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Submission + - Symantec Fires CEO Steve Bennett (securityweek.com)

wiredmikey writes: Symantec on Thursday announced that CEO Steve Bennett was terminated by the security company and has been replaced by Michael Brown as interim president and CEO. Bennett, who also resigned from Symantec's board of directors, took the top position at Symantec in July 2012, after former president and CEO Enrique Salem was pushed out by the Board of Directors.

In April 2013, Bennett, told attendees at its own Vision Conference, that the company was changing, and acknowledged that Symantec “lacked strategy” when it came to dealing with acquisitions. His plan was to move the company forward slowly, but consistently and make Symantec easier to do business with. That strategy, or at least the execution of it, hasn't impressed the board of directors, it seems.

Submission + - Firefox 29 Beta Arrives With Mozilla's Major User Interface Overhaul Australis

An anonymous reader writes: Following the release of Firefox 28 just two days ago, Mozilla today updated its Firefox Beta channel to version 29 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. This is a massive release: Firefox Sync has been revamped and is now powered by Firefox Accounts, there’s a new customization mode, and a href="http://people.mozilla.org/~shorlander/mockups-interactive/australis-interactive-mockups/windows8.html">the major user interface overhaul Australis has finally arrived. Release notes are here: Desktop and Android.

Submission + - How did Bill Nye become the Science Guy? (youtube.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Whether he's debating creationists, taking selfies with President Obama, or "Dancing with the Stars," Bill Nye the Science Guy is no stranger to the spotlight. But what about the man behind the public persona? How did Bill Nye become the Science Guy? Bill Nye has made his debut on the PBS series, The Secret Life of Scientists and Engineers, to reveal the story of how he rose from being a young comedian from Seattle to becoming a science icon. In his profile, Bill Nye talks about his early days impersonating Steve Martin, why bow-ties are important in the lab (and with the ladies), and how Carl Sagan's advice helped to shape his hit television show.
Google

Gmail Goes HTTPS Only For All Connections 141

Trailrunner7 (1100399) writes "Perhaps no company has been as vocal with its feelings about the revelations about the NSA's collection methods as Google has, and the company has been making a series of changes to its infrastructure in recent months to make it more difficult for adversaries to snoop on users' sessions. The biggest of those changes landed Thursday when the company switched its Gmail service to HTTPS only, enforcing SSL encryption on all Gmail connections. The change is a significant one, especially given the fact that Google also has encrypted all of the links between its data centers. Those two modifications mean that Gmail messages are encrypted from the time they leave a user's machine to the time they leave Google's infrastructure. This makes life much more difficult for anyone—including the NSA–who is trying to snoop on those Gmail sessions." GMail also does TLS for SMTP, but regrettably Talk (what's left of it) does not do TLS for XMPP server-to-server connections, effectively forcing XMPP server admins to lower their security if they want to federate with Google.
Education

CEO Says One Laptop Per Child Project Has Achieved Its Goals 54

waderoush (1271548) writes "A blog post at OLPC News last week went viral with the claim that the nine-year-old One Laptop Per Child project is dead. Media outlets quickly controverted the assertion, but the response from the OLPC Association itself was brief, saying that its mission is 'far from over' and citing ongoing projects to distribute laptops in Central America. In a more lengthy Q&A this week, OLPC chairman and CEO Rodrigo Arboleda says the organization has achieved many of its goals, including demonstrating the value of the 'Constructionist' 1:1 learning philosophy originally espoused by Negroponte. With 2.5 million laptops distributed so far, the OLPC vision is 'on track to being fully realized,' Arboleda says. He sees 'commercial greed' and a 'status-quo mentality' within ministries of education and teachers' unions as the main hurdles holding back faster progress."
United States

NSA General Counsel Insists US Companies Assisted In Data Collection 103

Related to yesterday's story about the NSA, Advocatus Diaboli (1627651) writes with this excerpt from The Guardian: "Rajesh De, the NSA general counsel, said all communications content and associated metadata harvested by the NSA under a 2008 surveillance law occurred with the knowledge of the companies – both for the internet collection program known as Prism and for the so-called 'upstream' collection of communications moving across the Internet. ... nearly all the companies listed as participating in the program – Yahoo, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook and AOL – claimed they did not know about a surveillance practice described as giving NSA vast access to their customers’ data. Some, like Apple, said they had 'never heard' the term Prism. De explained: 'Prism was an internal government term that as the result of leaks became the public term,' De said. 'Collection under this program was a compulsory legal process, that any recipient company would receive.'"

Submission + - College Grads Create Fake Tesla Commercial That Elon Musk Loves

cartechboy writes: Two University of Southern California grads were looking to start a digital content company so they decided to roll the dice and create a home-made (but incredibly professional looking) television commercial for Tesla — just to see if they could get some attention for it. Well, apparently, mission accomplished. R.J. Collins and James Khabushani took $1,500 and created a 60-second Tesla "faux-mercial" dubbed "Modern Spaceship" that is well, pretty good. Elon Musk noticed, tweeted it and has helped the thing go viral. Makes you wonder why TV commercials cost so much to make when these guys created this for a fraction of what it would normally take.
Debian

Debian Considering Long Term Support for Squeeze 46

Via Bits from Debian, comes news that the security team is considering adding a Long Term Support suite for Squeeze (Debian 6) after Jessie (Debian 8) is released sometime next year. From the mailing list post: "At the moment it seems likely that an extended security support timespan for squeeze is possible. The plan is to go ahead, sort out the details as as it happens, and see how this works out and whether it is going to be continued with wheezy. The rough draft is that updates will be delivered via a separate suite (e.g. squeeze-lts), where everyone in the Debian keyring can upload in order to minimise bottlenecks and allow contributions by all interested parties. Some packages will be exempted upfront due to their volatile nature (e.g. some web applications) and others might be expected to see important changes. The LTS suite will be limited to amd64 and i386. The exact procedures will be sorted out soon and announced in a separate mail. ... It needs to be pointed out that for this effort to be sustainable actual contributions by interested parties are required. squeeze-lts is not something that will magically fall from the sky. If you're dependent/interested in extended security support you should make an effort to contribute." If successful, the LTS idea would possibly be carried over to Wheezy. With all of the changes coming in Jessie and its aggressive release schedule, this sysadmin really likes the idea of having a bit more breathing room for updating infrastructure between releases. The email also contains a bunch of other info on changes coming to the security process.

In related news, the Debian Installer team announced the first alpha of debian-installer for Jessie. Just the installer, not the distro as a whole (Jessie will be frozen in November). XFCE remains the default desktop, ia64 was kicked out of the archive, and a few new ARM variants are supported.

Submission + - Nate Silver's new site stirs climate controversy

taiwanjohn writes: One of the first articles on Nate Silver’s highly anticipated data-driven news site used flawed data to make its conclusions, according to some of the nation’s top climate scientists.
Silver’s FiveThirtyEight published its first article about climate change on Wednesday, entitled “Disasters Cost More Than Ever — But Not Because of Climate Change.” But climate scientists are condemning the article and its author, Roger Pielke Jr., saying he ignored critical data to produce a “deeply misleading” result.
The crux of Pielke’s article is this: Extreme weather events are costing us more and more money, but that is not because climate change is making extreme weather more frequent or intense. The reason we are losing more money, rather, is because we have more money to lose. Pielke came to this conclusion by measuring rising disaster damage costs alongside the rising global Gross Domestic Product. He also cited a U.N. climate report, along with his own research, to assert that extreme weather events have not been increasing in frequency or intensity.
Space

Earth Barely Dodged Solar Blast In 2012 202

Rambo Tribble (1273454) writes "Coronal mass ejections, with severity comparable to the 1859 Carrington event, missed Earth by only 9 days in 2012, according to researchers. The Carrington event caused widespread damage to the telegraph system in the U.S., and a similar occurrence would be devastating to modern electronics, it is thought. From the Reuters article, 'Had it hit Earth, it probably would have been like the big one in 1859, but the effect today, with our modern technologies, would have been tremendous.' The potential global cost for such damage is pegged at $2.6 trillion."

Submission + - Spinoffs from Spyland: How Some NSA Technology Is Making Its Way Into Industry (technologyreview.com)

An anonymous reader writes: MIT Technology Review reports, "Like other federal agencies, the NSA is compelled by law to try to commercialize its R&D. It employs patent attorneys and has a marketing department that is now trying to license inventions ... The agency claims more than 170 patents ... But the NSA has faced severe challenges trying to keep up with rapidly changing technology. ... Most recently, the NSA’s revamp included a sweeping effort to dismantle ... “stovepipes,” and switch to flexible cloud computing ... in 2008, NSA brass ordered the agency’s computer and information sciences research organization to create a version of the system Google uses to store its index of the Web and the raw images of Google Earth. That team was led by Adam Fuchs, now Sqrrl’s chief technology officer. Its twist on big data was to add “cell-level security,” a way of requiring a passcode for each data point ... that’s how software (like the infamous PRISM application) knows what can be shown only to people with top-secret clearance. Similar features could control access to data about U.S. citizens. “A lot of the technology we put [in] is to protect rights,” says Fuchs. Like other big-data projects, the NSA team’s system, called Accumulo, was built on top of open-source code because “you don’t want to have to replicate everything yourself,” ... In 2011, the NSA released 200,000 lines of code to the Apache Foundation. When Atlas Venture’s Lynch read about that, he jumped—here was a technology already developed, proven to work on tens of terabytes of data, and with security features sorely needed by heavily regulated health-care and banking customers. ... Eventually, Fuchs and several others left the NSA, and now their company is part of a land grab in big data ..."

Submission + - Could Earth's Infrared Emissions be a New Renewable Energy Source? (gizmag.com)

Zothecula writes: Could it one day be possible to generate electricity from the loss of heat from Earth to outer space? A group of Harvard engineers believe so and have theorized something of a reverse photovoltaic cell to do just this. The key is using the flow of energy away from our planet to generate voltage, rather than using incoming energy as in existing solar technologies.

Submission + - Fruit Flies are Better Than You at Calculus

DudeTheMath writes: Cornell University scientists studied how fruit flies respond to flight disturbances (instead of wind gusts, they used carefully controlled magnetic pulses) and found that the flies recover in as little as three wing beats (at 250 per second) by doing some kind of calculus in a little "integrated circuit" of neurons that control the wings directly. The pitch and yaw results are already published, and the roll study is forthcoming. (NYT, partial paywall, autoplay of fly that starts with a car ad.)

Submission + - Algorithm Composes Music By Text Analysing The World's Best Novels (medium.com)

KentuckyFC writes: The recent development of vast databases that link words to the emotions they conjure up is changing the way researchers study text. Sentiment analysis, for example, is increasingly used to gauge the mood of society on topics ranging from politics to movies. Now researchers have used the same technique to measure the "emotional temperature" throughout a novel and then to automatically compose music that reflects the content. The key advance in this work is the development of rules that map the emotional changes into musical qualities such as tempo, key pitch and so on. The team has fed a number of well known books through the algorithm, which they call TransProse. These include lighter texts such as Peter Pan and much darker novels such as The Road and Heart of Darkness. And the music isn't bad (to my untrained ear). The teams say the new algorithm could lead to audio-visual e-books that generate music that reflects the mood on open pages. And it may even be possible to use the algorithm in reverse to recommend known songs that reflect the mood in a book.

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