SoylentNews

Teckla writes:

Google has big plans to compete more aggressively against cloud computing giant Amazon and capture their piece of a multi-billion dollar pie that's projected to continue growing at least through 2020. From the article:

Holzle and his "TI" [technical infrastructure] engineers provide the infrastructure - the global computer - that these [Google] teams use in delivering their web and mobile services to millions upon millions of people. He is, in short, the man most responsible for ensuring that these Google services run as efficiently as they do.

But this past January, Holzle sent a thunderclap of a corporate memo across the company, laying out a new direction for both his team and the entire Google empire. In the months to come, he wrote, he and his team would be giving a little less attention to internal "customers" like Google Search and Gmail, so that they could concentrate on serving a new kind of customer outside the company. They were preparing a major expansion of the company's cloud computing services - services that let outside businesses or software developers run their own software atop Google's global infrastructure. "We will spend the majority of our development efforts on this New World," wrote Holzle. "Every developer will want to live in this world ... and it's our job to build it."

Google has long offered cloud services that let outsiders build websites and other applications without buying, installing, or operating their own computer hardware. It unveiled a service called Google App Engine in 2008, and in 2012, it followed with a sister service, Google Compute Engine. But in this market - a market that represents the future of computing - Google has always trailed Jeff Bezos and Amazon, who pioneered the idea. And for years, Holzle and company treated cloud computing as a sideline. Now, he says Google is intent on turning this into an enormous business, a business whose revenues could even surpass what the company pulls in from online advertising.

lhsi writes:

In a move to combat cyber-attacks, the UK has a new Team on the way:

The UK Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-UK) will be unveiled on the 31st March, and will work on developing the UK's cyber resilience to state-sponsored and criminal attacks on critical systems, including those controlling the national energy supply and within government departments, according to the Cabinet Office.

Neil Cassidy, former cyberdefence lead at government supplier Qinetiq, was made deputy director of operations. Andrew Whittaker, a former Foreign Office crisis management expert, was given the overall deputy director role.

The government has been co-ordinating with law enforcement bodies and the various industry-specific CERTs, including those based out of GCHQ and the Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure, over the last year on creating an effective response unit.

One of the key participants was the new National Cyber Crime Unit (NCCU), launched in October 2013, as part of the National Crime Agency. Kevin Williams, head of partnership engagement at the NCCU, said there had been 'really good engagement' thus far with CERT-UK, which will be based at an as-yet undisclosed London location.

kef writes:

In the future, when your mobile or tablet runs out of battery, you could just recharge it by putting it out in the sun. Nanyang Technological University (NTU) scientists have developed a next-generation solar cell material which can also emit light, in addition to converting light to electricity. From the article:

This solar cell is developed from Perovskite, a promising material that could hold the key to creating high-efficiency, inexpensive solar cells. The new cells not only glow when electricity passes through them, but they can also be customised to emit different colours. Assistant Professor Sum said to the team's surprise, the new Perovskite solar cell glowed brightly when a laser beam was shone on it. This is a significant finding as most solar cell materials are good at absorbing light but are generally not expected to generate light. In fact, this highly luminescent new Perovskite material is also very suitable for the making of lasers.

"What we have discovered is that because it is a high quality material, and very durable under light exposure, it can capture light particles and convert them to electricity, or vice versa," said Asst Prof Sum, a Singaporean scientist at NTU's School of Physical and Mathematical Sciences (SPMS).

"By tuning the composition of the material, we can make it emit a wide range of colours, which also makes it suitable as a light emitting device, such as flat screen displays."

GungnirSniper writes:

A small study done by The Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education at The University of California, San Francisco, "suggests that e-cigarettes don't actually help people to quit smoking." However, of the 949 smokers in the study, only 88 used e-cigarettes, causing the study's researchers to "admit that their findings should be viewed with some caution."

World Science reports "They also found that e-cigarette use was more commmon among women, younger adults and people with less education." Last year, the US Centers for Disease Control reported e-cigarette use more than doubled among U.S. middle and high school students from 2011-2012. The lack of solid research, potential youth market, and abundance of caution have had anti-tobacco activists and researchers pushing for a ban on advertising of e-cigarettes.

NPR has a recently story about "vaping" (using e-cigarettes) indoors and in the workplace.

If you smoke, have you been able to cut back your smoking or quit thanks to electronic cigarettes? If you do not smoke, does it bother you that others use e-cigarettes indoors?

mechanicjay writes:

While a bit pop-culture and light hearted, it's an indelible part of every geek's soul, so perhaps it's worthy of a front page discussion:

Over at Movie Pilot, Alex Rosenhiem puts forth a compelling argument for preservation of art and of shared cultural experience and why that matters. He couches it in the context of revisionism as applied to the Han/Greedo Cantina scene, long a source of nerd rage, countless arguments and is even it's own meme. The moment is a pivotal one for the development of the Han Solo character, but more importantly Rosenhiem argues that Art, Star Wars included, gives us access to the past and where we were at a certain point in time when we first experienced it.

lhsi writes:

"It has been discovered that some people have been accidentally donating money to a different charity than they intended by using the wrong SMS keyword. In the last few days, a lot of donations have been made to the Cancer Research UK charity, however some have accidentally been made to Unicef instead where mobile users sent a text with the message "DONATE" instead of "BEAT" to a specific shortcode.

Unicef has said, "We contacted Cancer Research [UK] as soon as we became aware of what was happening. Unicef and Cancer Research [UK] have agreed that these donations will be received in full by Cancer Research [UK]."

Even knowing which word to use didn't help some people as their smartphone auto-corrected "BEAT" to "BEAR", and they were subsequently sent information about adopting a polar bear from the WWF."

McGruber writes:

"Former United States President Jimmy Carter defended the disclosures by fugitive NSA contractor Edward Snowden on Monday, saying revelations that U.S. intelligence agencies were collecting meta-data of Americans' phone calls and e-mails have been 'probably constructive in the long run.'

'I think it's wrong,' President Carter said of the NSA program. 'I think it's an intrusion on one of the basic human rights of Americans, is to have some degree of privacy if we don't want other people to read what we communicate.'"

SpaceMan writes:

Former US President Jimmy Carter has said he hand-writes letters to foreign and US leaders in an effort to evade what he described as pervasive US electronic surveillance.

The former president runs The Carter Center, which has pursued human rights, humanitarian work and offered political mediation and election monitoring since he left office in 1981.

microtodd writes:

In the wake of Cisco's announcement of entering the cloud market, there are several business case analyses that provide insight into whether the cloud is a good thing or not. Of course there are always competing factors between management and IT, which usually boils down to short-term vs long-term cost and financials vs technicals. What do the Soylenters think? Is the cost savings worth the security risks? Are the technical benefits of reliability worth delegating some administrative control?

lhsi writes:

A petition on Change.org was created: "Jimmy Wales, Founder of Wikipedia: Create and enforce new policies that allow for true scientific discourse about holistic approaches to healing."

Jimmy Wales responded.

No, you have to be kidding me. Every single person who signed this petition needs to go back to check their premises and think harder about what it means to be honest, factual, truthful.

Wikipedia's policies around this kind of thing are exactly spot-on and correct. If you can get your work published in respectable scientific journals that is to say, if you can produce evidence through replicable scientific experiments, then Wikipedia will cover it appropriately. What we won't do is pretend that the work of lunatic charlatans is the equivalent of "true scientific discourse". It isn't.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

From the MIT press release,"Engineers design 'living materials.' Hybrid materials combine bacterial cells with nonliving elements that can conduct electricity or emit light." Is this the beginning of organic technology?

lhsi writes:

A "systemic model of neurotransmitter interactions to address questions of alcohol abuse and withdrawal" has been presented that aims to represent alcohol dependency.

We present a heuristic model of neurotransmitters that combines a neurochemical interaction matrix at the biochemical level with a mobile describing the balances between pairs of neurotransmitters at the physiological and behavioral level. We investigate the effects of alcohol on the integrated neurotransmitter systems at both levels. The model simulation results are consistent with clinical and experimental observations. The model demonstrates that the drug diazepam for symptoms of alcohol withdrawal effectively reduces the imbalances between neurotransmitters. Moreover, the acetylcholine signal is suggested as a novel target for treatment of symptoms associated with alcohol withdrawal.

Rune of Doom writes:

A study carried out in collaboration with the International School of Advanced Studies proposes that loss of key individials, 'Wise Elders', from an animal community can lead to collective loss of information such as migration routes. The study describes modeling animal groups as an "adaptive stochastic network" that suffers when key nodes are lost.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/03/14032 0111934.htm

buswolley writes:

"https://www.creditwritedowns.com/2014/03/boes-shar p-shock-monetary-illusions.html

In a new paper "Money creation in the modern economy," the Bank of England admits that the pound is a fiat currency, explains how it is created, why this matters, and why virtually everything that economic textbooks say about money is wrong.

The authority of the Bank of England on these matters is not easily dismissed, and can represent a shift in thinking among the financial elites from traditional models to fiat centric models."

An anonymous coward writes:

"Article covering: http://arstechnica.com/security/2014/03/zero-day-v ulnerability-in-microsoft-word-under-active-attack

Tech net advisory:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/security/adviso ry/2953095"

Teckla writes:

"Mozilla's Board of Directors has appointed Brendan Eich CEO of Mozilla, with immediate effect."

Anonymous Coward writes:

"http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/ 18/truth-money-iou-bank-of-england-austerity

Back in the 1930s, Henry Ford is supposed to have remarked that it was a good thing that most Americans didn't know how banking really works, because if they did, 'there'd be a revolution before tomorrow morning.'

Last week, something remarkable happened. The Bank of England let the cat out of the bag. In a paper called "Money Creation in the Modern Economy", co-authored by three economists from the Bank's Monetary Analysis Directorate, they stated outright that most common assumptions of how banking works are simply wrong, and that the kind of populist, heterodox positions more ordinarily associated with groups such as Occupy Wall Street are correct. In doing so, they have effectively thrown the entire theoretical basis for austerity out of the window."

lhsi writes

Research from the British Medical Journal has found that a Placebo was as effective as Nicotine Patches for pregnant women trying to stop smoking.

Just over 400 women between 12-20 weeks gestation in France were part of a trial that looked at the effectiveness of Nicotine Patches among those trying to stop smoking. The researchers found that "complete abstinence was achieved by 5.5% (n=11) of women in the nicotine patch group and 5.1% (n=10) in the placebo patch group"."

digitalderbs writes:

"A perennial problem facing computer users is how to keep documents, pictures, music and other personal files synchronized between computers. Robust uni-directional solutions, like rsync, and bi-directional solutions, like unison, have existed for a long time. However, these tools require some degree of manual intervention on a periodic basis. Simplified tools like Dropbox and bittorrent sync have emerged as popular, useful and automated alternatives, but these rely on closed-source software, which could be subject to backdooring. Open source solutions, like OwnCloud, are gaining traction, but are these open source platform robust and easy enough to maintain for routine and daily use? Moreover, distributed and encrypted file systems, like Ceph, are increasingly easy to use, but many of these do not work between Linux and OS X or Windows operating systems. What are your experiences and thoughts?"

Anonymous Coward writes:

"By Patrick Howell O'Neill on March 23, 2014 | pat@dailydot.com

"Tor, the most popular anonymizing network on the Internet, gained over 10,000 new users this week in Turkey alone as protesters fought back against a government ban on Twitter.

The American social media network has been an important communications tool for millions of Turkish protesters fighting against what they see as the increasingly authoritarian administration of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.'Everyone will see how powerful the state of the Republic of Turkey is,' Erdogan said on Thursday as the government ban on Twitter began. Graph showing TOR usage

Twitter's role in Turkish unrest has been profound. Last year, protests were first organized and recorded on social media while state media ignored them. Dozens of Twitter users have been arrested in the country. During recent protest marches, Twitter helped record the events including the police response. The service has been used to extensively report on government corruption in the country.

Erdogan has called Twitter "a menace" and "an extreme version of lying" in the past. That's true in at least one way: Last year, the Turkish government hired thousands of young people to post propaganda on the social network. Tor works by encrypting a user's Internet traffic and bouncing it around the globe to various nodes, making Internet use virtually untraceable and unblockable by authorities. The service has gained prominence in recent years as it has been famously used by activists, journalists, and criminals to hide sensitive Internet usage. Users can download the Tor program at TorProject.org. If and when the Turkish government blocks that website, dozens of mirrors (digital copies) exist around the Internet that can keep the anonymity tool in the hands of protesters.

Many users are using this opportunity to encourage anyone who sympathizes with Turkish protesters or with Tor itself to donate bandwidth to the network by acting as a relay in the anonymity network. The Turkish government's aggressive action against freedom of speech show no sign of slowing, so it would be no surprise if the number of Tor users in the country keep rising as the administration's grip on the Internet gets tighter."

Other related links:

• http://www.dailydot.com/tags/turkey/
• http://www.dailydot.com/politics/twitter-banned-tu rkey/
• http://www.dailydot.com/society/turkey-taksim-squa re-riot-facebook-twitter/
• http://www.dailydot.com/news/turkey-arrests-protes ters-twitter/
• http://www.dailydot.com/news/turkey-internet-censo rship-clash-police/
• http://www.dailydot.com/news/turkey-twitter-gezi-a kp-propaganda/
• https://twitter.com/search?q=%23taksim&src=hash
• https://twitter.com/search?q=%23Tuerkiyede%C4%B0nt ernetSans%C3%BCr%C3%BC&src=hash
• https://twitter.com/PearsonDani/statuses/432256312 613679104
• http://www.dailydot.com/tags/tor
  
• https://www.torproject.org/docs/tor-doc-relay.html.en
• https://twitter.com/dailydot
• http://facebook.com/dailydot
• http://dailydot.tumblr.com/