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dlb writes:

According to WIRED, a lot of people are about to have a level of encryption that, I imagine, will not please the NSA, CIA, FBI and other three-lettered spooks. As stated in the article:

WIRED goes on to report that Tuesday, 18 November 2014, Whatsapp announced...

Nope, the Folks in the Cloaks can't be too happy about this at all.

radu writes with an article from Phoronix covering a different Whatsapp story:

The FreeBSD has received their largest ever single donation: $1,000,000 USD.

The FreeBSD Foundation received the million dollar gift from Jan Koum, the CEO and co-founder of the WhatsApp messaging application that was acquired by Facebook earlier this year.

They put it another way, I think he's sick of systemd...

Serp Kannella the Odious writes:

In a Baltimore trial courtroom on Monday, a local judge threatened to hold a police detective in contempt of court for refusing to disclose how police located a 16-year-old robbery suspect’s phone.

But rather than disclose the possible use of a Stingray*, also known as a cell site simulator, Detective John L. Haley cited a non-disclosure agreement, likely with a federal law enforcement agency (such as the FBI) and/or the Harris Corporation, since the company is one of the dominant manufacturers of such devices. Stingrays can be used to determine a phone’s location, and they can also intercept calls and text messages.

Baltimore Circuit Judge Barry G. Williams retorted, "You don't have a non-disclosure agreement with the court," according to the Baltimore Sun.

* [Submitter's Note: Surely there's a joke about fishing expeditions to be had there.]

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Walmart's aggressive tactic of matching Amazon.com's prices on electronics gear for the holidays has hit a snag, with stories of consumers scoring a brand-new Playstation 4 for $89.99 by providing a link to a bogus third-party retailer listing on Amazon.com that advertises, but can't fulfill the goods at that price.

The Walmart employees (who apparently overlooked the funny spelling of 'Amazon') who made the sale were following orders from Bentonville AR.

The scam probably originated when Sears mistakenly listed some product bundles involving the Nintendo Wii for $60. Some people tried to coax managers at Toys-R-Us and Walmart to match the price, with mixed results.

Then things got nasty:

To add insult to injury, the Walmart managers have to read the tweets boasting of the deeds.

silverly writes:

The EFF will be offering free CA to people to help the web move to HTTPS from HTTP. This will be launching in 2015.

EFF is pleased to announce Let’s Encrypt, a new certificate authority (CA) initiative that we have put together with Mozilla, Cisco, Akamai, IdenTrust, and researchers at the University of Michigan that aims to clear the remaining roadblocks to transition the Web from HTTP to HTTPS.

Although the HTTP protocol has been hugely successful, it is inherently insecure. Whenever you use an HTTP website, you are always vulnerable to problems, including account hijacking and identity theft; surveillance and tracking by governments, companies, and both in concert; injection of malicious scripts into pages; and censorship that targets specific keywords or specific pages on sites. The HTTPS protocol, though it is not yet flawless, is a vast improvement on all of these fronts, and we need to move to a future where every website is HTTPS by default.With a launch scheduled for summer 2015, the Let’s Encrypt CA will automatically issue and manage free certificates for any website that needs them.

https://letsencrypt.org/

Hugh Pickens writes:

The NYT reports that city officials say that beginning in 2015 thousands of payphones across New York City will be converted into Wi-Fi hot spots, providing free Internet access, free domestic calls using cellphones or a built-in keypad, a charging station for mobile devices and access to city services and directions. “It’s going to help us close the digital divide,” says Maya Wiley, counsel to the mayor, noting that low-income people, particularly blacks and Latinos, rely disproportionately on cellphone browsing to get online (PDF) and data charges can add up. The network will be 100 times as fast as average municipal Wi-Fi systems, so a two-hour movie can be downloaded in about 30 seconds. The kiosks’ Wi-Fi range will extend 150 feet in any direction and up to 250 devices will be able to use the network at each kiosk without diminishing service. The city hopes to install about 10,000 kiosks, each about 9.5 feet high and less than a foot wide. The first 500 CityBridge sites will be available by late 2015 to early 2016, with the construction expected to go on for six years. The contract would last for 15 years.

A successful pilot project has been in operation since 2012 but some elected officials have expressed reservations about the city’s decision to entrust the final product to CityBridge, a consortium made up of companies including Qualcomm, Comark, Control Group and Titan calling it a monopolistic arrangement. “Instead of trying to rush the process, the administration should seek a new authorizing resolution from the City Council that contemplates multiple companies,” says Letitia James, the city’s public advocate. For her part, Wiley says that she is prepared for lawsuits against the city. “In my legal opinion,” says Wiley, “this is the coolest thing ever.”

tonyPick writes:

phys.org is reporting that a team of South African Researchers have successfully run Simon's algorithm on a quantum computer.

Simon's algorithm, named after Daniel Simon, is a solution to Simon's Problem that is:

If verified it's the first unambiguous case where an algorithm designed specifically for a quantum computer has been able to demonstrate an exponential gap to the equivalent classical computer algorithm run time.

The paper detailing this experiment is available at arXiv.

lhsi writes:

The BBC is reporting that Lunar Mission One are crowd funding a project to land a robotic probe on the Moon.

novak writes:

Ian Jackson's general resolution to prevent init system coupling has failed to pass, the majority vote deciding that the resolution is unnecessary. This means that not only will Debian's default init be systemd, but packages will not be required to support other init systems. Presumably, this means that using other init systems on Debian (without using systemd as a base) will not be possible without major workarounds, or possibly at all. It also leaves the future of Debian projects such as kFreeBSD unclear, as systemd is linux specific.

The vote results can be found here

Gordon Shure writes:

In a blow to civil rights, the latest attempt at NSA reform has been blocked from passage in the Senate. Introduced as a means to stop the NSA collecting bulk phone and e-mail records on a daily basis, the USA Freedom Act has been considered a practical route to curtailment of perceived overreach by security services almost 18 months since Edward Snowden went public with his revelations. Opponents to the bill characterized it as needless, whilst the Wall Street Journal raised the possibility of terrorists such as ISIS running amok on U.S. soil. Prior to this vote, the bill had already been stripped of many privacy protections in aid of gaining White House support, while a provision to extend the controversial USA Patriot Act to 2017 was tacked on by the House of Representatives.

ghost writes:

What does it take to build a little 68000-based proto-board computer, and get it running Linux? In my case, about three weeks of spare time, plenty of coffee, and a strong dose of stubbornness. After banging my head against the wall with problems ranging from the inductance of push-button switches to memory leaks in the C standard library, it finally works! I’ve built several other DIY computer systems before, but never took their software beyond simple assembly language programs. Having a full-fledged multitasking OS running on this ugly pile of chips and wires is a thrill, and opens up all kinds of interesting new possibilities. I’ve named this plucky little machine 68 Katy.

What other unusual projects have Soylenteers been involved in, either professionally, at college, or at home?

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Several outlets are reporting that IBM has decided to offer a free version of their email application called VERSE. IBM thinks Google and Microsoft are not up to the task. Do you agree?

PC World reports:

“We felt we could leverage analytics to build an experience that understands your priorities,” said Jeff Schick, IBM general manager of IBM social solutions, of the app that launched as a private beta on Tuesday. “We had the opportunity to reduce clutter and create priority, and to help people be more efficient in how they master their inbox.”

The company plans to offer Verse in the first quarter of 2015 as a hosted service though the IBM Cloud Marketplace. IBM will also issue apps for both iOS and Android that can access all the same features as the desktop browser version.

The Mighty Buzzard writes:

Phys.org is running a story on some of the issues with modern peer review:

Once published, the quality of any particular piece of research is often measured by citations, that is, the number of times that a paper is formally mentioned in a later piece of published research. In theory, this aims to highlight how important, useful or interesting a previous piece of work is. More citations are usually better for the author, although that is not always the case.

Take, for instance, Andrew Wakefield's controversial paper on the association between the MMR jab and autism, published in leading medical journal The Lancet. This paper has received nearly two thousand citations – most authors would be thrilled to receive a hundred. However, the quality of Wakefield's research is not at all reflected by this large number. Many of these citations are a product of the storm of controversy surrounding the work, and are contained within papers which are critical of the methods used. Wakefield's research has now been robustly discredited, and the paper was retracted by the Lancet in 2010. Nevertheless, this extreme case highlights serious problems with judging a paper or an academic by number of citations.

Personally, I've been of the opinion that peer review is all but worthless for quite a while. It's nice to know I'm not the only one who has issues with the process.

tonyPick writes:

There was an update last week on the fate of the Venus Express probe following a report on the aerobraking experiment from earlier this year.

Venus Express (VEX) was the first European Space Agency (ESA) mission to Venus, launched in 2005 and arriving in 2006 it has been in orbit relaying a variety of data back to Earth since then.

However although VEX survived this operation the mission is reaching its end:

The ESA Mission Page has more details, along with Wikipedia.

gewg_ writes:

Internet connection speeds in South Korea are excellent but the government is really anal about what it will let the people access.

TechDirt reports:

[...] those found violating the nation's Internet rules are subject to large fines or even jail time.

A story on the site of the Japanese broadcaster NHK shows how this is playing out in the world of social networks. Online criticism of the behavior of the President of South Korea following the sinking of the ferry MV Sewol prompted the government to set up a team to monitor online activity. That, in its turn, has led people to seek what the NHK article calls "cyber-asylum" -- online safety through the use of foreign mobile messaging services, which aren't spied on so easily by the South Korean authorities. According to the NHK article:

Many users have switched [from the hugely-popular home-grown product KakaoTalk] to a German chat app called Telegram. It had 50,000 users in early September. Now 2 million people have signed up.

gewg_ writes:

More Than 300 A Year: New Analysis Shows Devastating Impact of Pipeline Spills

Released one day before the U.S. Senate votes on the Keystone XL pipeline, a new analysis of federal records shows that in just the past year and four months, there have been 372 oil and gas pipeline leaks, spills, and other incidents, leading to 20 deaths, 117 injuries, and more than $256 million in damages.

The Center for Biological Diversity analysis is based on decades of records from the federal Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, which maintains a database of all U.S. pipeline incidents that are classified as "significant"--those resulting in death or injury, damages more than $50,000, more than 5 barrels of highly volatile substances or 50 barrels of other liquid released, or where the liquid exploded or burned.

In total there have been more than 8,700 significant incidents with U.S. pipelines involving death, injury, and economic and environmental damage since 1986, the Center reports--more than 300 per year.

"There's no way to get around the fact that oil and gas pipelines are dangerous and have exacted a devastating toll on people and wildlife. It's appalling to see Congress seriously considering giving the green light to Keystone XL," said Bill Snape, senior counsel with the Center for Biological Diversity. "The Obama administration's own analysis says Keystone XL will spill oil, so it's really troubling to see politicians wanting to add to this dangerous legacy of failed pipelines."