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AnonTechie writes:

Even as Europe powered up its most ambitious ever cybersecurity exercise this month, doubts were being raised over whether the continent's patchwork of online police was right for the job. The exercise, called Cyber Europe 2014, is the largest and most complex ever enacted, involving 200 organisations and 400 cybersecurity professionals from both the European Union and beyond. Yet some critics argued that herding together normally secretive national security agencies and demanding that they spend the rest of 2014 sharing information amounted to wishful thinking. Others questioned whether the law enforcement agencies taking part in the drill should be involved in safeguarding online security, in the wake of American whistleblower Edward Snowden's revelations of online spying by western governments.

The report does contain a contender for quote-of-the-week: One industry insider said the view in Brussels is that EU cybersecurity was "like teenage sex: everyone says they are doing it but not that many actually are."

b writes:

Swype is a popular third-party keyboard for Android phones (and also available for Windows phones and other platforms). It's currently the second-most-popular paid keyboard in Google Play (behind SwiftKey), and the 17th highest of all paid apps.

Recently, users have discovered that it's been accessing location data extremely frequently, making almost 4000 requests per day, or 2.5 requests per minute. The developers claim that this is to facilitate implementation of "regional dialects", but cannot explain why such frequent polling is required, or why this still occurs if the regional function is disabled.

Some custom ROMs such as Cyanogenmod can block this tracking, but most users would be unaware that such tracking is even occurring.

Fluffeh writes:

Legal action aimed at forcing local ISPs to block The Pirate Bay has been dismissed by the Icelandic Supreme Court. Following in the footsteps of copyright groups around Europe, last year representatives of the music and movie industry in Iceland decided to take action against The Pirate Bay. "Blocking access to websites that offer a wide range of entertainment without permission of the copyright holders has been proven effective in neighboring countries, and has a strong foundation in EU legislation." the groups said. The case was appealed to the Supreme Court which handed down its decision this week. The Supreme Court highlighted problems in two key areas.

Firstly, it appears that once the district magistrate rejected the original blocking request, the matter should have been referred to the District Court within a week. It took the entertainment groups twelve days, well outside the requirements prescribed by law.

Furthermore, while the complaint was filed in the names of four organizations, only one was recognized by the Supreme Court as having the right to bring this kind of complaint. While it was agreed that music group STEF has lawful standing to fight in court, the others had only local distribution rights.

"The fact remains that STEF can make these injunction requests. But not all of these groups together," lawyer Tomas Jonsson told local media. After the Supreme Court's rejection the case can now return to the District Court where it's likely that STEF will continue the process alone. If it succeeds the net result will be no different than if all parties had obtained an injunction.

Whether the Court will subsequently grant a blockade of The Pirate Bay remains to be seen though, as this type of injunction is yet to be tested under Icelandic copyright law.

Papas Fritas writes:

The NYT reports that recent revelations that Steve Jobs was the driving force in a conspiracy to prevent competitors from poaching employees raises the question: If Steve Jobs were alive today, should he be in jail? Jobs "was a walking antitrust violation. I'm simply astounded by the risks he seemed willing to take," says Herbert Hovenkamp, a professor at the University of Iowa College of Law and an expert in antitrust law. "Didn't he have lawyers advising him? You see this kind of behavior sometimes in small, private or family-run companies, but almost never in large public companies like Apple." In 2007, Jobs threatened Palm with patent litigation unless Palm agreed not to recruit Apple employees, even though Palm's then-chief executive, Edward Colligan, told him that such a plan was "likely illegal." That same year, Jobs wrote Eric E. Schmidt, the chief executive of Google at the time, "I would be extremely pleased if Google would stop doing this," referring to its efforts to recruit an Apple engineer. When Jobs learned that the Google recruiter who contacted the Apple employee would be "fired within the hour," he responded with a smiley face. "How could anyone have approved that?" says Hovenkamp. "Any competent antitrust counsel would know that's illegal. And they had to know they'd get caught eventually."

But the anti-poaching pact was hardly Jobs's only brush with the law. Jobs behavior was at the center of an e-book price-fixing conspiracy with major publishers where a federal judge ruled that "Apple played a central role in facilitating and executing that conspiracy." (Apple has appealed the decision. The publishers all settled the case.) Jobs also figured prominently in the options backdating scandal that rocked Silicon Valley eight years ago. An investigation by Apple's lawyers cleared Jobs of wrongdoing, saying he didn't understand the accounting implications but five executives of other companies went to prison for backdating options, while Jobs was never charged.

There's no way of knowing whether Jobs, had he lived and been healthy, would have faced charges, especially since he was a recidivist. Given Jobs's immense popularity, prosecutors might not have wanted to risk a trial, says Hovenkamp. Jobs probably came closest to being prosecuted in the backdating scandal, but by then he was already known to have pancreatic cancer. Jobs' biographer Walter Isaacson notes that "over and over, people referred to his reality distortion field." Isaacson added, "The rules just didn't apply to him, whether he was getting a license plate that let him use handicapped parking or building products that people said weren't possible. Most of the time he was right, and he got away with it."

AnonTechie writes about a story from ArsTechnica:

Everyone has a pet theory to explain the rise of modern scourges, things that our forbears rarely had to contend with during their short, brutish lives: obesity, diabetes, celiac disease, autism, asthma, allergies, esophageal cancer, etc. Plastics, pesticides, and genetically modified crops are perennial favorites; wheat seems to be the darling of the moment.

Martin Blaser, the director of the Human Microbiome Program at NYU, thinks that these ills are due to the overuse of antibiotics. He uses his new book, Missing Microbes: How the Overuse of Antibiotics Is Fueling Our Modern Plagues, to argue that the broad spectrum of antibiotics that is relied upon by modern medicine disrupt the microbiome, the diverse bacterial ecosystem that has been residing in human bodies ever since there were human bodies. The timeline corresponds; many of these disorders have exploded in prominence in the past few decades just as antibiotics began being prescribed almost indiscriminately because they always worked and "couldn't hurt."

Angry Jesus writes:

In a remarkably uncritical article, The Verge covers how loyalty card data is being used to search for statistical pricing advantages. Loyalty card data is more than just a person's shopping history, but also who they are, how old they are, their income level, their debts, the number of people in their family, where they live, what their religion is, etc. This unprecedented amount of knowledge about the lives of customers as well as their purchasing habits lets supermarkets model the effect of individual pricing changes on a store's total profitability with a 95% accuracy rate.

The Verge calls this use of Big Data techniques "placing the customer at the center of their pricing strategies." But it is really more about exploiting the fact that customers lack the ability for reciprocal analysis of all the merchants available to them. Nobody has the time to survey the inventory and pricing of all the supermarkets in their area on a regular basis. What's worse is that by using loyalty cards, customers are voluntarily giving the supermarkets this advantage over them. To paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, "They who would give up essential Privacy, to purchase a little temporary Discount, deserve neither Privacy nor Discounts."

AnonTechie writes:

From MIT Technology Review:

The ability to create primates with intentional mutations could provide powerful new ways to study complex and genetically baffling brain disorders.

Last November, the female monkey twins, Mingming and Lingling, were born here on the sprawling research campus of Kunming Biomedical International and its affiliated Yunnan Key Laboratory of Primate Biomedical Research. The macaques had been conceived via in vitro fertilization. Then scientists used a new method of DNA engineering known as CRISPR to modify the fertilized eggs by editing three different genes, and they were implanted into a surrogate macaque mother. The twins' healthy birth marked the first time that CRISPR has been used to make targeted genetic modifications in primates-potentially heralding a new era of biomedicine in which complex diseases can be modeled and studied in monkeys.

janrinok writes:

There is some controversy regarding the announcement recently that "Intel will invest $6Bn to upgrade its Kiryat Gat fab, it looks like the drama that has gripped Intel for the past two years as it decided where it would build its 10 nanometre fabrication facility is officially over". The Irish, for example, believe it might be a bluff. Nevertheless, ZDNet has a story covering it.

janrinok writes:

MaximumPC offers the following story:

You may have seen reports indicating that the bill of materials (BOM) associated with Google Glass is a mere $79.78, well short of the $1,500 price tag it costs to join the Explorer program and bring a set home. Sounds like highway robbery, right? Even after factoring in other expenses that have nothing do to with the actual component costs, the markup seems downright obscene. But is it? Google denies its Glass device cost just $80 to make. So how much is it really?

AnonTechie writes:

Antimicrobial agents incorporated into edible films applied to foods to seal in flavor, freshness and color can improve the microbiological safety of meats, according to researchers in Penn State's College of Agricultural Sciences. Using films made of pullulan an edible, mostly tasteless, transparent polymer produced by the fungus Aureobasidium pulluns researchers evaluated the effectiveness of films containing essential oils derived from rosemary, oregano and nanoparticles against foodborne pathogens associated with meat and poultry. The abstract is here.

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.