72037559
submission
George Maschke writes:
AntiPolygraph.org (of which I am a co-founder) has published a set of leaked Defense Intelligence Agency polygraph countermeasure case files along with a case-by-case analysis. The case files, which include polygraph charts and the exact questions used, suggest that the only people being "caught" trying to beat the polygraph are those using crude, unsophisticated methods that anyone who actually understood polygraph procedure and effective countermeasures (like, say, a real spy, saboteur, or terrorist) would ever use. AntiPolygraph.org has previously published polygraph community training materials on countermeasures that indicate they lack the ability to detect countermeasures like those described in our free book, The Lie Behind the Lie Detector (PDF) or in former police polygraph examiner Doug Williams' manual, How to Sting the Polygraph . Williams, who was indicted last year after teaching undercover federal agents how to pass a polygraph, is scheduled to stand trial on May 12 in Oklahoma City.
72030909
submission
Lashdots writes:
At Fast Company, Tina Amritha writes about the controversial rise of reference manager startup Mendeley, which inspired revolt among its users when it announced in 2013 it was being acquired by scholarly publishing conglomerate Elsevier."Seeing that some of our most vocal advocates thought we had sold them out felt awful," CEO Victor Henning said recently over a tea in Amsterdam, where Elsevier, Mendeley's parent company, is headquartered. "I had steeled myself for some pretty violent reactions beforehand. After all, I was aware of Elsevier's reputation and the mistakes they had made."...
Elsevier, like other large publishers, loathed Mendeley's open model; In 2013, it had forced Mendeley to remove its titles from its database. The thinking behind its acquisition of Mendeley—for a sum rumored to between $69 million and $100 million—was simple: to squash the threat Mendeley posed to its traditional subscription model, and to own the ecosystem that Mendeley had constructed, with its valuable data on the behavior of millions of researchers.
But Henning contends, “We’ve kept the promises we made when we began."
436878
submission
Richard Pritches writes:
MIT errata expert, Evangelos Georgiadis, attains a milestone by actually disproving 44 conjectures set by Dr Wolfram (owner of the Makers of Mathematica and owner of the new kind of cult ANKS).
Paper was published in the latest issue of the Journal of Cellular Automata and has also appeared free of charge at Prof Edwin Clark's Collection of Wolfram's NKS Reviews at the following link
http://www.math.usf.edu/~eclark/jca_georgiadis.pdf
I believe that this is a nice Xmas present for the ANKOS spirit.
Richard
402335
submission
roady writes:
We have seen a lot of talk about the Canadian DMCA. But few know about the Swiss version recently adopted by law makers, not even the Swiss people.
The government and media have been very quiet, probably to avoid a referendum. Indeed, Switzerland is a direct democracy and if 50'000 citizens sign a referendum, the whole country will have a chance to vote against the new copyright law. In this version of the DMCA, sharing a file on P2P networks will land you one year in jail, even though the law mandates a levy on blank media. The history of the law can be read here.
394151
submission
The_Rook writes:
the discovery institute copied Harvard University's BioVisions video, "The Inner Life of the Cell", stripped out Harvard's copyright notice, credits, and narration, and inserted their own creationist friendly narration and renamed the video "The Cell as an automated city". pretty insidious, as suggesting that a cell is like a city is to suggest that it was designed rather than evolved. it should also be of interest because the discovery institute, really more of a lawyer mill than a scientific institution, engaged in a particularly egregious example of copyright infringement.
390263
submission
Arashtamere writes:
Microsoft admitted late Tuesday that the recently discovered encryption flaw that Israeli researchers discovered in Windows 2000 exists in XP, its most popular product.
According to the report "as recently as last Friday, Microsoft hedged in answering questions about whether XP and Vista could be attacked in the same way, saying only that later versions of Windows "contain various changes and enhancements to the random number generator." Yesterday, however, Microsoft responded to further questions and acknowledged that Windows XP is vulnerable to the complex attack that Pinkas, Gutterman and Dorrendorf (the Israeli researchers) laid out in their paper, which was published earlier this month.
Apparently Microsoft and Pinkas have argued over whether the flaw was a security vulnerability, with the former denying the bug met the definition and the latter claiming it is a serious problem that — while it needs to piggyback on another, more common kind of exploit — is far from just a theoretical threat. Tuesday, even as it conceded that XP also had a weak PRNG, Microsoft continued to downplay the possibility of an attack. "If an attacker has already compromised a victim machine, a theoretical attack could occur on Windows XP," a company spokeswoman said in an e-mail. To exploit the PRNG's flaws, an attacker must have administrative rights to the PC, something that's easily obtained by most run-of-the-mill attacks, Pinkas noted."
157711
submission
tenchiken writes:
Zimbra, an Open Source enterprise messaging app, just scored a major win. Comcast will be moving mail services for all of their customers to Zimbra. Zimbra has been picking up steam for a while now, and appears to really be challenging Microsoft in a area that Exchange has been dominated in. Add in support for Samba Domain Controllers and Linux Authentication, Offline Access and Evolution Support and we might finally have our long desired Open Source exchange killer.
113647
submission
Braedley writes:
Members of the European IT industry are rightfully unhappy with a proposed law that would penalize various parties, from software companies to ISPs, to even some hardware manufactures, but not the end users for infringing on intellectual property. Penalties for this aiding and abetting could include jail time for employees if found guilty.
From the article:
"The proposed directive switches the onus from end users to the technological conduits, which could include ISPs (Internet service providers), mobile phone operators, instant-messaging services, video- and music-sharing Web sites such as YouTube, as well as open-source software producers.
The controversial draft law has sparked an outcry, uniting rivals within the IT industry, ranging from free and open-source software advocates, the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure, at one end to a lobbyist for the world's biggest software companies, the Business Software Alliance (BSA), at the other."
