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Submission + - Air Force Space Fence Being Shut Down (spacenews.com) 1

Submitted by meglon
meglon writes: NASA will no longer have real time information on tracking orbital debris if the order of Gen. William Shelton, commander of Air Force Space Command, is carried out. The Space Fence, the only monitoring system of it's kind, will cease function on October 1st. Start saying goodby to all your favorite telecommunication and GPS satellites now.

Submission + - Silent Circle follows Lavabit by closing encrypted e-mail service (cnet.com)

Submitted by Okian Warrior
Okian Warrior writes: Silent Circle shuttered its encrypted e-mail service on Thursday, in an apparent attempt to avoid government scrutiny that may threaten its customers' privacy. The company announced that it could "see the writing on the wall" and decided it best to shut down its Silent Mail feature. The company said it was inspired by the closure earlier Thursday of Lavabit, another encrypted e-mail service provider that alluded to a possible national security investigation.

Submission + - Memory Wars May Herald In Mobile Devices With Terabytes of Capacity (computerworld.com)

Submitted by Lucas123
Lucas123 writes: With 3D NAND flash going into high production and one startup demonstrating a resistive NAND (RRAM) flash array, it may not be long before mobile devices have hundreds of gigabytes of capacity, even a terabyte with performance only limited by the bus. Samsung announced it is now mass producing three-dimensional (3D) Vertical NAND (V-NAND) chips, and start-up Crossbar said it has created a prototype of its RRAM chip. Both technologies offer many times what current NAND flash chips offer today in capacity and performance. Which technology will prevail is still up in the air, but experts believe it will be years before RRAM can challenge NAND, but it's almost inevitable that it will overtake it as even 3D NAND heads for an inevitable dead end. Others believe 3D NAND, currently at 24 layers, could reach more than 100, giving it a lifespan of five or more years.

Submission + - Back to 'The Future of Programming'

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Bret Victor's The Future of Programming (vimeo) should probably be required viewing this fall for all CS majors — and their professors. For his recent DBX Conference talk, Victor took attendees back to the year 1973, donning the uniform of an IBM systems engineer of the times, delivering his presentation on an overhead projector. The 60's and early 70's were a fertile time for CS ideas, reminds Victor, but even more importantly, it was a time of unfettered thinking, unconstrained by programming dogma, authority, and tradition. "The most dangerous thought that you can have as a creative person is to think that you know what you're doing," explains Victor. "Because once you think you know what you're doing you stop looking around for other ways of doing things and you stop being able to see other ways of doing things. You become blind." He concludes, "I think you have to say: 'We don’t know what programming is. We don’t know what computing is. We don’t even know what a computer is.' And once you truly understand that, and once you truly believe that, then you’re free, and you can think anything.”

Submission + - Mozilla Launches Persona Identity Bridge For Gmail

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Mozilla today announced the Persona Identity Bridge for Gmail users. If you have a Google account, this means you can now sign into Persona-powered websites with your existing credentials. The best part is of course Mozilla’s pledge to its users. “Persona remains committed to privacy: Gmail users can sign into sites with Persona, but Google can’t track which sites they sign into,” Mozilla Pesrona engineer Dan Callahan promises.

Submission + - NSA Admits Searching "3 Hops" from Suspects

Submitted by cpitman
cpitman writes: In a house hearing Wednesday the NSA admitted that it could query not only a suspect's records, but also perform up to a "three hop query". Considering that most people in the world are separated by under 6 degrees of separation, the NSA essentially claims that any single suspect gives them rights to investigate a chunk of the world's population.

With the terror watch list having over 700,000 names, just how many times has Kevin Bacon been investigated?

Submission + - Jimmy Carter Calls Snowden Leak Ultimately "Beneficial" (rt.com)

Submitted by eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes: According to RT, the 39th president of the United States made several statements worth noting. Carter said that 'America has no functioning democracy at this moment' and 'the invasion of human rights and American privacy has gone too far.' The second comment sounded like the Carter predicted the future would look favorably upon Snowden's leads — at least those concerning domestic spying in the United States — as he said: 'I think that the secrecy that has been surrounding this invasion of privacy has been excessive, so I think that the bringing of it to the public notice has probably been, in the long term, beneficial.' It may be worth noting that, stemming from Zurcher v. Stanford Daily, Jimmy Carter signed the Privacy Protection Act of 1980 into law and that Snowden has received at least one nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Submission + - Blackberry 10 sends Full Email Account Credentials to RIM (geekheim.de)

Submitted by vikingpower
vikingpower writes: How a phone manufacturer making a somewhat successful come-back can shoot itself in the foot: Marc "van Hauser" Heuse, who works for German technology magazine Heise, has discovered that immediately after setting up an email account on Blackberry 10 OS, full credentials for that account are sent to Research In Motion, the Canadian Blackberry manufacturer. Shortly after performing the set-up, the first successful connections from a server located within the RIM domain appear in the mail server's logs. ( most of the story in english, some comments in German ). At least according to German law, this is completely illegal, as the phone's user does not get a single indication or notice of what is being done.

Submission + - Google storing WLAN passwords in the "clear"

Submitted by husemann
husemann writes: Micah Lee from the EFF filed a bug report (https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=57560) about Google storing all your WLAN passwords on their application settings backup service without allowing you to encrypt them. So far it's not known whether the passwords are stored encrypted at rest, but just the fact that Google can read them (and disclose them if forced by "law") is a bit surprising, too put it nicely. Already one German university is concerned enough about this "feature" that they issued a warning to their users (http://www.rz.uni-passau.de/rzaktuell/meldung/detail/speicherung-von-zugangsdaten-auf-servern-der-fa-google/).

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... when fits of creativity run strong, more than one programmer or writer has been known to abandon the desktop for the more spacious floor. -- Fred Brooks

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