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Papas Fritas writes:

Sebastian Anthony writes that Microsoft is setting an awful precedent by caving and issuing a fix for Windows XP. "Yes, tardy governments and IT administrators can breathe a little easier for a little bit longer," writes Anthony, "and yes, your mom and dad are yet again safe to use their old Windows XP beige box. But to what end? It's just delaying the inevitable." This won't be the only vulnerability found in XP adds Dwight Silverman. "If Microsoft makes an exception now, what about the flaw found after this one? And the next? And the one after that, ad infinitum?" Even though Microsoft has released a patch for the IE flaw, and Windows XP is included, it's time to move on really. "I don't want to hear that tired "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" line. Hey, XP IS broke, and it will just get more so over time. Upgrade to a newer version of Windows, or switch to another modern operating system, such as OS X or Linux."

Pav writes:

Set soon after the final episode, and starring Peter Tuddenham as Zen and Orac (the voice actor from the show) this is a fan project which never really got finished... until now. The film stocks have degraded somewhat, but damn, this is nerdy-cool. A first and second episode have been released so far, and it appears there are more to come. Blakes 7 was an innovative adult scifi series poduced by the BBC from 1978-1981, and has influenced many later works.

AnonTechie writes:

"Virtual periscope" could let submarines see up through the water's surface:

It's a classic scene from many a war movie - a submarine's presence is given away by its periscope protruding through the surface of the water. If submariners want to see what's up there, however, they really have no choice... although that may be about to change. Scientists at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology have devised a system that allows an underwater camera to look up through the surface from below, with a minimum of distortion. The system is called Stella Maris, which is short for Stellar Marine Refractive Imaging Sensor. It works by digitally altering the images from the camera, in order to compensate for the visual distortions caused by waves moving through the water's surface. Given that waves move in a random pattern, however, how can it know what sort of alterations are required?

The heart of the underwater imaging system is a camera, a pinhole array to admit light (a thin metal sheet with precise, laser-cut holes), a glass diffuser, and mirrors. Sunrays are projected through the pinholes to the diffuser, which is imaged by the camera, beside the distorted object of interest. The latter is then corrected for distortion.

"Raw images taken by a submerged camera are degraded by water-surface waves similarly to degradation of astronomical images by our atmosphere. We borrowed the concept from astronomers who use the Shack-Hartmann astronomical sensor on telescopes to counter blurring and distortion caused by layers of atmosphere," explains Schechner. "Stella Maris is a novel approach to a virtual periscope as it passively measures water and waves by imaging the refracted sun."

The unique technology gets around the inevitable distortion caused by the water-surface waves when using a submerged camera. According to Schechner, because of the sharp refractive differences between water and air, random waves at the interface present distortions that are worse than the distortion atmospheric turbulence creates for astronomers peering into space.

"When the water surface is wavy, sun-rays refract according to the waves and project onto the solar image plane," explains Schechner. "With the pinhole array, we obtain an array of tiny solar images on the diffuser." When all of the components work together, the Stella Maris system acts as both a wave sensor to estimate the water surface, and a viewing system to see the above surface image of interest through a computerized, 'reconstructed' surface.

AnonTechie writes:

Inside Facebook's Brilliant Plan - to hog your data. From the article:

Companies want to get information about people - their location, age, relationships, interests, preferences and much more - because when they have that information they can offer more powerful, more monetizable apps and services and can make money with high-priced personalized ads. But people want to prevent companies from getting their personal information for fear of being exploited, surveilled, abused and sold out. It's in the context of this tension that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg this week announced a new offering called Anonymous Login. It's one of the most ingenious ideas Facebook has ever had.

Here's how it's supposed to work: If you provide your personal data to Facebook, you can then install and use apps that support Anonymous Login without giving your personal data to the app maker, at least initially. Facebook says the feature provides "anonymity." But that's not accurate, because you do have to tell Facebook who you are. And it's not "pseudonymity," either, because you're not using a surrogate identity. Facebook is walking a very fine line between the need to attract users (with a promise that they won't have to share their data) and the need to attract app developers (with promises of a greater number of users who will hand over some personal data eventually).

Later the article explains:

Facebook promises app developers a process for converting "anonymous" users into data-divulging users. But I haven't seen any mechanism or contract or agreement or policy in any of this that might trigger the need for people to hand over personal information to app makers after some specific period of time.

My guess is that it will be up to the app makers to come up with incentives that will entice users to cough up their data. The implication that people would eventually hand over their data is probably just Facebook's attempt spin the service in a way that's friendliest to app developers as it tries to win them over to its platform.

janrinok writes:

A recent article in PCWorld reveals that many companies are simply throwing money away:

Organisations are wasting money licensing Microsoft Office applications that the majority of employees barely use, a study released this week by application analytics startup SoftWatch has found. Conclusion: many users could easly be migrated to far cheaper cloud applications such as Google Apps.

The firm carried out a 3-month analysis of Office suite use in 51 global firms representing 148,500 employees, revealing that seven out of ten employees weren't using any single application heavily, launching them only for viewing or light editing.

The average employee spent only 48 minutes per day using Office, largely the Outlook email client, which consumed about 68 percent of that activity. Excel was in second place with 17 percent, or an average of 8 minutes per day, leaving Word and PowerPoint trailing with only 5 minutes and 2 minutes per day each.

That email is popular and spreadsheets and presentations less so is not a surprise. The latter are occasional applications that non-specialist employees use only when they really have to and their importance can't necessarily be measured in terms of how often they are used so much as the impact that use has.

janrinok writes:

More safeguards for Americans' data and additional protections for emails are some of the recommendations being made by the White House as it asks Congress to pass new privacy laws. Six recommendations in total are being offered by President Barack Obama's counselor John Podesta, who posted the proposals on the White House website.

Following a 90-day review, at Obama's request, the president's top economic and science advisers looked at how both the government and private sector use large sets of data. The result is a report that suggests additional privacy laws, increased efforts to protect student and consumer data, make certain that such data cannot be used in discriminatory practices, and even provide non-U.S. citizens increased privacy protections.

(More details after the break.)

Anonymous Coward writes:

"EFF is launching a new extension for Firefox and Chrome called Privacy Badger. Privacy Badger automatically detects and blocks spying ads around the Web, and the invisible trackers that feed information to them."

From the launch description:

Privacy Badger is EFF's answer to intrusive and objectionable practices in the online advertising industry, and many advertisers' outright refusal to meaningfully honor Do Not Track requests. This week, Mozilla published research showing that privacy is the single most important thing that users want from their web browsers. Privacy Badger is part of EFF's growing campaign to deliver that privacy by giving you the technical means to disallow trackers within the pages you read on the Web.

This is an alpha release; we've been using it internally and don't think it's too buggy. But we're looking for intrepid users to try it out and let us know before we encourage millions of people to install it. If you find bugs, you can file them on github against either the Firefox or Chrome repos as appropriate.

You can try out Privacy Badger today on Firefox and Chrome.

kaszz writes:

Apple has won a patent battle against Samsung with 119.6 million USD in damages California USA. The demand was however $2.2 billion USD. It relates to the computerphones iPhone and Galaxy. In particular the look and feel where Apple claims ownership of allowing users to make a call by clicking on a phone number within a Web page or e-mail instead of having to dial it separately, slide-to-unlock function and automatic spelling corrections. Earlier Apple has forced the removal of single "universal" search that was subsequently repelled.

kaszz writes:

The NSA and GCHQ need mathematicians to function and are some of the largest employers of mathematicians in the world. An article in New Scientist by a mathematician describes some of the math behind mass surveillance, and calls on other mathematicians to refuse to cooperate with the NSA/GCHQ while they continue to surveil the entire population. From the article: 'Mathematicians seldom face ethical questions. We enjoy the feeling that what we do is separate from the everyday world. As the number theorist G. H. Hardy wrote in 1940: "I have never done anything 'useful'. No discovery of mine has made, or is likely to make, directly or indirectly, for good or ill, the least difference to the amenity of the world." That idea is now untenable. Mathematics clearly has practical applications that are highly relevant to the modern world, not least internet encryption.

lhsi writes:

A researcher has developed a machine that is a mixture between a 3D printer and a sewing machine. With it, 3D Objects are created from loose felt, although without the accuracy of 3D printers that use plastic.

An anonymous coward writes:

ABC News reports:

Toss your cap. Turn your tassel. Just don't snap that selfie.

Graduates at the University of South Florida and Bryant University in Smithfield, R.I., have been asked to refrain from taking self-portraits with their cell phones as they collect their diplomas.

Administrators at both USF and Bryant said their intentions were far less dramatic than making a statement about a generation often accused of oversharing, that they were simply trying to keep already long ceremonies from dragging on even longer.

It does raise the questions, should other institutions adopt a ban on selfies in certain situations, provided they do so legally? And, would it be beneficial to explicitly state the dangers of over-sharing as rationale for the selfie ban? I think it would.

kaszz writes:

Apple has removed encrypted email attachments from iOS 7.

In last few updates Apple has silently removed the email attachment encryption from data protection mechanisms. Noticed by Security Researcher - Andreas Kurtz, claims that since at least version 7.0.4 and including the current version 7.1.1, does not encrypt email attachments anymore.

egp writes:

Although I laughed out loud watching https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fNp37zFn9Q, there's serious science here. Round trip delay to moon and back is 2.5 seconds, so remote control of vehicles doesn't work very well. Round trip to Mars and back is between 4 and 24 *minutes* depending on the relative orbital locations.

Teckla writes:

El Reg reports:

The source code for MUD1, a multi-user dungeon created at the University of Essex in 1978, and generally held to have been the world's first online multi-player game, has been recovered.

The code has landed at Stanford University, which says it has secured permission to redistribute the game's blueprints from the authors Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw.

Angry Jesus writes:

In contrast to the recent story about canadian ISP's colluding with law enforcement to secretly hand over millions of customer records with little to no court supervision, a number of US internet companies have started to either insist on warrants or at least notify users. Credit goes to Snowden for raising general awareness of privacy issues and the EFF for their Who Has Your Back? campaign to report on corporate privacy and transparency policies.