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digitalderbs writes
"The director of the U.S. government office that monitors scientific misconduct in biomedical research has resigned after 2 years out of frustration with the 'remarkably dysfunctional' federal bureaucracy. David Wright, director of the Office of Research Integrity (ORI), writes in a scathing resignation letter obtained by ScienceInsider that the huge amount of time he spent trying to get things done made much of his time at ORI 'the very worst job I have ever had.'"
dx3bydt3 writes:
"This time of year, near the vernal equinox is a particularly busy time for fireballs. There is no definitive explanation as to why this is. The frequency of sporadic meteors, is at its lowest this time of year. This is because the part of the sky where meteors hit "head on", due to the direction of the earth's travel, is low in the night sky in March. Despite this, for some reason, the frequency of fireballs tends to increase. There have been numerous reports of bright meteors this month, one in New Mexico, one in Yellowknife, and multiple sightings last week in Eastern Canada. This article discusses the phenomenon."
lhsi writes:
Which?, a UK consumer group, has started a new campaign to fix problems with slow broadband speeds. This comes after a survey which found that 45% of customers have problems with download speeds. A voluntary code of conduct is currently in place, however Which? said that "in practice it supported the code but it was voluntary, not compulsory and providers needed to go further. Rather than providing an estimated speed range that a customer could expect to receive, providers should pinpoint a more accurate speed that customers can expect at their home address and provide this in writing."
The campaign is calling on providers to:
- Give customers written speed estimates at the start of the contract, expressed as a range and an accurate estimate for your home within that range.
- Allow people to exit contracts without penalty at any point if they can't get the minimum speed.
- Fix loss of connection as quickly as possible and refund people for loss of service.
- Cut out the jargon - give consumers information they understand and take responsibility for fixing problems, without the need for multiple contacts.
An anonymous coward writes:
"Three weeks ago, video game reviewer and online columnist Jim Sterling used his weekly "Jimquisition" video column (warning: NSFW) at The Escapist to address 'the ever thorny issue' of viewers using ad-blockers while watching his content.
As Mr Sterling relies entirely on ads on The Escapist and his YouTube channel for his income and isn't exactly known for pulling punches regardless of topic, it may have come as a surprise to many that he expressed considerable understanding for those who choose to block ads [transcribed and slightly censored by the submitter]:
"No, I don't like it when someone views my work with Adblock, but I get it. I absolutely understand it, and I find it hard to judge anybody who does it. If I'm p---ed off at anyone, it's the advertisers; those reckless buffoons who brought up intrusive pop-ups, auto-playing video ads, and those f---ing banners with the smileys that scream "SAY SOMETHING" at you.
'There is this horrible cycle in place, if you didn't know, where the less ads that get viewed, the worse the ads are, because the less scrupulous commercial companies will go after the more desperate venues. What this means is, the more you ad-block, the worse the ads actually get.'
After asking his viewers to 'kindly consider' viewing his videos with Adblock disabled (and expressing some considerable distaste for those who publicly state that they block the ads and still insists on criticising his work), Sterling willingly conceded that ads on web sites can represent a real problem for users:
'When ads break web sites, when they ruin your browsing or are offensive to you on some level, how the hell can I blame you for wanting to obliterate them? I can't!'
Whether one likes Mr Sterling's videos or not, he no doubt has a point. Ads are the only available source of revenue for many web sites and content producers, but they have little or no influence over the kind of ads the ad provider serves through their site. As we all know, intrusive ads can significantly degrade the browsing experience and even be a malware vector. Besides asking their users to please endure potentially obnoxious ads, are there ways for web sites (like, say, SoylentNews) and content producers to make money from advertisements?
The story ends with an interesting twist: For those who wanted to support him but just couldn't stomach the ads, Sterling briefly published the URL to an Amazon wishlist as well as his P.O. box address at the end of the video. Last week he revealed that although he had done so in jest, several viewers had indeed sent him gifts (from 7:02 onwards)."
First time submitter freetown writes:
"With all the claims of quackery going on about alternative medicine, here is some more fodder. Effective treatment of age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is claimed to have been clinically observed in 74 cases of varying ages. Details from the Standard. Incidentally, there is also an article on the same topic at the US National Library of Medicine . Never mind the fact that in 2003, all those who had SARS but saw Traditional Chinese Medicine practitioners lived to tell the tale while many who walked into a hospital never walked out again and in some cases even took their doctors and nurses with them into death."
Anonymous Coward writes:
"Dan Luu, in his blog, suggests that editing binaries is something that we should consider from time to time. From that blog:
Editing binaries is a trick that comes in handy a few times a year. You don't often need to, but when you do, there's no alternative. When I mention patching binaries, I get one of two reactions: complete shock or no reaction at all. As far as I can tell, this is because most people have one of these two models of the world:
- There exists source code. Compilers do something to source code to make it runnable. If you change the source code, different things happen.
- There exists a processor. The processor takes some bits and decodes them to make things happen. If you change the bits, different things happen.
If you have the first view, breaking out a hex editor to modify a program is the action of a deranged lunatic. If you have the second view, editing binaries is the most natural thing in the world. Why wouldn't you just edit the binary?"
Anonymous Coward writes:
"An article regarding adding support for a json variant to PostgreSQl appears interesting. From the article:
This work is a confluence of two projects - our hstore and json, which [have been] in PostgreSQL for years in somewhat incomplete forms - hstore (10 years old!) implements key-value storage with binary storage and indexing, while json - document storage implemented as a text. I and Teodor Sigaev have started working on nested hstore more than year ago with support of Engine Yard and got working prototype with everything document-oriented storage needed (see our presentations in Ottawa, 2013, Dublin, 2013, http://www.sai.msu.su/~megera/postgres/talks/), which eventually happens to be binary storage for jsonb - a new data type, introduced by Andrew Dunstan, which has everything from json, but performs better, thanks to binary representation and indexing ! jsonb doesn't preserve an order of keys and keys are unique ( the last win)."
Magic Oddball writes:
"Mozilla's new VP of Content posted an announcement to his blog stating that sometime in the presumably-near future, "sponsored content" will begin appearing in the unused tiles on Firefox's New Tab Page. It will be rolled out first to desktop Firefox, then mobile and FirefoxOS. AdAge: "Mozilla hasn't made a final decision on how to treat third-party tracking technologies, but Mr. Herman said it is investigating solutions such as unique identifiers from Apple and Google as well as other third parties."
DigitalTrends pointed out, "if the scheme proves lucrative, it may be hard to resist rolling them out to all users in some shape or form" and TechCrunch feels it's a trial 'to see how users react before pushing promoted tiles to all users in their new tab pages.'"
Anonymous Coward writes:
PandoDaily is reporting an illegal agreement between seven tech giants, including Apple, Google, and Intel, to suppress wages for tens of thousands of tech employees. From the article:
According to multiple sources familiar with the case, several of these newly named companies were also subpoenaed by the DOJ for their investigation. A spokesperson for Ask.com confirmed that in 2009-10 the company was investigated by the DOJ, and agreed to cooperate fully with that investigation. Other companies confirmed off the record that they too had been subpoenaed around the same time.
Although the Department ultimately decided to focus its attention on just Adobe, Apple, Google, Intel, Intuit, Lucasfilm and Pixar, the emails and memos clearly name dozens more companies which, at least as far as Google and Apple executives were concerned, formed part of their wage-fixing cartel."
So, the first, and perhaps most important question is, what are we doing on defining who we are, and how we operate. I'd be lying if I said the changeover in leadership was smooth, but as with any new fledged organization, we're victim to growing pains. There's been one sticking issue on my TODO list though since I took over, and that's provide indication of where we're going and how we're going to get there.
As most of you know, I was in Asia for two weeks due to my corporate job. During that time, I worked out a basic plan of where we are going to go. Not long after I returned from Asia, I wrote an email to the staff mailing list to act as a guiding statement, in lieu of a full manifesto. Unfortunately, my writing time has been curtailed by work, and other day-to-day Soylent operations, so as a down payment on that manifesto, I'd like to share that email publicly. It has been slightly edited for clarity, and to correct some misconceptions from the original. Contextual edits are marked in brackets.
Hey all,
So after two long weeks, I'm finally back home, resting and recovering from a ton of jetlag. I've caught up with recent events, and am finally able to take the time to lay out a clear vision for the future of the site, which is something that I know you have been promised now for some time.
First, I would like to formally announce that we will be organized as a nonprofit ([to become the equivalent] section 501(c) of U.S. tax law). I can hear you thinking, "why a nonprofit, and isn't this something the community should decide? These are valid and excellent questions, and I will address them one by one:
First, the nonprofit thing. To be very blunt, this is a matter of personal values, and commitment to the community. Slashdot sold out relatively early in its life, and changed from owner to owner until CmdrTaco resigned. While this process took over a decade, I consider that to be an exception to the rule. Plenty of other sites have been bought, and then quickly destroyed by greedy PHBs. While, given our current user base, I realize that as a for-profit business we could become rich and then sell out, it would be a betrayal of everything we forked from Slashdot for, a betrayal of the community. I'm not someone to take the money and run; I'm here because I believe we can change the world, and I stand by my word.
A nonprofit organization exists to further its mission, and frankly, I'm unaware (at least in the United States) of any major news source beside Wikinews which isn't for-profit. If we became a for-profit business, its possible (perhaps likely) that sooner or later, someone would offer the board of directors a *shit ton* of money, and to be honest, it is difficult for anyone to say no when a seven digit paycheck is staring them in the face. Slashdot, Digg, SourceForge, and many other sites have been bought out, and subsequently dismantled with the goal of profit and making money. Reddit is an anomaly having been bought out, but remaining largely independent of its mother ship. Furthermore, as a nonprofit, we won't have a corporate overlord that we have to please. We can report the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. I realize that perhaps its passe, but I'm serious when I say we are going to change the world.
As we become more and more established, I'd like to transition to a world where we can be both an aggregator of news, *and* a primary news source. We can hire full-time editors, and find people to help train our editors, both volunteer and paid, to bring us up to standards on par with ArsTechnica, Engadget, and other large names in this field.
This won't happen overnight. Here's my tentative list of where I want us to be in one year; these goals may seem a bit modest but I would like our goals to be reasonable, and then have us exceed them if possible:
- [To become the equivalent of] a federally approved (tax-exempt) 501(c) nonprofit organization
- I expect this to take anywhere between 3-6 months, unlike for-profits, the registration process for these is long and arduous
- Will require the creation of bylaws, board of trustees, etc.
- All site assets will be transferred to this once we're founded
- Selection of a permanent name (within next few weeks, but listing here for completion)
- SoylentNews Manifesto to provide detail on how we will organize ourselves to strengthen the site and keep it running smoothly
- SoylentNews Governance Model (see below)
- Sufficient income to cover server hosting expenses
- 5M pageviews daily by slash's internal count (slash reports ~2M pageviews daily at this point)
- Average 30-40 comments per article
- Sufficient income to support self-hosted servers vs. Linode (dedicated hardware/racks vs. Linode)
- Sufficient income to allow us to hire at least 2-3 people *if necessary*
Because nonprofits need to jump through a lot of hoops and are subject to a lot of laws and scrutiny, the governance model for the nonprofit itself will be fairly traditional, with a board of directors, written bylaws, etc. That being said, for the most part, Soylent will not be directly affected by this, which acts as a nice segue to my next points.
You may be questioning how I can definitively say that this is something we're doing without polling the community. The answer here is that it falls in the category of an implementation detail. We are subservient to the community, just as a fire hall is subservient to its community. The community isn't directly affected by us being for-profit or nonprofit, they just want a site that's better than the other site, and no risk that we're going to Beta them (as well as being free of the slant).
For the most part, the relationship between the nonprofit and the "SoylentNews" site itself will leave the site relatively free to set its own destiny. My plan for this relationship will be similar to that between the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikipedia, or SPI and Debian, or the original relationship between the federal government and the states in the United States. I'd like to see a future where there are host of Soylent-like sites on other topics, not just technical ones. The most popular articles on Slashdot were those involving politics, but a lot argued that they were rather off-topic for the site. Instead of trying to expand SN's mission, I'd rather see us have a "U.S. Current Events" site or similar, and perhaps a network of interconnected sites under a common constitution which outlines the rights and responsibilities each site has.
Aside from matters of law, each site will be free to mostly run and govern itself. While perhaps it is wishful thinking that we'll have more than just Soylent, there needs to be a clear separation of where the nonprofit ends, and where Soylent begins, lest we end up like for-profit projects where the community takes a back-seat to business needs. By having a defined relationship between the two at the get-go, the grounds on which an elected or appointed board of trustees can interfere with a community-governed site will be strictly limited. What we need is our "Freedom of the Press and Associated Rights" constitution, which will form the basis of the founding bylaws of the nonprofit, and then from there, work on creating a governance model for Soylent with the community, in which Soylent is represented and shielded by the nonprofit in matters of law, business, finance, and the like.
That being said, it has become clear that we need to become incorporated and organized as soon as possible so that we can legally represent ourselves in a sane and viable manner, as well as have an organization to shield individual people from specific prosecution should we ever manage to tick anyone else off. While this has always been the plan, it has become an absolute immediate priority lest another crisis come and make our lives miserable. To this end, Matt [will] post a journal article detailing the legal steps that we will take in the near term to set up the nonprofit.
--NCommander
I realize a lot of you probably wanted something more concrete, but we've been hashing out a lot of things to get to this point. When I took over, I promised the staff and the community that we would have transparency, and I intend to honour that promise for as long as I am in charge. I've said it before, and I will say it again, we are subservient to the community, and serve to fill the needs of that community.
This brings me to my next point. It's been raised that there are concerns with us being (legally) based in the United States. Given recent revelations, its fair to said many of these concerns are valid, and should be addressed. However, incorporation (especially as a non-profit) is difficult, and frequently requires local residency, fluency in the local language, and a strong understanding of local legal system. Furthermore, it is impossible for me to go through the legal codes of every country, determine fact from fiction, and comparatively weigh pros and balances.
I am not against the concept of international incorporation, and the option will remain open for the future. The problem here is specifically initial incorporation. Furthermore, despite everything, I do feeling the United States still has some of the strongest protections for bloggers, journalists, and freedom of press. I'm aware this is an issue that many feel very strongly about, so if you're interested in seeing us incorporate outside the United States, then we need you to step forward, and make yourself known. Come find me on IRC, and we'll go into depth on what is required, and what is expected.
For my part, I'm going to write up a rather in-depth pros and cons going through various case law, business regulations, and such to determine what we get for incorporate within the United States. I'm working with Matt to get a definitive list of questions we need answers to know to seriously consider for any given locale. Incorporation as a non-for-profit is a serious matter, and requires commitment and dedication to see the process to the end. If you're willing to put in the hours, accept any legal responsibilities required, and act as a definitive guru, then you're welcome to step up and make your case for your country.
Do not volunteer for this lightly! I'm going write an extremely detailed dissertation on United States incorporation, likely to be at least 10,000 words long. I expect the same of anyone else who has the commitment and drive to see this through. It will contain answers to the 'important considerations' such as citizenship requirements, legal reporting on matters of finance, as well as summarization (with citations) of journalist protections, relevant case law, and the like, both positive and negative. By taking on this responsibility, you are willing to essentially take charge on the bureaucratic aspects of our legal foundation.
The call for volunteers shall remain open one (1) week from the posting of this article. If no one steps forth to take on the responsibility, we will incorporate in the United States by default. We need to get incorporated both for the legal protections it provides, and to start building sources of funding so this isn't something that can be held up for months with endless discussion. I hope to have a report put together on the United States (with opinions of select states) within a week or two, followed by a discussion period should any viable alternatives step forward.
With that covered, I'd like to move onto talking about our progress on fulfilling our promise to hold a public vote on the site name. We're now over a month since go-live, and with each passing day SoylentNews as a name becomes more and more entrenched. I would have already liked to have the vote, and renamed the site, but as it stands, we're not just there yet. The biggest hold up is we don't have a realistic way to vote on issues; Poll Booth is unacceptable for this role.
Now, there are a million and one online survey sites which we could use, as well as various methods of polling packages. We could use one of these to get the job done quickly, but this is a case where its more important to get it right. We're going to have a future where a fair number of issues will be voted on by the community to be implemented by the staff. Furthermore, we value the privacy of our users. You may have noticed that we don't use anything like Google Analytic or the like on this site, nor do we log IPs of visitors. The only information we collect is a IPLD (MD5SUM salted hash) of the IP, a user name, salted password, and an email address (plus whatever a user enters in their profile).
We can't be compelled to hand over what we don't have, and such any voting infrastructure needs to be something we control, and something the community can audit. I won't pretend that we will have a perfect system the time around, but several devs have been hard at work at building an email based voting system, as well as looking into seeing if we can modify the Polling Booth to be acceptable for such votes. I'll allow our devs to speak for themselves, but I'm hoping we can demo the voting system, and get the ball rolling on the vote this week.
This unfortunately brings me to a less happy subject. We've recently received what we consider a creditable threat against the site, with a supposed vulnerable in slash that will allow someone to own the site. Now, we knew going into this that security was always going to be a concern, especially as we're still tied to Apache 1.3. With threats being made, it was time to, as they say, step up our A game, and go through all the entire backend, make sure that everything is reasonably documented. A complete overview of the most recent round of updates can be found in my journal
Most of our backend infrastructure was put together rather hastily as we went towards go-live with rather little documentation, and hadn't been audited since the initial startup. One thing we found was that it was possible to log into the production machine with an easily guessed username and password which was left open to the world. The account (slash) was non-root nor sudo access, but did have read access to the configuration files that drive slashcode, including the database credentials. I've gone through the auth.log and doesn't appear that this was ever discovered, and we're reasonably sure that no one ever got into the production boxes in this manner. We've rectified the mistake, and implemented strong SSH usage policies to prevent this from reoccurring (see my journal for full details on the new policies). We became aware of this misconfiguration on Thursday shortly after we came back from our scheduled down time, and the mistake was immediately rectified. As we don't believe we were compromised, I held off on public disclosure until we finished auditing and hardening lest it service as an invitation to hit us while we were down. As this is our first known security issue, feedback on our disclosure practices is welcome.
As part of this audit, we've established secure ways to access our nodes, a list of all hardware and what they're running, and a set of directions to setup new node from scratch. Furthermore, I went through and created AppArmor profiles for Apache which should hopefully stop any arbitrary code execution from doing anything useful. The full details are documented on the wiki, and we invite anyone interested to audit slashcode or our infrastructure (documented fully on the wiki) and provide comments.
It has been an exhausting week to say the least, but I feel we're firmly on track. As I said in the vision statement, I intend us to change the world, one person at a time, and one step at a time, and we've finally got that first step planted in the ground. Now we just need to move forward.
As something of a tradition, I normally post stats when I finish one of these letters. Unfortunately, our new varnish config skewed slashcode's internal stat counter, so to celebrate, here's the output of varnishstat, recording hits for the last 17 hours.
0+17:41:39 Hitrate ratio: 1 1 1 Hitrate avg: 0.8705 0.8705 0.8705 110979 0.00 1.74 client_conn - Client connections accepted 269748 0.00 4.23 client_req - Client requests received 225438 0.00 3.54 cache_hit - Cache hits 713 0.00 0.01 cache_hitpass - Cache hits for pass 33527 0.00 0.53 cache_miss - Cache misses 4899 0.00 0.08 backend_conn - Backend conn. success 446 0.00 0.01 backend_unhealthy - Backend conn. not attempted 3 0.00 0.00 backend_fail - Backend conn. failures 38944 0.00 0.61 backend_reuse - Backend conn. reuses 2019 0.00 0.03 backend_toolate - Backend conn. was closed 40971 0.00 0.64 backend_recycle - Backend conn. recycles 22829 0.00 0.36 fetch_length - Fetch with Length 17505 0.00 0.27 fetch_chunked - Fetch chunked 200 0.00 0.00 fetch_close - Fetch wanted close 1 0.00 0.00 fetch_failed - Fetch failed 691 0.00 0.01 fetch_304 - Fetch no body (304)
NCommander also adds: Corrected a minor factual error. We collect IPLDs on all posts. Slash also keeps an internal hit log with IPLDs for all his for 60 hours. Admins do get their IPs logged as a way to SAN check against abuse.
Papas Fritas wrote:
Jamal Andress writes that creationists are grumbling about Neil deGrasse Tyson's "Cosmos: A Space-Time Odyssey" because the show doesn't include creationist theories about the universe's origins. "Do they ever give a creationist any time?" says creationist Danny Falkner who appeared on "The Janet Mefford Show" to complain. "I was struck in the first episode where he talked about science and how, you know, all ideas are discussed, you know, everything is up for discussion it's all on the table and I thought to myself, 'No, consideration of special creation is definitely not open for discussion,' it would seem."
Tyson recently said science reporting should not be balanced with nonscientific claims, so it seems unlikely he would offer creationism a platform for their views on his own show. "There was a time when science and religion kind of co-existed under the same roof," says Tyson. "I find it odd that we live in a time where people who are strongly religious want to make everyone else the same kind of religious way they are, and break down the door of the science classroom to put their religious philosophies in there." The good thing about science says Tyson is that it's true whether you believe in it or not.
kebes writes:
Theoretical physicist Sean Carroll has written an opinion-piece in the New York Times about the role of "naturalness" in physics. Searching for physical theories that seem 'natural', as in they explain rather than introduce seeming contrivance and coincidence, has been very fruitful in science. For example, the recent BICEP2 results--measuring the imprint of gravitational waves on the very early universe--help vindicate the theory of inflation, which was developed in part to provide a more natural explanation for the seemingly unlikely state of the early universe (extremely homogeneous and 'low entropy'). Carroll's piece asks whether such reasoning also provides support for multiverse predictions, while equally questioning whether we can objectively judge naturalness, concluding:
Naturalness is a subtle criterion. In the case of inflationary cosmology, the drive to find a natural theory seems to have paid off handsomely, but perhaps other seemingly unnatural features of our world must simply be accepted. Ultimately it's nature, not us, that decides what's natural.
prospectacle writes about another possible shift from Win XP to Linux:
"With Microsoft ceasing to support Windows XP, the Tamil Nadu state government has advised its departments to switch to Bharat Operating System Solutions, also known as BOSS Linux.
BOSS Linux is developed by India's "National Resource Centre for Free/Open Source Software", which is financed by their Ministry of Communication and Information Technology. BOSS supports national languages including Bengali, Telugu, and Tamil.
Why would you develop your own entire operating system when you can just buy the newest version from Microsoft?"
"In a paper to be presented at the Association for Computing Machinery's Annual Symposium on the Theory of Computing in May, Nir Shavit, a professor in MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science suggests that Lock-free parallel algorithms may match performance of more complex wait-free algorithms. This may be especially important since today increases in processing power come from increasing the number of cores on a chip and not from traditional speed increases. From the article:
In theory, doubling the number of cores doubles the chip's efficiency, but splitting up computations so that they run efficiently in parallel isn't easy. On the other hand, say a trio of computer scientists from MIT, Israel's Technion, and Microsoft Research, neither is it as hard as had been feared.
In recent years, theoretical computer scientists have demonstrated ingenious alternatives called 'wait-free' algorithms, which guarantee that all cores will make progress in a fixed span of time. But deriving them from sequential code is extremely complicated, and commercial developers have largely neglected them.
In a paper to be presented at the Association for Computing Machinery's Annual Symposium on the Theory of Computing in May, Nir Shavit, a professor in MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science; his former student Dan Alistarh, who's now at Microsoft Research; and Keren Censor-Hillel of the Technion demonstrate a new analytic technique suggesting that, in a wide range of real-world cases, lock-free algorithms actually give wait-free performance."
Subsentient writes:
"I have a short attention span, a very short one, and I have very, abnormally poor energy levels, to such a point that while my physical strength can be up to snuff, my mind is always running at 8Mhz. I am a programmer. This is a problem. However, I find that some places are better to code at than others. If I can sit somewhere upright, looking down at the monitor, in a comfortable position, I can sometimes get some work done, and if my monitor is large, soft, and bright, I am better off still. Do soylentils have issues with location? What would you suggest for being able to sit down and code for hours, something I have NEVER been able to do?"
Mario writes:
"Herb Sutter has consolidated the C++ FAQ (formerly maintained by Bjarne and others in various places). The FAQ has also been restructured and now available at the official ISO-C++ homepage: http://isocpp.org/faq."
tkd-physics elaborates:
"The Standard C++ Foundation has put together a new 'unified' C++ FAQ, combining Marshall Cline's popular FAQ, Bjarne Stroustrup's FAQ pages, and many other sources. Check out http://isocpp.org/blog/2014/03/faq for the announcement. [Note I've already found a few places where the integration of all these sources is less than perfect. I suspect it will be a little while before all the necessary editing is complete. They are accepting both suggestions and volunteers.]"
Sir Finkus writes:
"As Microsoft begins to end support for Windows XP, many ATM operators are investigating Linux as an alternative. Microsoft will no longer provide updates for the operating system, which currently powers nearly 95% of the world's ATMs.
Operators say that they'd like to be able to upgrade their machines and operating system at the same time. They are also hampered by the high cost of upgrading machines and regulatory requirements. With the lifetime of a typical ATM being 10-15 years, companies would value more flexible upgrade schedules."
Xenex writes:
"In the wake of the Android Ware [Video] announcement, I have been giving thought to the impact these watches could have on our life. 'The more I read about smartwatches, the more I appreciate my "dumb" watches' writes Shawn Blanc. 'But I don't just wear a watch to know what time it is. Part of the reason I wear one is as an excuse not to pull out my iPhone.' Basically: when you look at a watch you see the time, when you look at a smartphone for the time you also see notifications. Avoiding my phone is definitely a factor for me nowadays, and a 'smart' watch might just be another distraction."
c0lo writes:
"New Republic runs a story on what seems (to me) to be an exaggerated obsession among Silicon Valley techs of needing to look young, even going to the extreme of undergoing cosmetic surgery.
Says the author:
In talking to dozens of people around Silicon Valley over the past eight months, engineers, entrepreneurs, money-men, [and] uncomfortably inquisitive cosmetic surgeons, I got the distinct sense that it's better to be perceived as naive and immature than to have voted in the 1980s.
The spirit seems to be captured best by the motto of a large I.T. services company operating in the bay: 'We Want People Who Have Their Best Work Ahead of Them, Not Behind Them.'
The story also cites Dan Scheinman, a former Cisco acquisition head who's proposal for Cisco to buy VMWare back in 2000 was not cleared by the Cisco's bureaucracy, who says that:
during a meeting with two bratty Zuckerberg wannabes, it hit him: Older entrepreneurs were 'the mother of all undervalued opportunities.' Indeed, of all the ways that V.C.s could be misled, the allure of youth ranked highest. The cutoff in investors' heads is 32. After 32, they [the V.C.] start to be a little skeptical.
The economics of the V.C. industry help explain why... Whereas a 500 percent return on a $2 million investment would be considered remarkable in any other line of work, the investments that sustain a large V.C. fund are the 'unicorns' and 'super-unicorns' that return 100x or 1,000x.
Finding themselves in the position of chasing 100x or 1,000x returns, V.C.s invariably tell themselves a story about youngsters. 'One of the reasons they collectively prefer youth is because youth has the potential for the black swan,' one V.C. told me of his competitors. 'It hasn't been marked down to reality yet. If I was at Google for five years, what's the chance I would be a black swan? A lot lower than if you never heard of me. That's the collective mentality.'
Speaking for myself, it almost makes falling for the sin of using cliches and exclaiming "Stop the world, I need to get off. I'm too old for this BS." What about you my fellow soylentnews netizens?"
chromas writes:
"From the Washington Post,
The massive cyberattack on Target last year unleashed efforts to protect consumers from crooks swiping credit card data from in-store transactions. But as retailers and regulators scramble to develop a solution, hackers have already moved on.
Most hackers are focusing their efforts on online transactions - increasingly with an eye on those conducted over smartphones or other mobile devices. While cyberattacks on physical systems, such as registers, card readers and gas pumps, have garnered a lot of attention lately, shoppers' online transactions are much more likely to fall victim to hackers, security experts say.
Mobile malware accounts for a small part of data breaches - Cisco estimates that malicious software targeted at mobile devices comprise only 1.2 percent of all Web malware - but security experts say it is growing at a frightening pace. MacAfee recently reported that the number of malware targeting Google's Android operating system nearly tripled between 2012 and 2013, to 3.7 million.
"Although not a significant percentage, it is still worth noting because mobile malware is clearly an emerging - and logical - area of exploration for malware developers," Cisco researchers wrote in the firm's latest annual report outlining major security threats."
Appalbarry writes:
"The National Post reports that the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) was involved in planning a response to First Nations "Idle No More" protests.
The legible parts of the report and corresponding PowerPoint presentation, however, show that Ottawa, helped in no small part by CSIS, was planning for every eventuality, concerned by the decentralized, leaderless nature of the protests and the multiple motivations and influences that drove them.
CSIS had previously denied it had any role in monitoring the movement. After reports last summer that the spy agency and its anti-terrorism section had been keeping a watchful eye, the agency said it was only assessing threats against the Idle No More protesters.
Idle No More was a pacifist, grassroots campaign by native organizations to press the government to address their issues. Despite government and CSIS claims to the contrary it was assumed that they were under surveillance.
Canada has a long history of secret surveillance of protest and left wing groups."
mendax writes:
"The New York Times is reporting, "A top congressional intelligence official said on Sunday that American counterintelligence officials are virtually unanimous in believing that Edward J. Snowden is 'under the influence of Russian intelligence services.' That suggestion came from Representative Mike Rogers, the Michigan Republican who is chairman of the Intelligence Committee.
Ben Wizner, an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer who advises Mr. Snowden, has vigorously rejected Mr. Rogers' contentions, noting that Mr. Snowden tried to gain asylum in several other countries before settling in Russia. There has been no public indication that investigators for the F.B.I., the N.S.A. or the Pentagon have uncovered evidence that Mr. Snowden received assistance from any foreign intelligence service."
chromas writes:
According to The Wall Street Journal,
Apple Inc. is in talks with Comcast Corp. about teaming up for a streaming-television service that would use an Apple set-top box and get special treatment on Comcast's cables to ensure it bypasses congestion on the Web, people familiar with the matter say.
The discussions between the world's most valuable company and the nation's largest cable provider are still in early stages and many hurdles remain. But the deal, if sealed, would mark a new level of cooperation and integration between a technology company and a cable provider to modernize TV viewing.
pbnjoe writes:
"CBC has a report on apparent price fixing by the country's top carriers.
Canada's big three wireless carriers have hiked the base prices for new plans by $5 in most markets over the past two months.
Rogers, Telus, and Bell Mobility now all charge $80 per month for new smartphone plans with a new contract, $5 more than what many of those same plans cost when they were introduced last year. The prices for other smartphone plans with more data cost upwards of $145.
The price hikes affect every province except Manitoba and Saskatchewan.
This exclusion appears to be due to the strong local competition from MTS and SaskTel, respectively; equivalent plans there are $55 cheaper than elsewhere in the country.
The $80 a month plan includes 500 MB of data, unlimited nationwide calling, unlimited messaging, voicemail and call display.
Existing plans are unaffected.
For more, here's Ars Technica's coverage of the story."
All of the trend lines on this site are positive except one: story submissions. After an initial surge, they have been gradually declining despite users and page views climbing. Tonight the submission queue ran dry. Janrinok and I could go scrounging, as we sometimes do, but this needs to be addressed.
We have around four thousand registered users, and who knows how may AC's reading along. We can do better.
I challenge each of you to submit stories on a regular basis, at whatever frequency you find comfortable. Really, if even half of us submitted a story once a week, we would have more than we could ever use. Once a day, once a week, once a month, whatever you can handle, send it in.
Bookmark this link: http://soylentnews.org/submit.pl - use it. Give us so many stories that we can select the cream of the crop and stun you with how amazing our community is. Make it happen.
I'm going to leave this story on top for a while, and see what is waiting for us when I get to work in the morning. Wow me, please.
This is our news site. There are others like it, but this one is ours. Its success is in your hands.
[UPDATE: We have received, in less than 12 hours, more submissions than we had the whole rest of the weekend. THANK YOU SO MUCH, and please, keep them coming. Even one story a month matters. Let the party re-commence. :) ]
janrinok writes:
From an ARS Technica story:
Linux 3.15, expected to be released in mid-2014, "will feature a large number of ACPI and power management updates" and allow Linux-based computers to suspend and resume faster, Phoronix reported today.
'Visible to users with the Linux 3.15 kernel should be reduced time for system suspend and resuming, thanks to the enabling of more asynchronous threads,' the article said, pointing to a list of changes posted by Rafael Wysocki, an Intel employee who maintains the Linux kernel's core power management code. Basic support for Nvidia's Maxwell architecture is also in the works for Linux 3.15.
janrinok writes:
"A paper published jointly by University of Warwick and Ruhr-University Bochum states that 'Researchers have found that preterm children are at an increased risk of having general cognitive and mathematic problems.'"
From the paper:
Dyscalculia, a learning disorder which involves frequent problems with everyday arithmetic tasks, is diagnosed when children do worse in maths than would be expected based on their general intelligence. Study co-author Professor Dieter Wolke from the University of Warwick explained, 'Mathematic impairment is not the same as dyscalculia. A child with both low IQ and low mathematic abilities can have general mathematic impairment without suffering from dyscalculia'.
The study's results, which looked at 922 children between the ages of seven and nine, showed that there is no direct correlation between preterm births and dyscalculia. However, the authors showed that being small-for-gestational-age is an indicator of whether a child is likely to have dyscalculia.
Children who are born very preterm, before 32 weeks, of gestational age have a 39.4% chance of having general mathematic impairment compared to 14.9% of those born at term (39 to 41 weeks), which translates into a significantly increased odds ratio of 3.22 (after controlling for child sex, socioeconomic background and small-for-gestational-age birth). In contrast, very preterm children's risk of being diagnosed with dyscalculia was with an odds ratio of 1.62 (22.6%) compared with term controls (13.7%) not significantly increased. 'What this study has shown is that preterm children are not at an increased risk of having dyscalculia, but their risk may be increased if they were born small for gestational age', says Professor Wolke.
We, along with similar sites, are always seeking new contributors to provide the stories that we publish. Member cosurgi writes of a new idea being suggested by coindesk for sites such as ourselves - the community paying contributors by way of a tip for each high quality submission that is eventually published. While we are certainly not considering such a move ourselves - the arrangement would be between the readers and the submitter of the story - the article is worth a read. It also looks at various other ways that digital currency might be used. The relevant part relating to tips is some way down the page. From the article:
One thing that Irdial's blog commends is the use of bitcoin to civilise Internet discourse, and that's a very sane aspiration. It points out that by allowing readers to upvote comments on community sites by tipping the originator a small amount of cybercurrency, only those that genuinely seem valuable will be promoted - and people will concentrate on writing such posts, instead of yammering away with trollish unpleasantries.
Such an idea would go a long way towards solving another problem of online content - finding stuff that's worth your time. A popular site with lots of tips would attract attention without having to market itself.