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Submission + - WSJ: NSA Drowns in Useless Data, Impeding Work, Former Employee Claims (news168.co.uk)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: "Some of the documents released by Mr. Snowden detail concerns inside the NSA about drowning in information. An internal briefing document in 2012 about foreign cellphone-location tracking by the agency said the efforts were "outpacing our ability to ingest, process and store" data.

"In March 2013, some NSA analysts asked for permission to collect less data through a program called Muscular because the "relatively small intelligence value it contains does not justify the sheer volume of collection," another document shows.

"In response to questions about Mr. Binney's claims, an NSA spokeswoman says the agency is "not collecting everything, but we do need the tools to collect intelligence on foreign adversaries who wish to do harm to the nation and its allies."

Some of this may be behind a paywall, but if approached via EU papers WSJ sometimes allows access to "World News" articles w/o subscription

Submission + - Surge in Online Orders Overwhelms UPS Christmas Deliveries

Submitted by Hugh Pickens DOT Com
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: Reuters reports that the high volume of online orders of holiday packages overwhelmed shipping and logistics company UPS delaying the arrival of Christmas presents around the globe and sending angry consumers to social media to vent. The company projected 132 million deliveries last week "and obviously we exceeded that," said UPS spokeswoman Natalie Black without disclosing how many packages had been sent. "For now, UPS is really focused on delivering the remaining packages. You might not see trucks, but people are working." Asked why the company underestimated the volume of air packages it would receive, Black noted that previous severe weather in the Dallas area had already created a backlog. Then came "excess holiday volume" during a compressed time frame, since the period between Thanksgiving and Christmas was shorter than usual this year. Amazon.com responded with an email to affected customers offering shipping refunds and $20 gift cards to compensate. Packages shipped via UPS for Amazon.com by Prime customers, who pay $79 a year for two-day shipping, may be eligible for additional refunds. Amazon's stated policy for missed deliveries is to offer a free one-month extension of Prime. Frustrated consumers took to social media, with some complaining that gifts purchased for their children would not arrive in time to make it under the tree by Christmas morning. "A lot of these employees keep saying 'It's the weather' or 'It's some kind of a backlog,'" said Barry Tesh. "Well then why, all the way up until the 23rd, were they offering next-day delivery? That guaranteed delivery was 80% of my decision to buy the gift." However others on social media urged shoppers to be more appreciative of the delivery company's work during the holiday season. "While others take vacation and time off in December, remember we aren't allowed ever to be off in December. Ever," said a 20 year veteran UPS driver on the UPS Facebook page. "So when you see your family and complain that your package is held up, everyone who moves your package is working and doesn't get the Xmas experience you get, Be thankful for that."

Submission + - Apple fined in Taiwan for iPhone price fixing (bgr.com)

Submitted by Frankie70
Frankie70 writes: Taiwan’s Fair Trade Commission has hit Apple with a small fine and warned the company that it may face a more substantial penalty if it doesn’t stop interfering with carriers’ iPhone pricing and the prices of the plans carriers sell alongside the iPhone. “Through the email correspondence between Apple and these three telecom companies we discovered the companies submit their pricing plans to Apple to be approved or confirmed before the products hit the market,” Taiwan’s FTC said in a statement.

Submission + - Prime Minister Wiretapped - Vast Corruption Upending Turkey's Government (businessinsider.com)

Submitted by cold fjord
cold fjord writes: Business Insider reports, "The prime minister will be lucky to emerge in one piece ... Dawn raids last Tuesday nabbed almost 60 people and implicated three government ministries, the directors of state banks, and some of Turkey’s most powerful businessmen in a massive corruption probe spread across three different cases. Three members of Turkey's cabinet resigned on Christmas Day, and one called on Erdogan to follow suit as accusations of kickbacks, smuggling, and abuse of office continue to mount. The scandal has even acquired an international dimension as suspicions that Iran has been using Turkey’s banks to shirk sanctions were further bolstered by the arrest of Reza Sarraf, an Iranian businessmen who is accused of bribing the Economic Minister while coordinating transactions from Iran worth $120 billion. The AKP is scrambling to defend itself by claiming the arrests are a result of a dastardly foreign conspiracy ... while police officials have been removed and reshuffled and special prosecutors appointed to a degree that makes Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre look like exemplary justice. The Turkish press continues to eagerly publish the latest colorful details that emerge from the probe, including police reports of $500,000 bribes administered in boxes of chocolate and news that Erdoan himself was being wiretapped as part of the investigation." — Erdogan urged to resign. Three days ago Turkey banned journalists from entering police stations. Police are using tear gas on protesters.

Submission + - Developing games on and for Linux/SteamOS (anki3d.org) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: With the release of SteamOS developing video game engines for Linux is a subject with increasing interest. Developing games on and for Linux/SteamOS is a lightweight reading and an initiation guide on the tools, pros and cons of Linux as a platform for developing game engines. This article evolves around OpenGL and drivers, CPU and GPU profiling, compilers, build systems, IDEs, debuggers, platform abstraction layers and other.

Submission + - Netflix: Non-'A' Players Unworthy of Jobs 5

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Describing How Netflix Reinvented HR for the Harvard Business Review, ex-Chief Talent Officer Patty McCord describes 'the most basic element of Netflix’s talent philosophy: The best thing you can do for employees-a perk better than foosball or free sushi-is hire only “A” players to work alongside them.' Continuing her Scrooge-worthy tale, McCord adds that firing a once-valuable employee instead of finding another way for her to contribute yielded another aha! moment for Netflix: "If we wanted only 'A' players on our team, we had to be willing to let go of people whose skills no longer fit, no matter how valuable their contributions had once been. Out of fairness to such people—and, frankly, to help us overcome our discomfort with discharging them—we learned to offer rich severance packages." It's a sometimes-praised-sometimes-criticized strategy that's straight out of Steve Jobs' early '80s playbook. But, even if you assume your execs are capable of identifying 'A' players, how do you find enough employees if 90% of the country's population are deemed unworthy of jobs? Well, Netflix CEO Reed Hasting's support of Mark Zuckerberg's FWD.us PAC suggests one possible answer — you get lobbyists to convince Congress you need to hire as many people as you want from outside the country. An article commenter points out that Netflix's 'Culture of Fear' has earned it a 3.2/5.0 rating on Glassdoor.

Submission + - U.S. Mobile Internet Traffic Nearly Doubled This Year (nytimes.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Two big shifts happened in the American cellphone industry over the past year: Cellular networks got faster, and smartphone screens got bigger. In the United States, consumers used an average of 1.2 gigabytes a month over cellular networks this year, up from 690 megabytes a month in 2012, according to Chetan Sharma, a consultant for wireless carriers, who published a new report on industry trends on Monday. Worldwide, the average consumption was 240 megabytes a month this year, up from 140 megabytes last year, he said.

Submission + - Sun Not A Signficant Driver In Climate Change (ed.ac.uk) 1

Submitted by damn_registrars
damn_registrars writes: Scientists from Edinburgh, Scotland have recently published a study based on data from 1,000 years of climate data. They have compared the effects of differing factors including volcanic activity, solar activity, and greenhouse gases to find which has the most profound effect on climate. They have concluded that the driving factor since 1900 has been greenhouse gases. Their work has been published today in Nature Geoscience: http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ngeo2040.html

Submission + - 'Smaller Than Earth'-Sized Exomoon Discovered? (discovery.com)

Submitted by astroengine
astroengine writes: Through the technique of microlensing, a candidate exomoon has been discovered in orbit around a free-floating planet about 1,600 light-years away toward the galactic bulge. The microlensing event, MOA-2011-BLG-262, was detected by the MOA-II telescope at Mt. John University Observatory (MJUO) in New Zealand and it appears to have a mass of approximately half that of Earth. The host planet is around 4 times the mass of Jupiter. Unfortunately there cannot be further studies of his particular exoplanet-exomoon pair (as microlensing events are transient and random), so the astronomers who made the discovery are remaining cautious and point out that although the exoplanet-exomoon model fits the data the best, there's a possibility that the lensing object may have been a more distant star with a massive exoplanet in tow. Microlensing surveys are, however, sensitive to low mass exoplanets orbiting massive free-floating planets, so this is a tantalizing first-detection. The study's pre-print publication has been uploaded to the arXiv.

Submission + - Researchers Connect 91% of Numbers With Names in Metadata Probe

Submitted by Trailrunner7
Trailrunner7 writes: One of the key tenets of the argument that the National Security Agency and some lawmakers have constructed to justify the agency’s collection of phone metadata is that the information it’s collecting, such as phone numbers and length of call, can’t be tied to the callers’ names. However, some quick investigation by some researchers at Stanford University who have been collecting information voluntarily from Android users found that they could correlate numbers to names with very little effort.

The Stanford researchers recently started a program called Metaphone that gathers data from volunteers with Android phones. They collect data such as recent phone calls and text messages and social network information. The goal of the project, which is the work of the Stanford Security Lab, is to draw some lines connecting metadata and surveillance. As part of the project, the researchers decided to select a random set of 5,000 numbers from their data and see whether they could connect any of them to subscriber names using just freely available Web tools.

The result: They found names for 27 percent of the numbers using just Google, Yelp, Facebook and Google Places. Using some other online tools, they connected 91 of 100 numbers with names.

Submission + - Inventor of AK-47 Dies at 94

Submitted by necro81
necro81 writes: Lt. Gen. Mikhail T. Kalashnikov, an arms designer for the Soviet Union, creator of the AK-47, passed away today at age 94. Kalashnikov was born a peasant and entered the Soviet Army as a conscript. However, the self-taught tinkerer had an aptitude that took him far. The AK-47, his best-known creation, was praised for its reliability and low cost; attributes that have made it the most successful firearm ever, seeing use in homeland defense, rebellion, terrorism, and untold massacres. The inventor was himself ambivalent about the uses his creation had seen, but was nevertheless proud of his contribution to his country, where he is praised as a hero.

Submission + - A Short History of Computers in the Movies

Submitted by Esther Schindler
Esther Schindler writes: The big screen has always tried to keep step with technology usually unsuccessfully. Peter Salus looks at how the film industry has treated computing.

For a long time, the "product placement" of big iron was limited to a few brands, primarily Burroughs. For instance:

Batman: The Movie and Fantastic Voyage (both 1966) revert to the archaic Burroughs B205, though Fantastic Voyage also shows an IBM AN/FSQ-7 Combat Direction Central. At 250 tons for each installation (there were about two dozen) the AN/FSQ-7 was the largest computer ever built, with 60,000 vacuum tubes and a requirement of 3 megawatts of power to perform 75,000 ips for regional radar centers. The last IBM AN/FSQ-7, at Luke Air Force Base in Arizona, was demolished in February 1984.

Fun reading, I think.

Submission + - NSA Mass Data Collection Dates Back To 9/11 (techweekeurope.co.uk)

Submitted by judgecorp
judgecorp writes: The NSA mass surveillance programme currently receiving criticism dates back to George W Bush's response to the 9/11 attacks, according to newly declassified documents. The agency was first given powers to collect the contents of certain international communications in October 2001;the powers had to be renewed regularly at first, and have since been solidified and extended.

Submission + - Naked self-destructing sexts could be what finally kills Google. No, Seriously. (bgr.com) 1

Submitted by zacharye
zacharye writes: As Google’s share price soars beyond $1,100, it seems like nothing can stop the Internet juggernaut as its land grab strategies continue to win over the eyes of its users and the wallets of its advertising clients. But an analysis published over this past weekend raises an interesting question surrounding a new business model that could someday lead to Google’s downfall. Do we want an erasable Internet?...

Submission + - Airport security is "all bullshit, TSA couldn't protect you from a 6-year-old"

Submitted by mrspoonsi
mrspoonsi writes: ...so says Rafi Sela Airport Head of Security at an Israel airport. Sela has seven major issues with the TSA. First, the TSA "essentially makes its own rules," according to Sela, the TSA is a regulatory agency and a security agency. They essentially make their own rules. No one else — not the FBI, not the CIA, not anyone but a loose-cannon New York cop — gets to do that. I call the TSA the biggest train system in the world, because it's common for much of the floor force to be replaced on a yearly basis. So if the TSA only drills once or twice a year, you've got a ton of screeners who go their entire (short) careers without ever being tested. People need to realize that security can't be treated like a fast food company. These people are tasked with finding bombs, not flipping burgers. Full-body scanners: these scanners were useless. I could strap a bomb capable of taking down a 747 to my body and walk right through a body scanner. Nobody would catch me. Most people pose no threat to anyone, and there's no point in even checking them. The very few terrorists that exist are like needles in a haystack. But the TSA's approach is to check every single piece of hay, in case it might actually be a needle. But if you only check luggage and you don't check the person behind the luggage, how do you know he hasn't camouflaged something into the luggage that you can't find? Trust me: Hiding things is so easy to do, it isn't even funny. At Ben Gurion Airport, we get travelers from their car to their gate in 25 minutes. When was the last time that happened to you in an American airport? Probably never, because a dozen 747s worth of cranky travelers can't take their shoes and coats off, pull their laptops out of their luggage, and queue up for pat downs without chaos.

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