SoylentNews

AnonTechie writes about Ham video on the International Space Station (ISS):

Astronauts on the ISS can now talk with people on Earth with video using simple transmitters. 'Ham TV' has been set up in ESA's Columbus laboratory and already used for talking with ground control. Amateur radio enthusiasts have been able to poll astronauts circling our planet using standard radio equipment since the Station was inaugurated in 2000. Radio signals easily reach the orbital outpost flying 350 km above us on sets readily available to radio enthusiasts. The new Ham TV adds a visual dimension, allowing an audience on the ground to see and hear the astronauts. The hardware, developed by Kayser Italia, was sent to the Station on Japan's space freighter in August last year and connected to an existing S-band antenna on Columbus. Anybody can still hail the Station via radio and, if an astronaut floats by the always-on receiver, they might just pick up and answer the call.

canopic jug writes:

The EuroBSDcon program committee is accepting talk and tutorial proposals until May 19th, 2014. The conference itself will take place September 25-28 in Sofia, Bulgaria and tutorials will be held on Thursday and Friday, while talks and papers will be on Saturday and Sunday. Presentations are to be 45 minutes and in English. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, applications, architecture, implementation, performance and security of BSD-based operating systems, as well as topics concerning the economic or organizational aspects of BSD use.

AnonTechie writes about an intelligent vehicle that can detect pedestrians at night-time - using old technology.

Researchers at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M) have designed a new pedestrian detection system for cars which works in low visibility conditions; the system is made up of infra-red cameras which capture body heat.

The new driving-aid system uses images captured by far infra-red with two thermal cameras to identify the presence of individuals in their field of vision. The objective is to alert the driver to the presence of pedestrians in the path of the vehicle, and even, in the case of cars with automated systems, actually stop the vehicle. "With the model being used in our research, pedestrians up to 40 meters away can be detected, although this distance could be extended if we substitute the lens with one that has greater focus range," explained one of its designers, Daniel Olmeda, from the Intelligent Systems Laboratory (LSI) at UC3M.

The use of this type of sensor provides the driver with information that goes beyond what he himself might perceive, something particularly useful in low visibility conditions such as night-time driving. "In this situation, the sensitive cameras in the visible spectrum, which are already incorporated into some vehicles, can only be utilized in regions illuminated by the car's headlights. But our system does not require any type of external lighting," the engineer asserted. The infrared range in which it operates corresponds to the emission of heat which allows it to obtain images in conditions of total darkness.

Technical Paper

stderr writes:

bryan over at Pipedot has released the source code for Pipecode, the software running pipedot.

Pipecode is written in PHP and the code is using the GPLv3.

Fluffeh writes in 2 different stories about the Australian Pirate Party:

Australia Pirate Party Posts Change.org Petition

The Australia Pirate Party has posted a petition on Change.org challenging a three strikes law and also suggesting that the outdated business model supporting subscription television be brought into the discussion before the US tries to impose yet another "Three Strikes" policy in another far-away country.

We are critical of mechanisms that would obstruct the functioning of the Internet in any way, as it is futile and ultimately meaningless pandering to big business and does not take into account the requirements of the largest stakeholder: the consumer.

The Internet sees censorship as damage and routes around it, so any attempt to censor the web to protect a Government-granted monopoly that struggles to remain relevant in the digital era is futile, and merely provokes the digital community to retaliate through subversion or other means.

Any legislation that would enact a three strikes regime or website blocking fails to take into account that not only has this been proven to fail at deterring people from file-sharing, but that giving people access to content in an effective and timely matter has a major impact on lowering "unlawful file-sharing".

A United Nations Human Rights Council Special Rapporteur has reported that graduated response regimes are a disproportionate response to online file-sharing. Cutting off Internet access even as an attempt to "protect" intellectual property rights is considered by the Special Rapporteur to be a violation of Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Modern society is dependent on the Internet. Preventing access is not an appropriate solution.

Pirate Party Fights Against Site Blocking in Australia

Yesterday news broke that the Australian government will soon consider the introduction of a graduated response style anti-piracy regime on top of court-ordered website blocking. Just 24 hours later and the Pirate Party are fighting back with a Senate petition opposing such measures and describing them as ineffective.

"There has been no evidence advanced that graduated response regimes are effective. In fact, academic literature on the matter has been skeptical that they have any measurable impact on reducing file-sharing." said Brendan Molloy, Councillor of Pirate Party Australia.

Research is available to back up the Party's stance. A paper published in January 2014 by U.S. and French researchers found that three-strikes-style regimes did little to reduce piracy. Also in January, the Court of The Hague ruled that the web blockade previously ordered against The Pirate Bay was not only disproportionate, but also ineffective.

Angry Jesus writes:

In 2008, two of Sarah Palin's personal Yahoo email accounts were hacked, revealing the existence of correspondence with other government officials like Alaska's Lieutenant Governor and even California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger outside any sunshine record-keeping requirements of the state government. Palin was eventually cleared of any wrong-doing with the account, despite the account being deleted before the investigation even started.

In what feels like the discovery of another tip of the same iceberg, ProPublica has a report about the Cuomo administration's adoption of similar tactics in New York.

AnonTechie writes:

Thought experiment proposed to reconcile psychological versus thermodynamic arrows of time:

A pair of physicists has proposed a thought experiment to help reconcile the seeming disparity between the psychological and thermodynamic arrows of time. In their paper published in the journal Physical Review E, Leonard Mlodinow and Todd Brun claim their thought experiment demonstrates that the two seemingly contradictory views of time, must always align.

When ordinary people think about time, they see the past as something that has come before and the future as a great unknown yet to come. We can remember the past, because it has happened already, but not the future, because it hasn't. Physicists, on the other hand see time as able to move either forward or backwards (towards greater entropy), which implies that we should be able to remember events in the future. So, why can't we?

Papas Fritas writes:

Evan Halper writes in the LA Times that with efforts to reduce carbon emissions lagging, researchers, backed by millions of dollars from the federal government, are looking for ways to protect key industries from the impact of climate change by racing to develop new breeds of farm animals that can stand up to the hazards of global warming. "We are dealing with the challenge of difficult weather conditions at the same time we have to massively increase food production" to accommodate larger populations and a growing demand for meat, says Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack. For example a team of researchers is trying to map the genetic code of bizarre-looking African naked-neck chickens to see if their ability to withstand heat can be bred into flocks of US broilers. "The game is changing since the climate is changing," says Carl Schmidt. "We have to start now to anticipate what changes we have to make in order to feed 9 billion people," citing global-population estimates for 2050.

Fluffeh writes:

On Friday, Canada's Munk Debate series hosted two staunch supporters and two strong opponents of the US "broad state surveillance." They did so for a public debate. Siding with the ability to peer into anything and everything were Michael Hayden, former head of the NSA and CIA, and US director of National Intelligence, along with Alan Dershowitz, Harvard Law professor and criminal defense attorney. Arguing against the resolution were Glenn Greenwald, the journalist and civil libertarian whose coverage in The Guardian opened the Snowden saga, and Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of reddit and Internet freedom advocate.

What ensued was an interesting, sometimes humorous, open and intelligent discussion. Well worth a few moments of anyones time. Even Snowden himself made a brief (video of course) statement.

AnonTechie writes:

From ArsTechnica:

We've been pretty vocal about the long-awaited release of Soylent, the engineered food supplement/substitute. However, every post about Soylent (be it at Ars or anywhere else) draws a not-insignificant number of comments from people who are nervous about its perceived artificiality. A common criticism is that modern food science doesn't yet have a complete picture of exactly how and why nutrition works. Perhaps throwing a bunch of micro- and macronutrients into a bag can't totally emulate the complex interaction of different natural ingredients in normally consumed food.

Whether or not that's actually true isn't certain, but Simo Suoheimo is betting that he and the rest of the people at Ambronite can deliver the same fast nutrition as Soylent while using whole foods instead of powders and pills. "We have the world's first drinkable meal that fulfills daily nutrition recommendations from organic, natural ingredients," Suoheimo explained to Ars in an interview.

Papas Fritas writes:

USA Today reports that Tennessee has become the first state with legislation that will criminally charge women who use drugs while pregnant with assault for harm done to their infants. Tennessee officials have wrestled with what to do about the growing numbers of infants born dependent on drugs (921 in Tennessee in 2013) and who often suffer from a condition known as neonatal abstinence syndrome. The legislation would allow mothers to avoid criminal charges if they get into one of the state's few treatment programs. Governor Bill Haslam says he wants doctors to encourage women to get into treatment before delivering their babies so they can avoid charges. "The intent of this bill is to give law enforcement and district attorneys a tool to address illicit drug use among pregnant women through treatment programs," says Haslam.

Seventeen states already consider drug use during pregnancy as child abuse and in three of them Minnesota, South Dakota and Wisconsin it is grounds for civil commitment (e.g. forced enrollment in treatment programs). In 15 states, health-care providers are required to report suspected abuse and, in four of those states, they are then also required to test for drug exposure of the child. Eighteen states have treatment programs targeted at pregnant women. Opponents of the bill, including five national medical organizations and local doctors who treat pregnant women, worry that criminalization will scare women away from treatment. "This law separates mothers from their children and is not patient-centered," says Cherisse A. Scott. "Tennessee families who are already being hit the hardest by policies such as the failure to expand Medicaid, poverty and a lack of available drug treatment facilities will be most deeply impacted by this bill."

AnonTechie writes:

An interesting article in The Independent by Stephen Hawking and professors from MIT and Berkley:

Artificial-intelligence (AI) research is now progressing rapidly. Recent landmarks such as self-driving cars, a computer winning at Jeopardy and the digital personal assistants Siri, Google Now and Cortana are merely symptoms of an IT arms race fuelled by unprecedented investments and building on an increasingly mature theoretical foundation. Such achievements will probably pale against what the coming decades will bring.

The potential benefits are huge. Everything that civilization has to offer is a product of human intelligence; we cannot predict what we might achieve when this intelligence is magnified by the tools that AI may provide, but the eradication of war, disease, and poverty would be high on anyone's list. Success in creating AI would be the biggest event in human history.

Unfortunately, it might also be the last, unless we learn how to avoid the risks. In the near term, world militaries are considering autonomous-weapon systems that can choose and eliminate targets. The UN and Human Rights Watch have advocated a treaty banning such weapons. In the medium term, as emphasised by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee in The Second Machine Age, AI may transform our economy to bring both great wealth and great dislocation.

AnonTechie writes:

Unisys unveils invisibility cloak for network traffic.

If you are ultra paranoid, what could be better than hiding your network traffic in such a way that no one could possibly intercept it? This is what Unisys is offering with its new Stealth appliance, which could make man-in-the-middle attacks and keylogger exploits obsolete, or at least more difficult to mount.

Stealth has been around since 2005, when it was developed exclusively for the Defense Department, which remains one of its largest customers. Several years ago Unisys took it to commercial enterprises and has paid for various independent tests to try to compromise the system, all of which have failed. This is because Stealth uses four layers of security: each packet is encrypted with AES256, then split into three separate pieces and dispersed across the network, destined for a particular group of users that have to be running its protocols. To deploy Stealth, you create virtual "communities of interest" that tie two or more PCs together in such a way that they can only communicate with each other. No one else can join in, and no one else can intercept the traffic.

yanom writes:

Chris Mooney writes from Slate about Katharine Hayoe, a climatologist who is also a conservative evangelical Christian, about her efforts to reach out to fellow religious conservatives on the issue of dealing with climate change.

"Simply put, millions of Americans are evangelical Christians, and their belief in the science of global warming is well below the national average. And if anyone has a chance of reaching this vast and important audience, Hayhoe does. "

In this article, Hayoe outlines five arguments she believes resonate with conservative Christians, who have often come under fire for their perceived rejection of science. These arguments include "Conservation is conservative", "The Bible does not approve of letting the world burn", and "Even if you believe in a young Earth, it's still warming"