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Submission + - Wi-Fi Scale Users Aren't Getting Any Wider During Covid-19 Lockdown (washingtonpost.com) 1

pfhlick writes: Geoffrey Fowler of the Washington Post reports that data from connected scale users suggests Americans, on average, are not gaining weight during lockdowns. Smart scale manufacturer Withings analyzed the anonymized, aggregated data of almost half-a-million of their users and found that they had gained, on average, less than a quarter of a pound. Withings went deeper, examining activity, sleep, and more to quantify how the lockdowns are affecting us physically.

Submission + - Algorithm Reveals Objects Hidden Behind Other Things In Camera Phone Images (medium.com)

KentuckyFC writes: Imaging is undergoing a quiet revolution at the moment thanks to various new techniques for extracting data from images. Now physicists have worked out how to create an image of an object hidden behind a translucent material using little more than an ordinary smartphone and some clever data processing. The team placed objects behind materials that scatter light such as onion skin, frosted glass and chicken breast tissue. They photographed them using a Nokia Lumina 1020 smartphone, with a 41 megapixel sensor. To the naked eye, the resulting images look like random speckle. But by treating the data from each pixel separately and looking for correlations between pixels, the team was able to produce images of the hidden objects. They even photographed light scattered off a white wall and recovered an image of the reflected scene--a technique that effectively looks round corners. The new technique has applications in areas such as surveillance and medical imaging.

Submission + - XKCD Author's Unpublished Book Has Already Become a Best-Seller (beyond-black-friday.com)

destinyland writes: Wednesday the geeky cartoonist behind XKCD announced that he'd publish a new book answering hypothetical science questions in September. And within 24 hours, his as-yet-unpublished work had become Amazon's #2 best-selling book. "Ironically, this book is titled 'What If?'," jokes one blogger, noting it resembles an XKCD comic where "In our yet-to-happen future, this book decides to travel backwards through time, stopping off in March of 2014 to inform Amazon’s best-seller list that yes, in our coming timeline this book will be widely read..." Randall Munroe new book will be collecting his favorite "What If..." questions, but will also contain his never-before published answers to some questions that he'd found "particularly neat".

Submission + - A Dispatch From Outside the Prison Holding Barrett Brown (vice.com)

Daniel_Stuckey writes: Yesterday, I got as close as any media physically can to Barrett Brown, the American journalist that was locked up in late 2012 for pasting a hyperlink in a chatroom, which federal prosecutors alleged contained leaked credit card data from the Statfor hacks.

Due to a media gag order upheld by the US District Court in the Northern District of Texas, Brown isn't allowed to make "any statement to members of any television, radio, newspaper, magazine, internet (included, but not limited to bloggers)," with the exception of Kevin M. Gallagher, who heads his defense fund. The prosecution's rationale for the gag order is that any extrajudicial statements made by Brown, or his attorneys, could be prejudicial to his defense.

Earlier this week, US Attorney Sarah Saldaña filed a motion to dismiss 11 of Brown's charges, namely those related to the pasted hyperlink (including trafficking in stolen authentication features, aggravated identity theft, and access device fraud). The motion came as both a victory for Brown's case, and a sigh of relief to supporters who have continuously cited the absurdity of his charges related to hyperlinking. Awaiting two trial dates this spring (April 28th, 2014, and May 19th, 2014), the prosecution's case is unraveling.

Submission + - My School Has Tricked Pupils Into Installing a Root CA on Their Laptops (imgur.com)

paddysteed writes: I go to secondary school in the UK. I went digging around the computers there and found that on the schools machines, there was a root CA from the school. I then suspected that the software they instruct windows users to install on their own hardware to gain access to the BYOD network installed the same certificate. I created a windows virtual machine and connected to the network the way that was recommended. Immediately afterwards I checked the list of root CA's, and found my school's.
Screenshot.

I thought the story posted a few days ago was bad but what my school has done is install their certificate on people's own machines which I think is far worse. This basically allows them to intercept and modify any HTTPS traffic on their network. Considering this is a boarding school, and our only method of communicating to the outside world is over their network, I feel this is particularly bad.

We were not told about this policy and we have not signed anything which would excuse it. I confronted the IT department and they initially denied everything. I left and within 5 mins, the WiFi network was down then as quickly as it had gone down, it was back up. I went back and they confirmed that there was a mistake and they had "fixed" it. They also told me that the risk was very low and the head of networks told me he was willing to bet his job on it. I asked them to instruct people to remove the bad certificate from their own machines, but they claimed this was unnecessary due to the very low risk.

I want to take this further but to get the school's management interested I will need to explain what has happened and why it is bad to non technical people and provide evidence that what has been done is potentially illegal.

Submission + - How to complete the equivalent of a Computer Science BS for free online

An anonymous reader writes: I am a middle school math teacher and I also run a programming club. I recent completed my M.Ed in math education and was inspired to try to do the new GT online MS in Computer Science in a couple of years. I have some background in programming: 2 intro to comp sci course, Java, C++, Python, they main scripting languages and a bunch of math background. I also read through this great article on getting these pre-requisites completed through coursera but unfortunately you need to wait for courses to enroll. I would like to just learn these on my own time, no credit necessary. Suggestions?

Comment Re:Anonymity is forbidden in Brazil (Score 1) 484

I am Brazilian too.

In order to conciliate the right to speech in the Internet with such constitutional twists (no anonymity) the government is proposing a Internet regulation document where ISP or other Internet "space" providers (like Google in this case) are responsible to take down offending material under request. If I understand it well they must:

1) Take down the content
2) Inform the poster (if possible)
3) If the poster stands up for what he said, the provider must put the content back up and the poster is assuming all libel (here the anonymity is gone).

If the ISP follows this rule it gets safe harbor. So yes, we are getting our own version of DMCA take down notices (even worse since it is not only related to copyrighted material).

Well... the same document guarantees net neutrality...

Comment Re:1,000,000 jobs lost without Net Neutrality (Score 1) 187

The telecoms aren't by decent entrepreneurs today and thus don't play by the same rules.

They, in fact, make their own rules with lobby power... including the ones to remove your ability to say what you just said. Or really. being pro-corporations, you would be fine. I could be blocked for my views. Some day you may be against corporations for something else and could be blocked. Extreme, yes, but without restoring the regulation that has gotten us to the point we are at (ahem.... WITH NET NEUTRALITY), this has become a possibility.

Are you really arguing that not having referees at a sports game is better because it frees players to kill each other? That's not a game, that's something else entirely. Rules are there to keep things sane. Not over regulate, which you seem to be confusing with my view. There are just enough rules in chess to keep things structured but not over burden. Net Neutrality was not a burden and we got many many great things out of it. This doesn't seem to be a part of your value equation but is a part of mine and many other geeks out there.

Your argument doesn't address the reality that net neutrality creates jobs at least in the instance of that large telecom merger a few years ago. You don't need studies to show what affect it had. People lost their jobs, and customers got slower service due to the lack of build out. Your argument also doesn't address the overwhelming political power held by telecom oligopolies or their "donations".

To me, the only incentive to not having net neutrality is more money for the telecoms. Do you have evidence otherwise? Or do you just have some corporate study to back your understanding? Personal experience also counts.

Comment Re:wagging the dog (Score 1) 840

Oh, and since TFA seems primarily concerned with the child abuse scandal (obviously this is a despicable thing that has happened), it might also be worth mentioning that the Pope is the bishop of Rome, and his primacy is in matters of faith.

And he just happened to worry about the internet's effect on individuals in the middle of a massive worldwide child abuse scandal that he has his dick caught in?

If we want to find resolutions to the abuse scandal, we have to bring the local bishops to account.

And possibly the pope, too. Remember his likely involvement.

All it will do is make a few Atheists happy.

Why do atheists give a damn? The embarrassment of the church rates somewhat below pictures of Britney's cooch on my scale. The systematic rape of children is much higher, but given the crap the church of england pulled on orphans in the 50s, I can't say I'm surprised. Cut from the same wood, etc.

Comment Re:Wait.. what??? (Score 1) 409

No allies, eh? So that leaves exactly two places we could attack:

Antarctica, which is, of course, no one's ally or enemy, and isn't even neutral, not being a country at all. (Same goes for outer space, but I don't think ICBMs can get to the moon.)

And America.

The conservatives are right, Obama is going to destroy America! Or Antarctica! One of the two! Or maybe the moon! (Didn't he already bomb the moon? I forget how that war turned out, but I bet we didn't bother to send soldiers helmets for their space suits.)

Wait, duh, we've been looking at this all wrong. We've been assuming he will attack land. No, he's planning an attack on international waters!

He's a liberal, they're always for saving the environment, so he's going to bomb the big floating garbage continent out there.

We've always been at war with Ocean. We've never been at war with Luna.

Comment 1,000,000 jobs lost without Net Neutrality (Score 2, Interesting) 187

Small business would have to start paying to play on the internet. This would cost small businesses a lot of money to pay for internet tolls. That's money that could be creating jobs if there were net neutrality. Forcing telecoms to build out their infrastructure would actually create jobs. It wasn't until the net neutrality contractual obligation of a large telecom merger ran out that they stopped building infrastructure and fired the masses of people working on the build out.

Also crazy is the cost of anti-competitive behavior, the cost of innovative ideas being squashed because they didn't fit the business model of the telecoms, and enabling corporations to be the enforcers of freedom of speech is just plain unconstitutional and is just an abrogation of the responsibility of Congress and Whitehouse.

I'd rather pay slightly higher prices to enable innovation, freedom of speech, equality of information, and decrease the power of the oligopolies.

Call me crazy but the intangibles tip that balance for me. There is more to life than money like freedom and liberty.

Of course this report isn't going to discuss these things... it was funded by large corporations. They don't value anything but money.

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