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Submission + - UK Parliament seizes cache of Facebook internal papers

Submitted by infolation
infolation writes: The UK Parliament has used its legal powers to seize internal Facebook documents in an extraordinary attempt to hold the US social media giant to account after chief executive Mark Zuckerberg repeatedly refused to answer MPs' questions. The documents are alleged to contain revelations on data and privacy controls that led to Cambridge Analytica scandal. Damian Collins, the chair of the culture, media and sport select committee, invoked a rare parliamentary mechanism to compel the founder of a US software company, Six4Three, to hand over the documents during a business trip to London.
Cloud

Submission + - Hands-On Insights Into Google Compute Engine (infoworld.com)

Submitted by
snydeq
snydeq writes: "Yesterday's Compute Engine announcement at Google I/O made it clear that Google intends to take Amazon EC2 head on. Michael Crandell, who has been testing out Compute Engine for some time now, divulges deeper insights into the nascent IaaS, which, although enticing, will have a long road ahead of it in eclipsing Amazon EC2. 'Even in this early stage, three major factors about Google Cloud stood out for Crandell. First was the way Google leveraged the use of its own private network to make its cloud resources uniformly accessible across the globe. ... Another key difference was boot times, which are both fast and consistent in Google's cloud. ... Third is encryption. Google offers at-rest encryption for all storage, whether it's local or attached over a network. "Everything's automatically encrypted," says Crandell, "and it's encrypted outside the processing of the VM so there's no degradation of performance to get that feature."'"
Wikipedia

Submission + - Statisticians Investigate Political Bias on Wikipedia

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "The Global Economic Intersection reports on a project to statistically measure political bias on Wikipedia. The team first identified 1,000 political phrases based on the number of times these phrases appeared in the text of the 2005 Congressional Record and applied statistical methods to identify the phrases that separated Democratic representatives from Republican representatives, under the model that each group speaks to its respective constituents with a distinct set of coded language. Then the team identified 111,000 Wikipedia articles that include “republican” or “democrat” as keywords and analyzed them to determine whether a given Wikipedia article used phrases favored more by Republican members or by Democratic members of Congress. The results may surprise you. "The average old political article in Wikipedia leans Democratic" but gradually, Wikipedia’s articles have lost the disproportionate use of Democratic phrases and moved to nearly equivalent use of words from both parties (PDF), akin to an NPOV [neutral point of view] on average. Interestingly some articles like civil rights tend to have a Democrat slant, while others like trade tend to have a Republican slant while at the same time many seemingly controversial topics such as foreign policy, war and peace, and abortion have no net slant. "Most articles arrive with a slant, and most articles change only mildly from their initial slant. The overall slant changes due to the entry of articles with opposite slants, leading toward neutrality for many topics, not necessarily within specific articles.""
The Military

Submission + - NATO Summit reading: What's wrong with term "tactical" nuclear weapons? (thebulletin.org)

Submitted by Lasrick
Lasrick writes: Benjamin Loehrke describes the rather odd definitions of what is a "tactical" nuclear weapon and what isn't. "There is enough ambiguity surrounding the capabilities of tactical and strategic nuclear weapons to render the term "tactical" all but useless for arms control purposes. As the United States and Russia pursue new arms control treaties, they should drop the tactical distinction and limit the total number of all nuclear weapons — strategic, tactical, or other."
Linux

Submission + - Open Source Driver For Microsoft Surface 2.0 (ubuntuvibes.com)

Submitted by dartttt
dartttt writes: Florian Echtler has developed an open-source driver for the Microsoft Surface 2.0 touch screen. According to him, the open source implementation works surprisingly well on Ubuntu 11.10. The process requires you to boot Linux on your Surface 2.0 in the first place. However, it can be done by just booting Ubuntu from a USB hard disk without modify anything on the original Win7 installation.
Space

Submission + - ESA declares flagship Envisat observing satellite lost (spaceflightnow.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: "The European Space Agency on Wednesday declared the Envisat environmental satellite lost one month after the bus-sized craft unexpectedly stopped communicating 10 years after its launch. 'Although chances of recovering Envisat are extremely low, the investigation team will continue attempts to re-establish contact while considering failure scenarios for the next two months,' ESA said in a written statement." This failure leaves a break in Earth observation data by ESA until the next generation satellites are launched in 2 years time.

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