365475
submission
FloatsomNJetsom writes:
Employers are checking out your facebook page, facebook employees know which pages you're checking out, and those pictures of you passed out on the street corner from last Saturday night just landed in the inboxes of your 200 closest friends... Switched.com is taking a look at the slow death of privacy at the hands of social media sites such as Facebook and MySpace with a gallery of Facebook's most embarrassing party photos, a report on the creepy practice of FB employees monitoring what pages you look at and a fantastic, thought-provoking video interview with social media expert, NYU professor and uber-geek Clay Shirky — who says that social networks are profoundly changing our ability to keep our private lives private. Eventually, Shirky theorizes, society will have to create a space that's implicitly private even though it's technically public, not unlike a personal conversation held on a public street. Otherwise, our ability to keep our lives private will be forever destroyed. Of course, that might already be the case.
88978
submission
FloatsomNJetsom writes:
Popular Mechanics has a fascinating story on what the Lisa Nowak astronaut lovetriangle/breakdown/attempted murder charges could mean for Mars Mission crew decisions: With a 30-month roundtrip, this isn't the sort of thing you'd want to happen in space. Scientists have been warning about the problems of sex on long-term spaceflight, and experts are divided as to whether you want a crew of older married couples, or a-sexual unitard-wearing eunuchs. But the big deal is that NASA's current archetype of highly-driven, task-oriented people might be precisely the wrong stuff for a Mars expedition. In addition, this is crazy, scientists might use genomics or even functional MRI in screening astronauts, in addition to facial-recognition computers to monitor mental health during the mission. "You're putting together the crew psych workup, aren't you HAL?"
75054
submission
FloatsomNJetsom writes:
High Definition Content Protection is supposed to make sure you're not playing pirated content, but sometimes your devices screw up the HDCP "handshake" (over an HDMI cable) and nothing works. This happens with some regularity with the PS3, and Popular Mechanics investigated and found a quick and dirty workaround. From the article:
We then checked with Leslie Chard, president of HDMI Licensing, which owns the rights to the standard, who told us that HDCP is one component of HDMI that has been plagued with interoperability issues. HDCP (high-bandwidth digital content protection) is designed to prevent the interception of data — specifically copyrighted Hollywood movies — between an output component and a display. As Steve Balough, the president of Digital Content Protection, the licensing company for HDCP explains, the two pieces of hardware must exchange a "key," a sort of certificate of authenticity unique to each individual device, to verify a secure connection.
The problem isn't limited to the PS3 — many HDTV cable boxes and have the same problem. The fix there? Unplugging the power cable.
