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Submission + - Google Nexus Gets Wireless Charger (techweekeurope.co.uk)

Submitted by judgecorp
judgecorp writes: Wireless charging has had little success so far (except for toothbrushes) but Google is giving it a good try, with a Nexus Wireless Charger that works with LG's Nexus 4 and 5 as well as the latest version of Google's tablet, the second generation Nexus 7. The charger operates using the Qi standard, which seems to be ahead of rival Powermat.

Submission + - Snowden Used Social Engineering To Get Classified Documents (reuters.com) 1

Submitted by cold fjord
cold fjord writes: Reuters reports, "Edward Snowden used login credentials and passwords provided unwittingly by colleagues ... to access some of the classified material he leaked ... A handful of agency employees who gave their login details to Snowden were identified, questioned and removed from their assignments ... Snowden may have persuaded between 20 and 25 fellow workers at the NSA regional operations center in Hawaii to give him their logins and passwords by telling them they were needed for him to do his job as a computer systems administrator ... People familiar with efforts to assess the damage to U.S. intelligence caused by Snowden's leaks have said assessments are proceeding slowly because Snowden succeeded in obscuring some electronic traces of how he accessed NSA records. ... The revelation that Snowden got access to some of the material he leaked by using colleagues' passwords surfaced as the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee approved a bill intended in part to tighten security over U.S. intelligence data. One provision of the bill would earmark a classified sum of money ... to help fund efforts by intelligence agencies to install new software designed to spot and track attempts to access or download secret materials without proper authorization."

Submission + - UK Passes Instagram Act (theregister.co.uk)

Submitted by kodiaktau
kodiaktau writes: UK govvt passes Instagram act which effectively makes content posted on social media that has become orphaned into the public domain. Corporations now only need to have made a diligent search to find the owner of the content before use.

Submission + - Grocery delivery is greener than driving to the store (washington.edu)

Submitted by vinces99
vinces99 writes: Those trips to the store can take a chunk out of your day and put more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. But now University of Washington engineers have found that using a grocery delivery service can cut carbon dioxide emissions by at least half when compared with individual household trips to the store. Trucks filled to capacity that deliver to customers clustered in neighborhoods produced the most savings in carbon dioxide emissions, but there are even benefits with delivery to rural areas.

Submission + - How LinkedIn's Project Inversion Saved The Company (businessweek.com)

Submitted by pacopico
pacopico writes: Shortly after its 2011 IPO, LinkedIn's infrastructure almost collapsed. The company had been running on decade's old technology and needed a major overhaul to keep up with other social sites. As Businessweek reports, LinkedIn initiated something called Project Inversion to fix its issues and has since evolved into one of the poster children for continuous development and creating open source infrastructure tools. But the story also notes that LinkedIn's technology revival has come with some costs, including constant changes that have bothered some users.

Submission + - Nuclear Power Prevents More Deaths Than It Causes (acs.org)

Submitted by MTorrice
MTorrice writes: NASA researchers have compared nuclear power to fossil fuel energy sources in terms of greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution-related deaths. Using nuclear power in place of coal and gas power has prevented some 1.8 million deaths globally over the past four decades and could save millions of more lives in coming decades, concludes their study. The pair also found that nuclear energy prevents emissions of huge quantities of greenhouse gases. These estimates help make the case that policymakers should continue to rely on and expand nuclear power in place of fossil fuels to mitigate climate change, the authors say.
Technology

Submission + - SMK just made micro-USB ports a lot stronger (geek.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: If a gadget chips with a micro-USB port I see it as a plus due to the fact it isn't proprietary, meaning I can easily and cheaply buy replacement cables. But the micro-USB ports aren't the strongest connectors in the world, so if the gadget is expensive (a smartphone) and you accidentally bust the port, you're in trouble. And that's easily done. Japanese manufacturer SMK may have fixed the problem though, with a new, double-strong connector design. They started producing them on Friday, and at an output of 500,000 a month, hopefully they'll be shipping with most new gadgets before long.
Google

Submission + - Google to Honor Don't-Track-Me-Bro Requests

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Someday soon, if you ask them pretty-please-with-sugar-on-top, Google will allow owners of Wi-Fi access points to opt out of a Google service that uses their data to determine the location of others' smartphones. The opt-out service will be available globally, although it was created at the instigation of European privacy regulators, Google Global Privacy Counsel Peter Fleischer explained in a blog post.
Graphics

Kinect Hack Builds 3D Maps of the Real World 70

Posted by CmdrTaco from the skipping-straight-to-six-d dept.
Lanxon writes "Noted Kinect-tinkerer Martin Szarski has used a car, a laptop, an Android smartphone and the aforementioned Xbox 360 peripheral to make a DIY-equivalent of Google Street View. The Kinect's multi-camera layout can be used to capture some fuzzy, but astonishingly effortless 3D maps of real world locations and objects. As we saw in Oliver Kreylos' early hack, you can take the data from Kinect's depth-sensitive camera to map out a 3D point-cloud, with real distances. Then use the colour camera's image to see which RGB pixel corresponds to each depth point, and eventually arrive at a coloured, textured model."
Nintendo

Submission + - Goldeneye Source released (tekgoblin.com) 2

Submitted by tekgoblin
tekgoblin writes: Were you a fan of the original Goldeneye on N64? Well this 5 year Half-Life 2 mod called GoldenEye Source has just come out of beta and fully released free. The game is a fan-made creation with the objective to bring the original experiences from GoldenEye on N64 back to life. I remember spending hours upon hours playing Goldeneye on the N64 and was sad seeing it go.
Google

Submission + - Google Patent Proposes $2 Fee to Skip Commercials 1

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: A day after Google debuted its new Google TV website, the USPTO issued U.S. Patent No. 7,806,329 to the search giant for its Targeted Video Advertising invention. Among other things, the patent proposes having viewers take 5-10 minutes to 'fill out a consumer survey and perhaps to provide additional information such as a mailing address survey before starting the program' to avoid having to watch 10 minutes of commercials. 'As another alternative,' the patent continues, 'the broadcaster may offer the users an option to pay $2 (such as through a micro-payment system, such as GBuy) to exchange for skipping all commercials.' More from the patent: 'The system may allow a user to skip all of the promotions that they want to skip, but may also require the user to fully watch at least four promotions before the program will continue. Likewise, the system may require the user to follow activities that generate a certain amount of advertising revenue or advertising points (e.g., that may correspond directly or indirectly to advertising revenues) before the program will continue.'

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