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shabadoo writes:

"Will software engineering always be a cowboy's game? Or is it just a case of when you're a passionate expert the pimples stand out more clearly. This guy has clearly had enough. His vents are amusing, but also raise some good points about the state of the industry."

SuperCharlie writes:

"I am in search of employment and ran across a bit of a dilemma that I would like some Soylent guidance. After applying for a job at CareerBuilder, I received a follow-up email which requested that I fill out their on-line application. The first field, mandatory, was Social Security Number as part of their initial screening process. My question for the community is, how would you deal with requests like this as the initial employment steps?"

KritonK writes:

Ed's Note: For those not sure what an optimal Golomb ruler is, or how you would use one, see here.

"Following the recent start of the OGR-28 project, the search for the optimal Golomb ruler with 28 marks, distributed.net quietly announced the completion of project OGR-27 on February 25. The shortest Golomb ruler with 27 marks has length 553 and marks at positions 0 3 15 41 66 95 97 106 142 152 220 221 225 242 295 330 338 354 382 388 402 415 486 504 523 546 553. This confirms that the best known, up to now, Golomb ruler was optimal. When the project began, it was expected that a shorter ruler would be found, but this did not happen."

threedigits writes:

"The technology to build giant robots is one bit step closer: a group of international researchers have published a paper describing a method to create artificial muscle fibres. The cool thing is that they are about 100 times stronger than biological muscle tissue, and you can try it at home! The basis is polyethylene or nylon string, AKA fishing line. A great video is available on Hack A Day."

girlwhowaspluggedout writes:

"Davi Barker, co-founder of the BitcoinNotBombs advocacy group, has recently described a run-in he had with the TSA. Barker was about to board his plane on his way back from the New Hampshire Liberty Forum, when he was stopped by two TSA agents. Barker, who was wearing a BitcoinNotBombs shirt and carrying a few hundred metal lapel pins some with the logo of Blockchain.info, a popular Bitcoin wallet and block explorer service was just cleared by airport security. But the TSA agents wanted to search his luggage again. They were looking for his Bitcoins:

I turned back to the orange shirt and asked 'What did the Bitcoin look like?' Bill chimed in and told the agent that what he was saying was impossible because Bitcoin is digital and doesn't have have any physical manifestation. You can't 'see' Bitcoin. The orange shirt said they looked like medallions or tokens. I said I didn't understand what he was talking about, and he simply repeated, in a child like way, that Bitcoins are like metal tokens. I told him that I didn't have any tokens.

The TSA agents suspected he was travelling internationally with over $10,000 worth of Bitcoins. This, presumably, might be seen as a form of money laundering. When another member of his group said that Barker was not going to fly out of the country, the agents simply turned around and disappeared."

AnonTechie writes "The Tor Foundation is moving forward with a plan to provide its own instant messaging service called the Tor Instant Messaging Bundle". The tool will allow people to communicate in real time while preserving anonymity by using chat servers concealed within Tor's hidden network. In planning since last July as news of the National Security Agency's broad surveillance of instant messaging traffic emerged the Tor Instant Messaging Bundle (TIMB) should be available in experimental builds by the end of March, based on a roadmap published in conjunction with the Tor Project's Winter Dev meeting in Iceland.

TIMB will connect to instant messaging servers configured as Tor "hidden services" as well as to commercial IM services on the open Internet."

AnonTechie writes:

"Schneier: NSA snooping tactics will be copied by criminals in 3 to 5 years. If you thought NSA snooping was bad, you ain't seen nothing yet: online criminals have also been watching and should soon be able to copy the agency's invasive surveillance tactics, according to security guru Bruce Schneier.

'The NSA techniques give about a three to five year lead on what cyber-criminals will do,' he told an audience at the RSA 2014 conference in San Francisco. 'These techniques for exfiltrating data aren't magical, they are just expensive. Everything we know about technology is that it gets cheaper. So the notion of putting up a fake cell tower or wireless access point, of jumping air gaps, you're going to see this stuff it's really just a matter of time.' "

regift_of_the_gods writes:

"Particle physicists are pondering the successor for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the 27 km (circumference) tunnel on the Franco-Swiss border which has produced experimental data to confirm the existence of the Higgs boson. CERN recently announced it was studying several proposals for a next generation hadron collider; perhaps the most intriguing was TLEP, an enormous (80-100 km) circular collider to be built adjacent to the LHC, that would pass below Lake Geneva. A group of physicists mostly associated with Texas A&M University have counterproposed reviving the Superconducting Supercollider (SSC), a partly-built 87 km circular collider south of Dallas that was abandoned in 1993 after Congress cancelled the project.

The Texas A&M physicists argue that a completed SSC would be powerful enough to generate the Higgs boson in quantities that would allow detailed study (a 'Higgs Factory' in the authors' words), while saving money relative to competing proposals since 45 percent of the tunnel has already been drilled. But then it gets real interesting; the authors propose an additional tunnel, an enormous 270 km circumference collider that would encircle the city of Dallas. Protons would be accelerated in the SSC tunnel for injection into the hadron collider."

CowboyTeal writes:

"Windows 8 is still being disputed as either the product of a genius or a nerdy sadist but that doesn't mean Windows 9 isn't in the works. That said, how would you guys improve Windows if you could change anything about it? Has windows 8 improved or degraded your overall experience of the Windows platform? If you're not a Windows user, what features would you like to see in Windows for possible assimilation?"

Anonymous Coward writes:

"Every geek worth his hash and salt has heard about the hacker/cracker distinction but have you ever wondered what does the designation entail when you go beyond scratching the surface? Gabriella Coleman has. According to Wikipedia she is an anthropologist, academic and author whose work focuses on hacker culture and online activism. The link below is her class on computer hackers at New York University. I found it an interesting read. The Anthropology of Hackers - Gabriella Coleman - The Atlantic"

Greetings, Soylentils. First of all, I want to thank you, the community, for the outpouring of support during these past few weeks. The participation has been amazing, and I'd like to personally thank each and every one of you for your help in a successful launch so far. Unfortunately, I can't thank every one of you individually. As of this writing, there are over 3500 registered users!

Now, we promised to be transparent, and we intend to deliver. Our first (and right now, only) all-hands staff meeting is at 1800 UTC on 2 March, and will be held on our IRC channels.

The staff will be holding the meeting on #Staff at irc.soylentnews.org. Only staff will be able to log into and speak on that channel. However, our IRC folks will be re-broadcasting this on the public channel, #Soylent. If you aren't familiar with IRC, please review Landon's recent post (we have a web client available as well). Many of our staff members will be monitoring both channels, and we will try to have the opportunity for questions. Conducting this meeting will be one of many learning experiences for us, so feel free to pipe up and say your piece.

Items on the agenda include a vision statement from our founder, an overview of staff organization from me(draft available here), general status update from each group, as well as proposals for future development. You may notice some missing names in the org chart. Please contact us at suggestions @ soylentnews dot. org if you are interested in volunteering or working here.

As always, thanks for being a part of this great community!

~mattie_p, general manager

dotdotdot writes:

"Joaquin 'El Chapo' Guzman used high-tech gadgetry to elude an international manhunt for 13 years.

Some of the communications equipment Guzman used was not generally available to consumers. The sophistication of the gear and Guzman's diligence deeply impressed investigators who were pursuing him. Among other practices, Guzman employed counter-surveillance scanners to detect transmitters hidden in rooms or carried by people with whom he was meeting.

The officials would not discuss the specific methods used over the last 13 years."

Ed's Note: There is more information in the article, although not in as much detail as I would have liked. Nevertheless, I would recommend giving it a read.

lhsi writes:

"The Guardian has revealed that GCHQ has been collecting the images of millions of Yahoo! webcam chat users, whether or not they were intelligence targets.

In one six-month period in 2008 alone, the agency collected webcam imagery including substantial quantities of sexually explicit communications from more than 1.8 million Yahoo user accounts globally.

Yahoo reacted furiously to the webcam interception when approached by the Guardian. The company denied any prior knowledge of the program, accusing the agencies of 'a whole new level of violation of our users' privacy'.

According to the documents provided by Edward Snowden, the system, called Optic Nerve, saved one image every five minutes from Yahoo! users' feeds. These users, the documents reveals, were 'unselected', i.e. indiscriminately targeted. GCHQ doesn't have the technical means to make sure no images of UK or US citizens are collected and stored by the system."

McGruber writes:

"The Atlanta Journal Constitution reports that Atlanta Police plan to have as many as 12,000 cameras installed in the city.

'Atlanta is really on the leading edge of work in this area,' said William Flynn, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) deputy assistant secretary of infrastructure protection. 'We spend a lot of our attention on preparedness, protection, prevention. This kind of technology is the best use of those efforts and the best use of our resources.'

We've even been able to capture a murder on film,' said Atlanta Police Lt. LeAnne Browning, a supervisor at the video integration center where footage from more than 2,700 cameras is monitored.

I'm sure that was of great comfort to the murder victim and his/her loved ones."

nobbis writes:

"Crime rates could be affected by climate change, according to economist Matthew Ranson quoted in a New Scientist article. Criminologists note that warm days see more offences, and Ranson used FBI crime data along with weather records to estimate the potential impact of increased temperatures on crime figures. His model estimates a rise in crime rates of between 0.5 and 3.1 percent if the world warms by 2.8 degrees by 2100. This would equate to an extra 22,000 murders in the US by that time.

Other researches think offending rates will fall when it is simply to hot to go out."

Rich26189 writes:

"In a somewhat pre-emptive move Google is lobbying against state legislation that would ban drivers from using Google Glass while driving. I, for one, would like to see such legislation passed. There is enough distracted driving due to hand-held cell phones and Google Glass would just be just one more task for the brain to cope with.

This from Reuters:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/02/25/us-googl e-glass-lobbying-idUSBREA1O0P920140225"

Papas Fritas writes:

"Last October, Bruce Schneier speculated that the three characteristics of a good backdoor are a low chance of discovery, high deniability if discovered, and minimal conspiracy to implement. He now says that the critical iOS and OSX vulnerability that Apple patched last week meets these criteria, and could be an example of a deliberate change by a bad actor:

Look at the code. What caused the vulnerability is a single line of code: a second "goto fail;" statement. Since that statement isn't a conditional, it causes the whole procedure to terminate ... Was this done on purpose? I have no idea. But if I wanted to do something like this on purpose, this is exactly how I would do it.

He later added that 'if the Apple auditing system is any good, they will be able to trace this errant goto line to the specific login that made the change.'

Steve Bellovin, professor of Computer Science in Columbia University and Chief Technologist of the Federal Trade Commission, has another take on the vulnerability: 'It may have been an accident; If it was enemy action, it was fairly clumsy.'"