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Submission + - How Boing Boing Handled an FBI Subpoena Over Its Tor Exit Node (boingboing.net)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Cory Doctorow has posted an account of what happened when tech culture blog Boing Boing got a federal subpoena over the Tor exit node the site had been running for years. They received the subpoena in June, and the FBI demanded all logs relating to the exit node: specifically, "subscriber records" and "user information" for everybody associated with the exit node's IP address. They were also asked to testify before a federal grand jury. While they were nervous at first, the story has a happy ending. Their lawyer sent a note back to the FBI agent in charge, explaining that the IP address in question was an exit node. The agent actually looked into Tor, realized no logs were available, and cancelled the request. Doctorow considers this encouraging for anyone who's thinking about opening a new exit node" "I'm not saying that everyone who gets a federal subpoena for running a Tor exit node will have this outcome, but the only Tor legal stories that rise to the public's attention are the horrific ones. Here's a counterexample: Fed asks us for our records, we say we don't have any, fed goes away."

Submission + - Sunday Times issues DMCA takedown notice to the Intercept over Snowden article (documentcloud.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: On Sunday the newspaper the Sunday Times published an article citing anonymous UK government sources that Edward Snowden was in the hands of the Russians and Chinese. Shortly thereafter, Glenn Greenwald at the Intercept published a scathing criticism of the article. In this article, Glenn published a photograph of the paper's front page on which the story occurred. Yesterday, the Intercept received a DMCA take down notice from News Corp on account of the photograph.
The Intercept is refusing to comply with the take down notice.

Submission + - Facebook Wants You to Vote Tuesday

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Six years in the making, Facebook's get-out-the-vote tool — a high-profile button that proclaims "I'm Voting" or "I'm a Voter" — will on Tuesday give many of the social network's more than 150 million American users a gentle but effective nudge to vote. "If past research is any guide," writes Micah L. Sifry in Mother Jones, "up to a few million more people will head to the polls partly because their Facebook friends encouraged them. Yet the process by which Facebook has developed this tool — what the firm calls the 'voter megaphone' — has not been very transparent, raising questions about its use and Facebook's ability to influence elections. Moreover, while Facebook has been developing and promoting this tool, it has also been quietly conducting experiments on how the company's actions can affect the voting behavior of its users." Sifry adds, "There may be another reason for Facebook's lack of transparency regarding its voting promotion experiments: politics. Facebook officials likely do not want Republicans on Capitol Hill to realize that their voter megaphone isn't a neutral get-out-the-vote mechanism. It's not that Facebook uses this tool to remind only users who identify themselves as Democrats to vote — though the company certainly has the technical means to do so. But the Facebook user base tilts Democratic." So, it's probably worth mentioning again that Facebook caught flack last summer for deliberately experimenting on users' emotions without their consent. And just last June, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's FWD.us PAC put out a call for "pissed off Data Scientists" to data mine critical legislative districts and "growth hack" ways to motivate "registered voters who are registered Republicans who we think are likely to support immigration reform."

Submission + - Welcome to Laniakea, Our New Cosmic Home (discovery.com)

Submitted by astroengine
astroengine writes: Using a new mapping technique that takes into account the motions — and not just the distances — of nearby galaxies, astronomers discovered that the Milky Way is located in the suburb of a massive, previously unknown super-cluster they named Laniakea, a term from Hawaiian words meaning “immeasurable heaven.” Actually, Laniakea’s girth is measurable, though difficult to conceptualize. The super-cluster spans 520 million light-years in diameter, more than five times larger than the cluster previously believed to be the Milky Way’s cosmic home.

Submission + - Did Sundance Vacations Forge A Court Order To Suppress Online Criticism? (medium.com)

Submitted by IonOtter
IonOtter writes: Matt Haughey, founder of MetaFilter, has challenged a Cease & Desist letter from Sundance Vacations, a seller of time-shares with a reputation for aggressive sales tactics and suppression of criticism. Only this time, it seems that the plaintiff may have forged court documents ordering Mr. Haughey, Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Bing and other search engines to remove any and all mentions of the links and posts in question. Legal blog, Popehat has picked this up as well, prompting Ken White to wryly note, "...Sundance Vacations is about to learn about the Streisand Effect." The story is gaining traction, and being picked up by Boing-Boing, as well as hitting the first page of search results on Google.

Submission + - IBM opens up its Watson supercomputer to researchers

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: IBM has announced the "Watson Discovery Advisor" a cloud-based tool that will let researchers comb through massive troves of data, looking for insights and connections. The company says it's a major expansion in capabilities for the Watson Group, which IBM seeded with a $1 billion investment. "Scientific discovery takes us to a different level as a learning system," said Steve Gold, vice president of the Watson Group. "Watson can provide insights into the information independent of the question. The ability to connect the dots opens up a new world of possibilities."

Submission + - Facebook experimenting with Blu-ray as a storage medium (cnn.com)

Submitted by s122604
s122604 writes: There aren't too many people collecting Blu-ray discs these days. But while the technology is fast becoming obsolete for movie viewers, Facebook sees it as a promising new means for handling data storage.

Submission + - 13-year-old Finds Fungus Deadly to AIDS Patients Literally Grows on Trees (scienceblog.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Researchers have pinpointed the environmental source of fungal infections that have been sickening HIV/AIDS patients in Southern California for decades. It literally grows on trees. The discovery is based on the science project of a 13-year-old girl, who spent the summer gathering soil and tree samples from areas around Los Angeles hardest hit by infections of the fungus named Cryptococcus gattii .

Submission + - Tuberculosis Is Newer Than What Was Thought (nytimes.com)

Submitted by mdsolar
mdsolar writes: After a remarkable analysis of bacterial DNA from 1,000-year-old mummies, scientists have proposed a new hypothesis for how tuberculosis arose and spread around the world.

The disease originated less than 6,000 years ago in Africa, they say, and took a surprising route to reach the New World: it was carried across the Atlantic by seals.

The new study, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, has already provoked strong reactions from other scientists.

“This is a landmark paper that challenges our previous ideas about the origins of tuberculosis,” said Terry Brown, a professor of biomolecular archaeology at the University of Manchester. “At the moment, I’m still in the astonished stage over this.”

Submission + - Research Unveils Improved Method To Let Computers Know You Are Human

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: CAPTCHA services that require users to recognize and type in static distorted characters may be a method of the past, according to studies published by researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Researchers focused on a broad form of gamelike CAPTCHAs, called dynamic cognitive game, or DCG, CAPTCHAs, which challenge the user to perform a gamelike cognitive task interacting with a series of dynamic images. For example, in a “ship parking” DCG challenge, the user is required to identify the boat from a set of moving objects and drag-and-drop it to the available “dock” location. The puzzle is easy for the human user to solve, but may be difficult for a computer program to figure out. Also, its gamelike nature may make the process more engaging for the user compared to conventional text-based CAPTCHAs.

Submission + - Knocking down the Great Firewall of China (dailydot.com)

Submitted by Nocturrne
Nocturrne writes: The FOSS project Lantern (https://getlantern.org/) is having great success in unblocking the internet for many users in oppressive regimes, like China and Iran. Much like Tor and bitorrent, Lantern is using peer-to-peer networking to overcome firewalls, but with the additional security of a trusted network of friends. The network of peers is growing, but we need more friends in uncensored countries to join us.

Submission + - NSA/GCHQ: The HACIENDA Program for Internet Colonization (heise.de)

Submitted by Advocatus Diaboli
Advocatus Diaboli writes: Since the early days of TCP, port scanning has been used by computer saboteurs to locate vulnerable systems. In a new set of top secret documents seen by Heise, it is revealed that in 2009, the British spy agency GCHQ made port scans a "standard tool" to be applied against entire nations. Twenty-seven countries are listed as targets of the HACIENDA program in the presentation, which comes with a promotional offer: readers desiring to do reconnaissance against another country need simply send an e-mail.

Submission + - How Drones Entered the FBI's Spying Toolkit

Submitted by Jason Koebler
Jason Koebler writes: The FBI has had an eager eye on surveillance drones since first experimenting with remote control airplanes in 1995. But budget cuts nearly ended the Bureau’s unmanned machinations in 2010, and it took a dedicated push aimed at making drones “a tool the FBI cannot do without” to cement their place in the FBI’s surveillance toolkit.
The near termination—and subsequent expansion—of the FBI’s drone program over the past four years is chronicled in hundreds of heavily-redacted pages released under a lawsuit filed by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington over the past several months.

Submission + - The IPV4 internet has broken (www.nux.ro) 2

Submitted by pla
pla writes: Due to a new set of routes published today, the internet has effectively undergone a schism. All routers with a TCAM allocation of 512k (or less), in particular Cisco Catalyst 6500 and 7600's, have started randomly forgetting portions of the internet. Time to switch to all IPV6 yet?

Submission + - Twitter Reports 23 Million Users Are Actually Bots

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In its most recent quarterly report to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Twitter disclosed that approximately 8.5% of its users are actually bots. Some of these 23 million bots were created to make revenue-generating URLs, others were created to collect followers that would later be sold to whoever needs a ready audience, and a few were created to mimic stereotypes just for fun. Now that Twitter is a public company, some wonder if these bots help or hinder Twitter's stock value.

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