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Hugh Pickens writes:

Jake Swearingen writes at The Atlantic that the Internet can be a mean, hateful, and frightening place - especially for young women but human behavior and the limits placed on it by both law and society can change. In a Pew Research Center survey of 2,849 Internet users, one out of every four women between 18 years old and 24 years old reports having been stalked or sexually harassed online. "Like banner ads and spam bots, online harassment is still routinely treated as part of the landscape of being online," writes Swearingen adding that "we are in the early days of online harassment being taken as a serious problem, and not simply a quirk of online life." Law professor Danielle Citron draws a parallel between how sexual harassment was treated in the workplace decades ago and our current standard. "Think about in the 1960s and 1970s, what we said to women in the workplace," says Citron. "'This is just flirting.' That a sexually hostile environment was just a perk for men to enjoy, it's just what the environment is like. If you don't like it, leave and get a new job." It took years of activism, court cases, and Title VII protection to change that. "Here we are today, and sexual harassment in the workplace is not normal," said Citron. "Our norms and how we understand it are different now."

According to Swearingen, the likely solution to internet trolls will be a combination of things. The expansion of laws like the one currently on the books in California, which expands what constitutes online harassment, could help put the pressure on harassers. The upcoming Supreme Court case, Elonis v. The United States, looks to test the limits of free speech versus threatening comments on Facebook. "Can a combination of legal action, market pressure, and societal taboo work together to curb harassment?" asks Swearingen. "Too many people do too much online for things to stay the way they are."

gewg_ writes:

The Center for American Progress reports:

Change.org, a website that allows users to create petitions, announced on Monday that it will be changing its family leave policy, increasing the paid time an employee can take for the arrival of a new child from six weeks to 18. Parents of both genders, as well as those who have a child through childbirth or adoption, will be eligible for the leave.

The company claims that it is the most generous paid family leave policy in the tech world, and that may be true. While as of last year Google offered 22 weeks [ NYT Paywall ] paid leave for biological mothers, fathers and parents who adopt only get seven. Facebook, Instagram, and Reddit offer both parents 17 paid weeks. Yahoo! offers mothers who give birth, adopt, use a surrogate, or foster 16 paid weeks, while fathers get eight.

gewg_ writes:

Common Dreams reports:

In a letter to [US officials], Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) John F. Sopko writes: "Despite spending over $7 billion to combat opium poppy cultivation and to develop the Afghan government's counternarcotics capacity, opium poppy cultivation levels in Afghanistan hit an all-time high in 2013."

"As of June 30, 2014, the United States has spent approximately $7.6 billion on counternarcotics efforts in Afghanistan," the letter states.

"Despite the significant financial expenditure, opium poppy cultivation has far exceeded previous records," he writes, adding that this "calls into question the long-term effectiveness and sustainability of those prior efforts."

[...] A Defense Department response to the SIGAR findings, which is included in the report, states, in part: "In our opinion, the failure to reduce poppy cultivation and increase eradication is due to the lack of Afghan government support for the effort." The Department also states that the rise in poppy cultivation "is a significant threat to U.S. and international efforts in Afghanistan."

But U.S. poppy eradication and interdiction efforts have been described as spectacular failures. As the Drug Policy Alliance has noted[1], drug eradication efforts have not brought decreases in violence:

Just as alcohol prohibition allowed organized crime to flourish in the 1920s, drug prohibition empowers a dangerous underground market that breeds violent crime throughout the United States and the world. The illegality of drugs has inflated the price, and thus the profit, of drugs substantially. With it, the competition for drug markets has intensified, often through violence. Whether on street corners in U.S. cities, across the border in Mexico, or in the poppy fields of Afghanistan, drug trade-related violence continues, despite the billions of drug war dollars devoted annually to law enforcement and interdiction efforts.

[1] Want a laugh? Look at the source code for that page and see how many times they repeat **This is the main content area**.

an arduino guy and tonyPick write:

Spotted over at Hackernews is a link to an eevblog posting on FTDI drivers recognising and disabling "fake" devices.

Future Technology Devices International, commonly known by its abbreviation FTDI, is a Scottish privately held semiconductor device company, specializing in Universal Serial Bus technology.

The FTDI FT232 is a widely used USB to serial converter component; there are, however, some cases of compatible "clone" devices being used in products rather than the official FTDI chips.

It appears that the latest official FTDI driver now recognises these devices and when it encounters them it reprograms the product ID so that the device is no longer recognised, and will not work. (These devices can, however, be reprogrammed and recovered using Windows/XP or Linux.) FTDI have stated that the user has allowed them to do this as part of the driver license agreement.

The Linux driver is still safe, but the binary blob from Windows update is now something that we should all blacklist and uninstall, for our own safety. I've already bricked one of my FTDI boards. Will FTDI reimburse me for the purchase and time it will now take to undo all this damage? I doubt it. Did they think this fully through before launching a hostile attack on their end-users? I doubt that, too.

More comments on the original hackernews thread.

gewg_ writes:

The Center for American Progress reports:

If free donuts, gym memberships, or flex pay programs aren't your preferred employee benefit, cheap solar systems could soon be an option. On Wednesday, three major companies -- Cisco Systems, 3M, and Kimberly-Clark -- announced they will now give employees a deeply discounted way of buying or leasing solar panels for their homes.

Called the Solar Community Initiative, the program promises a flat rate that is on average 35 percent lower than the national average and roughly 50 percent less expensive than average electric utility rates. According to the announcement, the offer will start as a benefit to more than 100,000 employees. If one percent choose to power their homes with solar, more than 74,500 metric tons of carbon emissions would be avoided each year.

Offered through Geostellar, a cost comparison site for solar panels, the program will also include options for employees' friends and families in the United States and parts of Canada. The initiative was conceived and facilitated by the World Wildlife Fund.

AnonTechie writes with an article from Eurekalert:

Chapman University has initiated the first comprehensive nationwide study on what strikes fear in Americans in the first of what is a planned annual study. According to the Chapman poll, the number one fear in America today is walking alone at night.

The Chapman Survey on American Fears included 1,500 participants from across the nation and all walks of life. Underscoring Chapman's growth and emergence in the sciences, the research team leading this effort pared the information down into four basic categories: personal fears, crime, natural disasters and fear factors.

The survey shows that the top five things Americans fear the most are:

1) Walking alone at night
2) Becoming the victim of identity theft
3) Safety on the Internet
4) Being the victim of a mass/random shooting
5) Public speaking

http://www.chapman.edu/wilkinson/research-centers/babbie-center/survey-american-fears.aspx

AnonTechie writes with an article from El Reg:

NCC Group has published a set of security standards that you'll have to follow if you want to operate a .trust website.

The company owns the rights to sell dot-trusts, and uploaded the 124-page policy document [PDF] earlier this month. It provides a technical rundown covering network security to secure DNS settings, and NCC Group says the rules will be used as a configuration standard for all new dot-trust websites.

Appalbarry writes:

I've been thinking it's time to upgrade my trusty Dell Inspiron 531. Although quite happy with the seven year old system, I am thinking of just replacing the Motherboard, CPU and RAM.*

The last time I did an upgrade like this was back in the days when the original Athlon was a big deal, so I'm feeling quite out of date. A couple of hours trolling through various shopping sites hasn't helped.

What I really could use is some real world advice on what products or features don't play well with Linux, especially Mint. I'm hoping to pull all of this together without spending more than about $250. Not a gamer, not doing massive heavy duty stuff, don't overclock, probably can live for years with 8 gigs of RAM. Do have dual monitors. Mostly just run what installs with Mint, plus Windows Vista in Virtualbox once or twice a month.

For instance, is UEFI BIOS still an issue? Are there certain things that still absolutely don't work with Linux? Suggestions and warnings please!

* Haven't considered whether the Dell has some odd MB spec that nothing else will fit into.

The Mighty Buzzard writes:

Martin Brinkmann over at ghacks.net brings us info on Windows 10 security changes:

The company started to open up only recently and reveal additional information about Windows 10. It published a lengthy blog post today on the Windows For Your Business blog that details security improvements coming to the operating system.

Aimed at business and enterprise customers, it provides insight for consumers as well.

One of the changes discussed in the blog post is how Microsoft plans to change how users identify themselves on the system. Microsoft plans to eliminate single-factor authentication systems such as user/password log ins by building improved protection right into the operating system.

Yeah, I know we're way off normal in Linux usership around here but we still have relatives whose computers we have to fix, so...

Hugh Pickens writes:

Brian Fung reports at the Washington Post that earlier this year emergency services went dark for over six hours for more than 11 million people across seven states. "The outage may have gone unnoticed by some, but for the more than 6,000 people trying to reach help, April 9 may well have been the scariest time of their lives." In a 40-page report, the FCC found that an entirely preventable software error was responsible for causing 911 service to drop. "It could have been prevented. But it was not (PDF)," the FCC's report reads. "The causes of this outage highlight vulnerabilities of networks as they transition from the long-familiar methods of reaching 911 to [Internet Protocol]-supported technologies."

On April 9, the software responsible for assigning the identifying code to each incoming 911 call maxed out at a pre-set limit; the counter literally stopped counting at 40 million calls. As a result, the routing system stopped accepting new calls, leading to a bottleneck and a series of cascading failures elsewhere in the 911 infrastructure. Adm. David Simpson, the FCC's chief of public safety and homeland security, says that having a single backup does not provide the kind of reliability that is ideal for 911. “Miami is kind of prone to hurricanes. Had a hurricane come at the same time [as the multi-state outage], we would not have had that failover, perhaps. So I think there needs to be more [distribution of 911 capabilities].”

AndyTheAbsurd writes with an article from smart.mit.edu:

lhsi writes:

Analysis of an allosaur skeleton (Abstract) shows that it died of a deep wound in the lower pubis - the shape and size of which matches a stegosaurus tail spike (informally, the Thagomizer). As the vertical strike came from below the allosaur, it shows that stegosaurus had great dexterity when using its tail as a defensive weapon.

Stegosaurs might be portrayed as lumbering plant eaters, but they were lethal fighters when necessary, according to paleontologists who have uncovered new evidence of a casualty of stegosaurian combat. The evidence is a fatal stab wound in the pubis bone of a predatory allosaur. The wound – in the conical shape of a stegosaur tail spike – would have required great dexterity to inflict and shows clear signs of having cut short the allosaur's life.

“A massive infection ate away a baseball-sized sector of the bone,” reports Houston Museum of Natural Science paleontologist Robert Bakker and his colleagues, who present a poster on the discovery on Tuesday at the meeting of the Geological Society of America in Vancouver, B.C. “Probably this infection spread upwards into the soft tissue attached here, the thigh muscles and adjacent intestines and reproductive organs.” The lack of any signs of healing strongly suggests the allosaur died from the infection.

In order to deliver the mortal wound to the allosaur, a stegosaur would have had to sweep its tail under the allosaur and twist the tail tip, because normally the spikes point outward and backward. That would have been well within the ability of a stegosaur, Bakker said.

silverly writes:

Google tries to combat piracy by changing their search results so slightly.

Ad formats. We’ve been testing new ad formats in search results on queries related to music and movies that help people find legitimate sources of media. For the relatively small number of queries for movies that include terms like “download”, “free”, or “watch”, ..

An improved DMCA demotion signal in Search. In August 2012 we first announced that we would downrank sites for which we received a large number of valid DMCA notices. We’ve now refined the signal in ways we expect to visibly affect the rankings of some of the most notorious sites. This update will roll out globally starting next week. ..

Removing more terms from autocomplete, based on DMCA removal notices. We’ve begun demoting autocomplete predictions that return results with many DMCA demoted sites.

Every day our partnership with the entertainment industry deepens. Just this month we launched a collaboration with Paramount Pictures to promote their upcoming film “Interstellar” with an interactive website. And Content ID (our system for rightsholders to easily identify and manage their content on YouTube) recently hit the milestone of enabling more than $1 billion in revenue to the content industry.

Providing more targeting ads you can now buy that new album from google directly from the search.

Also Google will change the way that they do rankings, so some SEO techniques are thrown out the window.

For those who haven't already changed http://duckduckgo.com is great search engine with a bunch of awesome tricks.

gewg_ writes:

El Reg reports:

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has joined the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS), as an adjunct professor. Woz will teach in the "Magic Lab" (Innovation and Enterprise Research Laboratory), School of Software and the Centre for Quantum Computation and Intelligent Systems at UTS' Faculty of Engineering and IT.

Magic Lab director Professor Mary-Anne Williams has allowed herself to be quoted saying Wozniak is the "coolest person in the Universe" and "loves the energy, the vibe and the robots in the Magic Lab."

"Woz constantly highlights the new possibilities for technology to change the world and enjoys sharing his insights and experiences," Williams added. "The students have been totally wowed by the attention he has given them--one claiming he had changed her life in less than 60 seconds."

bradley13 writes:

Arielle Schlesinger, from HASTAC, is working on her thesis: Feminism and Programming Languages

a feminist programming language is to be built around a non-normative paradigm that represents alternative ways of abstracting. The intent is to encourage and allow new ways of thinking about problems such that we can code using a feminist ideology. ... I realized that object oriented programmed reifies normative subject object theory. This led me to wonder what a feminist programming language would look like, one that might allow you to create entanglements."

Are there any insights to be gained here? Or, is this yet another social theorist questionably applying critical theory to the sciences?

For those who RTFA, be sure to read the comment on the article by Juliet Rosenthal. She brings up the obvious questions that leap to the mind of any computer scientist, and formulates them well without being needlessly confrontational.

Uncle_Al writes:

The Computer History Museum, with the aid of Xerox PARC has released the source code for the Xerox Alto.

Depending on your age, your first computer might have been an Apple II, a Radio Shack TRS-80, an IBM PC, an Apple Macintosh, or another of the early personal computers. If you missed these early machines the first time around, perhaps you have seen them in the Personal Computer section of the Revolution exhibit at the Computer History Museum. ...

It’s hard to explain just how advanced the Alto seemed at the time. It had a full-page graphics display with 606 by 808 black & white pixels, a keyboard, a mouse, a fairly powerful processor with 128 KBytes of main memory, a hard drive with a 2.5 MByte removable cartridge, and a 2.94 Mbit/sec Ethernet interface. The Ethernet connected Altos together into a local network that included a high-performance laser printer, an Alto-based file server with hundreds of megabytes of capacity, and gateways to local networks at other Xerox offices and to the ARPANET.

frojack writes:

That's what Congressman Darrell Issa tweeted as it became clear that Congress would have no part of the FBI's plan to require backdoors (or frontdoors) into encrypted phones.

The Register is reporting that the FBI's request had publicly failed after senators said the proposal would be rejected. Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren said:

The bipartisan opposition signaled the end of the line (at least until after the next election) of any chance for the FBI's proposal according to an article in The Hill.

Earlier this year, in another bipartisan move, Lofgren, and Rep. Thomas Massie introduced a measure to the defense spending bill banning the National Security Agency from using “backdoor” searches to spy on Americans through a legal provision targeting foreigners. That measure overwhelmingly passed the House 293-123.