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andrew writes:

"Alternet.org reports recent updates to terms of conditions for Bank of Americas cell phone app and Capital Ones new credit card contract have given banks unsettling new abilities. These privileges include the authority to access to your phone microphone and camera or even showing up at your workplace and home unannounced at any time.

From the the article:

We're witnessing a new era of fascism, where corporations are creating intrusive and over-bearing terms and conditions that customers click to agree to without even reading.

As a result, corporations in America have acquired king-like power, while we're the poor serfs that must abide by their every rule or else."

fliptop writes:

"Promising that orders will start shipping in June, Silent Circle has announced the Blackphone is ready for pre-orders. (Domain registered in Switzerland)

Touted as 'The high-end smartphone which puts privacy and security ahead of everything else' the Blackphone has a 4.7" screen, 2GHz quad-core CPU and 16GB storage. It also includes several Silent Circle apps.

The Blackphone makes use of a customized version of Android called PrivatOS, is fully unlocked, and the encryption can be used on any compatible network. Purchase includes a 1-year subscription to the apps; after that it's $10 a month (in addition to your carrier's charges).

In order to take advantage of the encryption, the other person you're communicating with has to have their own Blackphone or use Silent Circle apps on their Android or iOS phone."

mrbluze writes:

"A modified HTTP protocol is being proposed (the proposal is funded by AT&T) which would allow ISP's to decrypt and re-encrypt traffic as part of day to day functioning in order to save money on bandwidth through caching. The draft document states:

To distinguish between an HTTP2 connection meant to transport "https" URIs resources and an HTTP2 connection meant to transport "http" URIs resource, the draft proposes to 'register a new value in the Application Layer Protocol negotiation (ALPN) Protocol IDs registry specific to signal the usage of HTTP2 to transport "http" URIs resources: h2clr.

The proposal is being criticized by Lauren Weinstein in that it provides a false sense of security to end users who might believe that their communications are actually secure. Can this provide an ISP with an excuse to block or throttle HTTPS traffic?"

Rashek writes:

"Intel and Qualcomm just announced their roadmaps for mobile System on a Chip at this year's Mobile World Congress.

Intel presented performance numbers of their Merrifield SoC, a dual-core Silvermont based SoC that's effectively the phone version of Bay Trail, with some carefully chosen benchmarks that compared it to Apple's A7 SoC and Qualcomm's Snapdragon 800 series. Meanwhile, Qualcomm revealed future 64-bit Snapdragons for its mid-tier Snapdragon series. The Snapdragon 610 and 615 will arrive in Android smartphones in Q4 of this year and are four and eight core implementations of ARM's Cortex A53."

mrbluze writes:

"An interesting blog post by Charles Hugh Smith on Why Banks Are Doomed: Technology and Risk.:

The funny thing about technology is that those threatened by fundamental improvements in technology attempt to harness it to save their industry from extinction. For example, overpriced colleges now charge thousands of dollars for nearly costless massively open online courses (MOOCs) because they retain a monopoly on accreditation (diplomas). Once students are accredited directly--an advancement enabled by technology--colleges' monopoly disappears and so does their raison d'etre.

The same is true of banks. Now that accounting and risk assessment are automated, and borrowers and owners of capital can exchange funds in transparent digital marketplaces, there is no need for banks. But according to banks, only they have the expertise to create riskless debt.

...

One last happy thought: technology cannot be put back in the bottle. The financial/banking sector wants to use technology to increase its middleman skim, but the technology that is already out of the bottle will dismantle the sector as a function of what technology enables: faster, better, cheaper, with greater transparency, fairness and the proper distribution of risk.

There may well be a place for credit unions and community banks in the spectrum of exchanges, but these localized, decentralized enterprises would be unable to amass dangerous concentrations of risk and political influence in a truly transparent and decentralized system of exchanges.

It's still early days, but can new electronic currencies such as Bitcoin become mainstream without the assent of governments?"

Covalent writes "Scientists suggest that the early universe could be better understood by considering its viscosity which, as it turns out, was similar to that of chocolate syrup. Researchers claim to be able to use this approach (along with as yet unavailable measurements) to determine precisely how inflation took place in the instants after the Big Bang.

Green cheese, the Milky Way... Now chocolate syrup. The universe is a complicated but delicious place!"

lhsi writes "A recent publication on the British Medical Journal finds that stopping smoking improves mental health: "Change in mental health after smoking cessation: systematic review and meta-analysis" (CC BY-NC 3.0).

A lot of smokers claim that smoking has mental health benefits; reducing depression and anxiety, and for relaxation and relieving stress. However the study suggests this is likely mis-attributing the ability of cigarettes to abolish nicotine withdrawal as a beneficial effect on mental health. The study notes that some health professionals are reluctant to recommend stopping smoking as a way to help mental health problems due to the fear that it might make things worse, but this study suggests that it actually would help.

The main conclusion of the study:

Smoking cessation is associated with reduced depression, anxiety, and stress and improved positive mood and quality of life compared with continuing to smoke. The effect size seems as large for those with psychiatric disorders as those without. The effect sizes are equal or larger than those of antidepressant treatment for mood and anxiety disorders."

kef writes:

"By 2029, computers will be able to understand our language, learn from experience and outsmart even the most intelligent humans, according to Google's director of engineering Ray Kurzweil.

Kurzweil says:

Computers are on the threshold of reading and understanding the semantic content of a language, but not quite at human levels. But since they can read a million times more material than humans they can make up for that with quantity. So IBM's Watson is a pretty weak reader on each page, but it read the 200m pages of Wikipedia. And basically what I'm doing at Google is to try to go beyond what Watson could do. To do it at Google scale. Which is to say to have the computer read tens of billions of pages. Watson doesn't understand the implications of what it's reading. It's doing a sort of pattern matching. It doesn't understand that if John sold his red Volvo to Mary that involves a transaction or possession and ownership being transferred. It doesn't understand that kind of information and so we are going to actually encode that, really try to teach it to understand the meaning of what these documents are saying.

Skynet anyone?"

janrinok writes "A recent survey carried out by Tripwire, reported by the BBC, claims that "80% of the 25 best-selling routers available on Amazon are vulnerable to compromise". Security researcher Craig Young from Tripwire said exploits had been publicly discussed and published for more than one-third of these devices.

In a separate report, the Internet Storm Center (ISC) warned about a continuing attempt to exploit a vulnerability in 23 separate models of Linksys routers. A worm, called 'The Moon' is compromising Linksys routers and then scans for other potentially vulnerable systems. So far, wrote ISC researcher Johannes Ullrich in his blogpost, it is not clear why the routers are being compromised and what might be done with them. There are hints in the exploit code that the routers will at some point be gathered together into a network of compromised machines. Currently, he added, all the worm was doing was spreading to other Linksys routers.

The reason for the current European concern is a recent large scale attack on home routers in order to gather usernames and passwords for online bank accounts, reported by the Polish Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) and elsewhere."

What is IRC? It stands for internet relay chat, and despite being developed in 1988, it is still a very useful means of low-bandwidth communication, serving hundreds of thousands of users daily across the world. We have created our own IRC Server at irc.sylnt.us, port 6667. Won't you join us?

Barrabas writes:

"Some have asked why we run our own servers instead of using a public one such as freenode.net. We did this to have control of the TOS, copyright, DMCA, and other legal issues. I like freenode (and their TOS) a lot, but we're building a community and we should make our own choices.

Landon, our overlord of IRC, set this up with a lot of help from his team. He also set us up a link-shortener sylnt.us domain for the Twitter account: that rocks! So send him some love if you see him on IRC - he's doing a bang-up job!

Speaking of Twitter, Bender, our IRC bot, posts the headlines to our Twitter account, so feel free to follow us there."

AnonTechie writes:

"I have the following requests to members of this new forum:

1) Please use SI Units wherever possible. Alternative comparative units such as swimming pools, size of Florida, cars, libraries of congress, etc are also welcome ...

2) Please cover tech/science related stories from around the world. Please do not make this a US only website !!

Cheers and best wishes,

AnonTechie"

[ED Note: We as a community welcome submissions from around the world, as befits our international userbase. The Editorial team in particular is looking closely at including voices from outside the U.S. as we continue to grow. As for the units question in particular, stories will certainly arrive with a variety of units depending on the origin of the submission. We encourage, though do not require, submitters to include conversions where appropriate for clarity out of courtesy to your fellow readers. Though we try to use a light touch when making edits to story submissions, Editors may add these from time to time as well, should clarity demand and time permit.

Soylentils, does the current ad-hoc approach meet your needs, or do you favor a more formal approach from your news discussion site?]

l3g0la5 writes:

"Apple released iOS 7.0.6 to patch a vulnerability which, if unpatched, could allow attackers to capture or modify data in sessions protected by SSL/TLS. However, quite a few users have reported that the upgrade didn't go as planned and their iDevices have been bricked after the update or during the update process. Users have flocked to Twitter as well as Apple support forums voicing their concerns and frustrations as quite a few users have tried updating their iOS 7 devices while on the move and once bricked, their iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch requires a connection to iTunes to restart."

joekiser writes "In 2010, Ford Motor Company was rated as top-five automotive manufacturer in terms of quality, per J.D. Power and Associates. This was a major turnaround for the automotive giant, which had faced bankruptcy just two years prior. This high reliability rating would be short lived however; Ford began installing touch screen hubs powered by Microsoft SYNC, which were both confusing and buggy.

By 2012, Ford quality rankings had dropped to 23rd, even after numerous software upgrades and a rebranding of SYNC to "MyFordTouch." One customer reported:

"The voice controls typically do not work until the vehicle has been on for five to 10 minutes, meaning short trips require dialing phone calls by hand, only to have the call cut off when the system finally starts up."

This slide continued into 2013, when Ford ranked 27th of 28 brands (as an aside, Ford's premium brand, Lincoln, ranked one slot higher that year at 26th).

Apparently, Ford Motor Company has had enough. On Friday, the Detroit News reported that Ford will make the switch to QNX on future vehicles. This is the same platform currently used by Acura, Audi, BMW, and Land Rover."

[ED Note: "Ford Motor Company's decision to move to QNX aside, I'll be heavily considering a Blackberry for my next phone, especially with rumors of a 64-bit octa-core model for later this year. BB10 also has gotten rave reviews for its design and ease-of-use."]

"A mere three days after Mark Zuckerberg announced Facebook's acquisition of Whatsapp, the popular smartphone messaging app suffered a major service outage that lasted three and a half hours. Left to their own devices, Whatsapp users worldwide went rushing to its rival apps, including secure chat provider Telegram. The surge in new users quickly turned into a tidal wave that brought Telegram's service to its knees:

The SMS gateways we use to send registration codes are overloaded and slow 100 SMS per second is too much. Trying to find a solution.

In its official twitter, Telegram announced that more than 1.8 million new users had joined on Saturday, Feb 22. Four hours later, it reported an additional 800 thousand.

Telegram's messaging service, which uses 256-bit symmetric AES encryption, RSA 2048 encryption and Diffie-Hellman secure key exchange, began enjoying a spike in popularity after Whatsapp's acquisition. Although it has released the source code for its java libraries and all its official clients, its server software is still closed source."