that even if law enforcement officials can't decrypt communications protected by Silent Circle's technology, law enforcement can easily get a subpoena to collect reams of meta data from your phone (as we now know the NSA did with its PRISM program). Finally, for high value targets, the government has zero day exploits that will give them the access they need, he said.

Check out the full (podcast) interview over at The Security Ledger.

Comment Re:Depends on the energy source duh! (Score 1) 775

by countach44 (#44165643) Attached to: Electric Vehicles Might Not Benefit the Environment After All
It's important to remember that most wind turbines use neodymium (and lots of it - roughly 2 tons per large turbine), carrying the high environmental pricetag associated with rare earth mining. Whether or not that outweighs that environmental impact of where the energy would've been obtained from otherwise is debated.

Submission + - Cold-War Nuclear Radiation Creates Anti-Poaching Tool (insidescience.org)

Submitted by benonemusic
benonemusic writes: The fallout from 20th-century atmospheric nuclear tests could help to prevent poaching in some animals. In this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers shows that carbon-14 levels can be used to determine when an animal died to within about one year. The researchers make use of the fact that the levels of carbon-14 in the atmosphere from the mid-1950s, during the era of Cold War nuclear tests, are precisely known, and are taken up in different amounts by animals depending upon the years in which they lived.

Submission + - Unclean at Any Speed 1

Submitted by countach44
countach44 writes: From An article in IEEE's Spectrum magazine: 'Upon closer consideration, moving from petroleum-fueled vehicles to electric cars begins to look more and more like shifting from one brand of cigarettes to another. We wouldn’t expect doctors to endorse such a thing. Should environmentally minded people really revere electric cars?' The author discusses the controversy and social issues behind electric car research and demonstrates what many of us have been thinking: are electric cars really more envrionmentally friendly than those based on internal combustion engines?

Submission + - Fear of thinking war machines may push U.S. to exascale (computerworld.com) 1

Submitted by dcblogs
dcblogs writes: Unlike China and Europe, the U.S. has yet to adopt and fund an exascale development program, and concerns about what that means to U.S. security are growing darker and more dire. If the U.S. falls behind in HPC, the consequences will be "in a word, devastating," Selmer Bringsford, chair of the Department. of Cognitive Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, said at a U.S. House forum this week. "If we were to lose our capacity to build preeminently smart machines, that would be a very dark situation, because machines can serve as weapons." The House is about to get a bill requiring the Dept. of Energy to establish an exascale program. But the expected funding level, about $200 million annually, "is better than nothing, but compared to China and Europe it's at least 10 times too low," said Earl Joseph, an HPC analyst at IDC. David McQueeney, vice president of IBM research, told lawmakers that HPC systems now have the ability to not only deal with large data sets but "to draw insights out of them." The new generation of machines are being programmed to understand what the data sources are telling them, he said.

Comment Verification of results (Score 4, Interesting) 28

One thing that would be great would be to fund studies that's sole purpose is to verify/reproduce someone else's work. Obviously, with the current state of funding, this really doesn't happen. Once something is published, we as the next researchers are forced to take results as fact - which may not be true due to error, low yield, or (hopefully not) fabrication of results (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_misconduct).

I really do believe that incentivizing verification of results and repeat studies (with reasonable limits, of course) would improve scientific research tremendously. However, it's even less likely to take hold than moving away from "publish or perish."

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