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Comment Turking it out (Score 1) 273

by adriccom (#50082195) Attached to: The Uber Economy Needs a New Category of Worker

In recent scifi I think this is classed as "turk" work, a unfortunate term based on the scam of the Mechanical Turk, which Amazon also adopted for one of their service offerings.

This term is used in at least the Metatropolis story anthologies by multiple authors (John Scalzi editing) and there's development on the theme in the plot of some stories (Detroit) so I don't want to give too many details.

http://www.goodreads.com/book/...

There's some parallel with "runners" from various cyberpunk scifi and gaming, too: Work for money with little formal relationship with the source of the contracts ("Mr Johnson") and a very simple professional code of ethics.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmw...
http://shadowrun.wikia.com/wik...

Doomo chums!

Comment Laywer fight (Score 1) 357

by adriccom (#48279363) Attached to: MPAA Bans Google Glass In Theaters

It will be fun to see this go up against the Americans With Disabilities Act (et al) in court in a few weeks/year when citizens rely on digital devices to augment their biology.

EG, as soon as my spectacles have on-board tech this fails fast.

Hey, would someone get on that? Why can't I snap picks like Spider yet?

hth
adric

Comment slashvertized service is commercial (Score 1) 51

by adriccom (#47367731) Attached to: IEEE Launches Anti-malware Services To Improve Security

CMX Consumer and/or Taggant SSV (price US $8,000.00)

        Access to CMX for 1 year
        Access to Taggant System IEEE Public Root Key, and blacklist for one year

http://standards.ieee.org/deve...

Most TI vendors at least offer some free feeds to suggest they have valuable content before asking you to pay up. Adoption of this new service isn't going to very good if no one can try it out/use it for free. *shrug*
Crime

NYPD Is Beta-Testing Google Glass 158

Posted by samzenpus from the watching-you-better dept.
Presto Vivace writes "The New York City Police Department is trying to determine how useful Google Glass would be for law enforcement. From the article: 'The New York City Police Department's massive and controversial intelligence and analytics unit is evaluating whether Google Glass is a decent fit for investigating terrorists and helping cops lock up bad guys, VentureBeat has learned. The department recently received several pairs of the modernist-looking specs to test out. "We signed up, got a few pairs of the Google glasses, and we're trying them out, seeing if they have any value in investigations, mostly for patrol purposes," a ranking New York City law enforcement official told VentureBeat.'"

Comment Re:NSA doesn't like the system it created??? (Score 1) 529

In case you aren't trolling...

Getting a government security clearance is a long and painful process that is entirely besides any status of enlistment or commision and includes additional oaths and regulations well beyond those.

In fact civilians can get a clearance without being in the military at all (I know a fewe folks who haev done this). The oaths are probably publically available but no one with a clearance is likely to volunteer to post them on /., if I had to guess.
Businesses

Most Companies Will Require You To Bring Your Own Mobile Device By 2017 381

Posted by samzenpus from the get-your-own dept.
Lucas123 writes "Half of all employers will require workers to supply their own mobile devices for work purposes by 2017, according to a new Gartner study. Enterprises that offer only corporately-owned smartphones or stipends to buy your own will soon become the exception to the rule in the next few years. As enterprise BYOD programs proliferate, 38% of companies expect to stop providing devices to workers by 2016 and let them use their own, according to a global survey of CIOs by Gartner. At the same time, security remains the top BYOD concern. 'What happens if you buy a device for an employee and they leave the job a month later? How are you going to settle up? Better to keep it simple. The employee owns the device, and the company helps to cover usage costs,' said David Willis, a distinguished analyst at Gartner."
Programming

Taking the Pain Out of Debugging With Live Programming 254

Posted by samzenpus from the we'll-do-it-live dept.
angry tapir writes "'Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place,' Brian Kernighan once wrote (adding: 'So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?') However, Sean McDirmid, a researcher at Microsoft, has been working to remove some of the pain from debugging. McDirmid, based at Microsoft Research Asia, has been studying ways of implementing usable live programming environments: a solution that is less intrusive than classical debuggers. The idea is to essentially provide a programming environment in which editing of code and the execution of code occur simultaneously — and in the same interface as code editing — with tools to track the state of variables in a more or less live manner."
Google

North Korea's Prison Camps Are Now On Google Maps 159

Posted by Soulskill from the follow-the-dirt-road-and-hang-a-left-at-the-Denny's dept.
pigrabbitbear writes "It's been nearly a decade since Shin Dong-hyuk, an ex-prisoner of North Korea's Camp 14, crawled over the electrocuted body of a friend lying dead on a fence, a boundary he was born inside of and lived within for 23 years. He made his way across the Chinese border on foot and was granted political asylum and citizenship in Seoul. Now, thanks to updated Google maps of the region, you can actually (if somewhat loosely) retrace the steps of his incredible escape. Through its Map Maker program, which crowdsources cartographic info, Google has published finer details of some North Korean roads. More notably, it has included shaded-in locations of the country's notorious prison camps. The data has flowed in from a few different sources, including defected North Korean expats now living in Seoul. Geographically-minded tourists and visitors of North Korea have weighed in, and historic map data from pre-partitioned Korea into has also been helpful. (Google maintains that the recent trip to Pyongyang by CEO Eric Schmidt had nothing to do with this project.)"
The Military

Designing DNA Specific Bio-Weapons 227

Posted by samzenpus from the poison-just-for-you dept.
Hugh Pickens writes writes "The Atlantic reports that experts in genetics and microbiology are convinced we may be only a few years away from the development of advanced, genetic bio-weapons able to target a single human being based on their DNA. The authors paint a scenario of the development of a virus that causes only mild flu in the general population but when the virus crosses paths with cells containing a very specific DNA sequence, the sequence would act as a molecular key to unlock secondary functions that would trigger a fast-acting neuro-destructive disease that produces memory loss and, eventually, death. The requisite equipment including gene sequencers, micro-array scanners, and mass spectrometers now cost over $1 million but on eBay, it can be had for as little as $10,000. According to Ronald Kessler, the author of the 2009 book In the President's Secret Service, Navy stewards gather bedsheets, drinking glasses, and other objects the president has touched—they are later sanitized or destroyed—in an effort to keep would-be malefactors from obtaining his genetic material. However no amount of Secret Service vigilance can ever fully secure the president's DNA, because an entire genetic blueprint can now be produced from the information within just a single cell. How to protect the President? The authors propose open-sourcing the president's genetic information to a select group of security-cleared researchers who could follow in the footsteps of the computer sciences, where 'red-team exercises,' are extremely common practices so a similar testing environment could be developed for biological war games. 'Advances in biotechnology are radically changing the scientific landscape. We are entering a world where imagination is the only brake on biology,' write the authors. 'In light of this coming synbio revolution, a wider-ranging relationship between scientists and security organizations—one defined by open exchange, continual collaboration, and crowd-sourced defenses—may prove the only way to protect the president.'"

Comment Share your logs with the community (Score 2) 241

by adriccom (#41181595) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Where To Report Script Kiddies and Other System Attacks?

Join and contribute ssh/firewall logs to DShield or another collaboration system so that others can benefit from the information you are collecting.

http://dshield.org/howto.html

If you want to report unwanted activity against your network your ISP may be able to help. Try opening a ticket with their Abuse team.
Earth

Earth Approaching Tipping Point Say Scientists 759

Posted by samzenpus from the let-the-flaming-begin dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "The UC Berkeley News Center reports that a prestigious group of 22 internationally known scientists from around the world is warning that population growth, widespread destruction of natural ecosystems, and climate change may be driving Earth toward an irreversible change in the biosphere, a planet-wide tipping point that would have destructive consequences absent adequate preparation and mitigation. 'It really will be a new world, biologically, at that point,' warns lead author Anthony Barnosky. 'The data suggests that there will be a reduction in biodiversity and severe impacts on much of what we depend on to sustain our quality of life, including, for example, fisheries, agriculture, forest products and clean water. This could happen within just a few generations.' The authors note that studies of small-scale ecosystems show that once 50-90 percent of an area has been altered, the entire ecosystem tips irreversibly into a state far different from the original, in terms of the mix of plant and animal species and their interactions. Humans have already converted about 43 percent of the ice-free land surface of the planet to uses like raising crops and livestock and building cities. This situation typically is accompanied by species extinctions and a loss of biodiversity. 'My view is that humanity is at a crossroads now, where we have to make an active choice,' says Barnosky. 'One choice is to acknowledge these issues and potential consequences and try to guide the future (in a way we want to). The other choice is just to throw up our hands and say, 'Let's just go on as usual and see what happens.'"
Earth

Wind Turbine Extracts Water From Air 227

Posted by samzenpus from the making-the-most-of-moist dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Getting access to enough water to drink in a desert environment is a pretty tough proposition, but Eole Water may have solved the problem. It has created a wind turbine that can extract up to 1,000 liters of water per day from the air. All it requires is a 15mph wind to generate the 30kW's of power required for the process to happen. The end result is a tank full of purified water ready to drink at the base of each turbine."

Submission + - CDC Reports a Surge in Autism Rates, 1 in 88 children affected in the US

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A new government health report indicated that about one in 88 children in the United State has autism or a related disorder, the highest estimate to date, which represented an overall increase of 25 percent since the last analysis in 2006.

The Centers for Disease Control reported on Thursday that the rate increased by 78 percent compared to the reported rate in 2002.
Security

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: A cheap, DIY home security and surveillance system? 1

Submitted by
scubamage
scubamage writes: "Approximately 6 weeks ago, my home was broken into while my fiance and I were at work. Our neighborhood is essentially empty during the day because it's an upper middle class neighborhood. Two laptops were stolen, an iPad, a power brick, a safe (complete with several years worth of taxes, my birth certificate, and old copies of my driver's license), a digital SLR, several pieces of heirloom jewelry, a guitar, and a custom built saxophone. In total, we lost around $20-30,000 dollars that day. We are now dealing with an attorney because the homeowner's insurance is fighting us on a number of items and we're not backing down. It has been a nightmare. Now as we were hoping things were starting to calm down, we've noticed that someone has been visiting our house during the day. There has been garbage left sitting on our back porch table, so its unlikely to have blown there. We've also seen footprints in our garden that are not there in the morning. We want to know who is on our property while we're not, and maybe if we're really lucky reporting it to the police could recover some of our property. My fiance has asked me to assemble a home security system that is motion activated, and both notifies us of an entry, as well as records video or rapid HD stillframes when sensing motion. The goal is to do this cheaply and more effectively than going with a private security company like ADT (who, consequently, our police department told us to ignore due to the incredibly high rate of false alarms). Also, we already have gotten the dog and the gun, so we have those bases covered now. What suggestions do you have on setting up home security systems, and what have you done to build one in the past? Help me slashdot posters, I need your brain juices!"

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