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An anonymous coward writes:

The Washington Post and other sources report that ZEFS, a Russian business association that built a memorial to Steve Jobs, has now dismantled it following the announcement by Apple CEO Tim Cook that he's gay. The interactive memorial, shaped like a 2-meter tall iPhone, was unveiled on Jan. 9, 2013 in St. Petersburg (formerly Leningrad).

It was removed on Friday, and ZEFS announced in a public statement:

After Apple CEO Tim Cook publicly called for sodomy, the monument was dismantled pursuant to Russian federal law on the protection of children from information that promotes the denial of traditional family values.

tonyPick writes:

Over at the BBC is a report that the eLoran system has been installed at 7 ports in Britain.

The General Lighthouse Authorities have finished installing eLoran in seven ports along the east coast of Britain, completing the first phase of their roll out. It is now in place in Dover, Sheerness, Harwich and Felixstowe, Middleborough, Leith, Humber and Aberdeen.

[...] For now, eLoran is being tested for shipping, but it could also play a role on land for the vast array of systems that use GPS.

eLoran is a ground based system which uses 100kHz pulses and can operate as a complementary system to GPS for critical navigation systems in maritime applications in case of accidental failures or deliberate interference.

Also covered at phys.org and Digital Ship.

frojack writes:

NPR reports that Tom Magliozzi, one half of the wisecracking Car Talk duo known as "Click and Clack the Tappet Brothers", has died from complications of Alzheimer's disease. He was 77.

Magliozzi and his co-host brother, Ray, began the show at WBUR in Boston in 1977, taking it to the NPR network, and a national audience, a decade later. In 2012, the brothers announced they were retiring from the show, and it has been heard in reruns on NPR member stations since then.

I been listening to these guys since the early 80s on the radio while tinkering in the garage on an old Ford. Sometimes for actual car advice, but most often just for the the patter. First I had the find a radio station that carried them, but in later years, I use a one of the popular pod-cast payers on phone during my commute.

The podcasts are still available via NPR, and the the Car Talk website is still running. As is their vocalized car noises collected over the years of describing problems.

The Guys did know their stuff, and it got so that in later years, I could diagnose the the problems as almost well as they could. But no one could turn a normal question into a hilarious episode as quickly as these guys. They never did reveal who was Click and who was Clack, it was a 37 year running joke.

The carefully chosen podcast reruns never seem to get old, and the only give away that it is dated is that the cars they help average folks with are always older models, usually no later than 2010 models.

gewg_ writes:

Common Dreams reports that for the 23rd time, the United Nations has rejected the embargo of Cuba. This time the vote was 188 - 2 (the same as the previous year) with USA and its dependent, Israel, the only No votes. One major reason Cuba gets such respect is its singular commitment to providing medical assistance where it is needed, worldwide.

Despite having suffered cumulative economic damages of more than $1 trillion at U.S. hands over the last half-century, the island nation of 11 million people has made itself a medical superpower that shares its life-saving resources with the world. No country or combination of nations and NGOs comes close to the speed, size, and quality of Cuba's response to the Ebola crisis in West Africa. With 461 doctors, nurses, and other health professionals either already on site or soon to be sent to Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea, Cuba sets the standard for international first-response. The Cuban contingent of medical professionals providing direct treatment to sick people outnumbers that of the African Union and all individual countries and private organizations, including the Red Cross. (Few of the 4,000 U.S. military personnel to be deployed in the region will ever lay a well-protected hand on an Ebola patient. Instead, the troops build field hospitals for others to staff.)

Doctors Without Borders is second to Cuba in terms of health professionals. But the French NGO is a swiftly revolving door, churning doctors and nurses in and out every six weeks because of the extreme work and safety conditions. Cuba's health brigades are made of different stuff. Every volunteer is expected to remain on duty in the Ebola zone for six months. Moreover, if any of the Cubans contract Ebola or any other disease, they will be treated at the hospitals where they work, alongside their African patients, rather than sent home.

[...] Cuba has been selfless in defense of others, whether against marauding microbes or imperial aggression.

[...] For the United States, military adventure and the imperative to seize other countries' natural resources or strangle their economies, are defining national characteristics--in complete contrast to Cuba. The U.S. embargo of its island neighbor is among the world's longest-running morality plays, with Washington as villain.

To begin to equal Cuba's effort, USA (population: 316 million) would need to commit 11,950 medical personnel.

prospectacle writes:

What influences the conclusions that non scientists draw about science? Is it a scientist's job to persuade the general public to agree with their scientific opinions?

This worry wasn’t just about climate change, but also stem cells. Genetically modified food. Vaccines. Nuclear power. And, of course, evolution: Challenging scientific reality seems to be an increasingly common feature of American life. Some researchers have gone so far as to accuse one political party, the Republicans, of making "science denial" a bedrock principle. The authority attributed to scientists for a century is crumbling.

It is a disturbing story. It is also, in many ways, a fairy tale. So says Dan M. Kahan, a law professor at Yale University who, over the past decade, has run an insurgent research campaign into how the public understands science.

If you think there's an unhealthy gap between expert and public opinion on important scientific issues (or, if you think (paradoxically) that the existence of this gap itself is a common misconception which doesn't stand up under expert scrutiny), then this article may be of interest.

tonyPick writes:

IEEE Spectrum has an article on using a Penguin bot to monitor other penguins.

Worth a look if only for the "camouflage emperor chick" photos. The paper is at Nature Methods, but appears to be paywalled access version.

There was a nature program on BBC (UK) over a year ago based on footage gained from a penguin robot - a robot looking far more convincing than the one in the link provided here. Although it would not pass the scrutiny of a human being, it was convincing enough to other penguins for one to decide it wanted to be its mate! However, the clever part was that the robot was able to right itself if it fell over and recovered from some major accidents without human intervention.

J053 writes:

According to The Virginian-Pilot, Judge Steven Frucci ruled that making suspects provide their passwords so police can snoop through their phones is a violation of the Fifth Amendment because it would force suspects to incriminate themselves. But in the same ruling, the presiding judge decided that demanding suspects to provide their fingerprints to unlock a TouchID phone is constitutional because it’s similar to compelling DNA, handwriting or an actual key—all of which the law allows.

Note that this ruling only applies in one Circuit in Virginia, but the logic would seem to apply. So, use passwords/passcodes on your iDevices!

AnonTechie writes:

If you think the two-factor authentication offered by Google and other cloud services will keep your account out of the hands of an attacker, think again. One developer found out this weekend the hard way; Google’s account protection scheme can be bypassed by going after something most people would consider an even harder target—the user’s cell phone account.

As Wired’s Mat Honan found out two years ago, customer service representatives are the weakest link in cloud security. And mobile phone carrier customer service representatives are just as susceptible to social engineering attacks, apparently. That’s what Grant Blakeman, an independent software developer and designer, learned when he woke up to find his Google account’s password had been changed and his Instagram account—desirable because of its two-letter name (@gb)—had been hijacked despite the use of two-factor authentication on his Google account.

Blakeman contacted his cell provider after an online conversation with Honan about what happened. He found that someone enabled call-forwarding on his cell account without his knowledge. That call-forwarding setup allowed the attacker to get an authentication code from Google to take over his Gmail address, which was in turn tied to his Instagram account.

http://arstechnica.com/security/2014/11/cell-carrier-was-weakest-link-in-hack-of-google-instagram-accounts/

AnonTechie writes:

North Carolina State University researchers have developed a suite of technologies that can be used to enhance communication between dogs and humans, which has applications in everything from search and rescue to service dogs to training our pets.

“We’ve developed a platform for computer-mediated communication between humans and dogs that opens the door to new avenues for interpreting dogs’ behavioral signals and sending them clear and unambiguous cues in return,” says Dr. David Roberts, an assistant professor of computer science at NC State and co-lead author of a paper on the work. “We have a fully functional prototype, but we’ll be refining the design as we explore more and more applications for the platform.” The platform itself is a harness that fits comfortably onto the dog, and which is equipped with a variety of technologies.

http://news.ncsu.edu/2014/10/bozkurt-dogs-2014/

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?reload=true&tp=&arnumber=6914468 [Paywalled]

Hugh Pickens writes:

Kris Osborn writes at DefenseTech that the US Navy is outfitting a prototype Virginia-class attack submarine platform with a series of upgrades designed to improve sonar detection and make attack submarines less detectable and more stealthy with upgrades including the addition of a large vertical array, special coating materials for the exterior of the submarine and special noise-reduction technologies for the engine room. “The USS South Dakota is a platform for three crucial aspects of our efforts to work on acoustic superiority. The large vertical array is about 60-percent designed with a preliminary design and we are installing a similar array on the USS Maryland that is 75-percent complete,” says Rear Adm. Joe Tofalo, director, submarine warfare. Virginia-class submarines will be acquired through 2043, and are expected to remain in service past 2060. Mainly aimed at dominating the world's littoral and deep waters, the Virginia-class submarines are capable of conducting anti-submarine; anti-surface ship; strike; special operation forces; intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance; irregular warfare; and mine warfare missions. The idea is to stay in front of fast-moving technological progress on the part of potential adversaries and help ensure undersea dominance for the US Navy and provide a technological advantage to US submarines looking to operate beneath or behind barriers erected by the weaponry and sensors of potential adversaries.

Many countries such as China, North Korea and Iran have or are developing long-range anti-ship missiles designed to prevent surface ships from operating within a certain distance of the shoreline. These technologies and weapons could be intended to deny access or deny an area to US forces, making it much harder to operate and project power. “We need to be ready for a Russia, China, Iran or whoever else who – recognizing the superiority we have today – seeks to develop an A2/AD like network underwater to match what many of them currently have on the surface and in the air. We know that is going to happen,” says Vice Adm. Mike Connor, commander of the Navy’s Atlantic submarine force. "We are the folks who are expected to get in underneath and – at the time and place of our choosing – do what needs to be done. A significant part of our ability to do this is an acoustic advantage."

AnonTechie writes:

In an effort to make to make Internet and mobile transactions more secure, American Express has launched a new service that aims to replace payment card numbers with unique tokens.

E-commerce sites and digital wallet applications that use the company’s new token service won’t have to store customers’ card details. Instead merchants, banks and payment processors will be able to work with digital tokens that are mapped to real payment card accounts.

The payment tokens can be tied to specific merchants, transaction types or payment devices, limiting the ability of cybercriminals to misuse them if compromised. This means that widespread adoption of tokenization for card-not-present transactions would likely reduce fraud.

Unlike payment card numbers, if tokens are compromised, they can easily be revoked and replaced without the need to physically reissue the cards they link back to.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2842592/seeking-security-american-express-aims-to-swap-card-numbers-with-tokens.html

hubie writes:

The optical properties of sapphire make it a wonderful material to use as a protective window. Apple, recognized to have impressive supply chain management capability, is known to lock in manufacturers for present or future products. To shore up their desire to include sapphire windows on new generation iPhones and iPads, they signed an exclusive production agreement with GT Advanced Technologies (GTAT) to provide them sapphire windows. However, less than a year after that agreement was announced, GTAT filed for bankruptcy.

The bankruptcy filing surprised many in the industry, including Apple. Although portions of the filing were redacted and led to much speculation, the reason was stated to have to do with a burdensome contract. Eventually a bankruptcy judge ruled the filing could be unsealed and it showed the one-sided deal that proved impossible to keep. Because the contract was overwhelmingly in favor of Apple, people are wondering why GTAT would agree to such a deal in the first place.

On a related note, GTAT CEO Thomas Gutierrez sold a pile of stock one day before the iPhone 6 release announcement where it would be known that the iPhone would not have a sapphire screen. GTAT says the stock sale was part of a pre-arranged deal made back in the spring, but Gutierrez had been dumping stock the whole year.

Hugh Pickens writes:

The Pentland Firth is a raw, stormy sound between the Scottish mainland and the Orkney Islands, known for some of the world’s fastest flowing marine waters. Daily tides here reach 11 miles per hour, and can go as high as 18 – a breakneck current that’s the reason people are describing Scotland as the Saudi Arabia of tidal power. Now Megan Garber reports in The Atlantic that a new tidal power plant, to be installed off the Scottish coast aims to make Scotland a world leader for turning sea flow into electricity. Underwater windmills, the BBC notes, have the benefit of invisibility—a common objection to wind turbines being how unsightly they are to human eyes. Undersea turbines also benefit from the fact that tides are predictable in ways that winds are not: You know how much power you're generating, basically, on any given day. The tidal currents are also completely carbon-free and since sea water is 832 times denser than air, a 5 knot ocean current has more kinetic energy than a 350 km/h wind.

MeyGen will face a challenge in that work: The turbines are incredibly difficult to install. The Pentland Firth is a harsh environment to begin with; complicating matters is the fact that the turbines can be installed only at the deepest of ocean depths so as not to disrupt the paths of ships on the surface. They also need to be installed in bays or headlands, where tidal flows are at their most intense. It is an unbelievably harsh environment in which to build anything, let alone manage a vast fleet of tidal machines beneath the waves. If each Hammerfest machine delivers its advertised 1MW of power, then you need 1,000 of them to hope to match the output of a typical gas or coal-fired power station. "The real aim," says Keith Anderson, "is to establish the predictability which you get with tidal power, and to feed that into the energy mix which includes the less predictable sources like wind or wave. The whole point of this device is to test that it can produce power, and we believe it can, and to show it's robust and can be maintained."

Prowler writes:

There are other atrocities happening in the world, especially right next door. We should focus media attention on cartels as well. It's all about media propaganda at the end of the day and what they want you to focus your attention on. For instance Mao killed more people then any known dictator in history, but Hitler is more infamous, why? Vested international interest in propaganda. The same thing Is happening all over the world, there are major things happening and yet our media is focused in on one thing. Vested interest. It's time we ask, in what?

And yes the war on drugs is what spurned these cartels to pop up, which is another debate this country still is iffy about talking about. Thank you Nancy Reagan. You can read more here.

VLM writes:

Any software plans for blocking political spam on Tuesday election day?

Last presidential election I got more than one political text message spam per hour, which was getting incredibly annoying and distruptive. Also I got about one legacy landline phone call every 90 minutes. ALL DAY LONG.

My plan for this election is I have Mr Number on my phone and I'm hoping the spam sources will be blacklisted fast enough that I won't get spammed to death. I have no plan for the legacy landline, turn off the ringer and delete 10 voicemails on Wednesday, I guess.

I'd be interested to hear if anyone has some good technological ideas for spam blocking given whats likely to happen starting in less than 24 hours.