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Comment Re:Totally believable (Score 0) 161

Actually, he probably would. I'm not certain how the Air Force works, but in the Army, his equivalent position would be commander of the Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC). When new technologies get developed, it's up to TRADOC to determine how to integrate it into Army operations. Assuming the AF does things in a similar way, he'd be in on this early on in its development, as the organization he commands would be responsible for writing the doctrine on how this technology would be employed, and then developing the training to teach the force how to use it.

Submission + - EFF Sues DOJ For Access To Secret Court Orders On Decryption (techcrunch.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: TechCrunch reports the Electronic Frontier Foundation has filed a lawsuit against the Department of Justice to reveal documents that "show whether DOJ has ever forced a company like Google or Apple to provide technical surveillance assistance in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a federal court that issues secret surveillance warrants in national security cases and has been criticized for rubber-stamping NSA overreach." The EFF has been rejected in its attempt to gain access to the documents under the Freedom of Information Act. "Even setting aside the existence of technical assistance orders, there's no question that other, significant FISC opinions remain hidden from the public," EFF senior staff attorney Mark Rumold said in a statement regarding the lawsuit. “The government’s narrow interpretation of its transparency obligations under USA FREEDOM is inconsistent with the language of the statute and Congress’ intent. Congress wanted to bring an end to secret surveillance law, so it required that all significant FISC opinions be declassified and released. Our lawsuit seeks to hold DOJ accountable to the law.”

Submission + - Researchers can identify you by your brain waves with 100 percent accuracy

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Scientists have developed a new system that can identify people using their brain waves or 'brainprint' with 100 per cent accuracy, an advance that may be useful in high-security applications. Researchers at Binghamton University in US recorded the brain activity of 50 people wearing an electroencephalogram ( EEG) headset while they looked at a series of 500 images designed specifically to elicit unique responses from person to person — eg a slice of pizza, a boat, or the word "conundrum." They found that participants' brains reacted differently to each image, enough that a computer system was able to identify each volunteer's 'brainprint' with 100 per cent accuracy.

"When you take hundreds of these images, where every person is going to feel differently about each individual one, then you can be really accurate in identifying which person it was who looked at them just by their brain activity," said Assistant Professor Sarah Laszlo.

Submission + - Dyson Airblades 'Spread Germs 1,300 Times More Than Paper Towels' (telegraph.co.uk)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Journal of Applied Microbiology published a report claiming Dyson Airblade hand-driers spread 60 times more germs than standard air dryers, and 1,300 times more than standard paper towels. The researchers from University of Westminster conducted their research by dipping their hands in water containing a harmless virus. Then, they dried their hands with either a Dyson Airblade, a standard hot-air dryer, or a paper towel. Their research shows the Dyson drier's 430mph blasts of air are capable of spreading viruses up to 3 meters across a bathroom. Typical driers spread viruses up to 75cm (about 2.5ft), and the hand towels 25cm (less than 1ft).

Submission + - DARPA's Latest Chip Is Designed to Be Bad at Arithmetic (technologyreview.com)

Submitted by holy_calamity
holy_calamity writes: Pentagon research agency DARPA has funded the creation of a chip incapable of correct arithmetic, in the hope of making computers better at understanding the real world. The S1 chip can process noisy data like video very efficiently because it doesn't need the extra circuits or operations needed to ensure every mathematical operation is performed perfectly. This summer DARPA will put five prototype computers, each equipped with 16 of the inexact S1 chips, online for researchers to experiment with.

Submission + - Man deletes his entire company with one line of bad code (independent.co.uk)

Submitted by JustAnotherOldGuy
JustAnotherOldGuy writes: Marco Marsala appears to have deleted his entire company with one mistaken piece of code. By accidentally telling his computer to delete everything in his servers, the hosting provider has seemingly removed all trace of his company and the websites that he looks after for his customers. Marsala wrote on a Centos help forum, "I run a small hosting provider with more or less 1535 customers and I use Ansible to automate some operations to be run on all servers. Last night I accidentally ran, on all servers, a Bash script with a rm -rf {foo}/{bar} with those variables undefined due to a bug in the code above this line. All servers got deleted and the offsite backups too because the remote storage was mounted just before by the same script (that is a backup maintenance script)." The terse "rm -rf" is so famously destructive that it has become a joke within some computing circles, but not to this guy. Can this example finally serve as a textbook example of why you need to make offsite backups that are physically removed from the systems you're archiving?

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