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Submission + - Paint dust covers the upper layer of the world's oceans (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Even when the sea looks clean, its surface can be flecked with tiny fragments of paint and fiberglass. That’s the finding from a study that looked for plastic pollution in the uppermost millimeter of ocean. The microscopic fragments come from the decks and hulls of boats, and they could pose a threat to tiny creatures called zooplankton, which are an important part of the marine food web.

Feed Schneier: The US Intelligence Community has a Third Leaker (schneier.com)

From feed by bsfeed
Ever since The Intercept published this story about the US government's Terrorist Screening Database, the press has been writing about a "second leaker": The Intercept article focuses on the growth in U.S. government databases of known or suspected terrorist names during the Obama administration. The article cites documents prepared by the National Counterterrorism Center dated August 2013, which is after...

Submission + - Major Internet Censorship Bill Passes in Turkey (rawstory.com) 1

Submitted by maratumba
maratumba writes: The Bill extends what are already hefty Internet curbs in place under a controversial 2007 law that Earned Turkey equal ranking with China as the world’s biggest web censor according to a Google Transparency report published in December.
The text notably permits a government agency, the Telecommunications Communications Presidency (TIB), to block Access to websites without court authorization if they are deemed to violate privacy or with content Seen as “insulting”.
Erdogan, Turkey’s all-powerful leader since 2003, is openly suspicious of the Internet, branding Twitter a “menace” for being Utilized in organisation of mass nationwide protests in June in which siX people died and thousands injured.

Submission + - US to standardize car app/communication device components (networkworld.com) 1

Submitted by coondoggie
coondoggie writes: The US Department of Transportation has high hopes of standardizing the way autos talk to each other and with other intelligent roadway systems of the future. The department recently issued a call for public and private researchers and experts to help it build what the DOT called "a hypothetical four layer approach to connected vehicle devices and applications certification."

Submission + - Royal Navy Deployed Laser Weapons During the Falklands War (gizmag.com) 1

Submitted by Zothecula
Zothecula writes: Despite recent demonstrations by the US Navy, we still think of laser weapons as being things of the future. However, previously-classified British documents prove that not only were the major powers working on laser weapons in the 1970s and 80s, but that they were already being deployed with combat units in war zones. A letter from the Ministry of Defence released under the 30-year rule reveals that laser weapons were deployed on Royal Navy ships during the Falklands War in 1982, and that the British government was concerned about similar weapons being developed behind the Iron Curtain.

Submission + - Playing StarCraft Could Boost Your Cognitive Flexibility (psychologytoday.com)

Submitted by briglass
briglass writes: Imagine being a total non-gamer and then suddenly playing an hour of StarCraft a day for almost two months. A new study of mine demonstrates that a group of female gaming novices (seriously novice, as in 0 to 1 hour of gaming per week novice) demonstrated increased cognitive flexibility after playing StarCraft, a sort of fast-paced chess on steroids — the control group played The Sims. It's been well known that video gaming can lead to psychological benefits, such as faster perceptual information processing after playing first-person shooter games. But this new study, published in PLOS ONE, shows that video gaming can also affect higher-level cognitive functions. The StarCraft game was customized to be adaptive and remain challenging as the newly minted gamers honed their skills, and in-game behavior was recorded to determine what aspects of StarCraft leads to the boost in flexibility.

Submission + - London Bans Recycling Bins That Track Phones (techweekeurope.co.uk)

Submitted by judgecorp
judgecorp writes: In a swift response to a media storm, the City of London has closed down a trial of recycling bins which track the phones of pedestrians. Renew provides recycling bins funded by digital advertising, and has been told to stop a trial where bins tracked phones. Although the CEO of Renew claims there was no intention to breach privacy, his own marketing material says otherwise.

Submission + - Navy Version of Expedia Could Save DoD Millions (slashdot.org)

Submitted by Nerval's Lobster
Nerval's Lobster writes: The U.S. Navy expects to save $20 million per year on its global logistics and transportation budget, thanks to technology that has been saving business travelers billions since 1996. The Navy is testing a system that consolidates information about freight and personnel travel schedules into a single database—the better to give individual decision-makers a choice of the quickest, cheapest options available using “an Expedia-like” search capability, according to the Office of Naval Research, which developed the application. All that being said, the Transportation Exploitation Tool (TET) is a little more sophisticated than online-travel sites such as Expedia or Travelocity were in 1996: The system consolidates travel schedules and capacity reports for both military and civilian carriers to give logistics planners a choice of open spaces in ships, planes, trucks, trains or other means of travel, along with information about cost, estimated time of arrival and recommendations of the most efficient route. Previously, logistics planners trying to get an engine part to a Navy ship stranded in a foreign port, for example, might spend hours or days looking through separate databases to find a ship or plane able to carry the part that could deliver it within a limited window of time. “This system is truly revolutionary,” Bob Smith, program manager at the Office of Naval Research (ONR), wrote in a statement announcing the system. “TET uses advances in technology to provide outstanding optimization of available flights and ship routes, saving our logisticians enormous amounts of time—and that can literally mean saving lives.”

Submission + - BREACH Compression Attack Steals SSL Secrets (threatpost.com)

Submitted by msm1267
msm1267 writes: A serious attack against ciphertext secrets buried inside HTTPS responses has prompted an advisory from Homeland Security. The BREACH attack is an offshoot of CRIME, which was thought dead and buried after it was disclosed in September. Released at last week’s Black Hat USA 2013, BREACH enables an attacker to read encrypted messages over the Web by injecting plaintext into an HTTPS request and measuring compression changes.
Researchers Angelo Prado, Neal Harris and Yoel Gluck demonstrated the attack against Outlook Web Access (OWA) at Black Hat. Once the Web application was opened and the Breach attack was launched, within 30 seconds the attackers had extracted the secret.
“We are currently unaware of a practical solution to this problem,” said the CERT advisory, released one day after the Black Hat presentation.

Submission + - Google Announces Android Device Manager Coming Later This Month

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Google today announced Android Device Manager, a new app coming later this month that helps you find your lost phone or tablet. The service will be available for devices running Android 2.2 (Froyo) or above. Details are scarce right now, but Google does say Android Device Manager will let you ring your phone at maximum volume so you can find it, even if it’s been silenced. We also know you’ll need to be signed into your Google Account to use the service.

Submission + - Shuttleworth Agrees To FSF Demands For Edge Phone (infoworld.com)

Submitted by WebMink
WebMink writes: In an interview at OSCON, Mark Shuttleworth of Canonical spoke about the vision behind the Ubuntu Edge phone as a concept device to test features the mobile industry is too conservative to try. Notably, he agreed with the Free Software Foundation's demands that the device should carry no proprietary software and have Free drivers (transcript):

So what’s going to be in there? That’s all going to be free software?
Yes, we’ll ship this with Android and Ubuntu, no plans to put proprietary applications on it. We haven’t finalised the silicon selection so we’re looking at the next generation silicon from all major vendors. I would like to ship it with all Free drivers.

Submission + - Open Source Drug Discovery Prompts a Fundamental Heart Failure Breakthrough (sciencecodex.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Case-Western researchers, led by Saptarsi Haldar MD., have made a fundamental discovery that could prevent heart failure after reviewing the "chemical recipe" for a cancer-treating molecule made open source by Jay Bradner MD. (whose TED Talk articulates the open source approach to drug discovery: http://www.ted.com/talks/jay_bradner_open_source_cancer_research.html) This cross-discipline discovery, which was published in the August 2013 issue of CELL, is a fundamental breakthrough in heart failure research, and highlights the value of an open source approach outside of software development. Now, if only drug companies could be held to the same ideals!

Submission + - White Hat luxury car hacker to speak at USENIX security event despite injunction (networkworld.com)

Submitted by alphadogg
alphadogg writes: The lead author of a controversial research paper about flaws in luxury car lock systems will deliver a presentation at this month’s USENIX Security Symposium even though a UK court ruling (inspired by a Volkswagen complaint) has forced the paper to be pulled from the event’s proceedings. USENIX has announced that in “in keeping with its commitment to academic freedom and open access to research,” researcher Roel Verdult will speak at the Aug. 14-16 conference, to be held in Washington, D.C. Verdult and 2 co-authors were recently prohibited by the High Court of Justice in the U.K. from publishing certain portions of their paper, “Dismantling Megamos Crypto: Wireless Lockpicking a Vehicle Immobilizer.” Among the most sensitive information: Codes for cracking the car security system in Porsches, Audis, etc.

Submission + - Paper: Evolution favors cooperation over selfishness (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by Beeftopia
Beeftopia writes: Conventional wisdom has suggested selfishness is most beneficial evolutionary strategy for humans, while cooperation is suboptimal. This dovetailed with a political undercurrent dating back more than a century, starting with social Darwinism and more commonly seen today as a Randian philosophy. A new paper in the journal Nature Communications casts doubt on this school of thought. The paper shows that while selfishness is optimal in the short term, it fails in the long term. Cooperation is seen as the most effective long term human evolutionary strategy.

Submission + - A Climate of Violence?

Submitted by Rambo Tribble
Rambo Tribble writes: US researchers have come to the conclusion that climate change can drive increased violence in human society. Their findings are to be found in this Science Magazine article: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2013/07/31/science.1235367.

A nice summation and discussion of the report can be found on the BBC News site, at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-23538771

Add this to the developing scarcity of water due to global warming and the prospects for a peaceful future do not bode well.

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