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lhsi writes:

Researchers have found that when a player performs an immoral action in a video game, their moral sensitivity increases outside of the video game.

"Rather than leading players to become less moral," Grizzard says, "this research suggests that violent video-game play may actually lead to increased moral sensitivity. This may, as it does in real life, provoke players to engage in voluntary behavior that benefits others."

Grizzard points out that several recent studies, including this one, have found that committing immoral behaviors in a video game elicits feelings of guilt in players who commit them.

The current study found such guilt can lead players to be more sensitive to the moral issues they violated during game play. Other studies have established that in real life scenarios, guilt evoked by immoral behavior in the "real-world" elicits pro-social behaviors in most people.

Studies like this need to get more mainstream coverage.

Bob The Cowboy writes:

This morning the US Supreme Court released a 5-4 decision that declares employers may object, on religious grounds, to providing contraception as part of their health care packages to employees.

c0lo writes:

The Internet Engineering Task Force has issued a new RFC 7258 that is titled "Pervasive Monitoring Is an Attack".

IETF debated last year the group's position in regards with Pervasive Monitoring, and this RFC seems to be the first step: it proposes the official inclusion of the Pervasive Monitoring in the list of recommendations of RFC 3552 (namely: "Guidelines for Writing RFC Text on Security Considerations") so that future protocol specifications and/or updates superseding older RFC will address pervasive monitoring specifically.

From the RFC text:

Pervasive Monitoring (PM) is widespread (and often covert) surveillance through intrusive gathering of protocol artefacts, including application content, or protocol metadata such as headers. Active or passive wiretaps and traffic analysis, (e.g., correlation, timing or measuring packet sizes), or subverting the cryptographic keys used to secure protocols can also be used as part of pervasive monitoring. PM is distinguished by being indiscriminate and very large scale, rather than by introducing new types of technical compromise.

The IETF community's technical assessment is that PM is an attack on the privacy of Internet users and organisations. The IETF community has expressed strong agreement that PM is an attack that needs to be mitigated where possible, via the design of protocols that make PM significantly more expensive or infeasible. Pervasive monitoring was discussed at the technical plenary of the November 2013 IETF meeting [IETF88 Plenary] and then through extensive exchanges on IETF mailing lists. This document records the IETF community's consensus and establishes the technical nature of PM.

Engineering problem addressed by engineering means? Good chances solutions will emerge.

azrael writes:

The Register reports that Microsoft is going after the UK's National Health Service threatening them with drastically increased software payments over claimed licence violations.

The company this month wrote to NHS organisations saying [recent NHS overhauls] made "this latest review and subsequent re-allocation necessary". It told the bodies to assess their software estate and cough for any "identified shortfall" by 30 June.

Microsoft's fiscal '14 closes this month and a spike in NHS revenues will help lift the numbers, no doubt, with some close to the company estimating several million pounds could be made from this audit exercise.

Any failure by an NHS body to hit the deadline this month will equally be a welcome boost to Microsoft's Q1 sales ledger for the next financial year.

How many shake downs will it take before the UK public sector realises that open-source solutions are a better option than being locked into a single commercial supplier's product?

lhsi writes:

A research team that included Michigan State University staff reports that:

The more a child is familiar with logos and other images from fast-food restaurants, sodas and not-so-healthy snack food brands, the more likely the child is to be overweight or obese.

And, unfortunately, studies have shown that people who are overweight at a young age, tend to stay that way.

The children ages 3 to 5 were tested by being given pictures of unhealthy food-related logos. They then were given pictures of food items, packaging and cartoon characters and asked to match the items with their corresponding brand logos.

lennier writes:

In the wake of the Facebook emotional manipulation scandal [also see earlier story], maybe more ordinary people are starting to think about alternatives to Facebook, and to centralised social media in general.

But what viable decentralised alternatives are out there? It's been four years since Diaspora* launched, and though the open network now has a foundation backing it and claims a million users, there have been few recent stories about how to connect.

Similarly, StatusNet as an alternative to Twitter has been around under various names since 2008, but still seems to remain little known.

Has anyone used these services, and can recommend them or anything similar? Are any open-source, decentralised microblogging and social media services even remotely ready for your parents to switch to?

More and more, it feels like Facebook is a problem that needs solving. How can we solve it?

lhsi writes:

There has been backlash against Facebook after it was involved in a psychology experiment that manipulated the news feeds of 700,000 users without their knowledge to see if "exposure to emotions led people to change their own posting behaviours" (i.e. if being exposed to negative posts meant users were more likely to post negative comments themselves).

fliptop writes:

It seems as though users of Android devices are stingy when compared to their iOS brethren:

Google Android has 1bn MAUs (mobile app users) (not including China or Kindle), and Google paid developers $5bn in the last 12 months, and $2bn in the previous 12 months.

Apple told us that it paid out $7bn [to developers] in calendar year 2013 given the growth trend, it probably paid $10bn in the last 12m. On a trailing 24m basis, there were 470m iOS users in March 2014.

So, Google Android users in total are spending around half as much on apps on more than twice the user base, and hence app ARPU (average revenue per user) on Android is roughly a quarter of iOS.

TFA comments it's not surprising, given Android is more popular in lower income countries and the fact that Android devices are about half the cost of iOS ones (which could signal purchasing intent).

Appalbarry writes:

Even though this is basically an HP press release, the Globe and Mail has a cute photo essay about how HP recycles inkjet cartridges. Stage one happens in Montreal, then the "new" black plastic is shipped to Ireland where it apparently becomes new inkjet cartridges.

I know that I rolled my eyes at least ten times while reading the copy that accompanies the photos can you do better?

Felonious Coward writes:

After ten years in orbit, the Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) on NASA's Aura satellite has been in orbit sufficiently long to show that people in major U.S. cities are breathing less nitrogen dioxide - a yellow-brown gas that can cause respiratory problems.

Nitrogen dioxide is one of the six common pollutants regulated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to protect human health. Alone it can impact the respiratory system, but it also contributes to the formation of other pollutants including ground-level ozone and particulates, which also carry adverse health effects. The gas is produced primarily during the combustion of gasoline in vehicle engines and coal in power plants. It's also a good proxy for the presence of air pollution in general.

Air pollution has decreased even though population and the number of cars on the roads have increased. The shift is the result of regulations, technology improvements and economic changes, scientists say.

lhsi writes:

TorrentFreak reports:

At every available opportunity copyright holders criticize Google for not doing enough to stop online piracy and every step taken by the search engine only results in more demands. Meanwhile, Microsoft's Bing flies largely under the radar, providing a video and TV show search tool that Google would not dare introduce.

The Bing video search included auto complete of infringing titles, and allows a search to be filtered to show only videos longer than 20 minutes to skip trailers from being shown in the results.

dyslexic writes:

Google handed out pieces of cardboard at this year's I/O 2014, but not any old piece of cardboard. This one piece of cardboard could change everything sort of.

You take the cardboard, cut it out, add a rubber band, two magnets, some Velcro and magnifying glasses and you have a virtual reality viewer.

No this isn't a joke.

And no you don't just look through the holes and pretend that the real world is virtual.

What you do is place a mobile phone so that the screen is visible through the magnifying lenses. You then have to use a free app that Google has created and view its output through the lenses. Your eyes are presented with two stereo images and hence you see the result in 3D.

The free app lets you use Google services such as YouTube and Google Earth. There is also a Chrome Experiment that you can use to try out a VR game, music video and a classic 3D stereoscopic photo. There is also a VR Toolkit, complete with tutorial, that you can use to create your own Android VR app.

You see innovation is alive and well at Google.

Seven writes:

So just how effective are those "hacking tools" you can find on most sites that consider themselves underground? The answer is complicated, and applies to both hacking AND security. It's not the users, but rather how many of them there are.

Whatever operating system you use though, if you're using any major anti-virus suite like McAfee, Norton, AVG, or Avast, you're not safe because, once again, too many people use them. Most virii and exploits are written to disable the top scanning software by default before they even begin their attack. It's the users of any piece of software alone that render it useless in the long run which means that to continue to be viable on the internet, for good or for evil, you sadly have to abandon things as they become popular.

lhsi writes:

The BBC report that:

North Korea has promised "merciless" retaliation if a forthcoming Hollywood movie about killing Kim Jong-un is released, say agencies.

A North Korean foreign ministry spokesman said in state media that the movie's release would be an "act of war".

He did not mention the title, but a Hollywood movie called The Interview with a similar plot is due in October.

kaszz writes:

A machine-learning project at UK's University of Sheffield are using simple drones and have created automatic-control software that enables the "flying robot" to learn about its surroundings using a camera and an array of sensors. The robot starts with no information about its environment and the objects within it. But by overlaying different frames from the camera and selecting key reference points within the scene, it builds up a 3D map of the world around it. Other sensors pick up barometric and ultrasonic data, which gives additional clues about the environment. This information is fed into autopilot software to enable the robot to navigate safely and learn about the objects nearby and navigate to specific items. The process of taking a large number of images of the same scene, possibly with inaccurate data about where they were taken, and building a 3D model is called Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM).

This reminds me when PlayStation 2 exports were restricted in 2000 because the graphics chip was powerful enough to control missiles equipped with terrain reading navigation systems. To prevent the console falling into the hands of Saddam, Qaddafi et al, no one could take more than two PlayStation 2s out of Japan. No flying PlayStations have been spotted but that may now change.