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Comment Thinking beyond the short game to the long play... (Score 2) 393

by jlaprise1 (#50986347) Attached to: How Anonymous' War With Isis Is Actually Harming Counter-Terrorism

While this is undoubtedly harming some existing intelligence gathering operations, it's probably more useful in providing other information such as how does ISIS's network react when attacked by another network actor. Think of Anonymous as the hounds chasing ISIS for the the intel community. Watching ISIS's online behaviour under attack is probably very useful.

Comment Not A Lie (Score 1) 385

by jlaprise1 (#43951907) Attached to: NSA Surveillance Heat Map: NSA Lied To Congress

Knowing how many people in the USA are surveilled is not the same as knowing how many Americans are surveilled. Two very different numbers. What's more, without breaking privacy by looking at the content, the NSA cannot be absolutely sure. Statistically confident but not without the element of uncertainty.

Congress should ask better questions. They are mostly lawyers after all.

Comment Taking a cue from WoW (Score 1) 93

by jlaprise1 (#42953261) Attached to: Internet Poker Could Make a Comeback By Going Brick-and-Mortar

Maybe the online poker industry should take a cue from WoW where player conventions are huge. Online players get to meet face-to-face. They could set up regional, national and international events to attract players for special prizes and recognition. The conventions could have workshops by leading players etc.
Linux

Submission + - ScummVM 1.5.0 "Picnic Basket" Released (scummvm.org)

Submitted by
YokimaSun
YokimaSun writes: "Fans of classic graphical point-and-click adventure games, will be happy to learn that a new version of ScummVM has been released with support for new games such as Once Upon A Time: Little Red Riding Hood, Backyard Baseball 2003, Blue Force, Darby the Dragon, Dreamweb, Geisha, Gregory and the Hot Air Balloon, Magic Tales: Liam Finds a Story and more. ScummVM not only supports Windows, Linux and new platforms such as iPhone and Android but also consoles such as Dreamcast, Gamecube and Nintendo 64 and rarer handhelds such as Openpandora and Dingoo."
Security

Submission + - JavaScript Botnet Sheds Light on Criminal Activity (darkreading.com)

Submitted by
CowboyRobot
CowboyRobot writes: "Informatica64, a security research group, demonstrated the use of cached JavaScript to control computers connecting to a malicious proxy.
"The researchers found a variety of low-level criminals using their proxy server: fraudsters posing as British immigration officials offering work permits in hopes of stealing money and sensitive documents from their victims; a man pretending to be a pretty woman on a number of dating sites to con victims into sending money for a plane ticket; and another fraudster selling nonexistent Yorkshire Terriers.""
Games

Submission + - GameStop Wants To Sell Secondhand Digital Download Video Games (hothardware.com)

Submitted by
MojoKid
MojoKid writes: "GameStop makes a killing selling used videogames, but what happens to that business model when digital distribution platforms run physical media out of town? That's not anything to worry about today, tomorrow, next week, or even next year, but at some point, GameStop will have to deal with the direction the games industry is headed, and it may already have a solution. GameStop CEO Paul Raines recently brought up the possibility of reselling used digital downloads."
Facebook

Submission + - Facebook Abstainers could be labeled Suspicious 2

Submitted by bs0d3
bs0d3 writes: According to this article printed in tagesspiegel.de, not having a facebook account should be the first sign that you are a mass murderer. As examples they use Norwegian shooter Anders Breivik, who used myspace instead of facebook and the newer Aurora shooter who used adultfriendfinder instead of facebook. They already consider those with facebook accounts, who lack friends to be suspicious, but now they are suggesting that anyone who abstains from facebook altogether may be even more suspicious. While it is already established that sites like facebook and google+ are no good for political activists, abuse survivors, and people in the witness protection program; abuse survivors will have to take a back seat while more and more insane articles like this come out. This line of thinking could sure help facebook's stock value.
Android

Submission + - Apple v. Samsung: Surprising Reveals in Latest Court Documents (wired.com)

Submitted by Nerdfest
Nerdfest writes: "The lawyers behind the upcoming Apple v. Samsung trial have been hard at work filing docket after docket as their court battle looms closer, and many of those dockets have just been released to the public. We’re now seeing a lot of previously secret information about the early days of iPhone and iPad R&D, and what’s happened behind closed doors at both Apple and Samsung."

Surprises include the iPhone design being 'inspired' by Sony product ideas, and that Samsung was warned that it was copying Apple.
Cellphones

Submission + - Fighting the iCrime Wave

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: 'What's the point of a mobile device,' asks WSJ reporter and iPad-beatdown-victim Rolfe Winkler, 'if people don't feel safe using it while they're mobile?' A lucrative secondhand market for today's electronics devices — a used iPad or iPhone can fetch $400+ — has produced an explosion in 'Apple picking' by thieves. So, how big is the iCrime wave? In New York City alone, there were more than 26,000 incidents of electronics theft in the first 10 months of 2011 — 81% involving mobile phones — according to an internal NYPD document. And plenty of the crimes are violent. The best way to deter theft is to reduce the value of stolen device — the wireless industry is moving to adopt a national registry that would deny service to such devices. A remote kill switch has been discussed as another approach. For its part, Apple says the company 'has led the industry in helping customers protect their lost or stolen devices,' although some are unimpressed. Could the estimated $575 in profit per iOS device be part of the problem?"

Submission + - 6 IT Projects are $8 Billion Over Budget at the Dept of Defense (federaltimes.com)

Submitted by McGruber
McGruber writes: The Federal Times has the stunning but not surprising news (http://www.federaltimes.com/article/20120723/DEPARTMENTS01/307230001/At-DoD-6-projects-8-billion-over-budget) that a new audit has found that Six Defense Department modernization projects are a combined $8 Billion — or 110 percent — over budget. The projects are also suffering from years-long schedule delays.

In 1998, work began on the Army’s Logistics Modernization Program (LMP). In April 2010, the General Accounting Office (GAO) issued their report "Actions Needed to Improve Implementation of the Army Logistics Modernization Program" (http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-10-461) about the status of LMP. LMP is now scheduled to be fully deployed in September 2016, 12 years later than originally scheduled, and 18 years after development first began! (Development of the often-maligned Duke Nukem Forever (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duke_Nukem_Forever) only took 15 years.)

Prime contractors Computer Sciences Corp, Accenture, IBM and CACI obviously have learned the "If you're not a part of the solution, there's good money to be made in prolonging the problem" lesson! (http://www.despair.com/consulting.html)
Games

Submission + - Games could predict whether you're color blind, a gambler, or have ADD (venturebeat.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Lukasz Twardowski, a young Polish entrepreneur, recently made an unexpected discovery. By analyzing data from video games, he thinks he’ll be able to predict whether players are color blind, have Alzheimer’s disease, or suffer from various learning and development disorders. He can already use this data to tell whether players are gamblers, cheaters, or minors, so the profiling of medical conditions is not that distant, Twardowski claims.

“Games are the richest and the most meaningful form of human computer interaction,” said Twardowski in an interview with VentureBeat. “We can use [them] to build a full user behavioral profile.”
Businesses

Submission + - Mark Zuckerberg's Big Facebook Mistake

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Nathan Vardi writes in Forbes that in the last two months, Mark Zuckerberg has had a rude introduction to the capital markets and with Facebook’s stock in free-fall, down more than 40% from its IPO price, Zuckerberg has a big problem. "Zuckerberg did not want to deal with the pressures of being a public company. Like many entrepreneurs these days he viewed the capital markets with suspicion," writes Vardi. "So Zuckerberg made a fateful decision, he decided to keep Facebook a privately-held company for much longer than other success stories like Google or Amazon." But waiting eight years to conduct an IPO has turned out to be an impossible problem to manage. The bankers at Morgan Stanley applied all the lessons of the last 15 years and priced the IPO at $38, which was very aggressive, in an attempt to avoid leaving any money on the table and the embarrassment that a huge IPO pop would represent. With such a big valuation at IPO time, Facebook had to show some results but the numbers that Facebook announced in its first quarterly earnings report were underwhelming and the trading hordes drove Facebook’s stock down by 15% in Friday morning trading. Now the early institutional investors are heading for the exits and it's hard to imagine morale at Facebook won’t take a hit that correlates with the loss in value of the shares belonging to the employees. "The lesson of the Facebook fiasco for Silicon Valley is clear. Start-up entrepreneurs cannot evade the discipline of the capital markets any more than can the prime ministers of Spain and Italy.""

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