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Apple

Submission + - Steve Jobs Yacht Revealed (mashable.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Venus, the incredible luxury yacht Steve Jobs had been designing up until his death a little over a year ago, seems to have made its first appearance as a finished product in the city of Aalsmeer in the Netherlands. Unsurprisingly, its design is breathtaking.

Reportedly designed in a joint effort between Jobs himself and Philippe Starck, the stunning ship first showed up on the blog One More Thing, which posted some stills as well as a few other details. The ship is about 230 to 260 feet long, for instance, and made entirely of aluminum, which makes it particularly light. And if you had any doubt this is Steve Jobs' yacht, there are seven 27-inch iMacs in the wheelhouse.

According to One More Thing's sources, the Jobs family will be present for the yacht's christening ceremony proper, thought it's unknown whether or not they intend to use it, or what its ultimate fate may be. Regardless of what may happen to her, she sure is a beauty. It's certainly a shame Steve Jobs never got the chance to see her finished.
Biotech

Submission + - South Korean Scientists to Clone Wooly Mammoth (inhabitat.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Last year Russian researchers discovered a well-preserved mammoth thigh bone and announced plans to clone a mammoth from the bone marrow within — and they just signed a deal with South Korea's Sooam Biotech Research Foundation to bring the project to fruition. The Sooam scientists plan to implant the nucleus of a woolly mammoth cell into an elephant egg in order to to create a mammoth embryo, which would then be placed in an elephant womb. “This will be a really tough job,” Soaam reasearcher Hwang In-Sung said, “but we believe it is possible because our institute is good at cloning animals.”
Music

Submission + - Mastering Engineer Explains Types of Compression, Effects on Today's Music (cepro.com) 1

Submitted by
Stowie101
Stowie101 writes: "Today is Dynamic Range Day, which is an event to educate the public about the “Loudness Wars” that are compressing and harming the quality of today’s music.

Ian Shepherd, a mastering engineer and founder of Dynamic Range Day, explains why music lovers should avoid MP3 files.

"The one that springs to mind is to avoid MP3, especially if it’s 128 kbps. Apple uses a more advanced technology called AAC, but if someone can get lossless files like FLAC that’s a better place to start."

Shepherd says it’s actually harder to make a good “lossy” encode of something that has been heavily musically compressed. Very heavy dynamic compression and limiting makes MP3s sound worse, so the loudness wars indirectly make MP3s sound worse.""

Submission + - European Parliament blocks copyright reform with 113% voter turnout (falkvinge.net) 1

Submitted by mcmadman
mcmadman writes: In a bizarre turn of events. The Legal Affairs committee (JURI), which has the responsibility of safeguarding the integrity and trustworthiness of the legal framework as a whole in Europe voted recently to weaken a reform of the copyright monopoly for allowing re-publication and access to orphan works. Pieces of our cultural heritage where no copyright monopoly holder can be located. What is surprising that the voter turnout happened to be 113%. This rather embarrassing issue was pointed out to the committee, the fact that there were three votes too many, and that these three votes determined the outcome. When this was done, along with formally requesting a re-vote, that re-vote on the points in question was denied.
Android

Submission + - 'Honey Stick' Project Shows Fate of Lost Smartphones (securityweek.com)

Submitted by wiredmikey
wiredmikey writes: In order to get a look at what happens when a smartphone is lost, Symantec conducted an experiment, called the Honey Stick Project, where 50 fully-charged mobile devices were loaded with the simulated (fake) personal and corporate data and then dropped in publicly accessible spots in five different cities: New York City; Washington D.C.; Los Angeles; San Francisco; and Ottawa, Canada.

Tracking showed that 96-percent of the devices were accessed once found, and 70-percent of them were accessed for personal and business related applications and information. Less than half of the people who located the intentionally lost devices attempted to locate the owner. Interestingly enough, only two phones were left unaccounted for, the others were all found.

Going further, of the devices located, 45-percent of them reported that there was an attempt to read corporate email, and the remote admin application was accessed 49-percent of the time. A file named “saved passwords” was also one of the top selections, with a 57-percent access rate. Access to social networking accounts and personal email were each attempted on over 60 percent of the devices.

The numbers shouldn't be surprising. While not everyone has malicious intent, people are curious by nature — so remember to password protect your smartphone.
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft shows off universal translator (extremetech.com)

Submitted by
MrSeb
MrSeb writes: "Microsoft Research has shown off software that translates your spoken words into another language while preserving the accent, timbre, and intonation of your actual voice. In a demo of the prototype software, Rick Rashid, Microsoft’s chief research officer, said a long sentence in English, and then had it translated into Spanish, Italian, and Mandarin. You can definitely hear an edge of digitized “Microsoft Sam,” but overall it’s remarkable how the three translations still sound just like Rashid. The translation requires an hour of training, but after that there's no reason why it couldn't be run in real time on a smartphone, or near-real-time with a cloud backend. Imagine this tech in a two-way setup. You speak into your smartphone, and it comes out in their language. Then, the person you’re talking to speaks into your smartphone and their voice comes out in your language."
Security

Submission + - Behind The Mask, Accused LulzSec Members Left Trail Of Clues Online (threatpost.com)

Submitted by Trailrunner7
Trailrunner7 writes: When the long arm of the law reached in to arrest members of Anonymous's senior leadership on Tuesday, speculation immediately turned to the identities of the six men behind the Guy Fawkes mask. With the benefit of hindsight, it turns out that many had been hiding in plain site, with day jobs, burgeoning online lives and — for those who knew where to look — plenty of clues about their extracurricular activities on behalf of the world's most famous hacking crew.

An investigation by Threatpost found that two of the accused, Darren Martyn (aka "pwnsauce," “raepsauce,” and “networkkitten,”) and Donncha O’Cearbhail, formerly known as Donncha Carroll (aka “Palladium”) sported outsize online footprints and made little effort to hide their affinity for hacking.

In other areas, however, Martyn (who was reported to be 25, but claimed to be 19), seemed to be on his way to bigger and better things. He was a local chapter leader of the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) in Galway, Ireland. He spent some of his free time with a small collective of computer researchers with Insecurety Research, under the name “infodox.”
Japan

Submission + - Nuclear Disaster in Japan Was Avoidable

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Martin Fackler writes that Japan’s nuclear regulators say that the magnitude 9.0 earthquake and 45-foot tsunami that knocked out cooling systems at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant were far larger than anything that scientists had predicted, but some insiders from Japan’s tightly knit nuclear industry have stepped forward to say that Tepco and regulators had for years ignored warnings of the possibility of a larger-than-expected tsunami in northeastern Japan, and thus failed to take adequate countermeasures, such as raising wave walls or placing backup generators on higher ground. “March 11 exposed the true nature of Japan’s postwar system, that it is led by bureaucrats who stand on the side of industry, not the people,” says Shigeaki Koga, a former director of industrial policy at the Ministry of Economics, Trade and Industry. Eight years ago, as a member of an influential cabinet office committee on offshore earthquakes in northeastern Japan, Kunihiko Shimazaki, professor emeritus of seismology at the University of Tokyo, warned that Fukushima’s coast was vulnerable to tsunamis more than twice as tall as the forecasts of up to 17 feet put forth by regulators and Tepco but government bureaucrats running the committee moved quickly to exclude his views from debate as too speculative and “pending further research.” Then in 2008, Tepco's own engineers made three separate sets of calculations that showed that Fukushima Daiichi could be hit by tsunamis as high as 50 feet. “They completely ignored me in order to save Tepco money," says Shimazaki."
Government

Submission + - Illinois: Law barring recording cops unconstitutional (arstechnica.com) 1

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: A Cook County judge today ruled the state’s controversial eavesdropping law unconstitutional.

The law makes it a felony offense to make audio recordings of police officers without their consent even when they’re performing their public duties.

Judge Stanley Sacks, who is assigned to the Criminal Courts Building, found the eavesdropping law unconstitutional because it potentially criminalizes “wholly innocent conduct.”

The decision came in the case of Christopher Drew, an artist who was arrested in December 2009 for selling art on a Loop street without a permit. Drew was charged with a felony violation of the eavesdropping law after he used an audio recorder in his pocket to capture his conversations with police during his arrest.
Social Networks

Submission + - LinkedIn Profiles Contain Fewer Lies Than Resumes (neoacademic.com)

Submitted by RichDiesal
RichDiesal writes: New research reveals that personal information provided on LinkedIn may contain fewer deceptions about prior work experience and prior work responsibilities than traditional resumes. However, LinkedIn profiles contain more deceptions about personal interests and hobbies. This researchers believe this may be because participants are equally motivated to deceive employers in both settings, but perceive lies about work experience on LinkedIn as more easily verifiable.
Government

Submission + - RIAA CEO Hopes SOPA Protests Were a 'One-Time Thing' (internetevolution.com)

Submitted by hapworth
hapworth writes: Cary Sherman, CEO of the RIAA, is at it again. After posting a controversial op-ed in The New York Times saying Wikipedia and Google "misinformed" the public about SOPA and PIPA, Sherman said in an interview yesterday that he hopes the SOPA protests were a "one-time experience." He also said that Wikipedia and Google users were duped into thinking SOPA was a bad bill because they assume "if it comes from these sources, it must be true." In another hilarious comment, Sherman blames the Internet for making it impossible for Congress to get out its side of the story, and for not spreading information with the same "clarity and integrity" of broadcast journalists.
IT

Submission + - How do you deal with priorities inflation in IT projects?

Submitted by NetDanzr
NetDanzr writes: I work for an IT company that has a steady stream of projects, new features to our existing products and technical support issues. As it is customary, though, our development resources are not sufficient to cover the amount of projects. As a result, our delivery dates are slipping, and as a result the average priority of projects is rising. Where the goal was to have only 10% of projects rated high, within a year nearly 50% of projects is rated as such. Our solution is to completely wipe out the project list once per year and start a new, properly prioritized list. How does your company deal with this inflation of priorities?
Privacy

Submission + - Female Passengers Say They Were Targeted for TSA Body Scanners (wired.com)

Submitted by wiedzmin
wiedzmin writes: TSA agents in Dallas singled out female passengers to undergo screening in a body scanner, according to complaints filed by several women who said they felt the screeners intentionally targeted them to view their bodies. Allegedly, women with "cute bodies" were directed through the body scanners up to three times over by female agents, who appeared to be acting on a request from male agents viewing the scans in a separate room. Apparently this was done because the scans were "blurry", possibly due to autofocus problems with agents' smartphone cameras.
Iphone

Submission + - Unauthorized iPhone Apps Leak Private Data Less Than Approved Ones (forbes.com)

Submitted by Sparrowvsrevolution
Sparrowvsrevolution writes: In the wake of news that the iPhone app Path uploads users’ entire contact lists without permission, Forbes dug up a study from a group of researchers at the University of California at Santa Barbara and the International Security Systems Lab that aimed to analyze how and where iPhone apps transmit users’ private data. Not only did the researchers find that one in five of the free apps in Apple’s app store upload private data back to the apps’ creators that could potentially identify users and allow profiles to be built of their activities. They also discovered that programs in Cydia, the most popular platform for unauthorized apps that run only on “jailbroken” iPhones, tend to leak private data far less frequently than Apple’s approved apps.

The researchers ran their analysis on 1,407 free apps in the App Store and in Cydia, the unofficial app market for jailbroken phones. Of those tested apps, 21 percent of official App Store apps uploaded the user’s Unique Device Identifier, for instance, compared with only four percent of unauthorized apps.
Microsoft

Submission + - Hotmail's spam filter: the best in the business? (pcpro.co.uk)

Submitted by
Barence
Barence writes: "Microsoft claims an "independent" report proves it has the best spam protection in the industry — an argument deconstructed by PC Pro. “Our own internal metrics, customer feedback, and even a recent third-party report confirms that no mail service offers better protection than Hotmail,” Microsoft's Dick Craddock wrote in a Windows Live blog post earlier this week.

What Microsoft’s Craddock and the 14-page report don’t tell you is that the research was commissioned and paid for by Microsoft. Microsoft chose the webmail services to be tested, Microsoft had right of veto over publication of the results. Indeed, in 2009 Microsoft commissioned the same research firm – Cascade Insights – to do a similar piece of research. Hotmail came second to Gmail. Did Microsoft publish the results? What do you think?"

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