SoylentNews

AnonTechie writes:

A few weeks ago, administrators at Penn State University did something they believed had never been attempted in American academia: The school put about 70 engineering patents up for auction and tried to sell them to the highest bidder. They weren't so successful - not many patents sold - but the project has disturbing implications. What if all this intellectual property, based on research done at a public institution, were to end up in the hands of someone less interested in innovation than in hauling companies to court? What if Penn State auctioned its inventions to a greedy patent troll?

lhsi writes:

Lobby groups are attempting to delay changes to a private copying exception and parody legislation. Despite the fact that copyright industry groups have always said they'd never sue anyone, they now claim that an exception would cause substantial damage that requires compensation.

Right now, both the private copying exception and parody [laws] appear to be delayed. The draft Statutory Instruments are now being discussed by a joint committee and the government in a rather opaque process.

The argument from publisher lobby groups is that European law requires compensation for economic harm arising from copyright exceptions. The UK government has so far, reasonably, argued that any harm would be minimal. Negligible might be more accurate. The change to the law would have little impact on people's behaviour. It would merely legalise what many people already do, copy the music they have legally bought from one device to another.

No politician is likely to agree to a levy for damage that barely exists, in return for a change in the law that merely reflects real behaviour that nobody is going to be prosecuted for. The real victim will be the legitimacy of copyright law: yet again, the copyright lobby groups are resisting change that could improve the perception of their industry and the laws that support it.

floppydisk writes:

IBM is researching a method by which computers can be powered and cooled by liquid. Nicknamed 'electronic blood', the process is decades away from commercialization, but if successful it promises to allow much greater hardware density and much greater energy efficiency than is available today. It would power the system through redox flow. The challenge for IBM is to combine that established liquid battery system with computer systems. The IBM Research Zurich office has an outline (pdf), presentation (pdf), and diagrams.

AnonTechie writes on a story similar to one that we covered in the very early days:

MI5 (the UK's Security Service) has again warned that foreign spy agencies are targeting IT workers within big organisations as a means of gaining privileged access to sensitive data.

The security service's warning about spy-infiltration tactics is a bid to encourage corporations to bolster their defences against such attacks, the Financial Times [Sign-up required] (via the Daily Mail) reports. While grooming internal sources with access to highly sensitive information used to take years in the time of the Cold War spymasters, it now takes much less time, basically however long it takes the new recruit to get privileged access to company info... that's if they don't have it already. Paul Ayers, VP EMEA at enterprise data security firm Vormetric, commented: "This warning confirms something that we've been saying for a while now that the abuse of privileged credentials is the next frontier for cyber crime against enterprises."

This warning is one of a series given by MI5 because "Although many British companies have increased their systems to protect against external cyber attacks in recent years, the threat from malicious members of staff has been somewhat ignored."

lhsi writes:

The UK Metropolitan Police are to wear cameras attached to their uniform in a trial as part of an attempt to boost transparency and accelerate convictions.

The cameras are designed to capture evidence at crime scenes.

A trial will see 500 devices distributed to officers across 10 London boroughs. Firearm officers will also use them in their training. The Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe added: "[We will] only put it on when we know there's a an incident running. If the victim wants it to be turned off it will be turned off, but the suspect doesn't have that right."

But Jack Hart from The Freedom Association says the move means "everyone is under suspicion. No police officer will have their body-worn camera on continually because of the sheer amount of data storage required; which will open continual debates about whether or not a camera was deliberately turned off. To create a situation where both police officers and the public feel constantly under suspicion is not sensible and undermines trust in all sectors of society."

The Mighty Buzzard writes:

Tim Cushing over at Techdirt is reporting that Amazon has received a patent for photographing against a white background:

The US Patent and Trademark Office is frequently maligned for its baffling/terrible decisions... and rightfully so. Because this is exactly the sort of thing for which the USPTO should be maligned. Udi Tirosh at DIY Photography has uncovered a recently granted patent for the previously-unheard of process of photographing things/people against a white backdrop... to of all companies, Amazon.

weeds writes:

Bryan F. Shaw, Ph.D. is an assistant professor of chemistry and biochemistry in Baylor's College of Arts and Sciences. When his son was diagnosed with retinoblastoma (the formation of tumors on the retina) he learned that "white eye" (a white spot appearing in the pupil) was a sign of leukocoria which is a precursor to the disease.

This led him to research old photographs of his son to see if they showed the white eye symptom. His research indicated that, indeed, the symptom was present as early as 12 days old. Since his investigation, investigators at Baylor and Harvard University have reviewed more than 7,000 photographs to determine the presence of the symptoms. Dr. Shaw is developing software that can detect the "white eye" symptom in the photographs of children.

Ultimately, Shaw would like to see this software available anywhere there's a picture of a child. "I would like this application, this software, to be free, and I would want it anywhere a picture of a kid is: your laptop computer, your Flickr account, your Facebook account, your phone, your camera," Shaw says. "I don't care where."

Angry Jesus writes:

Indie funk band Vulfpeck hacked the Spotify royalty system in order to fund a tour of free concerts. Spotify pays 0.5 cents for every track that is played for at least 30 seconds. Vulfpeck's latest album, "Sleepify" is 10 tracks of silence lasting 31-32 seconds each. The band asked fans to put the album on repeat and play it while they slept.

So far, they've racked up over $20,000 in royalties, but Spotify isn't so happy about the situation. Now the hard part is getting Spotify to actually pay out so that fans can see the band live.

AnonTechie writes:

Yahoo! reports:

Iran's President Hassan Rouhani has vetoed a plan to ban WhatsApp, following a row over censorship of the popular messaging application, media reports said Wednesday.

freesword writes:

Engineering.com reports that engineers at Rice University have developed a thin, flexible, high-performance battery that could be a game changer for the world of wearable electronics.

The new battery is an amalgamation of a nanoporous nickel-fluoride electrode and solid electrolyte. Measuring in at around a hundredth of an inch thick, the pliable energy cell also has the properties of a supercapacitor, lending it the ability to absorb and discharge current at an incredible rate.

"It behaves like a battery but the structure is that of a supercapacitor. If we use it as a supercapacitor, we can charge quickly at a high current rate and discharge it in a very short time. But for other applications, we find we can set it up to charge more slowly and to discharge slowly like a battery."

AnonTechie writes:

From NASA:

Cellular phones, streaming entertainment, data communications, civil and commercial providers; they are all placing incredible strains on available spectrum bandwidth. In the electromagnetic spectrum, many NASA missions use what is referred to as S-band, and commercial businesses are putting pressure on the government to free up other bands within the electromagnetic spectrum.

NASA saw this trend years ago and started opening up a new part of the electromagnetic spectrum called Ka-band. With the need to speed up transmission of high-rate science data from space missions, Ka-band, at 26 GHz, is now considered the spectrum of the future for NASA communications. Compared with S-band, Ka-band has data transmission rates that are hundreds of times faster.

lhsi writes:

An investigation into sources of internal company documents used in public health and healthcare research has found that most instances of use (around 90%) were documents from tobacco companies. Most of the articles found that relied upon internal company documentation was obtained due to litigation.

Bytram writes:

So you think your game controller is pretty slick? Wired got an "An Inside Look at the Insanely Complex Formula 1 Steering Wheel" of a Sauber C33 Formula 1 car. Besides the comparatively mundane task of turning the wheels, there are well over twenty other knobs and controls on the steering wheel. These permit modification of braking balance, ignition timing, as well as control the flaps and well, almost anything. Since there is no dashboard or center console in an F1 car, everything is presented on the steering wheel itself. There is also a 480x272 PCU-8D LCD display on the wheel which can access over 100 pages of information on the vehicle's operation.

hopp writes:

A story at Geek.com From the article:

Every gadget the Navy uses has to be designed in order to meet the specific needs of sailors, but at the same time maintain security and the integrity of the data they contain. That even extends as far as e-readers, but in order to make such a device secure, the Navy removed the ability to add any new content to it.

That may sound like a pretty useless device, but the Navy General Library Program teamed up with digital products company Findaway World to solve the content issue. Rather than allow content to be added, the locked down e-reader ships (sorry) full of content that remains on the device for its entire lifetime.

The Navy-specific e-reader has been given the rather unfortunate name of Navy e-reader device, which has been shortened to NeRD. The content stored on each NeRD is a subset of the Navy's 108,000 item digital library, meaning sailors get access to a range of books both old and new. And because the content can never be changed, the e-reader does not need or have WiFi, an SD card slot, or any other connections beyond a charging port. This not only makes it secure, but more practical when dealing with the limited space and resources on board a ship or submarine.

lhsi writes:

A replica of Denmark in Minecraft, which was reported here, has been vandalised with some areas blown up and flags of the United States created.

Only a small area was destroyed and the flags appeared near the starting point, which points to just attention seeking as opposed to a virtual liberation attempt. Other players have cleaned up the damage, replacing it with green grass and flowers.

SoylentNews reported how smart phones are trackable by analysis of data provided by the accelerometers that they contain in Smartphone sensors Leave Trackable Fingerprints and now we have another story about how it is possible to link a digital image with the camera that was used to produce it with increasing accuracy.

Angry Jesus writes:

It has been public knowledge (but not common knowledge) since 2006 that the sensor in a digital camera leaves a unique noise fingerprint in the recorded images. Researchers have now taken that theoretical knowledge and applied it to the real world. In a preliminary study of about 3,000 images from 15 different sources, it was shown that sensor noise could be used to group images by the originating camera 90% of the time with a false positive rate of just 2%.