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JNCF writes:

The Intercept reports:

A prominent national security reporter for the Los Angeles Times routinely submitted drafts and detailed summaries of his stories to CIA press handlers prior to publication, according to documents obtained by The Intercept.

Email exchanges between CIA public affairs officers and Ken Dilanian, now an Associated Press intelligence reporter who previously covered the CIA for the Times, show that Dilanian enjoyed a closely collaborative relationship with the agency, explicitly promising positive news coverage and sometimes sending the press office entire story drafts for review prior to publication. In at least one instance, the CIA’s reaction appears to have led to significant changes in the story that was eventually published in the Times.

“I’m working on a story about congressional oversight of drone strikes that can present a good opportunity for you guys,” Dilanian wrote in one email to a CIA press officer, explaining that what he intended to report would be “reassuring to the public” about CIA drone strikes.

[...] The emails also show that Dilanian shared his work with the CIA before it was published, and invited the agency to request changes. On Friday April 27, 2012, he emailed the press office a draft story that he and a colleague, David Cloud, were preparing. The subject line was “this is where we are headed,” and he asked if “you guys want to push back on any of this.”

It appears the agency did push back. On May 2, 2012, he emailed the CIA a new opening to the story with a subject line that asked, “does this look better?”

AndyTheAbsurd writes:

From Aeon Magazine:

AnonTechie writes:

Would SN Members like to predict the outcome of upcoming events?

In the Microsoft Prediction Lab you can make predictions about upcoming events and view the combined predictions of the crowd. The Microsoft Prediction Lab team is excited to push the boundaries of forecasting technology, including how to ask questions (data collection), how to keep billions of related likelihoods consistent (data analytics), and how to convey complex quantitative information usefully (data visualization).

An Anonymous Coward writes with news of an in-depth article at Ars Technica: Feds: Butterfly Labs mined bitcoins on customers’ boxes before shipping

On monday morning at 9:00am, lawyers from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) will ask a judge in a Kansas City federal courtroom to impose a preliminary injunction on Butterfly Labs (BFL), the embattled Bitcoin miner manufacturer. This would extend the temporary restraining order set down earlier this month, leaving the company controlled by a court-appointed receiver.

For the last 15 months, Ars has followed BFL as it has gone from being a curious hardware startup in a nascent industry to becoming the target of a federal investigation.

The FTC believes the three named members of the company’s board of directors—Jody Drake (aka Darla Drake), Nasser Ghoseiri, and Sonny Vleisides—spent millions of dollars of corporate revenue on non-corporate expenses like saunas and guns, while leaving many customer orders either wholly unfulfilled or significantly delayed.

In a slew of new court documents filed Saturday, FTC lawyers allege for the first time that not only did BFL engage in deceptive practices, it specifically used customer-ordered machines to mine its own bitcoins before shipping the machines out. (BFL has specifically denied mining for its own benefit.) The FTC also claims that BFL had its employees mine for personal gain using machines that had been refused by their purchasers or that had been returned after having arrived too late to be worthwhile.

n1 writes:

Phys.org reports:

The head of a Pakistani company which created an app called StealthGenie allowing users to spy on other people's mobile devices was indicted on US criminal charges, officials said Monday.

The Justice Department said the indictment of Hammad Akbar, 31, of Lahore, Pakistan, is the first-ever criminal case concerning the advertisement and sale of a mobile device spyware app.

Akbar is chief executive of InvoCode Pvt Ltd, which advertises and sells StealthGenie online and which uses a data center based in Virginia.

The app enables the monitoring of voice calls and chats on mobile devices such as the Apple iPhone and Android handsets.

According to officials the business plan of the group was to market the app to people who suspected cheating by a spouse or partner.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Steve Ballmer is bringing his same manic intensity to his new role as owner of the NBA's Los Angeles Clippers, which he once delivered as CEO of Microsoft. He's leading the team by example, leaving no stone unturned as he focuses on dominating the enemy.

That enemy is Apple.

Ballmer also told reporters he plans to revamp the 'fan experience', but seems to be keeping the details of his plans under wraps; for example, there was no mention of upgrading the Jumbotron in Staples Center to run Windows.

Ballmer joined Microsoft in 1980 as employee number 30, and was CEO from 2000 until February 2014, when he resigned under pressure from the board. He bought the Clippers for $2 billion in May, in a sale orchestrated by the wife of disgraced owner Donald Sterling. Ballmer resigned from the Microsoft board shortly thereafter, but is still the company's largest individual shareholder.

_NSAKEY writes:

The Daily Dot has a story about a browser vendor who wants to package Tor as part of its private browsing mode. From the article:

Several major tech firms are in talks with Tor to include the software in products that can potentially reach over 500 million Internet users around the world. One particular firm wants to include Tor as a “private browsing mode” in a mainstream Web browser, allowing users to easily toggle connectivity to the Tor anonymity network on and off.

“They very much like Tor Browser and would like to ship it to their customer base,” Tor executive director Andrew Lewman wrote, explaining the discussions but declining to name the specific company. “Their product is 10-20 percent of the global market, this is of roughly 2.8 billion global Internet users.”

The author elaborates:

The product that best fits Lewman’s description by our estimation is Mozilla Firefox, the third-most popular Web browser online today and home to, you guessed it, 10 to 20 percent of global Internet users.

The story appears to have gleaned most of its information from a tor-dev mailing list post. An interesting reply from Tor developer Mike Perry explains how Tor can be modified so that the network can handle the extra load.

Hugh Pickens writes:

It’s time to face the naked truth. According to the New York Daily News the latest celebrity phone hacking scandal hasn't stopped or even slowed people down from taking naked selfies. In fact the McAfee security company’s 2014 Love, Relationships & Technology survey reveals that 54% of their respondents regularly send or receive intimate photos, videos, texts and emails, and that number spikes to 70% when it comes to those aged 18 to 24. "I can only think of two people my age who haven't done it. It becomes like a sort of weird correspondence. If I snapchat someone a pic, they would send one back," says Julia, a 22-year-old English student, "It's sort of like a flirty thing, you meet a boy on a night out, you'd snapchat him a picture instead of texting him."

“If you’re taking selfies on a regular basis, that is going to get boring,” says John Suler, a member of the editorial board for the journal, Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networking. “So it becomes more risque, and that eventually leads to nude photos.” The desire to capture the naked body and share it with others is nothing new. “Every new medium that comes along, from cave paintings onward, no sooner does the medium get invented then people start using it for nudes,” says Robert Thompson, a pop-culture historian at Syracuse University. “We’ve found very explicit nude paintings on the walls of Pompeii.” While abstaining from taking nudies altogether is the only way to guarantee they won’t leak, it’s not a realistic approach for many. It’s more practical to password protect your phone and photo storage, doublecheck the recipient before hitting “send,” and to only sext someone you trust completely. “We have decided that the things we like to do online are things we like so much that we’re willing to take the risk,” says Thompson. “I know my credit card is not totally secure anywhere online... but I am willing to take that chance because I want to be able to order things online.”

n1 writes:

Yahoo! News reports:

Several Britons agreed to give up their eldest child in return for the use of free wifi, in an experiment to highlight the dangers of public Internet, published on Monday.

Londoners were asked to agree to terms and conditions as they logged on to use free wifi in a cafe in a busy financial district and at a site close to the houses of parliament.

The terms included a "Herod clause", under which the wifi was provided only if "the recipient agreed to assign their first born child to us for the duration of eternity."

Only six people agreed to the terms and conditions, however:

In just 30 minutes, 250 devices connected to the hotspot -- some of them doing so automatically due to their settings.

The company was able to collect the text of emails they sent, the email addresses of the sender and recipient, and the password of the sender.

c0lo writes:

Gizmodo reports on the use of mesh network by the Hong Kong protesters:

Tens of thousands of protestors are gathering in Hong Kong's financial district to protest changes to election policy that would let a mainland Chinese committee vet the city's political candidates, and many use their phones to organize.

College students spearheaded the initial meetup, and this protest is appropriately tech-savvy. In addition to mainstream social networks like Facebook and Twitter, Hong Kong's activists are using iOS and Android app FireChat.

FireChat's parent company Open Garden reports 100,000 new users from Hong Kong within 22 hours, and 33,000 users on the app at once.

[...] FireChat helps people create what are known as "mesh networks." These connections go between devices, using a phone's hardware to link people in a daisy chain. Right now, FireChat can connect devices up to 200 feet apart. The geographic limit means the app is really only useful in crowds...

[...] Mesh networks are an especially resilient tool because there's no easy way for a government to shut them down. They can't just block cell reception or a site address. Destroying one part won't kill it unless you destroy each point of access; someone would have to turn off Bluetooth on every phone using FireChat to completely break the connection.

Blackmoore writes:

ScienceDaily reports:

Present-day lithium batteries are efficient but involve a range of resource and environmental problems. Using materials from alfalfa (lucerne seed) and pine resin and a clever recycling strategy, Uppsala researchers have now come up with a highly interesting alternative. Their study will be presented soon in the scientific journal ChemSusChem.

Although present-day batteries contain non-renewable inorganic materials, this is not the first time batteries composed of renewable materials have been presented. But the recycling and recovery strategy is a wholly new concept. Constructing a new battery from a spent one is also feasible. In other words, a straightforward process enables it to be reused.

The scientists have shown that the lithium extracted from a spent battery can be used for a new battery: all that needs to be added is more biomaterial. Their battery proved capable of delivering as much as 99% of the energy output from the first. With future modifications, this figure can very probably become even higher, say the researchers.

AnonTechie writes:

New system aims to harness the full spectrum of available solar radiation.

The key to creating a material that would be ideal for converting solar energy to heat is tuning the material’s spectrum of absorption just right: It should absorb virtually all wavelengths of light that reach Earth’s surface from the sun — but not much of the rest of the spectrum, since that would increase the energy that is reradiated by the material, and thus lost to the conversion process.

Now researchers at MIT say they have accomplished the development of a material that comes very close to the “ideal” for solar absorption. The material is a two-dimensional metallic dielectric photonic crystal, and has the additional benefits of absorbing sunlight from a wide range of angles and withstanding extremely high temperatures. Perhaps most importantly, the material can also be made cheaply at large scales.

mendax writes:

The New York Times published an interesting article about other tasty articles—Thai food:

Hopscotching the globe as Thailand’s prime minister, Yingluck Shinawatra repeatedly encountered a distressing problem: bad Thai food.

Too often, she found, the meals she sampled at Thai restaurants abroad were unworthy of the name, too bland to be called genuine Thai cooking. The problem bothered her enough to raise it at a cabinet meeting.

Her political party has since been thrown out of office, in a May military coup, but her initiative in culinary diplomacy lives on.

At a gala dinner at a ritzy Bangkok hotel on Tuesday the government will unveil its project to standardize the art of Thai food — with a robot.

Diplomats and dignitaries have been invited to witness the debut of a machine that its promoters say can scientifically evaluate Thai cuisine, telling the difference, for instance, between a properly prepared green curry with just the right mix of Thai basil, curry paste and fresh coconut cream, and a lame imitation.

A boxy contraption filled with sensors and microchips, the so-called e-delicious machine scans food samples to produce a chemical signature, which it measures against a standard deemed to be the authentic version.

The government-financed Thai Delicious Committee, which oversaw the development of the machine, describes it as “an intelligent robot that measures smell and taste in food ingredients through sensor technology in order to measure taste like a food critic.”

I myself am a bit hesitant to believe that a machine can truly judge the quality of food, especially its authenticity. From my experience, the only real judge of good Thai food is when it's so spicy that my head is about to explode. Does the machine have a similar response?

Blackmoore writes:

Ars Technica brings us AT&T’s congestion magically disappears when it’s signing up new customers:

Like other carriers, AT&T slows the speeds of certain users when the network is congested. Such network management is a necessary evil that can benefit the majority of customers when used to ensure that everyone can connect to the network. But as Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler has argued, the carriers’ selective enforcement of throttling shows that it can also be used to boost revenue by pushing subscribers onto pricier plans.

AT&T’s throttling only applies to users with “legacy unlimited data plans,” the kinds of customers that AT&T wants to push onto limited plans with overage charges. Initially, the throttling was enforced once users passed 3GB or 5GB in a month regardless of whether the network was congested. In July, AT&T changed its policy so that throttling only hits those users at times and in places when the network is actually congested, according to an AT&T spokesperson. The 3GB and 5GB thresholds, with the higher one applied to LTE devices, were unchanged.

You can use the Internet Archive’s WayBack Machine to see that, through June, AT&T throttled unlimited subscribers whether its network was congested or not. The site, both then and now, encourages heavy data users to switch to a tiered or shared data plan. AT&T says that more than 80 percent of its postpaid smartphone subscribers are on limited plans.

AnonTechie writes:

The University of Queensland reports:

Mantis shrimp eyes are inspiring the design of new cameras that can detect a variety of cancers and visualise brain activity.

University of Queensland research has found that the shrimp’s compound eyes are superbly tuned to detect polarised light, providing a streamlined framework for technology to mimic.

Professor Justin Marshall, from the Queensland Brain Institute at UQ, said cancerous tissue reflected polarised light differently to surrounding healthy tissue.

“Humans can’t see this, but a mantis shrimp could walk up to it and hit it,” he said.

“We see colour with hues and shades, and objects that contrast – a red apple in a green tree for example – but our research is revealing a number of animals that use polarised light to detect and discriminate between objects.