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Transportation

Bruce Schneier vs. the TSA 741

An anonymous reader writes "Bruce Schneier has posted a huge recap of the controversy over TSA body scanners, including more information about the lawsuit he joined to ban them. There's too much news to summarize, but it covers everything from Penn Jillette's and Dave Barry's grope stories, to Israeli experts who say this isn't needed and hasn't ever stopped a bomb, to the three-year-old girl who was traumatized by being groped and much, much more." Another reader passed along a related article, which says, "Congressman Ron Paul lashed out at the TSA yesterday and introduced a bill aimed at stopping federal abuse of passengers. Paul’s proposed legislation would pave the way for TSA employees to be sued for feeling up Americans and putting them through unsafe naked body scanners."

Comment windows binary compatibility? (Score 1) 466

there is several projects aimed at running windows binaries, one of them being an NT clone, dos clones already exist and can be made to run windows dll's on top for an olde worlde windows, and of course wine. i personally hope what it will involve is a bsd core running a customised and advanced wine fork, i mean, considering brazil and several other countries are going linux and open source it would be stupid of them to not collaborate with their fellow rising industrial stars like brazil who iirc are moving their government IT over to open source. a 99.9% binary compatible framework to run windows apps would be beneficial for everyone who is not NATO, indeed i can imagine some of the more client-agnostic big tech contractors who help build military stuff would love to be able to sell their windows-targeted software to someone else... brazil, india and russia at least would all be interested, china is too closed to alliances in any way but who knows, if india gets their project off the ground and achieve their goal.

remember, a lot of those windows programs are now partially developed by indians... if anyone can make a fully binary compatible windows environment, it's india. they've been doing so much of american-based multinational corporations' development already they have a rich developer skills base.

Social Networks

Submission + - 71% of 1.2 billion Twitter "tweets" are ignored (sysomos.com) 1

destinyland writes: 1.2 billion Twitter "tweets" were analyzed over two months by analytics company Sysomos, who concluded that a whopping 71% of them got no reaction whatsover — no online responses, and no Twitter "retweets". "Only a small number of users actually have the ability to engage on Twitter in a significant way," the researchers conclude, noting that just 6% of Twitter's status updates ever get retweeted (while 23% get a reply). And among those status updates, 85% have exactly one response, while only 1.53% of Twitter conversations are more than three levels deep — where a reply receives a response which then generates a second reply. "If a tweet is not retweeted in the first hour, it is very likely that it will not be retweeted," the researchers conclude, noting that 92% of all retweets only happen within the first hour (versus just 1.63% during the second hour). But one technology reporter suggests flaws in their sample of 1.2 billion public Twitter messages. "Presumably these don't include those made by people who only allow their tweets to be seen by selected users," the reporter argues, adding that the study overlooks the possibility of conversations continuing via Twitter's private "direct messages", or that follow-up conversation may occur privately via e-mail.
Science

Submission + - Why Geim never patented graphene (nature.com)

gbrumfiel writes: Andre Geim won this year's Nobel prize in physics for graphene, but he never patented it. In an interview with Nature News, he explains why

We considered patenting; we prepared a patent and it was nearly filed. Then I had an interaction with a big, multinational electronics company. I approached a guy at a conference and said, "We've got this patent coming up, would you be interested in sponsoring it over the years?" It's quite expensive to keep a patent alive for 20 years. The guy told me, "We are looking at graphene, and it might have a future in the long term. If after ten years we find it's really as good as it promises, we will put a hundred patent lawyers on it to write a hundred patents a day, and you will spend the rest of your life, and the gross domestic product of your little island, suing us." That's a direct quote.


Submission + - Smart Phones that Know Their Users by How They Wal

mirgens writes: Technology review has a short article on new work on doing gait analysis with the accelerometers built into many smart phones. The work was done at the Norwegian Information Security Laboratory ("Nislab"). The need for more security on mobile devices is increasing with new functionalities and features made available. To improve the device security Nislab proposed gait recognition as a protection mechanism — in other words, if somebody else walks away with your phone, it locks up. While previous work on gait recognition used video sources, for instance to identify people in airports or secure buildings, the Nislab researchers collected the gait data using a Google G1 phone containing the AK8976A embedded accelerometer.
Facebook

Submission + - Lighthearted friends could make you join NAMBLA (pcmag.com)

mykos writes: The Facebook groups feature is causing bit of a stir with its users. TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington was allegedly added to a group about NAMBLA, and in turn, he added Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. It's all in good (albeit tasteless) fun, except when a harmless joke goes awry and you find yourself being detained by customs when a friend decided to drag you into a mock terrorist group. Facebook representatives are aware of the matter, but are dismissive of it. A Facebook spokeswoman said "If you have a friend that is adding you to Groups you do not want to belong to, or they are behaving in a way that bothers you, you can tell them to stop doing it, block them or remove them as a friend – and they will no longer EVER have the ability to add you to any Group".

In somewhat related news, guillotines ensure you won't have dandruff on your shoulders anymore.

Comment Re:Ying/Yang (Score 1) 207

the more money the mafiaa makes me pay for watching their rubbish the less i want to pay. anyone remember an article from yesterday pointing out that the encoding and decoding of a standard definition raw video stream on hdmi requires at least a quad core 2ghz x86 class cpu? ok maybe it's not well optimised code yet but please explain to me the logic of encrypting a point to point connection that is at most 6 metres long? without talking about fables about how all the people who leech a movie from torrents had the money to spend on movies in the first place (i for one can barely afford rent and food and infrequent transport and my internet spend is only about the same as 2 movies a month if i buy popcorn). where do they think i'm gonna extract that extra money from? sell my blood or something? i don't have haemochromatosis, and the blood bank doesn't want my blood anyway because i used needles years ago even though i have been tested clear of blood borne diseases the whole time since.

anyway, wikipedia does better movie entries than the imdb. for that matter filmographies too. and if your interest is music, discogs is the best place to go and wouldn't you know it, it's user content driven... i'm boycotting imdb from now on, not that i'd ever click on their stupid ads. i also don't go to cinemas much anymore... not that there's much worth really watching anyway... but there's an IMAX sized theatre not far from me right in the middle of a major student district that will let you watch most of the mainstream releases on an imax-sized screen for aud$6.50 full adult ticket price... now and then i'd be happy to go there but the rest of the city has your regular 100sq/m theatres with 5 metre wide screens and $12 ticket prices... who are these twits getting their data from?

can anyone else spot the irony about their nonsense about losing money to piracy when they aren't obeying the laws of economics they profess are godsent about price elasticity? goodbye imdb, and good riddance... you don't have a monopoly on publicly available information.

Comment Re:2d to 3d??? (Score 1) 409

viewmaster? i always wondered why everything on those things seemed like multilayer cels like in animations... so the viewmaster people were too cheap to even use stereoscopic cameras eh? if they did that to any movie it would make it unwatchable. it'd look better if it was rotoscoped with fingerpaint.

Comment Re:No hardware? (Score 1) 225

yeah, the fact it takes a 2ghz cpu to decrypt standard definition fast enough should be sufficient to argue that it's not only a waste of time (keys are already cracked and now the algorithms are out in the wild) - the whole thing is defunct. it is only a matter of a very short time before they can't stop anyone plugging a computer into a hdmi output from an 'authorised' playback device and the computer pretends to be a monitor that knows the seekrits and voila, 100% pristine, unencrypted video dumped onto a hard drive (or piped into an encoder).

if only this was enough of a point to suggest they are wasting their energy and that any law that permits such stupidity is a bad law. let's not forget the stupid dvd/bluray disc is also encrypted and before it gets re-encrypted again, it has to be decrypted. that's three totally wasteful processing loads that are so big that for the same processing cost you could be decoding the whole stream in high definition if it wasn't encrypted.

i'll stop downloading bluray rips from the interwebs when they stop costing me twice as much electricity as is neccessary to decode their crappy movies. oh, and when they start realising that tiny little 2 metre high cinema screens, cruddy overpriced popcorn and no comfy seats and beers to drink are gonna make me think my 42 inch bravia and 8 channel surround system in my own loungeroom is much more pleasant. i'm sure i'm not alone and if the lawyers ever come to my house making overblown claims about how much i owe them i'll spend that money they are demanding on laywers to put them back in their place. not just violating the laws of cryptography but also the laws of free market economics. which on any other subject they will swear black and blue is 'The Way'.

oh and what are they going to do when high def eyegoggles finally hit the market? they better be hoping someone makes processors that are about 10x as calculation-per-second-per-watt more efficient than any portable media playing device can handle, cos otherwise the technology would be dead in the water.

Comment Re:2d to 3d??? (Score 1) 409

hehe yep nothing to see here except wild claims from one site on the first page of results with not even an attempt to convince me with marketing woo. just 'we can make your 2d 3d kthxbye' puhlease.

it's possible to generate 3d models from multiple 2d image sources, microsoft was showing one off a year or two ago but that thing required at least two to generate any depth and of course the more different views the more accurate it would have been with regard to surface textures.

i personally want this technology to become more widely developed and available, being able to turn photos into a mesh even if it is relatively primitive would be immensely useful. for one thing it'd mean no more funny looking facial skin textures because the model would be directly derived from the photos rather than wrapped onto a model which may or may not match the image in the first place. plus i still haven't got around to learning how to use a 3d modelling program and being able take a real object and turn it into 3d would be very useful.

my biggest interest is in digitising body parts, specifically hands and feet, because they are extremely difficult to create perfectly fitting tailoured hm... 'garments' to put over them. if i could digitise my feet i could use that to warp a design or generate a new design and - for example - use it to generate a 3d printed prototype for moulding a urethane mould to make soles, for example, or to make gloves that have knuckle protection and knife-edge protection that actually protects those parts properly. on-demand fabrication of custom made items would be made so much simpler if the person simply needed to stand in front of a pair of mirrors oriented at 45 degrees either side, it would be enough, along with some kind of measuring scale, to be able to warp a clothing pattern automatically for a tailored fit without all the fiddling and prototyping required normally.

Comment 2d to 3d??? (Score 3, Informative) 409

how the hell do you turn a fully 2d primary source into 3d? and 3d that doesn't make you want to scream 'FAKE!'...

if anyone can post a link in reply to my post showing that from a single 2d image source a 3d image can be created that doesn't look a bit wonky i'll stfu. sure, piece of cake converting all that 3d graphics to stereoscopic, but, and maybe i am not understanding the filming process with that expensive 70mm cinema type film, but there is definitely only one 'good' copy of all the shots in 2d, there isn't inadvertently gonna suddenly be a second one... i mean, i would guess you could work on something if there was a second cam recording at the same time at a slightly different but convergent view, but really, you'd have to have one on each side, that could give you a volume model that could let you do the 3d but even still... i call bullshit on converting star wars to 3d. i don't see how it could be done. i'd love to know how such a thing could be done. 3d won't work if you can't flesh out the occluded parts that you see to the left and right of the 2d original.

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