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Submission + - Electric shock study suggests we'd rather hurt ourselves than others (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: If you had the choice between hurting yourself or someone else in exchange for money, how altruistic do you think you’d be? In one infamous experiment, people were quite willing to deliver painful shocks to anonymous victims when asked by a scientist. But a new study that forced people into the dilemma of choosing between pain and profit finds that participants cared more about other people’s well-being than their own. It is hailed as the first hard evidence of altruism for the young field of behavioral economics.

Submission + - Trans-Pacific Partnership May Endanger World Health, Newly Leaked Chapter Shows

Submitted by blottsie
blottsie writes: WikiLeaks has released an updated version of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) chapter on intellectual property. The new version of the texts, dated May 2014, show that little improvement has been made to sections critics say would hurt free speech online. Further, some of the TPP's stipulations could have dire consequences for healthcare in developing nations. The Daily Dot reports:

Nearly all of the changes proposed by the U.S. advantage corporate entities by expanding monopolies on knowledge goods, such as drug patents, and impose restrictive copyright policies worldwide. If it came into force, TPP would even allow pharmaceutical companies to sue the U.S. whenever changes to regulatory standards or judicial decisions affected their profits.

Professor Brook K. Baker of Northeastern U. School of Law [said] that the latest version of the TPP will do nothing less than lengthen, broaden, and strengthen patent monopolies on vital medications.

Submission + - FBI director continues his campaign against encryption (dailydot.com)

Submitted by apexcp
apexcp writes: Following the announcements that Apple and Google would make full disk encryption the default option on their smartphones, FBI director James Comey has made encryption a key issue of his tenure. His blitz continues today with a speech that says encryption will hurt public safety. This is an old refrain from law enforcement. But wheres the evidence?

Submission + - Court Rules Parents May Be Liable for What Their Kids Post on Facebook (wsj.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Parents can be held liable for what their kids post on Facebook, a Georgia appellate court ruled in a decision that lawyers said marked a legal precedent on the issue of parental responsibility over their children’s online activity.

The Georgia Court of Appeals ruled that the parents of a seventh-grade student may be negligent for failing to get their son to delete a fake Facebook profile that allegedly defamed a female classmate.

Submission + - Github staff Jake Boxer disables #GamerGate operation disrespectful nod repo

Submitted by Vanderhoth
Vanderhoth writes: Last night (October 3) Github developer Jake Boxer disabled the GamerGate github repository containing documents for "Operation Disrespectful Nod". Which contained documents for a letter writing campaign to advertisers for the publishers of the game media articles declaring gamers dead just over a month ago. Here's a link to an image of the removal request for if/when the original tweet is eventually removed.

Jake previously voiced his disapproval for intel pulling ads from Gamasutra claiming: "While we wait for @Intel to correct this, here's @leighalexander's fantastic piece that they pulled ads because of ..." along with "@leighalexander so fucking angry that this happened. thank you so much for the writing and work that you do." original tweet, Backup Image for both.

Note @leighalexander is Leigh Alexander Editor At Large for Gamasutra, author of 'Gamers' don't have to be your audience. 'Gamers' are over.

Reddit is also up in arms over a "rogue" employee being allowed to delete repositories that, to my knowledge, don't violate Githubs terms of service.

So what's the /. take on this? Is it ok seeing as Github is a private entity, maybe they don't have to host anything they don't want. Maybe it's time to start migrating my personal repos to other services in case electrical diagramming or web development offends someone.

Submission + - Microsoft's Top Lawyer Assails Secret Surveillance Court (wsj.com) 2

Submitted by mpicpp
mpicpp writes: 'Only One Side Gets to Tell Its Story,' Says General Counsel Brad Smith

The U.S.'s secret surveillance court is unaccountable to the public and not "inclined to promote justice," Microsoft Corp.'s top lawyer said.

Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith testified before a Senate panel last year. Associated Press
General Counsel Brad Smith said the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which reviews applications and appeals involving U.S. government data-collection efforts in the name of national security, acts unlike most other courts because "only one side gets to tell its story." The surveillance court also effectively creates law "that the American public is not permitted to read," Mr. Smith said Tuesday in a speech at the Brookings Institution.

"This is not an approach inclined to promote justice," Mr. Smith said, as he showed an image of what he implied was a government document before the surveillance court, with all text blacked out. Microsoft is among the U.S. tech firms that previously have sued the government to reveal more details about secret U.S. surveillance demands.

Submission + - Parents Mobilize Against States' Student Data Mining

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: To paraphrase Paul Simon, the government would like to know a little bit about your children for their files. But Politico reports that parents have mobilized into an unexpected political force to fight the data mining of their children, catapulting student privacy to prominence in statehouses. Having already torpedoed the $100 million Bill Gates-funded inBloom database project, which could have made it easier for schools to share confidential student records with private companies, the amateur activists are now rallying against another perceived threat: huge state databases being built to track children for more than two decades, from as early as infancy through the start of their careers. "The Education Department," writes Stephanie Simon, "lists hundreds of questions that it urges states to answer about each child in the public school system: Did she make friends easily as a toddler? Was he disciplined for fighting as a teen? Did he take geometry? Does she suffer from mental illness? Did he go to college? Did he graduate? How much does he earn?" Leonie Haimson, a NY mother who is organizing a national Parent Coalition for Student Privacy says, "Every parent I’ve talked to has been horrified. We just don’t want our kids tracked from cradle to grave." For their part, ed tech entrepreneurs and school reformers are both bewildered by and anxious about the backlash — and struggling to craft a response, having assumed parents would support their vision: to mine vast quantities of data for insights into what’s working, and what’s not, for individual students and for the education system as a whole. "People took for granted that parents would understand [the benefits], that it was self-evident," said Michael Horn, a co-founder an education think tank.

Submission + - Cable companies reportedly funding fake consumer groups to attack net neutrality (engadget.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: VICE believes that the nation's cable companies are funding groups that pretend to represent consumers, but are actually just parroting their own stance to shout down the general public. For instance, the outlet has learned that Broadband for America, which describes itself as a coalition involving "independent consumer advocacy groups," and which counts senator John Sununu amongst its members, is actually funded by the NCTA — big cable's lobbyists. It's the same situation with the American Consumer Institute, another anti-net neutrality voice of the people, which just happens to receive the bulk of its funding from the CTIA, which represents the US wireless industry. Now, what was the thing our grandma told us about astroturfing? Oh right: if you have to invent spokespeople to represent the other side in the debate, you're probably not the good guys.

Submission + - Humans Are Taking Jobs From Robots in Japan

Submitted by Hugh Pickens DOT Com
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: Bloomberg reports that humans are taking the place of machines in plants across Japan so workers can develop new skills and figure out ways to improve production lines and the car-building process. “We need to become more solid and get back to basics, to sharpen our manual skills and further develop them,” says Mitsuru Kawai, a half century-long company veteran tapped by President Akio Toyoda to promote craftsmanship at Toyota’s plants. “When I was a novice, experienced masters used to be called gods (Kami-sama in Japanese), and they could make anything.”

According to Kawai, learning how to make car parts from scratch gives younger workers insights they otherwise wouldn’t get from picking parts from bins and conveyor belts, or pressing buttons on machines. At about 100 manual-intensive workspaces introduced over the last three years across Toyota’s factories in Japan, these lessons can then be applied to reprogram machines to cut down on waste and improve processes. In an area Kawai directly supervises at the forging division of Toyota’s Honsha plant, workers twist, turn and hammer metal into crankshafts instead of using the typically automated process. Experiences there have led to innovations in reducing levels of scrap and shortening the production line and Kawai also credits manual labor for helping workers improve production of axle beams and cut the costs of making chassis parts. “We cannot simply depend on the machines that only repeat the same task over and over again,” says Kawai. “To be the master of the machine, you have to have the knowledge and the skills to teach the machine.”

Submission + - Microsoft Confirms It Is Dropping Windows 8.1 Support 1

Submitted by snydeq
snydeq writes: Microsoft TechNet blog makes clear that Windows 8.1 will not be patched, and that users must get Windows 8.1 Update if they want security patches, InfoWorld's Woody Leonhard reports. 'In what is surely the most customer-antagonistic move of the new Windows regime, Steve Thomas at Microsoft posted a TechNet article on Saturday stating categorically that Microsoft will no longer issue security patches for Windows 8.1, starting in May,' Leonhard writes. 'Never mind that Windows 8.1 customers are still having multiple problems with errors when trying to install the Update. At this point, there are 300 posts on the Microsoft Answers forum thread Windows 8.1 Update 1 Failing to Install with errors 0x80070020, 80073712 and 800F081F. The Answers forum is peppered with similar complaints and a wide range of errors, from 800F0092 to 80070003, for which there are no solutions from Microsoft. Never mind that Microsoft itself yanked Windows 8.1 Update from the corporate WSUS update server chute almost a week ago and still hasn't offered a replacement.'

Submission + - Scientists Use Women's Own Cells to Create Lab-Grown Vaginas (newsweek.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Per the English medical journal, Lancet, researchers are implanting lab-grown vaginas in female patients. Four women received the treatment between 2005-2008. The procedure is different from past vagina-replacement techniques because it uses a new mixture of cells to make a more 'real' vaginal tissue.

Submission + - Intel Integrated Iris Pro Graphics Closes The Performance Gap Vs. AMD (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: Over the years, Intel's integrated graphics engine in their Core series processor haven't exactly been known to be very robust. Before Intel's Haswell series processors arrived, it could be argued that Intel integrated graphics weren't good for much more than some video rendering and maybe some low resolution, entry-level gaming at best. However, with Intel's recent Haswell release with Iris Pro 5200 Graphics on board, the company appears to have dramatically closed the gaming and graphics performance gap between their solutions and competitive integrated solutions from AMD and even entry level discrete graphics performance. In the benchmarks with the new Gigabyte BRIX Pro small form factor system, Intel's Core i7-4770R with Iris Pro 5200 Graphics on board, is actually able to maintain very playable frame rates in recent DX11 titles, right up to 1080p resolution, even with a bit of AA turned on. It will be interesting to see what Intel's follow-on Broadwell chip can do at 14nm. If Intel can maintain consistent driver updates the future looks bright for Intel integrated graphics.

Submission + - 1Password (Agilebits) was affected by Heartbleed

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: They claim on their blog that they were not affected by Heartbleed unlike their competitor (LastPass) but in fact they were.

Going to https://agilebits.com/onepassw... and looking at the certificate issue date (4/10/2014) indicates they reissued it recently.

Additionally their own discussion forum admin admits they had to patch their OpenSSL on their website. http://discussions.agilebits.c...

So a malicious attacker could have stolen their main websites wild-card key and certificate to impersonate their website and trick people into downloading software with malware instead.

They were the same as LastPass in that user password data wasn't compromised, but LastPass was more transparent about it.

http://discussions.agilebits.c...

Hi @Quantumpanda,

Our website (agilebits.com) has been fixed with the patched version of OpenSSL, and is using a newly issued SSL certificate.

The forum (discussions.agilebits.com) does not use SSL (as you can see by looking at the URL, it's http), thus is not affected. With that said, we should be using SSL on the forum as well, and we're looking into it.

http://blog.agilebits.com/2014...

Submission + - Mozilla Appoints Former Marketing Head Interim CEO (itworld.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: Following the contentious and ultimately failed appointment of Brendan Eich as CEO last month, the Mozilla Corporation has appointed board member Chris Beard as interim CEO. Beard starting working as chief marketing officer for Mozilla in 2004, and oversaw the launch of its current browser, Firefox, in 2005. Beard also managed the launches of Firefox on Android and the Firefox OS for mobile phones.

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