96847501
submission
kbahey writes:
Can a single pixel cost you your livelihood and/or freedom? Apparently, this has already happened in Turkey to thousands of people and their relative. It all stems down from the purge by president Edrogan, following a failed coupe. The result is that many innocent people lost their jobs (and source of income), their freedom, their reputation, and more.
The details are frightening. The underlying technology is the use of 1x1 transparent pixels, as most web sites do, to track their visitors. This particular pixel was used by Bylock, a messaging app that the Turkish government deemed seditious, in their purge against Fethullah Gulen loyalists. Pre-dawn raids by police on those who have this pixel. The long legal proceedings caused a digital forensic expert to challenge those cases based on the servers for Bylock being used for other applications, such as music streaming, and prayer times/direction of Mecca.
87672605
submission
theodp writes:
In a late Friday blog post entitled An Update on Computer Science Education and Federal Funding, tech-backed Code.org explains that Congress's passage of a 'continuing resolution' extending the current budget into 2017 spelled the death knell for President Obama's proposed $4B Computer Science For All initiative, which enjoyed support from the likes of Microsoft, Facebook, and Google. So, wait'll next year? Perhaps not. "We don’t have any direct feedback yet about the next administration’s support for K-12 CS," wrote CEO Hadi Partovi and Govt. Affairs VP Cameron Wilson, "other than a promise to expand 'vocational and technical education' as part of Trump’s 100-day plan which was published in late October. I am hopeful that this language may translate into support for funding K-12 computer science at a federal level. However, we should assume that it will not." The nonprofit may have ruffled the new administration's feathers — among the recent WikiLeaks disclosures was correspondence from Code.org's founders advising the Clinton campaign that the issue of K-12 CS education could be used to win Hillary the election.
84027683
submission
jader3rd writes:
Quartz has an article written by the CEO of Ready about how public education should be embracing computer science, and how existing programmers don't like these efforts because they feel that doing so will result in kids being exposed to programming in a manner different then how they were introduced to it.
Writing software today is eerily similar to what it was like in the late 1950s, when people sat at terminals and wrote COBOL programs. And like the late 1950s, the stereotype of the coder is largely unchanged: mostly white guys with deep math skills, and minimal extroversion. Back in the Sputnik-era, people thought of programmers as a priesthood in lab coats: the sole keepers of knowledge that ran these exotic, and mysterious room-sized machines. Today the priesthood is a little hipper—lab coats have long given way to a countercultural vibe—but it’s still a priesthood, perhaps more druidic than Jesuitic, but a priesthood nonetheless
55977315
submission
SugarManner writes:
Google Glass is in for a fight even before they hit the market. The Taiwanese company Chipsip has just released plans for a competing product that beats Google Glass on all specifications. (Seen on the Swedish Elektronik Tidningen — warning: written in Swedish)
Nine sensors on the Taiwanese product “Smart Glass” can detect speed, altitude, temperature, light and position. It has built-in GPS, Bluetooth 4.0 and a microphone. The processor is based on Rock Chips Cortex A9 system RK3168 running at 1.5 GHz.
While Google Glass supports 802.11g communication, Chipsip Smart Glass supports 802.11n. The camera and screen resolution also top Google Glass by a notch, and with stereo sound on the Smart Glass compared to Google’s mono sound, it seems that the Taiwanese company has hit all the right spots to make Google goggle.
Or not. Google Glass is still in Beta, so specs on the final product may change.
35687203
submission
ananyo writes:
A species of termite found in the rainforests of French Guiana takes altruism seriously: aged workers grow sacks of toxic blue liquid that they explode onto their enemies in an act of suicidal self-sacrifice to help their colonies.
The “explosive backpacks” of Neocapritermes taracua grow throughout the lifetimes of the worker termites, filling with blue crystals secreted by a pair of glands on the insects' abdomens. Older workers carry the largest and most toxic backpacks. Those individuals also, not coincidentally, are the least able to forage and tend for the colony: their mandibles become dull and worn as the termites age, because they cannot be sharpened by moulting (abstract).
30983639
submission
lyran74 writes:
Saturday's electronic leadership vote for Canada's New Democratic Party was plagued by delays caused by a botnet DDoS attack, coming from over 10,000 machines. Details are still scarce, but Scytl, who provided electronic voting services, will have to build more robust systems in the future in anticipation of such attacks. Party and company officials say an audit proved the systems and integrity of the vote were not compromised.
