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Eponymous Coward writes regarding what is, essentially, a book review:

Robert David Steele, former Marine, CIA case officer, and US co-founder of the US Marine Corps Intelligence Activity, is a man on a mission. But it's a mission that frightens the US intelligence establishment to its core.

Steele started off as a Marine Corps infantry and intelligence officer. After four years on active duty, he joined the CIA for about a decade before co-founding the Marine Corps Intelligence Activity, where he was deputy director. Widely recognised as the leader of the Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) paradigm, Steele went on to write the handbooks on OSINT for NATO, the US Defense Intelligence Agency and the U.S. Special Operations Forces. In passing, he personally trained 7,500 officers from over 66 countries.

Last month, Steele presented a startling paper at the Libtech conference in New York, sponsored by the Internet Society and Reclaim. Drawing on principles set out in his latest book, The Open-Source Everything Manifesto: Transparency, Truth and Trust, he told the audience that all the major preconditions for revolution were now present in the United States and Britain.

Cornwallis writes:

Yesterday, Microsoft Outlook Online, part of Office 365, suffered an outage of several hours, affecting customers in North America.

Kevin Watson, who runs a political consulting firm in San Clemente, Calif., uses Google for his personal e-mail but, like many in the business world, relies heavily on Microsoft Outlook to stay in touch with clients. His e-mail service was out for more than half of the workday, and he began receiving e-mail only in the afternoon, about five hours late. He worried all day that people were trying to contact him.

"I've been picking up the phone and calling my most important clients," He said. "You can't stop because there's no e-mail."

Without e-mail on Tuesday, frustrated Microsoft users turned to another modern medium for airing complaints: Twitter.

lhsi writes:

Between 2003 and 2004 the US Food and Drug Administration issued several health advisories warning that children and adolescents taking antidepressants were at increased risk of suicidality (suicidal ideation and behavior). In October 2004 the FDA required a boxed warning of this risk to be on the labels of all antidepressant drugs. In May 2007 the FDA extended the warnings to include young adults.

Researchers have looked into what effect this contoversial stance had. After the warnings, there was an abrupt decline in the previously upward trend of antidepressant use by adolescents, an immediate reversal of the upward trend of antidepressant use in young adults, and antidepressant use decreased suddenly among adults.

Undertreated mood disorders can have severe negative consequences. Thus, it is disturbing that after the health advisories, warnings, and media reports about the relation between antidepressant use and suicidality in young people, we found substantial reductions in antidepressant treatment and simultaneous, small but meaningful increases in suicide attempts. It is essential to monitor and reduce possible unintended effects of FDA warnings and media reporting.

lhsi writes:

Google is expanding into domain registration, aimed at small businesses. Currently Google Domains is an invite only beta. See also here.

lhsi writes:

A new Nokia phone from Microsoft will be released with the Android operating system. It comes with some of Microsoft cloud apps pre-installed.

One expert said the alternative would have been leaving "money on the table".

"I still find it astounding that Microsoft is making Android phones, but there seems to be a steely determination to take a more open approach for the greater good of the whole company rather than just the Windows Phone platform," said Ben Wood, from the telecoms consultancy CCS Insight.

lhsi writes:

A White Dwarf star has been identified that could be the coldest detected so far [artists impression]. It is so cool that the carbon has crystallised.

The researchers calculated that the white dwarf would be no more than a comparatively cool 3,000 degrees Kelvin (2,700 degrees Celsius). Our Sun at its center is about 5,000 times hotter.

Astronomers believe that such a cool, collapsed star would be largely crystallized carbon, not unlike a diamond. Other such stars have been identified and they are theoretically not that rare, but with a low intrinsic brightness, they can be deucedly difficult to detect. Its fortuitous location in a binary system with a neutron star enabled the team to identify this one.

A paper describing these results is published in the Astrophysical Journal (Abstract only).

frojack writes:

Pacific Standard reports that higher education may stave off dementia for as long as 8 years, even among those with a high genetic risk factor for Alzheimer's disease; and mid to late life cognitive endeavors may work just as well.

A study by the Mayo Clinic evaluated about 2000 individuals, 70-89 years old, 20% of whom had the APOE4 allele which strongly increases one's risk for developing late-onset Alzheimer's Disease.

All participants then underwent a battery of neuro-psychological tests designed to measure a variety of cognitive skills, including executive functioning, language, and memory. Higher levels of educational, occupational, and cognitive activity are independently associated with a lower risk of dementia.

Among people with the APOE4 variant, who are at relatively high risk for dementia, the difference is huge: The onset of cognitive impairment was delayed, on average, by more than eight and one-half years for people who ranked in the top 25 percent in terms of lifetime intellectual enrichment, compared to those in the bottom 25 percent.

They also found that the number of years of "protection" provided by higher educational attainment (keeping cognitive activity constant) is at least five years, irrespective of sex and APOE4 carrier status. That part about keeping cognitive activity constant means that the delay was associated with the college early in life, not the later cognitive activity.

But continued intellectual activity in mid to late-life is also correlated with staving off dementia onset by up to 7.3 years for non APOE4 carriers, as well as 3.2 years for those having the allele.

Examples of activities the researchers considered cognitively stimulating (if performed at least three times per week) included reading, playing games, music, and participating in arts and crafts. So even for those of us in the geezer crowd, it might not be too late to learn a new language, start designing that software project, writing the next great novel.

iwoloschin writes:

The United States Supreme Court has ruled 6-3 against Aereo, saying that Aereo's scheme to lease out thousands of tiny antennas doesn't differentiate it from a cable company, and therefore Aereo violates copyright law. "In a 6-3 opinion (PDF) written by Justice Steven Breyer, Aereo was found to violate copyright law. According to the opinion, the company is the equivalent of a cable company, which must pay licensing fees when broadcasting over-the-air content. "Viewed in terms of Congress; regulatory objectives, these behind-the-scenes technological differences do not distinguish Aereo's system from cable systems, which do perform publicly," reads the opinion."

AnonTechie writes:

Newly uncovered components of a digital surveillance tool used by more than 60 governments worldwide provide a rare glimpse at the extensive ways law enforcement and intelligence agencies use the tool to surreptitiously record and steal data from mobile phones. The modules, made by the Italian company Hacking Team, were uncovered by researchers working independently of each other at Kaspersky Lab in Russia and the Citizen Lab in Canada, who say the findings provide great insight into the trade craft behind Hacking Team's tools.

It's long been known that law enforcement and intelligence agencies worldwide use Hacking Team's tools to spy on computer and mobile phone users-including, in some countries, to spy on political dissidents, journalists and human rights advocates. This is the first time, however, that the modules used to spy on mobile phone users have been uncovered in the wild and reverse-engineered. In addition to the modules that were uncovered, Citizen Lab obtained from an anonymous source a copy of the lengthy user's manual that Hacking Team provides customers.

kaszz writes:

Nest has officially announced a new developer program and API (reference) that will allow other companies' smart devices to communicate with Nest's Protect smoke alarm and Learning Thermostat. Among the companies that Nest is partnering with for this initial publicity push are IFTTT, Jawbone, LIFX, Logitech, Mercedes-Benz, Whirlpool, Chamberlain, and Google itself. The latter two companies will release Nest-compatible features this fall, while the others are all available today.

The API lacks the ability to set Home or Away status and no ability to set a boundary of upper and lower rather than a single temperature. For developers perspective, it can be described as pretty meh. No behavior pattern learning is exposed in the API. The API exposes temperature and heat, cool, and fan status. And possibly the ability to set setpoints. It enables you tell if someone is home, and when they set the time for when they were coming back. Add dropcam and the lesson to the perils of cloud based devices to get the larger picture. For developers a few 8-bit microcontrollers with RS-485 transceivers + cheap wall mounted tablet will easily get you the same functions without the cloud or radio link dependence.

This is an API for a Google-hosted service that is in total control of your "smart home" device(s).

lhsi writes:

MedicalXpress reports that links between schizophrenia and cannabis may not be solely due to a causal relationship.

Genes that increase the risk of developing schizophrenia may also increase the likelihood of using cannabis, according to a new study led by King's College London, published today in Molecular Psychiatry.

The researchers found that people genetically pre-disposed to schizophrenia were more likely to use cannabis, and use it in greater quantities than those who did not possess schizophrenia risk genes.

Power says: "We know that cannabis increases the risk of schizophrenia. Our study certainly does not rule this out, but it suggests that there is likely to be an association in the other direction as well that a pre-disposition to schizophrenia also increases your likelihood of cannabis use."

Blackmoore writes:

Science news brings us If the world is a computer, life is an algorithm

To Shakespeare, all the world was a stage. To natural philosophers of Newton's era, it was a mechanical clock. Physicists of the 19th century viewed reality more like a steam engine. Today a fair number of scientists regard nature as a computer.

From time to time in recent decades, scientists have explored the notion that the universe is also digital. Nobel laureate Gerard Hooft, for instance, thinks that some sort of information processing on a submicroscopic level is responsible for the quantum features that describe detectable reality. He calls this version of quantum physics the cellular automaton interpretation.

So, if this is the case aren't we all just malfunctioning objects?

frojack writes:

U.S. District Court Judge Anna Brown, Portland OR, ruled on remand, that the No Fly List was unconstitutional.

Originally, Brown, back in 2012 said she could not rule on the case due to federal laws, but that ruling was overturned by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. So her current ruling comes with an already built in higher court review.

In her ruling, Brown said:

Since much of what is used for placement is classified, the government should provide people on the list the nature and extent of the classified information, the type of threat they pose to national security, and the ways in which they can respond to the charges.

The process does not provide a meaningful mechanism for travelers who have been denied boarding to correct erroneous information in the government's terrorism databases.

Reuters also reports that The decision hands a major victory to the 13 plaintiffs -- four of them veterans of the U.S. military -- who deny they have links to terrorism and say they only learned of their no-fly status when they arrived at an airport and were blocked from boarding a flight.

The American Civil Liberties Union, which brought suit against the policy in 2010, argues that secrecy surrounding the list and lack of any reasonable opportunity for plaintiffs to fight their placement on it violates their clients' constitutional rights to due process.

lhsi writes:

The Huffington Post, Sustainable Pulse, and Before It's News report on U.S. government pressure on El Salvador to buy GMO seeds.

The U.S. government, a revolving door for Big Agra's biotech, is indeed bullying El Salvador into using genetically modified seeds just as current headlines suggest.

"'I would like to tell the U.S. Ambassador to stop pressuring the Government (of El Salvador) to buy 'improved' GM seeds,' said [President of the El Salvadoran Center for Appropriate Technologies (CESTA)] Navarro, which is only of benefit to U.S. multinationals and is to the detriment of local seed production," reported Sustainable Pulse.

Through the Millennium Challenge Corporation, a self-described "independent U.S. foreign aid agency that is helping to lead the fight against global poverty," created by Congress in 2004, $277 million in aid is being dangled over El Salvador's head if, as the World War 4 Report puts it, "the Salvadoran Agriculture Ministry continues its current practice of buying seeds from small-scale Salvadoran producers for its Family Agriculture Plan."

The threat was apparently made, "with clear intentions to advance the interests of transnational agricultural companies."

While distributing seed packets under the program from small Salvadoran producers (instead of multinational corporations like Monsanto) have actually spurred the growth of basic food crops by a third and employed over 200,000 hectares for cultivation thus achieving the goals that MCC's entire existence are supposedly based on nearly $300 million in aid might be withheld simply because El Salvador isn't using Monsanto's GMO seeds.

So which is it? Foreign aid or a corporate pay day?

jdccdevel writes:

In general, I'm not a "The end of the world is nigh" kind of person. However, I have been following the Ebola Epidemic in West Africa with some concern for the last six months, and it's out of control.

With a 90% fatality rate, Ebola scares me in ways that SARS, Swine/Bird Flu, and other recent outbreaks never did. Living next to a international airport, with 2 small children, I'm starting to get a little worried. If it starts to spread beyond West Africa, it could easily turn into a pandemic.

I'm not interested in going to extremes, but I'd like to take some precautions. I'm looking for things I can do that are Cheap, Simple, and Effective. Things like stocking up on food, and buying surgical gloves and masks seem simple enough. How would you prepare?

Hugh Pickens writes:

Olga Khazan writes at The Atlantic that hangover research is a bit of a neglected field, but there's a lot hangovers can tell us about our brains, our guts, and the epidemiology of alcoholism. According to researcher Richard Stephens from a health standpoint everyone tends to think that hangovers are a good thing because it stops you from drinking too much, like the natural brake on drinking. And yet, a number of studies have actually shown the opposite. "If hangover is a natural brake on drinking, then alcoholics should get the least hangovers of anyone that the reason they are alcoholic is that they don't have that natural brake on drinking," says Stevens who has been studying hangovers for ten years. "But actually a number of studies in the US have actually shown the opposite, that alcoholics get the most severe hangovers, even when you control for the amount of alcohol consumed. And so it seems like it's a more complex relationship between being at risk of alcoholism and hangovers"

Stevens also says that there's is a biological basis for "the hair of the dog". When you drink alcohol, there's an enzyme in the body that breaks down the ethanol in alcohol into metabolites after you've had a drink of alcohol and felt drunk, once you start to feel sober again, that's because your body has metabolized the ethanol. But once the ethanol has been metabolized, there are usually other alcohols in smaller quantities in alcoholic beverages. One such compound is methanol, and when the body metabolizes methanol, it metabolizes it into toxins formaldehyde and formic acid. And those make you feel ill, sort of poison you a little bit. What's interesting though is that the enzymes in your body that break down alcohols would prefer to break down ethanol first and methanol second. "It means that when you're in a hangover phase, if you drink more alcohol you'll actually stop your body from breaking down methanol and the things that are making you feel ill, and instead go back to working on the ethanol and leave the methanol intact."

Finally, a number of studies show that the severity of hangovers declines with age, a finding that cannot be explained by the usual amount of alcohol consumption, frequency of binge drinking, or the proportion of alcohol consumed with meals. "Hangovers predominantly affect younger, less experienced drinkers," says Stephens. "Younger drinkers in their late teens and 20s are several times more likely to get a hangover than older, more experienced drinkers. In light of links between hangover and risk of alcoholism, younger drinkers should beware."

taylorvich writes:

The odds are you can't make out the PIN of that guy with the sun glaring obliquely off his iPad's screen across the coffee shop. But if he's wearing Google Glass or a smartwatch, he probably can see yours.

Researchers at the University of Massachusetts Lowell found they could use video from wearables like Google Glass and the Samsung smartwatch to surreptitiously pick up four-digit PIN codes typed onto an iPad from almost 10 feet away-and from nearly 150 feet with a high-def camcorder. Their software, which used a custom-coded video recognition algorithm that tracks the shadows from finger taps, could spot the codes even when the video didn't capture any images on the target devices' displays.

gewg_ writes:

Corinthian Colleges, with about 75,000 students in the US and Canada as well as online classes, owns 3 for-profit higher education brands: Everest College, Heald College, and WyoTech schools.
Corinthian receives $1.4B a year from federal education financing programs ($4 out of every $5 of its income).
Late last week, the company appeared headed for permanent closure, but an agreement reached Monday with DoE will allow it to stay in business with Federal oversight.

The US Department of Education has limited its access to federal funds after it failed to provide documents and other information to the agency.
That follows allegations that the company altered grades, student attendance records and falsified job-placement data used in advertisements for its schools.
[...]
The Education Department said that it heightened its oversight of the company after requesting data "multiple times" over the past five months

The company, based in Santa Ana, California, has previously been sued by California Attorney General Kamala Harris

for marketing fraud, arguing that the company mislead prospective students about how its graduates fared in the job market.

Worse, Everest officials paid nearby companies to hire their graduates for just long enough to make the school's statistics look better, then let them go. One Everest campus in Georgia paid companies $2,000 a head to keep Everest graduates on staff for 30 days.
[...]
the company will reportedly get the bridge funding it needs long enough to act on several DOE requests, including closing some of its schools and bringing in an independent auditor for its remaining operations. The DOE is weighing whether or not to reauthorize several Corinthian-owned schools for participation in the federal financial aid system, according to the Associated Press. The company will attempt to sell off significant parts of its 107-campus network.