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c0lo writes:

My previous submission showed the spooks piggybacking hackers. A previous disclosure from the Snowden stash run by The Intercept shows how much care the spooks take care about your (tax) money - they piggyback ad-trackers as well, in a programme codenamed BADASS:

British and Canadian spy agencies accumulated sensitive data on smartphone users, including location, app preferences, and unique device identifiers, by piggybacking on ubiquitous software from advertising and analytics companies, according to a document obtained by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.
...
For users, however, the smartphone data routinely provided to ad and analytics companies represents a major privacy threat. When combined together, the information fragments can be used to identify specific users, and when concentrated in the hands of a small number of companies, they have proven to be irresistibly convenient targets for those engaged in mass surveillance. Although the BADASS presentation appears to be roughly four years old, at least one player in the mobile advertising and analytics space, Google, acknowledges that its servers still routinely receive unencrypted uploads from Google code embedded in apps.

Maybe SPDY had a better idea than HTTP/2?

SamE writes:

Apple CEO Tim Cook believes privacy is a life and death issue. He spoke Friday at a White House cybersecurity summit at Stanford University. He warned that there will be “dire consequences” if technology companies do not protect the privacy of their users.

Mr Cook was the only technology executive to attend a White House cybersecurity summit at Stanford University after Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer and Google’s Larry Page skipped the event amid growing concerns about US government surveillance.

"We still live in a world where all people are not treated equally, too many people do not feel free to practice their religion or express their opinion or love who they choose - a world in which that information can make the difference between life and death."

“If those of us in positions of responsibility fail to do everything in our power to protect the right of privacy, we risk something far more valuable than money. We risk our way of life."

The American president joked that before he became educated on cyber security “password” and “1234567” used to be his security codes.

darkfeline writes:

http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/02/report-millions-stolen-from-banks-through-sophisticated-malware/

Hackers infiltrated over 100 banks in several countries, stealing millions of dollars in possibly the largest bank theft the world has seen, according to a report published by the New York Times on Saturday.

The Times said it received an advance copy of an upcoming report by Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab that details how banks in Russia, Japan, the United States, and other countries fell victim to malware starting in late 2013 that allowed the hackers to watch video feeds, view daily operations, and impersonate bank officials.

The malware apparently allowed the hackers to transfer money from the banks to fake accounts. According to the Times, Kaspersky Lab said the total theft could be more than $300 million, although the cybersecurity firm has not nailed down an exact figure. Each transaction was limited to $10 million and some banks were hit more than once, according to the publication.

LancePodstrong writes:

http://theconversation.com/air-pollution-from-europe-and-america-is-making-the-tropics-drier-37395

Air pollution pumped out by factories and power plants in Europe and North America has led to drier spells in the tropics, thousands of miles to the south. Scientists had long suspected this was the case and even had modelled the change in computer simulations, but now for the first time we have direct evidence – straight from a cave in Belize.

Precipitation in the tropics, including Belize, is governed by the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) – a belt of monsoon rainfall encircling the Earth near the equator that migrates seasonally between the hemispheres. The relative temperature difference between the hemispheres plays a crucial role in controlling the position of the ITCZ and hence, rainfall distribution in the tropics.

What we found was a distinct drying trend in Belize since 1850 that coincides with a steady rise in industrial aerosol emissions in North America and Europe. This presents strong evidence that industrial sulfate emissions have shifted the position of the ITCZ through reflecting the Sun’s incoming radiation and therefore moderating warming in the northern hemisphere.

Our claims are backed up by the volcano record. Emissions from volcanoes are similar to those produced by burning fossils fuels – basically lots of sulphur – and we identified short-lived drier spells in the northern tropics following very large volcanic eruptions in the northern hemisphere, such as the Icelandic Laki eruption in 1783.

I'm not sure why they single out North America and Europe as sources of sulfates, but probably because of proximity to their tropical study site, Belize. Asia, dominated by India and China, is the largest source region of sulfates. It's been known for some time that they affect downstream weather in the Pacific, the North American West coast, and probably further downstream in the continent. They act in a number of ways, by reflecting sunlight directly, and also by seeding clouds, which gives more energy to storms allowing their convective currents to reach higher. Much as volcanoes lead to short term cooling by sulfates and long term warming by carbon dioxide, so do fossil fuels. When Asia cleans up their sulfate emissions, we're in for a big surprise downstream. For more on this, check out this January 26, 2015 release from NASA.

ah.clem writes:

During 10 years of discovery, NASA's Cassini spacecraft has pulled back the smoggy veil that obscures the surface of Titan, Saturn's largest moon. Cassini's radar instrument has mapped almost half of the giant moon's surface; revealed vast, desert-like expanses of sand dunes; and plumbed the depths of expansive hydrocarbon seas. What could make that scientific bounty even more amazing? Well, what if the radar images could look even better?

Thanks to a recently developed technique for handling noise in Cassini's radar images, these views now have a whole new look. The technique, referred to by its developers as "despeckling," produces images of Titan's surface that are much clearer and easier to look at than the views to which scientists and the public have grown accustomed.

Read about smart people doing stuff over at phys.org, here.

tt1216496 writes:

Brian Roberts is the CEO of Comcast, and the son of the late founder, Ralph Roberts. We all know that Roberts' company has been very, very bad. Comcast is in the news every other day with another irate customer's tale of horrible treatment from the behemoth cable provider.

Comcast is headquartered in Philadelphia, which is also the beat of local Daily News columnist and consumer advocate, Ronnie Polaneczky. After hearing the latest in the nearly constant litany of Comcast customer service cock-ups, Polaneczky decided to take it up a notch and tattle on Brian to his mom.

tonyPick writes:

Spotted at RT (Russia Today) is a link to footage of a Soviet-era ‘Tesla Tower’ lightning machine taken from a drone flyby by RT's Ruptly video agency:

The article links to the Youtube flyby video and also includes links to an earlier article showing the tower in action which includes more video footage.

Wikipedia has more background on Marx Generators.

Bill Dimm writes:

Google announced PerfKit Benchmarker and Perfkit Explorer, which are open source tools (ASLv2 license) they developed with help from over 30 researchers, cloud service providers, and other corporations.

We wanted to make the evaluation of cloud performance easy, so we collected input from other cloud providers, analysts, and experts from academia. The result is a cloud performance benchmarking framework called PerfKit Benchmarker. PerfKit is unique because it measures the end to end time to provision resources in the cloud, in addition to reporting on the most standard metrics of peak performance. You'll now have a way to easily benchmark across cloud platforms, while getting a transparent view of application throughput, latency, variance, and overhead.

We created a visualization tool, Perfkit Explorer, to help you interpret the results. We’re including a set of pre-built dashboards, along with data from actual network performance internal tests. This way, you'll be able to play with the PerfKit Explorer without having to first input your data.

Hugh Pickens writes:

The New York Times reports that President Obama met yesterday with the nation’s top tech executives and company officials on a host of cybersecurity issues and the threats posed by increasingly sophisticated hackers amid a deepening estrangement between Silicon Valley and the government. “What has struck me is the enormous degree of hostility between Silicon Valley and the government,” says Herb Lin. “The relationship has been poisoned, and it’s not going to recover anytime soon.”

American firms are increasingly concerned about international competitiveness, and that means making a very public show of their efforts to defeat American intelligence-gathering by installing newer, harder-to-break encryption systems and demonstrating their distance from the United States government. “In some cases that is driving them to resistance to Washington,” says Obama’s cybersecurity coordinator, Michael Daniel. “But it’s not that simple. In other cases, with what’s going on in China,” where Beijing is insisting that companies turn over the software that is their lifeblood, “they are very interested in getting Washington’s help.”

Silicon Valley execs have also been fuming quietly over the government’s use of zero-day flaws. “The government is realizing they can’t just blow into town and let bygones be bygones,” says Eric Grosse, Google’s vice president of security and privacy. “Our business depends on trust. If you lose it, it takes years to regain.”

"gewg_" writes:

Are you tired of worrying if someone who should be home in bed is instead preparing|serving your food? In Philly, you won't have to.

The Philadelphia Inquirer reports

Mayor [Michael] Nutter signed mandatory paid sick leave into law [February 12.]

[...]In 90 days, businesses with 10 or more employees will be required to give workers at least one hour of paid sick leave for every 40 hours worked. [Councilman William K. Greenlee, who had introduced the bill as well as similar bills in 2011 and 2013,] says the bill will benefit up to 200,000 Philadelphians.

Workers will be able to use accrued sick time for their own illnesses or those of family members, or to seek support in dealing with domestic violence or sexual assault. Employees not covered include independent contractors, seasonal workers or those hired for fewer than six months, adjunct professors, interns, government employees, and workers covered by collective-bargaining agreements.

Councilmen David Oh and Brian J. O'Neill, two of Council's three Republicans, were the only members to vote against the measure.

The business community--the hospitality industry in particular--had lobbied against the bill, saying it could dissuade companies from moving to Philadelphia or current ones from expanding.

tt0480239 writes:

Southern California Edison (SCE) was known for good pay and benefits before it began laying off IT workers and replacing them with H-1B visa holders. Today, SCE is the latest Exhibit A in Congress of a company whose IT workers are displaced through the use of the H-1B visa.

"They are bringing in people with a couple of years' experience to replace us and then we have to train them," said one longtime IT worker. "It's demoralizing and in a way I kind of felt betrayed by the company. Not one of these jobs being filled by India was a job that an Edison employee wasn't already performing," he said.

SCE, Southern California's largest utility, has confirmed the layoffs and the hiring of Infosys, based in Bangalore, and Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) in Mumbai. They are two of the largest users of H-1B visas.

sigma writes:

Business Insider had two stories about Android recently, one trumpeting in full capitals "ANDROID SALES ARE IN DECLINE FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER", the other claiming "Apple is now an existential threat to Android". Other publications like Forbes have frequent vitriolic articles about Google's Open Source mobile OS and fulsome praise for Apple and its iPhone.

So why does MSM (MainStream Media) love iOS and hate Android? Is it purely advertising-revenue driven or is there a deeper underlying reason?

http://www.businessinsider.com/android-sales-in-decline-for-first-time-ever-2015-2
http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-is-an-existential-threat-to-android-2015-2

Hugh Pickens writes:

Are you, your family, or your community at risk of turning to violent extremism? Now you can find out as The Intercept reports that a rating system devised by the National Counterterrorism Center titled "Countering Violent Extremism: A Guide for Practitioners and Analysts,” lets police, social workers and educators rate individuals on a scale of one to five in categories such as: “Expressions of Hopelessness, Futility,” “Talk of Harming Self or Others,” and “Connection to Group Identity (Race, Nationality, Religion, Ethnicity).” The ranking system is supposed to alert government officials to individuals at risk of turning to radical violence, and to families or communities at risk of incubating extremist ideologies. Families are judged on factors such as “Aware[ness] of Each Other’s Activities,” as well as levels of “Parent-Child Bonding,” (PDF) and communities are rated by access to health care and social services, in addition to “presence of ideologues or recruiters” as potential risk factors. A low score in any of these categories would indicate a high risk of “susceptibility to engage in violent extremism,” according to the document. Users of the guide are encouraged to plot the scores on a graph to determine what “interventions” could halt the process of radicalization before it happens.

Experts have suggested that intervention by law enforcement or other branches of the government in individuals’ lives, particularly young people, based solely based on the views they express, can potentially criminalize constitutionally protected behavior. “The idea that the federal government would encourage local police, teachers, medical and social service employees to rate the communities, individuals and families they serve for their potential to become terrorists is abhorrent on its face,” says former FBI agent Mike German calling the criteria used for the ratings “subjective and specious.” Arun Kundnani questions the science behind the rating system. “There’s no evidence to support the idea that terrorism can be substantively correlated with such factors to do with family, identity, and emotional well-being," says Kundnani. "“It is obvious that, in practice, [this] would mostly only be applied to Muslim communities."

For those, like myself, trying to work out if this story is worth reading, I'll tell you that 'npm' is the package manager for node.js, and io.js is an npm compatible platform originally based on node.js. If you are still confused then perhaps this story is not going to excite you too much, but for the others:

An Anonymous Coward writes of a story from earlier this week:

Too little, too late? With io.js gaining popularity and mindshare, Joyent has attempted to regain some hipster buzz and community standing by creating the Node.js Foundation. Unmentioned in their press release was the catalyst -- io.js, the fork with an open governance model, was unmentioned and uninvited.

Javascript: a language designed to punch the monkey. Something went horribly wrong and now people are trying to use it everywhere.

Node.js: A server-side platform built on Google's v8 javascript engine for "less-than-expert programmers".

io.js: A fork of node.js operating under an open governance model with a focus on a modern features and a more predictable release cycle.

kebes writes:

For the movie Interstellar, the FX team at Double Negative Visual Effects partnered with physicist Kip Thorne to generate realistic visualizations of the rapidly-spinning black hole featured in the film. They have just published a scientific paper detailing how this was done: Gravitational lensing by spinning black holes in astrophysics, and in the movie Interstellar (full-text is freely-available through open access). See also a brief summary at Science Magazine.

The team used ray-tracing to compute the trajectories of ray-bundles through the highly curved space-time around the spinning black hole. They explain the features seen in proximity of the event horizon: caustics and distorted/duplicated images of stars due to the intense gravitational-lensing of the black hole, as well as "frame-dragging" of space-time around the black hole, due to its fast rotation. They also provide movies from the point-of-view of a camera orbiting the black hole. The later parts of the paper describe the artistic choices made when depicting the black hole in the movie, where an accretion disk of hot-matter around the black hole's equator is distorted into multiple 'halos'.