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mendax writes:

The New York Times is reporting:

Edward J. Snowden says he was not merely a "low-level analyst" writing computer code for American spies, as President Obama and other administration officials have portrayed him. Instead, he says, he was a trained spy who worked under assumed names overseas for the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency.

Mr. Snowden's claims were made in a television interview to be broadcast Wednesday evening by NBC News. They added a new twist to the yearlong public relations battle between the administration and Mr. Snowden, who is living under asylum in Moscow to escape prosecution for leaking thousands of classified files detailing extensive American surveillance programs at home and abroad.

"I was trained as a spy in sort of the traditional sense of the word in that I lived and worked undercover overseas--pretending to work in a job that I'm not--and even being assigned a name that was not mine," Mr. Snowden told Brian Williams of NBC News, in an excerpt released in advance of the full interview.

Anonymous Coward writes:

The periodic table of elements is a fantastic tool for the accounting of valence electrons, but doesn't give a sense of the importance of different elements to us humans. My General Chemistry students at the Claremont Colleges have re-imagined the classic periodic table as Elemental Cartograms. These are visualizations where the area of each element scales with a value system. For example, you can relate the importance of the elements to the number of Google News hits, or the composition of a chocolate-chip cookie, or the needs of a human body, or the number of mentions in Star Trek. You can using just a spreadsheet and our website, or get the open Octave code that runs it.

Blackmoore writes:

Ars Technica reports:

US Rep. Bob Latta (R-OH) on Wednesday filed legislation that would prevent the Federal Communications Commission from attempting to regulate broadband Internet service as a public utility.

It probably won't surprise you that Internet service providers have enthusiastically given money to this congressman. As we reported in our May 16 story "Bankrolled by broadband donors, lawmakers lobby FCC on net neutrality," Latta received $51,000 from cable company interests in the two-year period ending December 2013.

Latta was one of "28 House members who lobbied the Federal Communications Commission to drop net neutrality," with those lawmakers having "received more than twice the amount in campaign contributions from the broadband sector than the average for all House members," our story noted.

lhsi writes:

After a recent release, Torrentfreak interviewed the founder of anonymous wireless file-sharing device, PirateBox.

In 2012 a device called PirateBox excited users with the prospect of anonymous wireless file-sharing anywhere, no Internet required, and at a cost of just a few dollars. Now the project has released PirateBox 1.0 and a brand new website. TorrentFreak caught up with PirateBox founder David Darts for the lowdown.

Inspired by the local communications power of traditional pirate radio, in 2011 NYU art professor David Darts created the PirateBox. Part WiFi hotspot, part file server, PirateBox provides quick, easy and above all anonymous access to the files onboard.

lhsi writes:

http://torrentfreak.com/could-bitcoin-miners-help-pay-for-pirated-games-140601/

Torrentfreak spoke to an investor in bitcoin startups about whether bitcoin mining could be added to games as an alternative to paying for the game. The idea had been prompted after a pirate version of a game was alleged to include bitcoin mining software.

Nobody wants malware introduced to their computer by the installation of a game, but if bitmining software was installed openly with the express intent of reducing or even negating the cost of the game, would that be sufficient incentive for gamers to install it, and would it bring the game writers sufficient revenue?

Angry Jesus writes:

Zilong Li and Cosimo Bambi with Fudan University in Shanghai have come up with a very novel idea--those black holes that are believed to exist at the center of a lot of galaxies, may instead by wormholes. They've written a paper [abstract], uploaded to the preprint server arXiv, describing their idea and how what they've imagined could be proved right (or wrong) by a new instrument soon to be added to an observatory in Chile.

From the article:

Back in 1974, space scientists discovered Sagittarius A* (SgrA*) - bright source of radio waves emanating from what appeared to be near the center of the Milky Way galaxy. Subsequent study of the object led scientists to believe that it was (and is) a black hole - the behavior of stars nearby, for example, suggested it was something massive and extremely dense.

What we're able to see when we look at SgrA* are plasma gasses near the event horizon, not the object itself as light cannot escape. That should be true for wormholes too, of course, which have also been theorized to exist by the Theory of General Relativity. Einstein even noted the possibility of their existence. Unfortunately, no one has ever come close to proving the existence of wormholes, which are believed to be channels between different parts of the universe, or even between two universes in multi-universe theories. In their paper, Li and Bambi suggest that there is compelling evidence suggesting that many of the objects we believe to be black holes at the center of galaxies, may in fact be wormholes.

Plasma gases orbiting a black hole versus a wormhole should look different to us, the pair suggest, because wormholes should be a lot smaller. Plus, the presence of wormholes would help explain how it is that even new galaxies have what are now believed to be black holes - such large black holes would presumably take a long time to become so large, so how can they exist in a new galaxy? They can't Li and Bambi conclude, instead those objects are actually wormholes, which theory suggests could spring up in an instant, and would have, following the Big Bang.

c0lo writes:

The Guardian publishes a lengthy but well constructed essay of Eben Moglen, titled "Privacy under attack: the NSA files revealed new threats to democracy". It is one of the most insightful excursion into why privacy matters, why Snowden cannot be considered a traitor; has well picked examples from history; hints about what the civil society could do (my cynical note: if only it'd be interested) to reclaim privacy back. Granted, takes about an hour to read (and probably a lifetime to filter by first-hand experience: unfortunately not the kind of experience one would wish for).

(I dare not write a digest for SN, the essay is so coherent and round that I'm afraid any omission would damage its discourse. Can't do nothing but recommend it for reading: if you can't do on a working say, save the link for the weekend)

Fluffeh writes:

Peter Sunde was arrested today in a police raid in southern Sweden. The Pirate Bay co-founder was wanted by Interpol as he had yet to serve prison time for his involvement with the site.

Earlier today, a special Swedish police unit tasked with tracking down criminal fugitives carried out a raid at a farm in Skane. Local law enforcement reportedly worked in collaboration with the Polish police.

While details are scarce at the moment, the Swedish newspaper Expressen (Swedish Original or English Translation) reports that the arrest has been confirmed by the Swedish authorities.

Ezber Bozmak writes:

Researchers from the Biorobotics Laboratory at the Ecole Polytechnique Federal de Lausanne (EFPL) in Switzerland have created a group of modular shape-changing robots called Roombots that are 3D reconfigurable, meaning they can change shapes and in this case, would be come adaptive furniture.

This generation of robots seems more Duplo than Lego, the idea has lots of potential.

infodragon writes:

The One Inch Punch is an ancient martial arts move of kung-fu. In this popular mechanics article the neuroscience of the punch is explored.

While the biomechanics behind the powerful blow certainly aren't trivial, the punch owes far more to brain structure than to raw strength...

By the time the one-inch punch has made contact with its target, Lee has combined the power of some of the biggest muscles in his body into a tiny area of force. But while the one-inch punch is built upon the explosive power of multiple muscles, Rose insists that Bruce Lee's muscles are actually not the most important engine behind the blow.

"Muscle fibers do not dictate coordination," Rose says, "and coordination and timing are essential factors behind movements like this one-inch punch."

AnonTechie writes:

IBM patents technique for killing fraud, using click patterns.
Someday, if you use your non-dominant hand to control your mouse or touchpad when you're say, shopping online, websites might interpret your irregular scrolling and clicking as a sign of fraud and require you to prove your identity, thanks to an IBM fraud-detection patent. The company has patented a technique for better detecting fraud online to prevent the theft of log-in credentials and other sensitive information, particularly in e-commerce and banking, it said Friday. U.S. patent #8,650,080 is intended for a "user-browser interaction-based fraud detection system."

hankwang writes:

Linux Mint 17 "Qiana", the latest version of the popular Linux distribution, was just released. It is a long-term support version, to be supported with security updates until 2019. It is released in the MATE (Gnome 2 fork) and Cinnamon (Gnome 3 fork) versions. It is the first release of a new update strategy; the next few releases until 2016 will be based on the same base packages as this LTS version.

AnonTechie writes:

How to Hack a Car and Control It From 1500 Miles Away:

"When you are driving an automobile today, you are driving a big computer system that happens to have wheels and a motor," says a security researcher interviewed by Motherboard. And there are definite vulnerabilities in CAN bus, the network at the heart of your car that communicates with everything from the windshield wipers to the engine. In the video, you can watch information security researcher Mathew Solnick take control of a car from his laptop. If it's any consolation, hacking a car is not easy, and this is definitely not the simplest way for someone to take you out. So take heart-there are plenty of other things to fear in the world than car hackers.

AnonTechie writes:

The Real-Life Science Behind The Summer's Most Outrageous Sci-Fi Movies: Mechanized suits, alien apes, dinosaur robots - this summer's blockbusters are brimming with scientific-sounding conceits. But is there any real science to back them up? While you watch, here's something to chew on (besides the popcorn).

Appalbarry writes:

The Vancouver Sun reports that the BC Supreme court has approved a class action lawsuit against Facebook. From TFA:

British Columbia's Supreme Court gave the go-ahead Friday to a class-action suit against Facebook seeking damages for the networking giant's practice of turning users into brand ambassadors when they hit the "like" button for a product or service.

Judge Susan Griffin said there is evidence that the names or portraits of B.C. residents who are Facebook users were used without their consent in Facebook's Sponsored Stories. Facebook, which last year paid $20 million US to settle a lawsuit in the United States over its sponsored stories, stopped using them earlier this year.

In the Globe and Mail story Facebook seems to claim that because they no longer do this they shouldn't be held accountable for doing it in the past.