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Submission + - What Intel's $300 million diversity pledge really means (itworld.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: Intel’s Rosalind Hudnell responsible for implementing the company’s much-publicized $300 million initiative to bring more women and under-represented minorities into its workforce by 2020. But even with Intel’s renewed commitment to diversity, the company’s workforce will still be just about 32 percent women in five years, Hudnell estimated. Here's a rough breakdown of how the money will be spent: The funds will be applied over five years to change hiring practices, retool human resources, fund companies run by minorities and women, and promote STEM education in high schools.

Submission + - Justice Sotomayor Warns Against Tech-Enabled "Orwellian" World (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor spoke on Thursday to faculty and students at the University of Oklahoma City about the privacy perils brought on by modern technology. She warned that the march of technological progress comes with a need to enact privacy protections if we want to avoid living in an "Orwellian world" of constant surveillance. She siad, "There are drones flying over the air randomly that are recording everything that’s happening on what we consider our private property. That type of technology has to stimulate us to think about what is it that we cherish in privacy and how far we want to protect it and from whom. Because people think that it should be protected just against government intrusion, but I don’t like the fact that someone I don’t knowcan pick up, if they’re a private citizen, one of these drones and fly it over my property."

Submission + - Selectively re-using bad passwords is not a bad idea, researchers say

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: For all the repeated advice to use different, complex password for each online account, users are still opting for easy-to-guess, short ones and use them repeatedly across many websites and online services. Unfortunately, it seems that security professionals must make peace with the situation, or find another way to make users listen and do as they are counselled. But is the experts' advice sound? A trio of researchers from Microsoft Researcher and Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada are of a different mind, and are challenging that long-held belief that every account needs a strong password.

Submission + - The NSA Is Commandeering the Internet (theatlantic.com)

Submitted by Nerdfest
Nerdfest writes: Bruce Schenier writes: 'Bluntly: The government has commandeered the Internet. Most of the largest Internet companies provide information to the NSA, betraying their users. Some, as we've learned, fight and lose. Others cooperate, either out of patriotism or because they believe it's easier that way.

I have one message to the executives of those companies: fight."
Government

Submission + - Red light cameras raise crash risk, cost (courierpostonline.com) 1

Submitted by
concealment
concealment writes: "A pilot program for red-light cameras in New Jersey appears to be changing drivers’ behavior, state officials said Monday, noting an overall decline in traffic citations and right-angle crashes.

The Department of Transportation also said, however, that rear-end crashes have risen by 20 percent and total crashes are up by 0.9 percent at intersections where cameras have operated for at least a year."
Government

Submission + - IEEE Standards for Voting Machines (ieee.org)

Submitted by kgeiger
kgeiger writes: Voting machine designs and data formats are a free-for-all. The result is poor validation and hence opportunity for fraud. From TFA:

IEEE Standards Project 1622 is working on electronic data interchange for voting systems. The plan is to create a common format, based on the Election Markup Language (EML) already recommended for use in Europe. This is a subset of the popular XML (eXtensible Markup Language) that specifies particular fields and data structures for use in voting.

Submission + - House Appropriators want to limit public availability of pending bills (washingtonexaminer.com)

Submitted by Attila Dimedici
Attila Dimedici writes: The House Appropriations Committee is considering a draft report that would forbid the Library of Congress to allow bulk downloads of bills pending before Congress. The Library of Congress currently has an online database called THOMAS (for Thomas Jefferson) that allows people to look up bills pending before Congress. The problem is that THOMAS is somewhat clunky and it is difficult to extract data from it. This draft report would forbid the Library of Congress from modernizing THOMAS until a task force reports back. I am sorry that I cannot write a better summary of these articles, but I think this is an important issue about improving the ability of people to understand what Congress is doing. I am pretty sure that the majority of people on slashdot agree that being able to better understand how the various bills being considered by Congress interact would be good for this country.
Businesses

Submission + - Why Freemium Doesn't Work (itworld.com)

Submitted by
itwbennett
itwbennett writes: "Tyler Nichols learned an obvious but important lesson with his freemium Letter from Santa site: 'most people who want something for free will never, ever think of paying you, no matter how valuable they find your service.' He also discovered that non-paying customers are more demanding than paying customers, which only stands to reason: If someone likes your service enough to pay for it, they probably have an affinity for your brand and will be kinder."
Google

Google Apps Deciphered 91

Posted by samzenpus from the read-all-about-it dept.
Lorin Ricker writes "Computing in the Cloud — Free Apps — Outsource It! Yippee! Automation TCO nirvana at last! You can hear the non-technical managers and home-users unite in grateful song and dance! If we can just offload our office applications and data to the Cloud Known As Google, that apparently bottomless source of storage, search and now other useful capabilities, our office automation problems will be solved! Hooray! 'Well, just y'all hold up there a minit, lil' cowboy. Thar's a few thangs y'all oughta know 'bout afore ya go rushin' off...' If John Wayne didn't say exactly that, well, he should'a." Keep reading for the rest of Lorin's review.
Upgrades

Submission + - Is finding part time work in I.T. unrealistic?

Submitted by
I like my current job
I like my current job writes: "Having worked full time in I.T. for the past 12 years, I would really like to work less for other goals and priorities in my life. I have asked my current employer and got shot down. It seems like everyone I know in I.T. works full time except for entry level help desk staff. Striking out on my own seems to be the only way to control the ball and chain around my ankle. However, my experience with independent consulting is either feast or famine with work coming all at once thus making part-time impossible, or the other extreme being even more likely. Is it a pipe dream in I.T.? Maybe a career in toilet cleaning is calling me. (FYI, I searched Slashdot for this topic but didn't find anything close. Do all I.T. people love their systems and money so much that we prefer to live at work? I know I do.)"
Privacy

Journal Journal: FISA ACTION: Operation Read the Bill

Journal by bmasel

First, print the thing out, all 114 pages (pdf), and hand it to your Senators. Best if you can say "I've read it, I expect you to take the time to do so yourself." For extra credit, take a highlighter to the printout and mark up the sections you consider problematic.

Bring an accomplice with a vidcam. An admission that they haven't and won't read the bill makes nice youtube, come re-election time.
Privacy

Journal Journal: How to Convince Non-IT Friends that Privacy Matters?

Journal by mmtux

As technology becomes more advanced I am more and more worried about my privacy in all aspects of my life. Unfortunately, whenever I attempt to discuss the matter with my friends, they show little understanding and write me off as a hyper-neurotic IT student. They say they simply don't care that the data they share on social networks may be accessible by others, that some laws passed by governments today might be privacy infringing and dangerous or that they shouldn't use on-line banking with
Intel

Submission + - Why Intel and OLPC Parted Ways (nytimes.com)

Submitted by
runamock
runamock writes: "The New York Times has an article that sheds some light on why Intel left the OLPC board: 'A frail partnership between Intel and the One Laptop Per Child educational computing group was undone last month in part by an Intel saleswoman: She tried to persuade a Peruvian official to drop the country's commitment to buy a quarter-million of the organization's laptops in favor of Intel PCs. Intel and the group had a rocky relationship from the start in their short-lived effort to get inexpensive laptops into the hands of the world's poorest children. But the saleswoman's tactic was the final straw for Nicholas Negroponte..'"
Software

Submission + - Doctoring Electronic Health Records

Submitted by
mynameismonkey
mynameismonkey writes: "openEHR guru Tim Cook discusses why Electronic Health Record developers should use open standards in a guest blog at A Scanner Brightly. Why are so few doctors using EHR systems? And, as more and more hospital EHR systems come online across the country, what do we have to fear from proprietary databases? It's one thing to find out your social security number was stolen. Now add your mental health and STD results."

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