SoylentNews

janrinok writes:

The Register is running with a story that criminal lawyers in the Netherlands are pushing back against the country's data retention laws:

The Netherlands is the latest EU country to see pushback against excessive state surveillance of the Internet, with that country's criminal lawyers' association leading a court action against the state over its data retention laws.

The association (the NVSA) has joined forces with the Dutch Association of Journalists, Privacy First, NDP New Media, local ISP Bit, and Publiekstijdschriften. In light of the EU Court of Justice decision in April, which in April ruled that Europe's two-year data retention directive was invalid, the plaintiffs want the Netherlands' data retention regime repealed.

At the time, the EU Court of Justice ruled that the data retention regime represented a “wide-ranging and particularly serious interference with the fundamental rights to respect for private life and to the protection of personal data”, and went beyond was was “strictly necessary”.

I wonder how many other European countries are waiting to see the outcome of this particular attempt to redress the balance?

janrinok writes:

A story from Phys.org claims that a high-level engagement in the comments of a thread is the best way to defeat internet trolls.

Scrolling through the comments section on a news site is like seeing a verbal war before your eyes. Internet trolls flourish in an anonymous world, so much so that sites like Reuters and Popular Science have done away with the comment sections altogether. But there has to be a better way to let the audience engage in a civil manner. A recent study published in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication by researchers at the University of Texas, Purdue University, and University of Wyoming, found that having a journalist engage with commenters can affect the deliberative tone of the comments, effectively reducing trolling.

Natalie Stroud (University of Texas), Joshua Scacco (Purdue University), Ashley Muddiman (University of Wyoming), and Alexander Curry (University of Texas) published their findings in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. The researchers partnered with a local television news station and conducted an experiment using its Facebook community of 40,000 followers.

Between December 2012 and April 2013 a total of 70 political posts were included in the study on a randomized schedule. Each post was assigned to one of three random conditions: a well-known reporter would engage in the comments section; the station's web team (under its insignia) would engage; or there would be no engagement at all from the station. The researchers then conducted a content analysis of all 70 posts and the 2,403 comments left on these posts. They examined whether the comments were civil, relevant, contained genuine questions, and provided evidence. The researchers found that in comment sections where the recognized journalist engaged with the audience, it had a statistically significant effect on the tone of the comments. Incivility decreased by 17% and people were 15% more likely to use evidence in their comments on the subject matter.

Are we, the majority of the SN community, the solution to the trolls who make up the minority here?

The Mighty Buzzard writes:

I've been hinting around about this for a week or two, so here it is. I circulated this proposal around the staff mailing list before Thanksgiving and got nobody telling me it sucks and to die in a fire, so it falls to you lot to do it if necessary. Let's be clear beforehand though. This is not a complete solution; no meta-mod consideration included for instance. Nor is it a permanent change. What it is is an experiment. Unless you lot are overwhelmingly opposed, we'll run it for a month or two and either keep it, keep parts of it, or trash it entirely based on staff and community feedback. We're not the other site and this isn't Beta; what we as a community want is what's going to happen.

So, here's the deal with the bit that's likely to be most controversial right out front. Bad downmods and mod-bombing both suck hardcore but you can't really get rid of them and still have downmods even with meta-moderation because you still have the same ideologically driven few who think Troll/Flamebait/Overrated means Disagree. To that end, I converted all the downmods to +0 mods and added a proper Disagree +0 mod. They affect neither score of the comment nor karma of the commenter but will show up beside the comment score (and be subject to user adjustment from their comments preferences page) if they hold a majority vote. It'll be entirely possible, for instance, to have a +5 Troll comment and equally possible that the same comment will show as -1 Troll to someone who has Troll set to -6 in their preferences.

Underrated and Overrated are also out. For Underrated, I for one would really like to know why you think it's underrated. For Overrated, it was almost exclusively used as Disagree, which we now have.

Second, everyone who's been registered for a month or more gets five mod points a day. We're not getting enough mods on comments to suit the number of comments; this should have been tweaked a while back but we quite frankly just let it slip through the cracks. Also, the zero-mod system will need the extra points to reliably push comments from +5 insightful to +5 Flamebait if they warrant it. We may end up tweaking this number as necessary to find the right balance during The Experiment.

Third, we're introducing a new Spam mod. As of this writing it's a -1 to comment score and a -10 to the commenter's karma; this may very well change. Sounds easily abused, yeah? Not so much. Every comment with this mod applied to it will have a link out beside the score that any staff with editor or above clearance on the main site (this excludes me by the way) can simply click to undo every aspect of the spam moderation and ban the moderator(s) who said it was from moderating. First time for a month, second time for six months; these also are arbitrary numbers that could easily change. So, what qualifies as spam so you don't inadvertently get mod-banned?

• Proper spam. Anything whose primary purpose is advertisement.
• HOSTS/GNAA/etc... type posts. Recurring, useless annoyances we're all familiar with.
• Posts so offtopic and lacking value to even be a troll that they can't be called anything else. See here for an example.

Caveats about banning aside, if something is really spam, please use the mod. It will make it much, much easier for us to find spam posts and attempt to block the spammers. One SELECT statement period vs one per post level of easier.

Lastly, if I can find it and change it in time for thorough testing on dev, we'll be doing away with mod-then-post in favor of mod-and-post. Without proper downmods, there's really just no point in limiting you on when you can moderate a comment.

Right, that's pretty much it. Flame or agree as the spirit moves you. Suggestions will all be read and considered but getting them debated, coded, and tested before the January release will be a bit tricky for all but the exceedingly simple ones.

"gewg_" writes:

NPR (formerly National Public Radio) reports:

By a 44-5 vote, Chicago's City Council set a minimum-wage target of $13 an hour, to be reached by the middle of 2019. The move comes after Illinois passed a nonbinding advisory last month that calls for the state to raise its minimum pay level to $10 by the start of next year.

The current minimum wage in Chicago and the rest of Illinois is $8.25. Under the ordinance, the city's minimum wage will rise to $10 by next July and go up in increments each summer thereafter.

[...]The bill states that "rising inflation has outpaced the growth in the minimum wage, leaving the true value of lllinois' current minimum wage of $8.25 per hour 32 percent below the 1968 level of $10.71 per hour (in 2013 dollars)."

It also says nearly a third of Chicago's workers, or some 410,000 people, currently make $13 an hour or less.

[...][In the 2014] midterm elections, voters in Alaska, Arkansas, Nebraska, and South Dakota approved binding referendums that raise their states' wage floor above the federal minimum.

Media Matters for America notes that The Chicago Tribune's coverage tried to trot out the *job-killer* dead horse once again, to which the response was

According to a March 2014 report(PDF) prepared for the Seattle Income Inequality Advisory Committee titled "Local Minimum Wage laws: Impacts on Workers, Families, and Businesses", city-wide minimum wage increases in multiple locations--Albuquerque, NM; Santa Fe, NM; San Francisco, CA; and Washington, DC--produced "no discernible negative effects on employment" and no measurable job shift from metropolitan to suburban areas.

Related:

Seattle Approves $15 Minimum Wage

Mayor's Minimum Wage Veto Overridden by San Diego City Council

States That Raised Their Minimum Wages Are Experiencing Faster Job Growth

tonyPick writes:

phys.org has an article on a new solar powered water desalination system.

Through a combination of thermal, electrical and heat exchange, the result is pure clean drinking water through the power of the sun. Specifically, Desolenator maximizes the solar radiation that hits the surface area of the system to boil water to get a yield over 15 liters of water per day. Solar panels typically convert only about 15 to 18 percent of the solar radiation that hits them into energy, but Desolenator also harvests the heat that would otherwise be lost and directs this to heat the salt or polluted water.

Desolenator will desalinate water at a lower cost per liter, [they] said, than any system at this scale available on the market today. But what about other drinking water and desalination technologies on the market? The Desolenator team said that existing solutions are not viable. CEO of Desolenator, William Janssen, said that "A massive 97 percent of the world's water is salt water and our plan is to tap into this valuable and available resource to disrupt the global water crisis in an unprecedented way. The process is called desalination and today whilst 0.7 percent of the world's water comes from desalination, existing technology is expensive, inefficient and disproportionally drains 0.5 percent of the world's global energy supply."

The Desolinator homepage has more detail, including links to an indiegogo campaign which is raising funds for scaling up the prototype to production scale. This device is also covered at optics.org.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

In June 2010, the FBI famously broke a ring of eleven Russian intelligence operatives (including one in Cyprus) who were in "deep cover" - not necessarily participating in a short-term mission, but rather attempting to blend into American society and to obtain positions close to people in power wherever possible. Bombshell redhead (fake, as it turns out) Anna Chapman, who was working as a Manhattan real estate agent when she was arrested, quickly became the public face of the group, capturing the world's attention. All ten USA-based operatives pleaded guilty; following a spy swap negotiated between the US and Russian governments, the failed spies were given a hero's welcome when they returned to Russia.

Three years later, after Edward Snowden fled the USA, Chapman tweeted a marriage proposal:

But a Russian defector has just revealed that Chapman's proposal wasn't from the heart after all, but rather was ordered by her Russian spy bosses, presumably at SVR.

For those who wonder why this news would be of interest to readers of this site (other than the Snowden/NSA angle), the following video provides more context.

Hugh Pickens writes:

Spatial disorientation (SD) is the leading aeromedical cause of Class A mishaps not only throughout DoD aviation, but in commercial flying as well including problems coping with the Black Hole Illusion, or BHI – when a pilot on a nighttime runway approach in a poorly lit area perceives he is higher than he should be and descends to a lower approach. So what causes this visual illusion? Perception scientists don’t exactly know for sure. There is disagreement as to the exact cause and probably no one theory alone fully explains the phenomenon. Across the services, SD related mishaps result in average annual losses of 25 lives and $400 million in aircraft. Now Bryant Jordan reports from Defense Tech that researchers have developed new simulation and training programs to help all Defense Department pilots avoid BHI and another potentially fatal spatial misperception. The unit tested a team of 38 pilots in day– and nighttime simulation landings, finding that they all flew near perfect approaching in the daylight. But 92 percent made “significantly low BHI approaches” in the nighttime simulation, the report said. On average, they were 148 feet too low when 1.5 nautical miles from the runaway, it said. “If unlit high terrain or obstacles are near the approach path the results can be fatal,” says Henry P. Williams, a researcher with the Naval Medical Research Unit-Dayton. After BHI training pilots were, on average, just three feet too low at the same distance from the runway.

Another spatial disorientation problem tackled in the same study was Control Reversal Error, or CRE, which occurs when pilots lose visuals on a lead aircraft while making turns – as will happen flying into clouds. When that happens pilots swap over to instrument control to recover from the turn, but in nearly a quarter of the cases pilots turned in the wrong direction and steepened the angle of bank (PDF), researchers found. "This error can be extremely dangerous in actual instrument flight, leading to incapacitating [spatial disorientation] and a fatal departure from controlled flight."

eapache writes:

Home automation is one of those things that keeps getting promised, but never seems to take off, probably because it always seems to involve replacing everything you already own. I recently came across a kickstarter for a project that claims to solve this problem - they integrate with your existing stuff so there's no retrofitting required. I think the concept at least might be appealing to other Soylent readers, so I'm including a link below, but I'm more interested in the question of if this actually seems feasible, and whether there are other problems blocking home automation from becoming mainstream?

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/652024705/habitat-home-automation-for-products-you-already-o

An Anonymous Coward writes:

CoreOS, an early supporter of the Docker project, has announced Rocket, a competing Linux containerization project. CEO Alex Polvi explains that over the past year, Docker's original building block approach has been abandoned, in favor of a monolithic platform controlled by Docker, Inc., integrated with container management tools portable to other operating systems. An executive at Pivotal (spin-out of EMC and VMWare) blogged support for the Rocket approach.

From CoreOS's Rocket FAQ:

Rocket is technically not a fork of Docker, as its source code was written from scratch. Version 0.1.0, which is not claimed to be production ready, was posted on github last week under the Apache license.

CoreOS develops a lightweight Linux distribution intended to allow developers to easily configure their OS for cloud deployments. CoreOS says it will continue to support use of Docker by its customers.

tt1262403 writes:

This is a very scary fact about modern medicine: if researchers don't like the results they get from clinical trials, they can simply hide them—and none of us, the people who take the various drugs and devices under testing, will ever know.

For over a decade, Dr. Zarin, a Harvard-trained MD, has been trying to change that. She has earned a reputation as a crusader for open data, quietly presiding over the world's largest database of clinical trials, ClinicalTrials.gov. Established in 2000, and operated by the NIH, it now holds information from more than 180,000 studies in humans in over 180 countries.

But there was still a problem: ClinicalTrials.gov, up until now, hasn't required researchers to report the outcomes of their trials—only the fact they're happening. Under a new plan, proposed by Health and Human Services last month, researchers who run clinical trials would be made to not only register them on the database within three weeks of signing up the first study participant, but also report a summary of results—no matter the outcome.

"gewg_" writes:

VentureBeat's 6News reports

Announced in September, Streaming Photoshop is Google's plan to bring desktop-only apps to its web-only Chrome OS. [...] For Streaming Photoshop, [however, Adobe and Google] actually run the full-fledged desktop app on a server, stream a video of that app to your browser, and use JavaScript to watch for click events.

What a workaround.

Right now, the experiment is being tested with 1,689 users, according to Chrome Web Store data, but Adobe tells us it's "ramping it up pretty quickly." Still, Adobe only let us watch the app in action--we couldn't play with it ourselves. The app is rolling out slowly to Adobe Education customers, and the company declined to share when it will become more widely available.

[...]The app "usually takes about 10 seconds" to launch, Adobe tells us.

"It's the full photoshop UI, [but] 3D is not available--the server we're using does not have GPU yet. Also printing, but in general you have the entire functionality," the company says.

Streaming Photoshop uses Google Drive to open and save files.
The web app runs on any computer that can run the Chrome browser, including Macs.
Standard image adjustments and effects, including "Brightness/Contrast," appeared snappy during the demo.

OMG! Chrome! notes

You don't download and install Photoshop locally. Instead, you install a small app from the Chrome Web Store [then open] Photoshop on a Google virtual machine in a Google data center--delivering high-end performance on a low-end device.

An Anonymous Coward claims that loginkit is the proposed replacement for logind as part of the Devuan fork of Debian. It is under development and not yet ready for general use.

It's still very early days, but the AC believes that Devuan will start out as a repository that can be added to Debian's sources.list file, but will eventually become a complete fork.

You can follow developments at #devuan @ FreeNode or check out https://github.com/dimkr/LoginKit

[Ed's Comment: As this item is submitted by an AC and contains no other links than that to the github page, we cannot verify this information as being accurate. Furthermore, it might be the precursor to yet another systemd troll - we shall have to wait and see.]

"gewg_" writes:

Military & Aerospace Electronics Magazine reports

Officials of the Marine Corps Systems Command at Quantico Marine Base, Va., announced a $10.2 million contract modification Wednesday to the Northrop Grumman Corp. Electronic Systems segment in Linthicum Heights, Md., to convert the Ground/Air Task-Oriented Radar (G/ATOR) operator command and control computer from Windows XP to [...] a Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA)-compliant Linux operating system.

[...]Linux [...] has become popular with the military because of its ease of use, reliability, and affordability.

Capital Gazette notes

Ingrid Vaughan, director of the program, said the change would mean greater [compatibility] for laptop computers used to control the system in the future.

In a statement released [December 5], she said Microsoft Windows XP is no longer supported by the software developer and the shift to a DOD-approved Linux operating system will reduce both the complexity of the operating system and need for future updates.

tonyPick writes:

phys.org is reporting that Stephen Hawking's new communication system software is being published under an open source license.

The new Intel system, ACAT (Assistive Context Aware Toolkit), is covered in more depth at Wired

Ting Model writes:

Donald McNeil writes in the NYT that this year’s flu season may be deadlier than usual because this year’s flu vaccine is a relatively poor match to a new virus that is now circulating. “Flu is unpredictable, but what we’ve seen thus far is concerning,” says Dr. Thomas R. Frieden. According to the CDC, five U.S. children have died from flu-related complications so far this season. Four of them were infected with influenza A viruses, including three cases of H3N2 infections. The new H3 subtype first appeared overseas in March but because it was not found in many samples in the United States until September, it is now too late to change the vaccine. Because of the increased danger from the H3 strain — and because B influenza strains can also cause serious illness — the CDC recommends that patients with asthma, diabetes or lung or heart problems see a doctor at the first sign of a possible flu, and that doctors quickly prescribe antivirals like Tamiflu or Relenza. “H3N2 viruses tend to be associated with more severe seasons,” said Dr. Tom Frieden. “The rate of hospitalization and death can be twice as high or more in flu seasons when H3 doesn’t predominate.”