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Submission + - Hackers can track subway riders' movements even underground by (dailydot.com)

Submitted by Patrick O'Neill
Patrick O'Neill writes: Tens of millions of daily subway riders around the world can be tracked through their smartphones by a new attack, according to research from China's Nanjing University. The new attack even works underground and doesn't utilize GPS or cell networks. Instead, the attacker steals data from a phone's accelerometer. Because each subway in the world has a unique movement fingerprint, the phone's motion sensor can give away a person's daily movements with up to 92% accuracy.

Submission + - Silk Road's leader paid a doctor to help keep customers safe (dailydot.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Two years after the fall of Silk Road, new facts about the saga are still emerging all the time. The latest revelation is that Dread Pirate Roberts, the leader of Silk Road, paid a doctor $500 per week to offer public and private counseling to customers of the site. DoctorX, also known as Dr. Fernando Caudevilla, became famous for his free work on the site. The fact that he was eventually paid a salary is being used by lawyers for Ross Ulbricht to argue that Silk Road emphasized harm reduction and was, on the whole, a huge improvement in safety for drug users.

Submission + - NSA's Former General Council Talks Privacy, Security, And Snowden's 'Betrayal'

Submitted by blottsie
blottsie writes: In his first interview since retiring as general council to the NSA, Rajesh De offers detailed insights into the spy agency's efforts to find balance between security and privacy, why the NSA often has trouble defending itself in public, the culture of "No Such Agency," and what it was like on the inside when the Snowden bombshell went off.

Submission + - Can Bitcoin Save Democracy?

Submitted by blottsie
blottsie writes: If implemented correctly, the proliferation of online voting could solve one of the biggest problems in American democracy: low voter turnout. The 2014 midterms, for example, boasted the lowest voter turnout in 72 years. Making it easier to vote by moving the action from a polling station to your pocket could only increase turnout, especially in the primaries. Making online voting work is infinitely harder than it initially seems. However, in the past few years, there’s been a renewed effort to solve the conundrum of online voting using a most unexpected tool: Bitcoin.

Submission + - Thync, The Craziest Thing At CES, Zapped My Brain (dailydot.com)

Submitted by blottsie
blottsie writes: It didn't... hurt. Hurt isn't the right way to describe it. It felt like a tightness; it felt like the patch was trying to crawl across my skin. But—if you can believe this—in a good way.

And while Thync was attached to the right side of my head, occasionally I felt "tingles" pulling and hitting my brain on the left side and in the middle.

I was feeling progressively awake and aware. Granted, I had patches stuck to my head sending gentle vibrations to my brain, so that might have been part of my sudden alertness. But still, after 20 minutes of Thync I just felt... better.

Submission + - Robots sell themselves in this California store (dailydot.com)

Submitted by Molly McHugh
Molly McHugh writes: What better way to sell telepresence technologies than having the store employees themselves appear via robot? At the Beam store in Palo Alto, Calif., no human salespeople physically appear, only robots.

Submission + - The Unstoppable Rise Of The Global Surveillance Profiteers

Submitted by blottsie
blottsie writes: A new report takes a deep dive into companies like Hacking Team, which have sprouted up in the years since 9/11 sparked a global war on terror and a wired technological revolution. As the U.S. developed the online surveillance tools that, over a decade later, would eventually be revealed to the world by National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden, savvy businesses across the globe realized there were plenty of countries that might not be able to afford to develop such sophisticated technology in-house but still had money to burn.

Submission + - What Canada Can Teach The U.S. About Net Neturality 1

Submitted by blottsie
blottsie writes: If there are two ways in which the Internet is similar in the United States and Canada, it’s that it’s slow and expensive in both places relative to many developed countries. The big difference, however, is that Canada is looking into doing something about it.

The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission—the northern equivalent of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)— is examining how the wholesale market, where smaller Internet service providers (ISPs) use parts of bigger companies’ networks to sell their own services, should operate in the years ahead.

The industry reaction to this proposal provides insights to the potential consequences of re-classifying broadband in the U.S. as a Title II public utility.

Submission + - Net neutrality campaign to show what the Web would be like with a 'slow lane'

Submitted by blottsie
blottsie writes: In a move out of the anti-SOPA campaign playbook, Fight for the Future and other net neutrality activist groups have set up the Battle for the Net coalition, which plans to launch an “Internet slowdown day” later this month.

No actual traffic will be slowed down. Instead, participating sites will display embeddable modules that include a spinning “loading” symbol and information about contacting the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the White House, and members of Congress.

Submission + - Inside the Facebook algorithm most users don't even know exists (dailydot.com)

Submitted by catparty
catparty writes: An examination of what we can know about Facebook's new machine learning News Feed algorithm:

Facebook's current News Feed algorithm might be smarter, but some of its core considerations don't stray too far from the groundwork laid by EdgeRank, though thanks to machine learning, Facebook's current algorithm has a better ear for "signals from you." Facebook confirmed to us that the new News Feed ranking algorithm does indeed take 100,000 weighted variables into account to determine what we see. These factors help Facebook display an average 300 posts culled from roughly 1,500 possible posts per day, per user.

Submission + - The Department of Homeland Security needs its own Edward Snowden

Submitted by blottsie
blottsie writes: Out of all the U.S. government agencies, the Department of Homeland Security is one of the least transparent. As such, the number of Freedom of Information Act requests it receives have doubled since 2008. But the DHS has only become more adamant about blocking FOIA requests over the years. The problem has become so sever that nothing short of an Edward Snowden-style leak may be needed to increase transparency at the DHS.

Submission + - OKCupid blocks Mozilla Firefox over gay rights (bbc.com)

Submitted by PortWineBoy
PortWineBoy writes: The Beeb is reporting that OkCupid is prompting Mozilla Firefox users to switch browsers over Brendan Eich's opposition to Prop 8 in California in 2008. Users are met with a message stating that OkayCupid would prefer no one access their site with Mozilla software. Eich is the new CEO of Mozilla.

Submission + - The Connected Home's Battle Of The Bulbs (readwrite.com)

Submitted by redletterdave
redletterdave writes: The current leader in smart lights is Philips Hue Wi-Fi-enabled bulbs. But the competition just heated up last week, with both LG and Samsung unveiling new smart bulbs. Not that Philips is sitting idly by—the boss of intelligent bulbs also unveiled two new products: the Hue Lux LED bulb, a cheaper, stripped-down version of its pricey original, and the Philips Hue Tap, an add-on that lets you trigger lights by touch. But which company will win the battle to illuminate the connected home?

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