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buswolley writes:

Russia has blocked access to GitHub after finding a text file in a repository entitled 'suicide.txt'. Surely this is pretext for Russia's continuing move towards isolation. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8692584

Techcrunch has Russia Blacklists, Blocks GitHub Over Pages That Refer To Suicide

Developers in Russia are putting up their feet today — that is, after they have finished stomping around in frustration for a little while. It’s emerged that Russia’s regulator RosComNadzor has blocked GitHub after the popular software and coding collaboration platform was found to be hosting content related to suicide — specifically, see this file that details 32 ways to kill yourself.

The “block” effectively amounts to an order to ISPs to restrict access to the site. And because GitHub works on HTTPS, providers can only comply by restricting access to the entire site, rather than individual pages. According to Russian blog Meduza, several leading ISPs have already complied with the order, including Beeline, MTS, MGTS and Megafon.

The block reignites the debate over how Russia’s government decides what is and what is not appropriate Internet content for people in Russia. The country’s firewall, when it was originally raised in 2012, was controversial not only because of concerns that it would be used against freedom of speech (especially in cases when that speech was critical of the state), but also because it was deemed to be too heavy-handed in how it would get implemented.

Ting Model writes:

In the US, a new solar project is installed every 3.2 minutes and the number of cumulative installations now stands at more than 500,000. For years, homeowners who bought solar panels were advised to mount them on the roof facing south to capture the most solar energy over the course of the day. Now Matthew L. Wald writes in the NYT that panels should be pointed south so that peak power comes in the afternoon when the electricity is more valuable. In late afternoon, homeowners are more likely to watch TV, turn on the lights or run the dishwasher. Electricity prices are also higher at that period of peak demand. “The predominance of south-facing panels may reflect a severe misalignment in energy supply and demand,” say the authors of the study, Barry Fischer and Ben Harack. Pointing panels to the west means that in the hour beginning at 5 p.m., they produce 55 percent of their peak output. But point them to the south to maximize total output, and when the electric grid needs it most, they are producing only 15 percent of peak.

While some solar panel owners are paid time-of-use rates and are compensated by the utility in proportion to prices on the wholesale electric grid, many panel owners cannot take advantage of the higher value of electricity at peak hours because they are paid a flat rate, so the payment system creates an incentive for the homeowner to do the wrong thing. The California Energy Commission recently announced a bonus of up to $500 for new installations that point west. "We are hoping to squeeze more energy out of the afternoon daylight hours when electricity demand is highest," says David Hochschild, lead commissioner for the agency’s renewable energy division, which will be administering the program. "By encouraging west-facing solar systems, we can better match our renewable supply with energy demand."

lhsi writes:

The video "Gangnam Style " has broken the view limit in YouTube, prompting an update into how views are handled.

Ting Model writes:

The NYT reports that NY County District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr.’s most significant initiative has been to transform, through the use of data, the way district attorneys fight crime. “The question I had when I came in was, Do we sit on our hands waiting for crime to tick up, or can we do something to drive crime lower?” says Vance. “I wanted to develop what I call intelligence-driven prosecution.” When Vance became DA in 2009, it was glaringly evident that assistant D.A.s fielding the 105,000-plus cases a year in Manhattan seldom had enough information to make nuanced decisions about bail, charges, pleas or sentences. They were narrowly focused on the facts of cases in front of them, not on the people committing the crimes. They couldn’t quickly sort minor delinquents from irredeemably bad apples. They didn’t know what havoc defendants might be wreaking in other boroughs.

Vance divided Manhattan’s 22 police precincts into five areas and assigned a senior assistant D.A. and an analyst to map the crime in each area. CSU staff members met with patrol officers, detectives and Police Department field intelligence officers and asked police commanders to submit a list of each precinct’s 25 worst offenders — so-called crime drivers, whose “incapacitation by the criminal-justice system would have a positive impact on the community’s safety.” Seeded with these initial cases, the CSU built a searchable database that now includes more than 9,000 chronic offenders (PDF), virtually all of whom have criminal records. A large percentage are recidivists who have been repeatedly convicted of grand larceny, one of the top index crimes in Manhattan, but the list also includes active gang members, people whom the D.A. considers “uncooperative witnesses,” and a fluctuating number of violent “priority targets,” which currently stands at 81. “These are people we want to know about if they are arrested,” says Kerry Chicon. “We are constantly adding, deleting, editing and updating the intelligence in the Arrest Alert System. If someone gets out of a gang, or goes to prison for a long time, or moves out of the city or the state, or ages out of being a focus for us, or dies, we edit the system accordingly — we do that all the time.”

“It’s the ‘Moneyball’ approach to crime,” says Chauncey Parker. “The tool is data; the benefit, public safety and justice — whom are we going to put in jail? If you have 10 guys dealing drugs, which one do you focus on? The assistant district attorneys know the rap sheets, they have the police statements like before, but now they know if you lift the left sleeve you’ll find a gang tattoo and if you look you’ll see a scar where the defendant was once shot in the ankle. Some of the defendants are often surprised we know so much about them.”

"gewg_" writes:

Via Common Dreams, the American Civil Liberties Union reports

[December 3], a three-judge panel at the 11th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that a 2011 Florida law mandating that all applicants for the state's Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program submit to suspicion-less drug tests violates the Constitution's protection against unreasonable government searches.

[...]The 11th Circuit panel's order rejects arguments made by attorneys for the State of Florida that government has the authority to require people to submit to invasive searches of their bodily fluids without suspicion of wrongdoing, stating "the warrantless, suspicionless urinalysis drug testing of every Florida TANF applicant as a mandatory requirement for receiving Temporary Cash Assistance offends the Fourth Amendment."

[...]A 2012 review of the TANF mandatory urinalysis program found that the state of Florida spent more money reimbursing individuals for drug tests than the state saved on screening out the extremely small percentage.

tonyPick writes:

IEEE Spectrum has a story on research into graphene which shows protons can pass through the material. One of the key properties of graphene was that it was previously thought to be impermeable to gases and liquids:

This has significant applications in fuel cells, since proton exchange membrane fuel cells require a barrier that only passes protons, and this discovery could be used to improve the efficiency of existing designs. However in addition to this it could also allow the cells to extract hydrogen directly from humid air

Additional detail is available at Science Daily and in the original press release from the University of Manchester.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Ten years ago, a team of four kids from Carl Hayden Community HIgh School in West Phoenix - undocumented immigrants from Mexico - swept the top awards in a remotely operated underwater vehicle competition for college students, sponsored by NASA and the Office of Naval Research. One kid was a mechanical whiz who came up with the idea of powering the vehicle by a battery that would double as ballast, providing greater mobility then the alternative of tethering to an above-water power supply. Another was an ROTC-trained leader who spearheaded the fundraising ($800 from local businesses) and convinced an industry scientist to field the team's technical questions in a conference call. Playing the role of Jaime Escalante were two science teachers at the school who acted as the team's advisors. The team choose PVC pipe to frame their vehicle, partly because they couldn't afford the welded metal frames used by most of the college teams.

Of course, when the team arrived at the competition site and made a trial run, disaster struck, just as in the movies. And their competition included a 12-man team from MIT.

The author of the 2005 Wired story, Joshua Davis, has just expanded the story into a book. Thanks in large part to donations that flew in after the Wired piece (their immigration status prevented them from getting Federal loans), the four kids were able to stay in the USA; here's what they've been up to. Meanwhile the folks at MIT have been good sports about it.

"gewg_" writes:

El Reg reports

Fort Lauderdale, Florida suffered a distributed denial of service attack [...] Monday afternoon [which] led to massive congestion of the websites of the city and its police force as well as the email system used by local government. The city authorities shut them down as a precautionary measure but the attack stopped by 6:30pm local time.

The previous day, a group claiming to be affiliated with Anonymous threatened action against the Fort Lauderdale authorities in a video uploaded to YouTube. The group said action would be taken because the city had enacted new laws to make life difficult for transients in the city by banning panhandling, sleeping in public places, and feeding the homeless.

The latter law brought a welter of bad publicity after city police twice charged Arnold Abbott, a 90-year-old local resident and war veteran, with breaking the law by organizing a buffet lunch to feed the homeless in a city park--as he had for the last 23 years with his group Love Thy Neighbor.

[...]Tuesday, a local judge suspended the law banning the feeding of homeless people in the city, saying that the city fathers needed to sit down with Mr. Abbott and his group to try and find a compromise.

Ting Model writes:

Elizabeth Olson reports at the NYT that financially wobbly law schools face plunging enrollment, strenuous resistance to six-figure student debt and the lack of job guarantees — in addition to the need to balance their battered budgets. Nine months after graduating, only 57 percent of the 2013 class had full-time jobs that required passing the bar. Law schools are left in the unenviable position of trying to allay students’ fears that they will not be able to find a job that pays enough to repay $150,000 to $200,000 in education loans. With the declining interest, law schools have been working hard behind the scenes to trim their operations and to expand their offerings of joint degrees in, say, law and medicine. Still they are trying to avoid wholesale cuts in faculty or degrees, steps that would publicly eviscerate their business model and reputation. “I don’t get how the math adds up for the number of schools and the number of students,” says Professor Rodriguez of Northwestern, who is also president of the Association of American Law Schools. “We all know it’s happening, and we are all taking steps that urgent, not desperate, times call for.”

The history of another graduate school bust suggests what may be in store for the nation's 204 ABA accredited law schools. After peaking in 1979, dental-school enrollments precipitously collapsed (the reasons why included “improved dental health from fluoridation, reductions in federal funding, high tuition costs and debt loads,” among others). By the mid-1980s, they were down by about one-third. Then, over the next several years, six private universities closed their dental schools, including Emory University and Georgetown University, which had been the largest program in the country. Given there were only about 60 dental schools to begin with, this amounted to a pretty enormous bust. "The point is that law schools are facing similar pressures," says Jordan Weissmann. "Many institutions opened law schools precisely because they were supposed to be cash cows and won’t be particularly psyched to suddenly start subsidizing them. "

jimbrooking writes:

Techcrunch http://techcrunch.com/2014/12/03/googles-recaptcha-mostly-does-away-with-those-annoying-captchas/ reports that Google is doing away with the old fuzzy, warped re-CAPTCHA in favor of a cleaner, more effective CAPTCHA with options for picture matching or un-distorted text. The old re-CAPTCHAs were found to be nearly useless, as current algorithms can decipher them with almost 100% accuracy.

janrinok writes:

The BBC are covering a story regarding a university that was set up in Budapest at the end of the Cold War:

In the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Communist regimes in Europe, a unique university was created. It was going to be a laboratory for democracy. George Soros, the Hungarian-born investor and philanthropist, funded the creation of the Central European University, with the specific aim of promoting the values of an open society and democracy. The university in Budapest in Hungary is still going strong, with graduate students from more than 100 countries studying courses taught in English.

But the challenges have changed. If the university was created on a rising tide of democracy, it now has to examine liberal values under pressure. In parts of Eastern Europe, the voices of authoritarianism and nationalism are getting louder. The president of the Central European University is John Shattuck, an American human rights lawyer, law professor, diplomat and former assistant secretary of state in the Clinton administration.

[....]

But if Budapest is a crossroads between Eastern and Western Europe, he says that we're now living in an era approaching its own crossroads. "We're in another period of time, which is as disruptive and complicated as it was in 1991 when the university was founded." The financial crash, the loss of confidence in party politics in the West, the rise of the "Putin model" of government, the weakness of international institutions are all raising "a set of questions that haven't been asked for 25 years". "We see very dangerous trends at work," he says, such as the rise of "xenophobia" and antagonism towards immigrants.

The full story is worth a read. It outlines several of the problems that we face today and describes several traits that appear to be more prevalent now than they were a few years ago; intolerance and racism, for example. It also prompts us to consider how modern technology and communications shape an individual's view of democracy.

lhsi writes:

Capuchin monkeys are not fooled by expensive brands, unlike some humans (Full text: Open Access).

Ting Model writes:

Allison Griswold reports at Slate that Pizza Hut wants to help you order your food subconsciously with a new product that is being tested at 300 locations across the UK that uses eye-tracking technology to allow diners to order within seconds using only their eyes. The digital menu shows diners a canvas of 20 toppings and builds their pizza based on which toppings they look at longest. To try again, a diner can glance at a "restart" button. "Finally the indecisive orderer and the prolonged menu peruser can cut time and always get it right," a Pizza Hut spokesperson said in a statement, "so that the focus of dining can be on the most important part - the enjoyment of eating!" According to news release from Tobii Technology, the Subconscious Menu can determine which ingredients your mind and eyes have been looking at longest in exactly 2.5 seconds. The menu then uses a powerful mathematical algorithm to identify, from 4896 possible ingredient combinations, the customer’s perfect pizza. "Tests on the Subconscious Menu have been incredibly positive with 98% of people, recommended a pizza with ingredients they love."

"gewg_" writes:

The Center for American Progress reports

On [November 30], Germany's biggest utility E.ON announced plans to split into two companies and focus on renewables in a major shift that could be an indicator of broader changes to come across the utility sector. E.ON will spin off its nuclear, oil, coal, and gas operations in an effort to confront a drastically altered energy market, especially under the pressure of Germany's Energiewende—the country's move away from nuclear to renewables. The company told shareholders that it will place "a particular emphasis on expanding its wind business in Europe and in other selected target markets," and that it will also "strengthen its solar business."

E.ON will also focus on smart grids and distributed generation in an effort to improve energy efficiency and increase customer engagement and opportunity.

Ting Model writes:

The NYT reports that in the aftermath of the crippling online attack against Sony last month, internal documents have been leaked containing the pre-bonus annual salaries of Sony's senior executives. A spreadsheet containing the salaries of more than 6,000 Sony Pictures employees has been posted on Pastebin, the anonymous Internet posting site, that includes the company’s top executives including 17 senior executives who earn more than $1 million a year sending "a ripple of dread across Hollywood to Washington". Tom Kellermann says that unlike stealth attacks from China and Russia, Sony’s hackers not only aimed to steal data, but also to send a clear message. “This was like a home invasion where after taking the family jewels the hackers set the house ablaze."

Although large attacks on companies are increasingly common, this one has played out like one of Sony’s own thrillers, with macabre images on computer screens of studio executives’ severed heads. Although the studio is exploring multiple explanations, one theory involves North Korea and that the attack could be retribution from North Korea for a coming Sony comedy about an assassination attempt on that country’s leader, Kim Jong-un. Sony plans to release “The Interview,” an R-rated comedy about two American journalists who are recruited by the Central Intelligence Agency to kill Mr. Kim. A spokesman for North Korea’s Foreign Ministry called the film — apparently after seeing a trailer — “the most undisguised terrorism and a war action" adding that the film would invite “a strong and merciless countermeasure.” The destructive attack at Sony mirrors similar attacks last year on computers inside South Korea that paralyzed the computer networks at three major South Korean banks and two of the country’s largest broadcasters. Those attacks were traced back to computer addresses inside China, though many suspected that hackers inside China were working on behalf of North Korea, retaliating against South Korea for conducting military exercises with the United States, and for supporting recent American-led sanctions against the north. “In 2015 hackers will destroy systems not just for activism, but also for counter-incident response,” concludes Kellermann. Sony is moving ahead with the release of the comedy regardless.