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Papas Fritas writes:

"There's an interesting read today by John Paul Titlow at FastCoLabs about DuckDuckGo, a search engine launched in 2008 that is now doing 4 million search queries per day and growing 200-500% annually. DuckDuckGo's secret weapon is hardcore privacy. When you do a search from DuckDuckGo's website or one of its mobile apps, it doesn't know who you are. There are no user accounts. Your IP address isn't logged by default. The site doesn't use search cookies to keep track of what you do over time or where else you go online.

'If you look at the logs of people's search sessions, they're the most personal thing on the Internet,' says founder Gabriel Weinberg. 'Unlike Facebook, where you choose what to post, with search you're typing in medical and financial problems and all sorts of other things. You're not thinking about the privacy implications of your search history.' DuckDuckGo's no-holds-barred approach to privacy gives the search engine a unique selling point as Google gobbles up more private user data. 'It was extreme at the time,' says Weinberg. 'And it still may be considered extreme by some people, but I think it's becoming less extreme nowadays. In the last year, it's become obvious why people don't want to be tracked.'"

jcd writes:

"I'm rather excited to get going with Soylent and to watch it grow. Nay, help it grow. I have lurked in /. for more than a decade (note: I'm not the same username over there, I know, how sneaky), and always wished I could have been involved with the beginning. So this is a great opportunity, and I joined as soon as I saw what Soylent was doing. Not to mention the fact that I felt right at home with the old style. It's very comfortable.

So here's a question for everyone. Are we going to be the same as slashdot? A clone that focuses as entirely as possible on tech related news? Or will we branch out to other topics? I'm interested to see either way. I posted a comment to this effect in one of our two existing polls, and it may be a community-wide assumption, but I do think it merits a discussion."

captain normal writes:

An essay by Robert W.Lucky in IEEE Spectrum, 'Who is the Crowd?', discusses how the internet has provided the means for many people to contribute to knowledge.
From the essay:

I look at my computer screen and imagine all the murmuring voices behind it, clamoring for attention. There is almost a mystical presence out there, not from aliens but from something almost as thrilling and unexpected--a new presence that has been brought about as a consequence of the enveloping architecture of the Internet.
...
The crowd has wisdom, knowing things that may not be known to individuals. It has sentiments, beliefs, and feelings that can be abstracted and analyzed. Moreover, it has the power to affect the real physical world...Small armies of volunteers and paid contributors can be assembled on a moment's notice to work on projects.

I find this very much like this current project here on SoylentNews. This is a 'Crowd' thing. Not a top down organization like the old 19th ~ 20th century organization model."

KritonK writes:

"On February 19, distributed.net began project OGR-28, the challenge to discover the Optimal Golomb Ruler with 28 marks. The previous challenge, OGR-27, is almost complete, with only 9 stubs remaining to be processed, as of February 19. People participating in that challenge do not need to update their client, as it can also process stubs for the new challenge."

Open4D writes:

"The BBC reports that a bounty of 10,000 Euro ($13,700) is 'being offered to catch the people who took the online multiplayer game Wurm offline.' A blog entry on their website says, 'we can offer 10,000 Euro for any tips or evidence leading to a conviction of the person responsible for this attack.'

For those unfamiliar, Wurm Online is, according to Wikipedia, a 3D MMORPG from Sweden that came out in 2006. The client 'is developed in Java and uses OpenGL.'

Presumably they're hoping someone with inside knowledge of the attack will be tempted to inform on the main culprits. Or maybe Microsoft's commendable botnet-fighting unit has a chance to claim the money?"

girlwhowaspluggedout writes:

Hoping to be a pioneer on the Red Planet? First seek permission from your local cleric. Dubai's Khaleej Times reports that the General Authority of Islamic Affairs and Endowment in the UAE has ruled that promoting or being involved in a one-way trip to Mars is prohibited by Islam. The fatwa appears to be a response to Mars One's call for volunteers to make the pioneering trip to the red planet.

According to the General Authority, 'Such a one-way journey poses a real risk to life, and that can never be justified in Islam. There is a possibility that an individual who travels to planet Mars may not be able to remain alive there, and is more vulnerable to death.' Because of the inherent dangers of the trip, those who choose to go there are likely to die for no 'righteous reason,' thus incurring 'punishment similar to that of suicide in the Hereafter.'

The Khaleej Times further states that the General Authority fears that some of the volunteers, among whom are 500 Saudis and other Arabs, may be interested in traveling to Mars to escape punishment or to avoid standing before Allah for judgment. The General Authority decreed that 'this is an absolutely baseless and unacceptable belief because not even an atom falls outside the purview of Allah, the Creator of everything.'"

[ED Note: Likening the one-way-ticket to suicide does make some theological sense, but I am saddened that the Authority does not consider space exploration a "righteous reason" to risk one's life. In times past, many great explorers hailed from Muslim societies, and were part of what made them great.]

combatserver writes:

"The folks over at Dark Side of Gaming are reporting an interesting development in the game modding community--a recently released modification for the blockbuster game from Bethesda, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (PC version). A long-running issue with the game since release has been recurring CTDs (crashes to desktop) and infinite loading screens that often bring the game to a grinding halt after just a few minutes of play, especially when heavily modded. Bethesda has tried to resolve the issue with several patches, to no avail.

Sheson, a member of the Skyrim modding community, fixed Skyrim. According to many user reports--thousands, in fact--Sheson's relatively minor adjustment to memory allocation has solved the vast majority of stability issues. The improvements have increased game performance far beyond what anyone had expected. Players are now merging mods to get around the hard-coded cap of 256 mods that Skyrim can load at any given time, effectively packing more content into the game. The fix also allows for Skyrim to run on lower-end PCs, widening the market for a game that has already sold over 20 million copies.

Since Sheson's patch released, the fix has been repackaged by other community members as a mod for Skyrim to make it even more accessible. Skyrim players who use the script-extender SKSE will be pleased to hear that the patch will be included in the next build."

[ED Note: Bottom line -- Bethesda shouldn't be packaging poorly written and untested code for sale, then requiring gamers to pay to play as beta testers. Kudos to Sheson for his hard work and effort.]

Gaaark writes:

"The First Amendment has been upheld in the United States!

Dan McCall has been making T-shirts and mugs that parody the National Security Agency as "the only part of government that actually listens" for over a decade. In 2011, he got a cease-and-desist letter from the NSA and from the Department of Homeland Security. Last October, McCall filed a lawsuit saying his shirts and mugs parodied the government agency and were therefore protected by the First Amendment.

'Citizens shouldn't have to worry whether criticizing government agencies will get them in trouble or not,' said Public Citizen's Paul Levy, who filed the suit on McCall's behalf. 'This settlement proves the First Amendment is there to protect citizens' rights to free speech.'

Now, the NSA has admitted: McCall is right ."

Papas Fritas writes "Patrick Michaels writes in Forbes that atmospheric physicist Garth Paltridge has laid out several well-known uncertainties in climate forecasting including our inability to properly simulate clouds that are anything like what we see in the real world, the embarrassing lack of average surface warming now in its 17th year, and the fumbling (and contradictory) attempts to explain it away. According to Paltridge, an emeritus professor at the University of Tasmania and a fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, virtually all scientists directly involved in climate prediction are aware of the enormous uncertainties associated with their product. How then is it that those of them involved in the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) can put their hands on their hearts and maintain there is a 95 per cent probability that human emissions of carbon dioxide have caused most of the global warming that has occurred over the last several decades? In short, there is more than enough uncertainty about the forecasting of climate to allow normal human beings to be at least reasonably hopeful that global warming might not be nearly as bad as is currently touted.

Climate scientists, and indeed scientists in general, are not so lucky. They have a lot to lose if time should prove them wrong. "In the light of all this, we have at least to consider the possibility that the scientific establishment behind the global warming issue has been drawn into the trap of seriously overstating the climate problem-or, what is much the same thing, of seriously understating the uncertainties associated with the climate problem-in its effort to promote the cause," writes Paltridge. "It is a particularly nasty trap in the context of science, because it risks destroying, perhaps for centuries to come, the unique and hard-won reputation for honesty which is the basis of society's respect for scientific endeavor.""

lubricus writes "Facebook announced plans to acquire WhatsApp for four billion cash, plus 12 billion in Facebook shares.

Additionally, WhatsApp employees and founders will receive three billion in restricted stock which will vest in four years. Facebook also agreed to a one billion dollar break up fee.

WhatsApp says they have message volume which approaches the global SMS volume, and hope to have one billion users. Even at those figures, Facebook is paying $16 per user.

I'm guessing WhatsApp will send Snapchat developers a cake."

An anonymous coward writes "Former cypherpunk shares his conspiratorial view on Linux security:

Since then, more has happened to reveal the true story here, the depth of which surprised even me. The GTK development story and the systemd debate on Debian revealed much corporate pressure being brought to bear in Linux. [...] Some really startling facts about Red Hat came to light. For me the biggest was the fact that the US military is Red Hat's largest customer:

"When we rolled into Baghdad, we did it using open source," General Justice continued. "It may come as a surprise to many of you, but the U.S. Army is 'the' single largest install base for Red Hat Linux. I'm their largest customer." (2008)

This is pretty much what I had figured. I'm not exactly new to this, and I figured that in some way the military-industrial/corporate/intelligence complex was in control of Red Hat and Linux. [...] But I didn't expect it to be stated so plainly. Any fool should realize that "biggest customer" doesn't mean tallest or widest, it means the most money. In other words, most of Red Hat's money comes from the military and, as a result, they have significant pull in its development. In that respect, the connection between the military and spying agencies, etc. should be obvious.

Next, the FOSDEM: NSA Operation ORCHESTRA Annual Status Report is well worth watching in its entirety (including the Q&A at the end). To me, this turned out to be a road-map detailing how Red Hat is operating on Linux!"

Landon writes:

"The (evil?) IRC overlord and crew are wondering what you think about our new IRC network. What can we do better? What do you want to see happen with our new network? Heck, should we even have a new network?

See more in Landon's journal"

Fluffeh writes:

"Google has officially invited 34 cities in nine metro areas to become the next batch of the Google Fiber rollout.

Google said it 'genuinely would like to build in all of these cities,' but that the complexities of deploying networks may not allow it. 'During this process, we will work with each city to map out in detail what it would look like to build a new fiber-optic network there,' Google said. 'The most important part of this teamwork will be identifying what obstacles might pop up during network construction — and then working together to find the smoothest path around those obstacles. Some might be easy, some might take some creative thinking or a few months to iron out, and in some cases there might be such local complexities that we decide it's not the right time to build Google Fiber there.'"

r00t writes:

"In September of 2013, Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper stated that there were many 'important reasons' for the overly broad scope of the NSA's information collection programs. Among the reasons listed was that 'it could provide the United States and our allies early warning of international financial crises which could negatively impact the global economy.' Also mentioned was the long standing argument that the 'collection of information ... saves lives.'

In the months since the NSA data collections have come to light, many people question [pdf] the efficacy of the programs.

Now, in an exclusive interview, with The Beast, Clapper says that the NSA should have been more transparent about the secret programs. 'I probably shouldn't say this, but I will. Had we been transparent about this from the outset, we wouldn't have had the problem we had'. However, he still defends the practice by comparing it to 'fire insurance.'"

Walzmyn writes:

"The company I work for is not a tech company. We are, however, a multi-national, multi-billion dollar company that claims to be the largest of our kind in three industries (and second largest in a 4th). And yet, our company network sucks. There is a mishmash of Citrix and SAP, multiple web-portals, and none of them work with each other. The several thousand non-technical people that work for this company are routinely asked to interface with this system and end up spending time with the helpdesk or with a supervisor looking over the shoulder for something that was supposed to be private.

I've heard of similar situations with other companies, so I wanted to ask the folks that live and breathe the tech sector this: Why can't a company this size get something so fundamental done right? Why can't they at least hire a third party to do it right for them?"

Thexalon writes:

"University of Bedfordshire professor and applied linguist Stephen Bax has decoded 10 words of the baffling Voynich Manuscript. He focused on proper names that would match the accompanying drawings, which allowed him to find similar drawings in other books of the period."

girlwhowaspluggedout writes:

"When Pedro Rivera, an on-call photographer for Hartford, CT's WFSB-TV, used his drone to photograph the scene of a fatal car crash, he probably did not expect to be detained by the local police and be forced to ground his drone and leave the area. What he certainly did not expect was being suspended by his employer without pay for a week after the head of the department's major crimes division contacted WFSB-TV, requesting that disciplinary action be taken against him.

Rivera has now filed a federal lawsuit against Hartford's police department for violating his First and Fourth Amendment rights. The lawsuit seeks more than just damages it asks the court to declare that Rivera did not break any laws by operating the drone.

Shortly after the incident, Hartford police told the media that it was concerned with 'the safety of the officers and the privacy of the victim.' But, as Rivera told the Professional Society of Drone Journalists, 'If privacy is a concern ... it was not with me. It was with all the local news stations that were on the sidewalks with 'long lenses' and had shots so tight, that you could see inside the crash vehicle.' The photo he has provided and the GPS coordinates that are embedded in its EXIF data show what his drone was capable of photographing 150 feet from the accident site.

As Rivera succinctly describes it, 'What happened to me falls in the category of the war on cameras by the police. Whenever the police are videotaped, they try to detain people and confiscate the camera.' It's time to add one more marker to the War on Cameras Map'."