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AnonTechie writes with an article from Phys.org:

US President Barack Obama voiced support Monday for "free and open Internet" rules to protect against putting online services that don't pay extra fees into a "slow lane".

Obama endorsed an effort to reclassify the Internet as a public utility to give regulators more authority to enforce "net neutrality", the principle barring Internet service firms from playing favorites or opening up "fast lanes" for services that pay fees for better access.

In a statement, Obama said he wants the independent Federal Communications Commission to "implement the strongest possible rules to protect net neutrality".

Obama's comment comes amid heated debate among online industry sectors as the FCC seeks to draft new rules to replace those struck down this year by a US appeals court, which said the agency lacked authority to regulate Internet service firms as it does telephone carriers.

"'Net neutrality' has been built into the fabric of the Internet since its creation—but it is also a principle that we cannot take for granted," Obama said in a statement.

microtodd writes:

I thought this was an interesting presentation by Adrian Cockcroft at Netflix.

I know a lot of people think "DevOps" is a dirty word but the way Adrian describes how it works at Netflix is really interesting. This seems to be the embodiment of the "get out of the engineer's way" approach. And its more of that "speed of iteration wins in the marketplace" mentality I've started to see in the past few years. I liked the OODA loop callout in the slides, too....seems like Adrian might actually know who John Boyd is.

What do my fellow soylenters think? Better to give a developer ownership of the entire lifecycle? Or better to have defined checkpoints and stakeholders to ensure quality and defect prevention/identification?

AnonTechie writes with an article from PC World:

Computer scientists have asked the U.S. Supreme Court to reverse an appeals court decision that Java APIs, the specifications that let programs communicate with each other, are copyrightable.

In a dispute between Oracle and Google, the 77 scientists argue that the free and open use of the application programming interfaces has been both routine and essential in the computer industry since its beginning, and depended on the “sensible assumption” that APIs and other interfaces were not copyrightable.

The scientists include five Turing Award winners, four National Medal of Technology winners, and a number of fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery, IEEE, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, according to digital rights group, Electronic Frontier Foundation, which filed the amici curiae (friends of the court) brief on Friday on behalf of the scientists.

Among the signatories are Vinton “Vint” Cerf, Internet pioneer and Google’s chief Internet evangelist, and Ken Thompson, co-designer of the Unix operating system.

Do you think APIs should be copyrightable?

Hugh Pickens writes:

Mozilla announced that they are excited to unveil Firefox Developer Edition, the first browser created specifically for developers that integrates two powerful new features, Valence and WebIDE that improve workflow and help you debug other browsers and apps directly from within Firefox Developer Edition. Valence (previously called Firefox Tools Adapter) lets you develop and debug your app across multiple browsers and devices by connecting the Firefox dev tools to other major browser engines. WebIDE allows you to develop, deploy and debug Web apps directly in your browser, or on a Firefox OS device. "It lets you create a new Firefox OS app (which is just a web app) from a template, or open up the code of an existing app. From there you can edit the app’s files. It’s one click to run the app in a simulator and one more to debug it with the developer tools."

Firefox Developer Edition also includes all the tools experienced Web developers are familiar with including: Responsive Design Mod, Page Inspector, Web Console, JavaScript Debugger, Network Monitor, Style Editor, and Web Audio Editor. At launch, Mozilla is starting off with Chrome for Android and Safari for iOS. and the eventual goal is to support more browsers, depending on what developers tell Mozilla they want, but the primary focus is on the mobile Web. "One of the biggest pain points for developers is having to use numerous siloed development environments in order to create engaging content or for targeting different app stores. For these reasons, developers often end up having to bounce between different platforms and browsers, which decreases productivity and causes frustration," says the press release. "If you’re a new Web developer, the streamlined workflow and the fact that everything is already set up and ready to go makes it easier to get started building sophisticated applications."

AnonTechie writes that the Tor Project is asking the same question that we did on Saturday:

Little is known about how U.S. and European law enforcement shut down more than 400 websites, including Silk Road 2.0, which used technology that hides their true IP addresses. The websites were set up using a special feature of the Tor network, which is designed to mask people’s Internet use using special software that routes encrypted browsing traffic through a network of worldwide servers.

The Tor Project, is a nonprofit that relies in part on donations. The project “currently doesn’t have funding for improving the security of hidden services,” wrote Andrew Lewman, the project’s executive director, in a blog post on Sunday. ( https://blog.torproject.org/blog/thoughts-and-concerns-about-operation-onymous )

It is possible that a remote-code execution vulnerability has been found in Tor’s software, or that the individual sites had flaws such as SQL injection vulnerabilities. But Lewman wrote The Tor Project had little information on the methods used by law enforcement in the latest action.

“Tor is most interested in understanding how these services were located and if this indicates a security weakness in Tor hidden services that could be exploited by criminals or secret police repressing dissents,” he wrote.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2845352/tor-project-mulls-how-feds-took-down-hidden-websites.html

[Related]: https://blog.torproject.org/blog/hidden-services-need-some-love

Can anybody help Andrew Lewman understand what happened ?

Hugh Pickens writes:

Arthur Bright reports in the Christian Science Monitor that the European Leadership Network has chronicled some 40 incidents over the past eight months, saying that Russian forces seem to have been authorized to act in a much more aggressive way. "Russian armed forces and security agencies seem to have been authorized and encouraged to act in a much more aggressive way towards NATO countries, Sweden and Finland" in a way that "increases the risk of unintended escalation and the danger of losing control over events," ELN warns.

The report cites three incidents in particular as having "high probability of causing casualties or a direct military confrontation between Russia and Western states." The first occurred in March, when a passenger flight out of Copenhagen, Denmark, had a near miss with a Russian surveillance plane that did not transmit its position. The second was the capture of an Estonian border agent by Russian security in September. The report also summarizes a incident last month where Swedish naval patrols undertook a broad search for what was widely speculated to be a Russian submarine in the Stockholm archipelago. The New York Times writes that the report adds credence to former Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev's comments over the weekend, during the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, that the world seems "on the brink of a new cold war." Mr. Gorbachev warned that “Bloodshed in Europe and the Middle East against the backdrop of a breakdown in dialogue between the major powers is of enormous concern.”

The report has three main recommendations: The Russian leadership should urgently re-evaluate the costs and risks of continuing its more assertive military posture, and Western diplomacy should be aimed at persuading Russia to move in this direction; All sides should exercise military and political restraint; All sides must improve military-to-military communication and transparency. "To perpetuate a volatile stand-off between a nuclear armed state and a nuclear armed alliance and its partners in the circumstances described in this paper is risky at best. It could prove catastrophic at worst."

Open4D writes:

Now that Laura Poitras's film about the Edward Snowden affair (previously mentioned on SN a month ago) is out in cinemas, the Observer/Guardian has an article in which she and other people in Berlin (including Andy Müller-Maguhn of the Chaos Computer Club) talk about state surveillance.

With its strict privacy laws, Germany is the refuge of choice for those hounded by the security services. Carole Cadwalladr visits Berlin to meet Laura Poitras, the director of Edward Snowden film Citizenfour, and a growing community of surveillance refuseniks.

"I can't help thinking that Berlin, the city that found itself at the frontline of so much of the 20th century's history, has found itself, once again, on the fracture point between two opposing world orders."

mhajicek writes:

Human clinical trials to begin on drug that reverses diabetes in animal models.

http://www.gizmag.com/verapamil-diabetes-clinical-trial/34642/

From the article:

"Currently, we can prescribe external insulin and other medications to lower blood sugar; but we have no way to stop the destruction of beta cells, and the disease continues to get worse," said Fernando Ovalle, M.D., the co-principal investigator of the study who helped develop and will oversee all clinical aspects of the trial. "If verapamil works in humans, it would be a truly revolutionary development in a disease affecting more people each year to the tune of billions of dollars annually."

frojack writes:

And now for something completely different.....

One man's collection of Once Magnificent Autos is rotting away in the German woods.
And that was his plan all along.

The owner collected fifty classic cars and parked them in back woodlot as a present to himself when he turned 50 in the year 2000.
Even in the shape they are in, some of these cars could bring in ten thousand dollars from classic car restorers. But the owner isn't interested in the money.

This is his (semi) private monument to post apocalyptic automobile landscapes. Or an expensive junk yard. Its hard to tell.

lhsi writes:

https://peerj.com/articles/589/

A trial of students in a massive open online course in statistics found that only around half could correctly determine from scatterplots whether the data was statistically significant.

Scatterplots are the most common way for statisticians, scientists, and the public to visually detect relationships between measured variables. At the same time, and despite widely publicized controversy, P-values remain the most commonly used measure to statistically justify relationships identified between variables. Here we measure the ability to detect statistically significant relationships from scatterplots in a randomized trial of 2,039 students in a statistics massive open online course (MOOC). Each subject was shown a random set of scatterplots and asked to visually determine if the underlying relationships were statistically significant at the P http://glimmer.rstudio.com/afisher/EDA/.

Nerdfest writes:

Trouble keeping up with new technologies? Want to learn a new skill or language?

"Professor Carla Shatz of Stanford University and her colleagues have discovered a way to revert an adult brain to the “plastic”, child-like state that is more able to form new connections quickly. The technical term “plastic” implies the ability to adapt or shape itself to new conditions. The striking results were revealed through experiments on a protein expressed in brain cells known as PirB (this is the name of the protein in the animal model, in humans it is called “LilrB2″), which seems to stabilize neural connections."

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Atheist vlogger Thunderf00t reports that Jordan Owen, Slade Villena, and Mykeru were "all suspended from twitter for no reason." Jordan Owen is the co-producer of the documentary The Sarkeesian Effect, a critique of the methods of controversial vlogger Anita Sarkeesian. Mykeru is the producer of The Block Bot and the Dumbification of the Beeb, a critique of the BBC Newsnight segment "Talking to the Twitter Trolls and those Who Study them". Slade Villena is a former writer for Gamasutra and the founder of indie game developer Rogue Star Games.

Thunderf00t himself was suspended from Twitter for two weeks in September for unclear reasons. At that time Twitter had also banned the account of "The Camera Lady", the researcher for a video series accusing award-winning developer Phil Fish and the Independent Games Festival of racketeering.

Daz writes:

A little less than a year ago HackADay featured the start of a world-wide collaboration around an open source offline password keeper, the Mooltipass. The device enumerates as a keyboard and uses a PIN-locked smartcard to read an AES-256 key required to decrypt its credentials database. All password accessing operations need to be approved on its physical user interface to prevent impersonation.

As its beta testing phase is over, the Mooltipass crowdfunding campaign is now live and already achieved 44% of its $100k goal in less than four days.

Hugh Pickens writes:

IBM has recently delivered a string of disappointing quarters, and announced recently that it would take a multibillion-dollar hit to offload its struggling chip business. But Will Knight writes at MIT Technology Review that Watson may have the answer to IBM's uncertain future.

IBM's vast research department was recently reorganized to ramp up efforts related to cognitive computing. The push began with the development of the original Watson, but has expanded to include other areas of software and hardware research aimed at helping machines provide useful insights from huge quantities of often-messy data. “We’re betting billions of dollars, and a third of this division now is working on it,” says John Kelly, director of IBM Research, said of cognitive computing, a term the company uses to refer to artificial intelligence techniques related to Watson.

tonyPick writes:

Over at Wired is a story on determining the optimal way to board a plane.

Jason Steffen is an astrophysicist at Northwestern University, and several years ago he modeled different airline boarding methods to see what made them so slow. He also figured out how airlines could get us on board much faster.

Jason Steffen has a page with more detail on the algorithm.

(Spotted via Scientific American's physics week in review, where it is noted this work is actually a few years old — having previously been covered in 2008 and 2011 — before the current Wired article).