SoylentNews

As a general rule, I don't post site news on weekends or holidays, but I'm making an exception due to the unique circumstances. I'm pleased to announce that as of today, our articles of incorporation have been accepted and signed off by the State of Delaware, and "SoylentNews PBC" is a licensed public benefit corporation, ready to accept business, effective today.

I feel that its fitting to post this today on July 4th, Independence Day, given the mission and unique history of SN. I'm going to do a follow-up post on Monday with more information on where we go now. Until then, have an awesome Independence Day, and a great weekend :-)

AnonTechie writes:

Reuters reports:

Goldman Sachs Group Inc said a contractor emailed confidential client data to a stranger's Gmail account by mistake, and the bank has asked a U.S. judge to order Google Inc to delete the email to avert a "needless and massive" breach of privacy.

The breach occurred on June 23 and included "highly confidential brokerage account information," Goldman said in a complaint filed last Friday in a New York state court in Manhattan.

Ars Technica reports:

At the request of investment bank Goldman Sachs, Google has blocked access to a sensitive e-mail that the bank mistakenly sent to a random Gmail account. Google confirmed to Goldman Sachs that the e-mail had not yet been opened by the recipient, according to a report late Wednesday from Reuters.

The e-mail in question, filled with confidential brokerage account information, was accidentally sent to a gmail.com address instead of a gs.com address by a contractor on June 23. Goldman Sachs tried to contact the e-mail account holder and then got in touch with Google, which initially said it would not take action without a court order. Goldman Sachs then filed for such a court order in a New York state court.

lhsi writes:

In a number of studies people were left alone with their thoughts and no outside activities. Most reported they did not like it and found it uncomfortable.

The period of time that Wilson and his colleagues asked participants to be alone with their thoughts ranged from six to 15 minutes. Many of the first studies involved college student participants, most of whom reported that this "thinking period" wasn't very enjoyable and that it was hard to concentrate. So Wilson conducted another study with participants from a broad selection of backgrounds, ranging in age from 18 to 77, and found essentially the same results.

"That was surprising — that even older people did not show any particular fondness for being alone thinking," Wilson said.

He does not necessarily attribute this to the fast pace of modern society, or the prevalence of readily available electronic devices, such as smartphones. Instead, he thinks the devices might be a response to people's desire to always have something to do.

A further study allowed participants to self-administer an unpleasant electric shock. Over half of the men and a quarter of the women did this.

Most people seem to prefer to be doing something rather than nothing, even if that something is negative.

Abstract is available here.

AnonTechie writes:

Last week, Amazon sued Zoltan Szabadi, who worked for Amazon Web Services until May, when he moved to a job working at Google Cloud Platform. The lawsuit, first reported by Geekwire, was filed on June 27 in King County Superior Court in Seattle. Amazon contends that Szabadi is violating the agreement, which calls him to avoid working for any competitors in the "target market" for 18 months after he leaves Amazon. It also bars him from working to hire any Amazon employees for 12 months after leaving.

Szabadi's lawyer told Amazon that his employment with Google does come with restrictions. His contract with Google states that for a period of six months, Szabadi won't be allowed to participate "directly or indirectly" in "sales, marketing, or business development... with or to any customers or strategic partners of your former employer." For the same six-month period, he's barred from assisting with the hiring of any other Amazon employees.

This story is from Ars Technica.

AnonTechie writes:

A fully opaque cockpit would let pilots navigate with view-screens and holograms. Future airliner flight decks may do away with windows and move out of the nose of the aircraft, according to Airbus. The European aircraft manufacturer filed a patent application Dec. 23, published June 26, for a flight deck that relies mostly or entirely on electronic viewscreens. The first advantage is aerodynamic, since flight deck windows require interrupting the ideal scalpel shape of the nose, Airbus wrote. Also, big windows and the reinforcement required for them add weight to the aircraft.

http://www.seattlepi.com/business/boeing/article/Airbus-Pilots-don-t-really-need-windows-5596374.php#photo-6548288

Appalbarry writes:

I'm surprised that it hasn't happened already. Artist Julien F. Thomas has opened a new pop-up cafe built as a Faraday cage, making cell and WIFI devices useless. The Chinatown cafe will be open for the next two weeks. It is actually more an exercise in art than a practical solution to stopping unwanted cell-phone activity, although the Faraday cage will function as expected. There will be morning meditation sessions, afternoon DJ sets (around 3 or 4 o'clock), a storytelling event in the evening of Tuesday the 15th, and hopefully a party or two in the space as well.

FWIW, many of the better survivalist.. um "Prepper"... sites have handy-dandy instructions for building your own cage. Good to know that "A Faraday cage is particularly useful for protecting against an electromagnetic pulse that may be the result of a high-altitude nuclear detonation in the atmosphere."

gewg_ writes:

The Center for American Progress reports:

Think a higher minimum wage is a job killer? Think again: The states that raised their minimum wages on January 1 have seen higher employment growth since then than the states that kept theirs at the same rate.

The minimum wage went up in 13 states Arizona, Connecticut, Colorado, Florida, Missouri, Montana, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington either thanks to automatic increases in line with inflation or new legislation, as Ben Wolcott reports in his analysis at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. The average change in employment for those states over the first five months of the year as compared with the last five of 2013 is 0.99 percent, while the average for all remaining states is 0.68 percent.

Digging deeper, all but one of those states are experiencing increases in employment, and nine of them have seen growth above the median rate.

Anonymous Coward writes:

Thomas Smith left some vulgar insults on Arena, WI police's Facebook page including calling them racist. Consequently he was arrested and convicted of using fighting words. On appeal the judge found that fighting words doctrine does not apply to people not in close physical proximity and Smith's anti-cop ranting was covered by the First Amendment. Full story.

mendax writes:

NPR is reporting the results of a Pew study of more than 1,400 tech industry leaders and academics indicate their belief that the Internet of the near future will be neither as free nor as open as it is now.

The factors cited by those surveyed include:

1. Actions by nation-states to maintain security and political control will lead to more blocking, filtering, segmentation, and balkanization of the Internet.
2. Trust will evaporate in the wake of revelations about government and corporate surveillance and likely greater surveillance in the future.
3. Commercial pressures affecting everything from Internet architecture to the flow of information will endanger the open structure of online life.
4. Efforts to fix the TMI (too much information) problem might over-compensate and actually thwart content sharing.

This is also an opportunity for an "Ask Soylent" question so here goes: What do you think the future Internet, say 10 years from now, holds?

damnbunni writes:

Cisco's Unified Communications Domain Manager software can be logged into at a root level using an SSH key intended for Cisco support representatives. The key is embedded in the binary and it's the same key for every installation of the software. According to Cisco, this is in every version of UDM older than 4.4.2. Better check and apply patches, posthaste!

Isn't it about thirty years late for anyone, especially Cisco, to think leaving permanent root-level backdoors in systems is a good idea?

hellcat writes:

I've been following Doug Lenat since he worked with Hofstadter at Stanford in the 70s. Two of the most brilliant people on the planet. Lenat went underground to work on Cycorp in order to insulate himself from lots of extraneous profit-making forces. The fact that he's ready to stick his head above ground is huge.

Consider this. The AI possibilities of Cycorp (yet to be proven) and the data organization access functions of Watson. The combination is the closest we'll get to "skynet" in our time.

Cycorp's goal is to codify general human knowledge and common sense so that computers might make use of it.

It's only a slight stretch to say Cycorp is building a brain out of software, and they're doing it from scratch.

Randolph Carter writes:

Exorcists now have an extra weapon in their fight against evil - the official backing of the Catholic church. The Vatican has formally recognised the International Association of Exorcists, a group of 250 priests in 30 countries who liberate the faithful from demons.

Pope Francis speaks frequently about the devil, and last year was seen placing his hands on the head of a man supposedly possessed by four demons in what exorcists said was a prayer of liberation from Satan.

Monogamous Coward writes:

It's now been six months since Colorado enacted its historic marijuana legalization policy, and two big things have already happened:

1. Colorado's cash crop is turning out to be even more profitable than the state could have hoped.

   Tax revenue from marijuana sales is expected to top $130M over the next fiscal year.

2. Denver crime rates have suddenly fallen.

   The Denver city- and county-wide murder rate has dropped 52.9% year-to-year since recreational marijuana use was legalized in January.

McGruber writes:

The young journalists at The Southerner, the student newspaper at Grady High School in Atlanta, Georgia, recently broke the news that creationism and other Christian religious views are incorporated into the Biology curriculum used by the City of Atlanta Public Schools.

A PowerPoint shown to a freshman biology class featured a cartoon depicting dueling castles, one labeled "Creation (Christ)" and the other labeled "Evolution (Satan)." Balloons attached to the evolution castle were labeled euthanasia, homosexuality, pornography, divorce, racism and abortion

The PowerPoint, which has more than 50 slides largely consisting of material about evolution, was downloaded from SharePoint, an APS file-sharing database for teachers. It was uploaded by Mary E. King, a project manager at APS who has also uploaded more than 2,000 other documents. Phone calls and emails to King have not been returned. Tommy Molden, science coordinator for APS, also did not respond to requests for comment.

Students were offended by the cartoon:

"[I] have gay parents, and [the cartoon] said that evolution caused homosexuality and it implied that to be negative, so I was pretty offended by it," [freshman Seraphina Cooley] said.

Cooley said that another student emailed the administration complaining about the PowerPoint.

Freshman Griffin Ricker, who is also in Jones' class, said [Biology class teacher Anquinette Jones] got angry with the class when she found out students had notified the administration.

"She had a 10-minute rant," Ricker said. "She yelled and said, 'This is on the APS website, and it was certified.'"

In case of soylentnewsing, the student reporting is also posted on a local Atlanta newspaper blog.

taylorvich writes:

From Boing Boing:

In a shocking story on the German site Tagesschau (Google translate), Lena Kampf, Jacob Appelbaum and John Goetz report on the rules used by the NSA to decide who is a "target" for surveillance.

According to the story, the NSA targets anyone who searches for online articles about Tails like this one that we published in April, or this article for teens that I wrote in May or Tor (The Onion Router, which we've been posted about since 2004). Anyone who is determined to be using Tor is also targeted for long-term surveillance and retention.

etherscythe writes:

Bruce Schneier is also covering the news. There appears to be no checks in the program to determine whether the user is in the United States. These captures are also being stored as permanent records. In other words, if you feel you might have something to hide, NSA does not care whether it is supposed to have jurisdiction, it will copy and store everything it can about you across the board, forever.

Then again, perhaps everyone should visit these sites. If too many false hits are detected, this particular program may at least partially overwhelm the system. Anyone want to crowd-fund a banner ad campaign?

AndyTheAbsurd contributed:

There's also a good chance you've been tagged for simply reading news articles about these services published by Wired and other sites.