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Submission + - Snowden used software scraper .. (nytimes.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Intelligence officials investigating how Edward J. Snowden gained access to a huge trove of the country’s most highly classified documents say they have determined that he used inexpensive and widely available software to “scrape” the National Security Agency’s networks, and kept at it even after he was briefly challenged by agency officials.

Using “web crawler” software designed to search, index and back up a website, Mr. Snowden “scraped data out of our systems” while he went about his day job, according to a senior intelligence official. “We do not believe this was an individual sitting at a machine and downloading this much material in sequence,” the official said. The process, he added, was “quite automated.”

Submission + - ReactOS crafts to perfection with release 0.3.16 (reactos.org)

Submitted by jeditobe
jeditobe writes: "The ReactOS Project is pleased to announce the release of version 0.3.16. A little under a year has passed since the previous release and a significant amount of progress has been made. More than 400 bugs were eliminated.

Some of the most significant include completion of the CSRSS rewrite and the first stages of a shell32 rewrite. 0.3.16 is in many ways a prelude to several new features that will provide a noticeable enhancement to user visible functionality.

A preview can be seen in the form of theme support, which while disabled by default can be turned on to demonstrate the Lautus theme developed by community member Maciej Janiszewki.

Another user visible change is a new network card driver for the RTL8139, allowing ReactOS to support newer versions of QEMU out of the box. Release images can be found in the usual spot here.

Several video demonstrations of popular software work were made — Office 2003, Photoshop CS2, OpenMPT."

Submission + - New Zealand Schools find less structure improve childrens' behavior

Submitted by geminidomino
geminidomino writes: A research project involving eight schools in Dunedin and Auckland report that loosening rules on the playground may lead to fewer incidents of bullying, vandalism, and injury. One principal opines ""The kids were motivated, busy and engaged. In my experience, the time children get into trouble is when they are not busy, motivated and engaged. It's during that time they bully other kids, graffiti or wreck things around the school."

As one might expect, the article states that there was a lot of resistance to the project, and I'm kind of surprised they got as many administrators to sign on as they did. The story may be premature, as the article states that "the results of the study will be collated this year," but it may be interesting to see how the numbers shake out.

Submission + - Edward Snowden says NSA engages in industrial espionage (www.cbc.ca) 2

Submitted by Maow
Maow writes: Snowden has been interviewed by a German TV network and stated that the NSA is involved in industrial espionage, which is outside the range of national security.

He claims that Siemens is a prime example of a target for the data collection.

I doubt this would suprise AirBus or other companies, but it shall remain to be seen what measures global industries take (if any) to prevent their internal secrets from falling into NSA's — and presumably American competitors' — hands.

Submission + - Google faces off against Intellectual Ventures in landmark patent trial (reuters.com)

Submitted by enharmonix
enharmonix writes: Although Google initially invested in Intellectual Ventures, a patent holding firm, the two have since parted ways and are about to face off in court over some technologies used in Motorola (and other) phones. This is an important battle and the timing is significant given Congress's recent interest in patent reform.

Submission + - Most run piece of code. Ever 9

Submitted by Hugo Villeneuve
Hugo Villeneuve writes: What is the piece of code, in a non assembler format, that have run the most often, ever, on this planet?
By 'most often' I mean the highest number of execution, regardless of cpu type.
By 'piece of code' I mean from a minimum of 3 consecutive line of code.

For example, is it the:
- a unix kernel context switching?
- a SHA2 algo for bitcoin mining on an ASIC?
- A scientific calculation running on a CRAY?
- An 'for-loop' inside on an obscure microcontroler that runs on all GE appliance since the 60's?

Goal: Make an awesome t-shirt

Submission + - There's a huge energy scandal happening right underneath your feet (medium.com)

Submitted by gallifreyan99
gallifreyan99 writes: Researchers from Duke revealed today that they had discovered nearly 5,900 gas leaks under the streets of Washington DC, including 12 that posed a serious risk of explosion. And it's not just Washington: a gas industry whistleblower who is part of the team showed this was happening in cities all over America. Why is that a big deal? Leaky pipes cause death, destruction —and the data means natural gas could actually be one of the worst fuels around.

Submission + - Ampere could be redefined after experiments track single electrons crossing chip (nature.com)

Submitted by ananyo
ananyo writes: Physicists have tracked electrons crossing a semiconductor chip one at a time — an experiment that should at last enable a rational definition of the ampere, the unit of electrical current.
At present, an ampere is defined as the amount of charge flowing per second through two infinitely long wires one metre apart, such that the wires attract each other with a force of 2×107 newtons per metre of length. That definition, adopted in 1948 and based on a thought experiment that can at best be approximated in the laboratory, is clumsy — almost as much of an embarrassment as the definition of the kilogram, which relies on the fluctuating mass of a 125-year-old platinum-and-iridium cylinder stored at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in Paris.
The new approach, described in a paper posted onto the arXiv server on 19 December, would redefine the amp on the basis of e, a physical constant representing the charge of an electron.

Submission + - Japan to tax sales of content downloaded from abroad (cio.co.uk)

Submitted by Qedward
Qedward writes: Japan is planning to tax sales of foreign online content such as e-books, apps and downloaded music by late 2015.

Japanese who purchase electronic content from foreign firms like Amazon.com through overseas servers don't have to pay consumption tax, currently at 5% but slated to rise to 8% in April. That has made foreign content cheaper than apps, MP3 downloads, software, and e-books distributed domestically.

Physical products purchased from abroad are hit with consumption tax when they clear customs in Japan, but no such levy exists for online goods.

The government plans to close the loophole and make foreign vendors selling consumer goods register with tax authorities and pay the tax. Japanese corporations that buy foreign electronic content such as business software, however, will have to pay the tax directly to the Japanese tax authorities, Nikkei Asian Review reported this morning.

Submission + - Regex Golf, XKCD And Peter Norvig (i-programmer.info)

Submitted by mikejuk
mikejuk writes: A recent xkcd cartoon has started some deep academic thinking. When AI expert Peter Novig gets involved you know the algorithms are going to fly. Code Golf is a reasonably well known sport of trying to code an algorithm in the shortest possible code. Regex Golf is similar, but in general the aim is to create a regular expression that accepts the strings in one list and rejects the strings in a second list. The xkcd cartoon in question http://xkcd.com/1313/ revealed that this is but the first step. Programmers like recursion and a regex is a string after all and a regex can process a string so a regex can process a regex and this means you can have meta-regex golf and meta-meta-regex golf.... Yes my friend, it's regexes all the way down!
The hover over text gives a regular expression that matches the last names of the elected US presidents, but not the losers. This started Peter Norvig, the well-known computer scientist, director of research at Google and wearer of brightly colored shirts, thinking about the problem. Is it possible to write a program that would create a regular expression to solve the xkcd problem? The result is an NP hard problem that needs AI like techniques to get an approximate answer.
To find out more read the complete description, including Python code, at Peter Norvig's blog post http://nbviewer.ipython.org/url/norvig.com/ipython/xkcd1313.ipynb which ends with the challenge:
"I hope you found this interesting, and perhaps you can find ways to improve my algorithm, or more interesting lists to apply it to. I found it was fun to play with, and I hope this page gives you an idea of how to address problems like this."

Submission + - Australian Teen Reports SQL Injection Vulnerability, Gets Arrested (wired.com)

Submitted by FuzzNugget
FuzzNugget writes: Wired brings us the latest in security researcher witch hunts: "Joshua Rogers, a 16-year-old in the state of Victoria, found a basic security hole that allowed him to access a database containing sensitive information for about 600,000 public transport users who made purchases through the Metlink web site run by the Transport Department. It was the primary site for information about train, tram and bus timetables. The database contained the full names, addresses, home and mobile phone numbers, email addresses, dates of birth, and a nine-digit extract of credit card numbers used at the site, according to The Age newspaper in Melbourne. Rogers says he contacted the site after Christmas to report the vulnerability but never got a response. After waiting two weeks, he contacted the newspaper to report the problem. When The Age called the Transportation Department for comment, it reported Rogers to the police."

Submission + - Ford Exec: 'We Know Everyone Who Breaks The Law' Thanks To Our GPS In Your Car (businessinsider.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Farley was trying to describe how much data Ford has on its customers, and illustrate the fact that the company uses very little of it in order to avoid raising privacy concerns: "We know everyone who breaks the law, we know when you're doing it. We have GPS in your car, so we know what you're doing. By the way, we don't supply that data to anyone," he told attendees.

Rather, he said, he imagined a day when the data might be used anonymously and in aggregate to help other marketers with traffic related problems. Suppose a stadium is holding an event; knowing how much traffic is making its way toward the arena might help the venue change its parking lot resources accordingly, he said.

Submission + - Who is liable when a self-driving car crashes? (driving.ca)

Submitted by innocent_white_lamb
innocent_white_lamb writes: Current laws make the driver of a car responsible for any mayhem caused by that vehicle. But what happens when there is no driver? This article argues that the dream of a self-driving car is futile since the law requires that the driver is responsible for the operation of the vehicle. Therefore, even if a car is self-driving, you as the driver must stay alert and pay attention. No texting, no reading, no snoozing. So what's the point of a self-driving car if you can't relax or do something else while "driving"?

Submission + - World's oldest decimal multiplication table discovered (nature.com)

Submitted by ananyo
ananyo writes: From a few fragments out of a collection of 23-century-old Chinese bamboo strips, historians have pieced together what they say is the world's oldest example of a multiplication table in base 10.
Each strip is about 7 to 12 millimetres wide and half a metre long, and has a vertical line of ancient Chinese calligraphy painted on it in black ink. The bamboo pieces constitute 65 ancient texts and are thought to be among the most important artefacts from the Warring States period before the unification of China. But 21 bamboo strips contained only numbers and, on closer inspection, turned out to be a multiplication table.
As in a modern multiplication table, the entries at the intersection of each row and column in the matrix provide the results of multiplying the corresponding numbers. The table can also help users to multiply any whole or half integer between 0.5 and 99.5. The researchers suspect that officials used the multiplication table to calculate surface area of land, yields of crops and the amounts of taxes owed.

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