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Submission + - Woman facing $3500 fine for posting online review

Submitted by sabri
sabri writes: Jen Palmer tried to order something from kleargear.com, some sort of cheap Thinkgeek clone. The merchandise never arrived and she wrote a review on ripoffreport.com. Now, kleargear.com is reporting her to credit agencies and sending collectors to collect $3500 as part of a clause which did not exist at the alleged time of purchase.

Now I'm wondering whether or not the terms and conditions even apply, since the sales transaction was never completed.

Submission + - Why Letting Your Insurance Company Monitor How You Drive is a Good Thing 1

Submitted by Hugh Pickens DOT Com
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: Kim Gittleson reports at BBC that car insurance firms like Progressive in the US are trying to convince consumers that letting them monitor their driving behavior is actually a good thing and say that the future of car insurance is not just being able to monitor individual drivers to give them lower prices but also to make them better drivers. "Now that we can observe directly how people drive, we think this will change the way insurance works," says Dave Pratt, who says that Progressive has more than a trillion seconds of driving data from 1.6 million customers. "18 year old guys pay a lot for insurance, but some 18 year olds are really safe drivers and they deserve a better deal." Better big data technologies, like the telematic driving data collected by car companies (PDF) or even information gathered from social media profiles, can help augment that risk profile. "If I'm a driver that doesn't drive that frequently, and I have a pattern that would indicate that I drive more carefully than an average person with my profile, then I may be able to save 30-40% on my car insurance, and that's pretty significant," says Joe Reifel. For now, using big data analytics for insurers is still in the early stages. Only 2% of the US car insurance market offers an insurance product based on monitoring driving but that proportion is projected to grow to around 10-15% of the market by 2017. And other countries, like Italy and the UK, are already using the data to analyze not just risk profiles but also to determine who is at fault in car accidents. The future, most analysts agree is create a continuous feedback loop between insurers and consumers, so that consumers will react to the big data analyses that insurers do on them and change their behavior accordingly. “Bad drivers will at some point need to improve their driving or accept [having] to pay for the real risk they represent,” says Jacques Amselem.

Submission + - NSA Broke Into Links Between Google, Yahoo Datacenters (washingtonpost.com) 2

Submitted by barlevg
barlevg writes: The Washington Post reports that, according to documents obtained from Edward Snowden, through their so-called "MUSCULAR" initiative, the National Security Agency has exploited a weakness in the transfers between data centers, which Google and others pay a premium to send over secure fiber optic cables. The leaked documents include a post-it note as part of an internal NSA Powerpoint presentation showing a diagram of Google network traffic, an arrow pointing to the Google front-end server with text reading, "SSL Added and Removed Here" with a smiley face. When shown the sketch by The Post and asked for comment, two engineers with close ties to Google responded with strings of profanity.

Submission + - Feds confiscate investigative reporter's confidential files during raid (dailycaller.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Using a warrant to search for guns, Homeland security officers and Maryland police confiscated a journalist’s confidential files.

The reporter had written a series of articles critical of the TSA. It appears that the raid was specifically designed to get her files, which contain identifying information about her sources in the TSA.

        “In particular, the files included notes that were used to expose how the Federal Air Marshal Service had lied to Congress about the number of airline flights there were actually protecting against another terrorist attack,” Hudson [the reporter] wrote in a summary about the raid provided to The Daily Caller.

        Recalling the experience during an interview this week, Hudson said: “When they called and told me about it, I just about had a heart attack.” She said she asked Bosch [the investigator heading the raid] why they took the files. He responded that they needed to run them by TSA to make sure it was “legitimate” for her to have them. “‘Legitimate’ for me to have my own notes?” she said incredulously on Wednesday.

        Asked how many sources she thinks may have been exposed, Hudson said: “A lot. More than one. There were a lot of names in those files. This guy basically came in here and took my anonymous sources and turned them over — took my whistleblowers — and turned it over to the agency they were blowing the whistle on,” Hudson said. “And these guys still work there.”

Comment Re:Hangings (Score 1) 1160

So as long as the police set up a case against someone well enough they deserve to die? It is not acceptable for any innocents to die because of a failed judicial system. I am in no way condoning the killing of prison guards but they at least made a choice to be there. The wrongly convicted have no choice.

Submission + - Angry Customer Buys Promoted Tweets to Bash British Airways (technologyadvice.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: After the airline lost his father's luggage (and presumably was less than helpful in resolving the issue), one man decided to use Twitter's self-serve ad platform to issue a warning to fellow travelers in the New York and UK markets. The tweets have gotten the attention not only of media outlets, but also of fellow airlines. A JetBlue executive even retweeted it. While companies use the platform to target customers, it's interesting to see it being turned around.

Submission + - 3-D Printable Food for NASA and the Very Hungry (qz.com) 2

Submitted by cervesaebraciator
cervesaebraciator writes: "[...] Systems & Materials Research Corporation, just got a six month, $125,000 grant from NASA to create a prototype of his universal food synthesizer. But Contractor, a mechanical engineer with a background in 3D printing, envisions a much more mundane—and ultimately more important—use for the technology. He sees a day when every kitchen has a 3D printer, and the earth’s 12 billion people feed themselves customized, nutritionally-appropriate meals synthesized one layer at a time, from cartridges of powder and oils they buy at the corner grocery store. Contractor’s vision would mean the end of food waste, because the powder his system will use is shelf-stable for up to 30 years, so that each cartridge, whether it contains sugars, complex carbohydrates, protein or some other basic building block, would be fully exhausted before being returned to the store." No word yet on whether anyone other than the guy trying to sell the technology thinks it'll make palatable food.

Submission + - Hubble Discovers 'Planetary Graveyard' (discovery.com)

Submitted by astroengine
astroengine writes: The Hubble Space Telescope has discovered rocky remains of planetary material ‘polluting’ the atmospheres of two white dwarfs — a sign that these stars likely have (or had) planetary systems and that asteroids are currently being shredded by extreme tidal forces. Although white dwarfs with polluted atmospheres have been observed before, this is the first time evidence of planetary systems have been discovered in stars belonging to a relatively young cluster of stars. “We have identified chemical evidence for the building blocks of rocky planets,” said Jay Farihi of the University of Cambridge in a Hubble news release. “When these stars were born, they built planets, and there’s a good chance that they currently retain some of them. The signs of rocky debris we are seeing are evidence of this — it is at least as rocky as the most primitive terrestrial bodies in our Solar System.”

Submission + - Mars One has 78.000 applicants (mars-one.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Mars One reports that 78.000 people have volunteered for a one-way ticket to Mars.
A quick calculation shows that this means people lined up coast-to-coast in a line with only 40cm per person! (As Robert Zubrin already predicted).
If you want, you can still go and sign up (or sign up your worst enemy). Or you can just look at some videos of the would be travellers.

Submission + - Kepler-62: A Star System With Two Earths? (discovery.com) 1

Submitted by astroengine
astroengine writes: About 1,200 light-years from Earth, five planets are circling around sun-like star Kepler-62, two of which are fortuitously positioned for water, if any exists, to remain liquid on their surfaces — a condition believed to be necessary for life. The discovery, made by scientists using NASA’s planet-hunting Kepler space telescope, is the strongest evidence yet for more than one Earth-sized planet existing in a star’s so-called “habitable” zone. “We’re particularly delighted to find that there are two planets in the habitable zone,” lead Kepler scientist William Borucki, with NASA’s Ames Research Center in California, told Discovery News. “It sort of doubles our chances of finding that Earth we’d all like to find. When you think about Earth and Mars, if Mars had been a bit larger, if Jupiter hadn’t been so close, we’d again have two planets in the habitable zone and maybe we’d have a place to go,” he said.

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