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Submission + - Schneier: The US government has betrayed the internet. We need to take it back. (theguardian.com) 2

Submitted by wabrandsma
wabrandsma writes: Quoting Bruce Schneier in the Guardian:

The NSA has undermined a fundamental social contract. We engineers built the internet – and now we have to fix it

Government and industry have betrayed the internet, and us. This is not the internet the world needs, or the internet its creators envisioned. We need to take it back. And by we, I mean the engineering community.

Yes, this is primarily a political problem, a policy matter that requires political intervention. But this is also an engineering problem, and there are several things engineers can – and should – do.

Submission + - Lavabit.com owner: 'I could be arrested' for resisting surveillance order (nbcnews.com)

Submitted by Zak3056
Zak3056 writes: NBC News is reporting that, "The owner of an encrypted email service used by ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden said he has been threatened with criminal charges for refusing to comply with a secret surveillance order to turn over information about his customers.

"I could be arrested for this action," Ladar Levison told NBC News about his decision to shut down his company, Lavabit LLC, in protest over a secret court order he had received from a federal court that is overseeing the investigation into Snowden."

--I seem to recall that the constitution has something in it prohibiting involuntary servitude, but I could be mistaken.

Submission + - FISC Secret Court Chief Judge: We can't effectively oversee the NSA (washingtonpost.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Via the Washington Post: "The leader of the secret court that is supposed to provide critical oversight of the government’s vast spying programs said that its ability to do so is limited and that it must trust the government to report when it improperly spies on Americans. The chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court said the court lacks the tools to independently verify how often the government’s surveillance breaks the court’s rules that aim to protect Americans’ privacy. Without taking drastic steps, it also cannot check the veracity of the government’s assertions that the violations its staff members report are unintentional mistakes."

President Obama: "We also have federal judges that we’ve put in place who are not subject to political pressure,” Obama said at a news conference in June. “They’ve got lifetime tenure as federal judges, and they’re empowered to look over our shoulder at the executive branch to make sure that these programs aren’t being abused.”

Not so much, Mr. President.

Submission + - GNUstep Kickstarter Campaign Launched (kickstarter.com)

Submitted by borgheron
borgheron writes: The maintainer of GNUstep has launched a kickstarter campaign to get the time to make GNUstep more complete and get it's APIs up to at least a Mac OS 10.6 level of compatibility. This will allow applications for Mac OS X to run on Linux with a simple recompile using new tools developed by the GNUstep team to directly build from xcodeproj project files. If the kickstarter project is funded beyond it's $50,000 goal, it's possible that WebKit and Darling might also be completed allowing applications built on Mac OS X to run without the need for a recompile... think WINE-like functionality for Mac OS X applications on other platforms... including Windows, Linux, BSD, etc.

Submission + - Cory Doctorow: privacy, oversharing and government surveillance (mybroadband.co.za)

Submitted by slash-sa
slash-sa writes: The European Parliament is currently involved in a wrangle over the new General Data Protection Regulation. At stake are the future rules for online privacy, data mining, big data, governmental spying (by proxy), to name a few. Hundreds of amendments and proposals are on the table, including some that speak of relaxing the rules on sharing data that has been “anonymised” (had identifying information removed) or “pseudonymised” (had identifiers replaced with pseudonyms). This is, however, a very difficult business, with researchers showing how relatively simple techniques can be used to re-identify the data in large anonymised data sets, by picking out the elements of each record that make them unique.

Submission + - Civil disobedience against mass surveillance (nzherald.co.nz)

Submitted by nut
nut writes: We're all aware of how much surveillance we are under on the internet thanks to Edward Snowden. Gehan Gunasekara, an associate commercial law professor at Auckland University in New Zealand, wants all to start sending suspicious looking but meaningless data across the internet to overload these automated surveillance systems. Essentially he is advocating a mass distributed Bayesian poisoning attack against our watchers. I'm curious, what do Slashdotters think of the practicality of this?

Submission + - 55,000 Sign Twitter Abuse Petition After Jane Austen Campaigner Rape Threats (ibtimes.co.uk) 1

Submitted by AlistairCharlton
AlistairCharlton writes: A petition campaigning for Twitter to improve its measures against online abuse has received more than 55,000 signatures in two days.

The petition was set up in support of feminist campaigner Caroline Criado-Perez, who faced a torrent of abusive tweets, including threats to rape and kill her, after successfully campaigning for a woman's picture to appear on a banknote; Jane Austen will appear on £10 notes from 2017.

Submission + - New Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 Service Packs Roll Out

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: While service packs are out of style for Windows operating system, Microsoft has pushed out another service pack (SP2) for both Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 products. According to the company, they provide key updates and fixes across servers, services and applications including security, stability, and performance enhancements and better compatibility with Windows 8, Internet Explorer 10, Office 2013, and SharePoint 2013. The updates are available through Windows Update and as separate downloads.
Science

Fossil of Ant-Eating Dinosaur Discovered In China 64

Posted by samzenpus from the ancient-picnic-defender dept.
thomst writes "Charles Q. Choi of LiveScience reports that a farmer in southern Henan Province in China has dug up the first known ant-eating dinosaur, a half-meter-long theropod (the dinosaur family to which T. Rex belongs), whose fossilized remains were described as 'fairly intact'. The 83- to 89-million-year-old pygmy dinosaur has been named named Xixianykus zhangi by Xig Xu, De-you Wang, Corwin Sullivan, David Hone, Feng-lu Han, Rong-hao Yan, and Fu-ming Du, whose paper on the critter, A basal parvicursorine (Theropoda: Alvarezsauridae) from the Upper Cretaceous of China, was published in the March 29 issue of Zootaxa (the abstract is available in PDF format for free, the full article is paywall-protected.)"
Space

How They Built the Software of Apollo 11 220

Posted by kdawson from the we-had-to-use-the-letter-o dept.
LinuxScribe tips a piece up at Linux.com with inside details on the design and construction of the Apollo 11 code. There are some analogies to open source development but they are slim. MIT drafted the code — to run on the Apollo Guidance Computer, a device with less grunt than an IBM XT — it had 2K of memory and a 1-MHz clock speed. It was an amazing machine for its time. NASA engineers tested, polished, simulated, and refined the code. "The software was programmed on IBM punch cards. They had 80-columns and were 'assembled' to instruction binary on mainframes... and it took hours. ... During the mission, most of the software code couldn't be changed because it was hard-coded into the hardware, like ROM today... But during pre-launch design simulations, problems that came up in the code could sometimes be finessed by... computer engineers using a small amount of erasable memory that was available for the programs. The software used a low-level assembly language and was controlled using pairs or segments of numbers entered into a square-shaped, numeric-only keyboard called a Display and Keyboard Unit... The two-digit codes stood for 'nouns' or 'verbs,' and were used to enter commands or data, such as spacecraft docking angles or time spans for operations." Reader Smark adds, "The Google Code Blog announced today that the Virtual AGC and AGS project has transcribed the Command Module and Lunar Excursion Module code used during the Apollo 11 moon landing. The code is viewable at the VirtualAGC Google Code Page."
The Internet

Virginia Becomes First State to Mandate Internet Safety Lessons 262

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the nanny-state dept.
kaufmanmoore writes "The Commonwealth of Virginia has become the first state in the nation to require that students in all grade levels receive a form of internet safety lessons. The story is scant on details about the lessons, but describes one recently at a high school where the presenter showed a social-networking profile of a convicted sex offender posing as a 15 year-old girl. "
Desktops (Apple)

Submission + - Microsoft Wanted To Drop Mac Office To Hurt Apple

Submitted by Overly Critical Guy
Overly Critical Guy writes: More documents in the Iowa antitrust case have come out. This time, it's revealed that Microsoft considers Mac users its "guinea pigs" for new Office features, and they once considered dropping Mac Office entirely, "as doing so will do a great deal of harm to Apple immediately." This case has become a treasure trove of internal memos describing Microsoft's internal business practices of the last ten years.
Censorship

Journal Journal: RIAA kills internet radio

Journal by Reavantos
I am A internet radio DJ for DNDRadio.com (ddo.mmoradio.com) and i want to bring to your attention that the RIAA is at it again. this time, they are killing internet radio! "direct qoute from our website" The Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) has announced its decision on Internet Radio royalty rates, rejecting all of the arguments made by Webcasters (an MMORadio) and instead adopting the "per play" rate proposal put forth by SoundExchange (a digital music fee collection body created by the RIAA).
Wireless Networking

Submission + - New Report on Municipal Wireless

Submitted by
PublicNet SF Coalition
PublicNet SF Coalition writes: "New Report on Municipal Wireless
Civil Defense — a weblog by Joshua Breitbart

The Institute for Local Self-Reliance has just published a new report called "Localizing the Internet: Five Ways Public Ownership Solves the U.S. Broadband Problem," arguing for municipal ownership of new wireless and fiber optic networks.

The report's author is Becca Vargo Daggett, whose presentation I'll have the pleasure of moderating at the National Conference for Media Reform.

The argument is persuasive. There is clearly a need for more aggressive public involvement in broadband deployment and the affordability of wireless is a great opportunity for that. Giving this opportunity over to private corporations is double the loss."

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