SoylentNews

joekiser writes:

I thought it this would be fun everybody. I thought it might be interesting to compare desktop screenshots and see what other SoylentNews user interfaces look like. Tiling window manager or stacking? Desktop environment or not? Are you minimalist? What operating systems are you using?

What about your phone/tablet/phablet?

I'll start: Desktop and Cellular Phone.

Hugh Pickens writes:

Brian Chen writes in the NYT that two companies, Republic Wireless and FreedomPop, that reduce cellphone costs by relying on strategically placed Wi-Fi routers are at the forefront of a tantalizing communications concept that has proved hard to produce on a big scale, The concept championed by the two little companies in their nationwide services is surprisingly simple. They offer services that rely primarily on Wi-Fi networks, and in areas without Wi-Fi, customers can pull a signal from regular cell towers. “Wi-Fi first is a massive disrupter to the current cost structure of the industry,” says Stephen Stokols. “That’s going to be a big shock to the carriers.” For $5 a month, customers of Republic Wireless can make calls or connect to the Internet solely over Wi-Fi. For $10 a month, they can use both Wi-Fi and a cellular connection from Sprint in Republic’s most popular option. Republic Wireless’s parent company, Bandwidth.com, a telecommunications provider with about 400 employees, developed a technique to move calls seamlessly between different Wi-Fi networks and cell towers. “You can’t pretend these companies are major players by any stretch. But I think their real importance is proof of concept,” says Craig Moffett. “They demonstrate just how disruptive a Wi-Fi-first operator can be, and just how much cost they can take out.”

In major cities, the Wi-Fi-first network makes sense. People use smartphones frequently while sitting around their offices and apartments, and Wi-Fi can handle the job just fine. But once people start moving around, it is not so simple. The benefit of a cell service is that your phone can switch among multiple towers while you are on the go which wi-fi is not designed to handle. Google may be experimenting with a hybrid approach similar to the small companies’. A person briefed on Google’s plans, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the conversations were private, says the company wants to make use of the fiber network it has installed in various cities to create an enormous network of Wi-Fi connections that phones could use to place calls and use apps over the Internet. In areas out of reach, Google’s network would switch over to cell towers leased by T-Mobile USA and Sprint. Still many wonder if even the biggest companies could make a Wi-Fi-based phone network work. “There are just so many places where Wi-Fi doesn’t reach," says Jan Dawson "and the quality of Wi-Fi that you can find is often subpar."

An Anonymous Coward writes with an announcement from m0n0wall:

[...] The world keeps turning, and while m0n0wall has made an effort to keep up, there are now better solutions available and under active development.

Therefore, today I announce that the m0n0wall project has officially ended. No development will be done anymore, and there will be no further releases.

The forums and the mailing list will be frozen at the end of this month. All the contents of the website, repository, downloads, mailing list and forum will be archived in a permanent location on the web so that they remain accessible indefinitely to anyone who might be interested in them.

m0n0wall has served as the seed for several other well known open source projects, like pfSense, FreeNAS and AskoziaPBX. The newest offspring, OPNsense (https://opnsense.org), aims to continue the open source spirit of m0n0wall while updating the technology to be ready for the future. In my view, it is the perfect way to bring the m0n0wall idea into 2015, and I encourage all current m0n0wall users to check out OPNsense and contribute if they can.

Finally, I would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who has been involved in the m0n0wall project and helped in some way or another - by contributing code, documentation, answering questions on the mailing list or the forum, donating or just spreading the word. It has been a great journey for me, and I'm convinced that even now that it has come to an end, the m0n0wall spirit will live on in the various projects it has spawned.

Manuel Kasper
15 February 2015

An Anonymous Coward writes:

The Guardian reports that ...

Men are more likely to think of women as objects if they have looked at sexy pictures of females beforehand, psychologists said yesterday.

Researchers used brain scans to show that when straight men looked at pictures of women in bikinis, areas of the brain that normally light up in anticipation of using tools, like spanners and screwdrivers, were activated. Scans of some of the men found that a part of the brain associated with empathy for other people's emotions and wishes shut down after looking at the pictures.

Susan Fiske, a psychologist at Princeton University in New Jersey, said the changes in brain activity suggest sexy images can shift the way men perceive women, turning them from people to interact with, to objects to act upon.

The finding confirms a long-suspected effect of sexy images on the way women are perceived, and one which persists in workplaces and the wider world today, Fiske said. "When there are sexualised images in the workplace, it's hard for people not to think about their female colleagues in those terms. It spills over from the images to the workplace," she said.

Two more interesting, and slightly amusing, quotes from the report, one of which has already been alluded to:

"Brain scans showed that when men saw the images of the women's bodies, activity increased in part of the brain called the premotor cortex, which is involved in urges to take action. The same area lights up before using power tools to do DIY."

"When they took a memory test afterwards, the men best remembered images of bikini-clad women whose heads had been digitally removed."

As a species, we are a funny lot.....

Teckla writes:

Tesla didn't ship nearly as many cars this quarter as it had projected, but CEO Elon Musk remained upbeat during today's earnings call as he let some details slip about a brand new product. According to Musk, the company is working on a consumer battery pack for the home:

Design of the battery is apparently complete, and production could begin in six months. Tesla is still deciding on a date for unveiling the new unit, but Musk said he was pleased with the result, calling the pack "really great" and voicing his excitement for the project.

What would a Tesla home battery look like? The Toyota Mirai, which uses a hydrogen fuel cell, gives owners the option to remove the battery and use it to supply electrical power to their homes. That battery can reportedly power the average home for a week when fully charged. Employees at many big Silicon Valley tech companies already enjoy free charging stations at their office parking lot. Now imagine if they could use that juice to eliminate their home electric bill. A more practical application for your car would be a backup generator during emergencies, which is how Nissan pitches the battery in its Leaf.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

According to the server status page of the Haskell programming language project, the deb.haskell.org server used for Debian builds is currently offline due to a suspected security breach.

The log of this incident currently states:

February 14, 2015 4:09PM CST
February 14, 2015 10:09PM UTC
[Identified] `deb.haskell.org` is currently offline due to our hosting provider suspecting malicious activity. We're working on getting it back.

February 15, 2015 1:07AM CST
February 15, 2015 7:07AM UTC
[Investigating] deb.haskell.org has been compromised; dating back to February 12th when suspicious anomalies were detected in outgoing traffic. `deb.haskell.org` was already offline and suspended shortly after these traffic changes were detected by the host monitoring system, meaning the window for package compromise was very very small.
We're continuing to investigate the breach and the extent to which it might have spread.

"gewg_" writes:

Common Dreams reports

Norm Stamper is a 34-year veteran police officer who retired as Seattle's Chief of Police in 2000. He is currently a speaker for Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (CopsSayLegalizeDrugs.com). He is the author of Breaking Rank: A Top Cop's Exposé of the Dark Side of American Policing.

Chief Stamper uses elements of recent police-involved events to construct an account of an assault by a SWAT team on the home of what is thought to be a low-level, nonviolent drug offender—executed on the wrong house.

As Radley Balko points out in his superb book, Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces, SWAT incidents of the type fictionalized above are proliferating at a frightening pace. In the '70s, the nation's roughly 18,000 municipal, county, and state police forces conducted a few hundred such operations a year. By the '80s the number had grown to approximately 3,000. And in 2005, the last year of collected data, there were more than 50,000 SWAT operations. Today's count is surely much higher.

Balko's book offers a depressingly abundant supply of all-too-real examples of city and county police officers shooting innocent citizens, getting shot themselves, dispatching beloved family pets, doing major damage to private dwellings, shredding the Constitution, souring relations between police and community, and scarring families for life.

Chief Stamper specifically mentions the grenade that severely injured Baby Bou Bou, whom we discussed here.

[...]how to reverse the militarization trend? As Seattle's police chief during the World Trade Organization's 1999 "Battle in Seattle," and acutely aware of my own unwise reliance on militarized tactics, I realize just how difficult the task will be. But that should not stop us. Here are five steps that can help us turn things around.

1. Residents of cities across the country must rise up and reclaim their police departments.
2. Sustained social and political pressure for demilitarization is essential.
3. Local political jurisdictions must implement independent citizen oversight of police practices.
4. It is vital that all law enforcement agencies, in conjunction with their communities, set and enforce rigorous standards for the selection, training, and systematic retraining of SWAT officers and their leaders.
5. End the drug war.

We discussed that last point just the other day.

bradley13 writes:

Ars Technica has an article about the US National Association for the Deaf (NAD) suing Harvard and MIT for publishing videos of lectures on the Internet without closed captioning. The issue of accessibility is generally important on large web projects. It seems to me that there are two schools of thought:

• All content should be fully accessible; this is the only way to ensure fairness. All organizations should be required to make all of their content fully accessible.
• Accessibility costs a lot; add to that the risk of expensive lawsuits (especially in the US) for minor compliance problems - it just isn't worthwhile. If material must be accessible, many organizations will simply stop publishing. Encourage accessibility, but don't require it.

I am not unsympathetic to the issue: I used to volunteer my time to read programming books into a microphone to assist the blind. I think that's the way it should go: let people who care about the issues invest the time and effort in solving them. Attempting to force the content providers to do so will only be counterproductive, vastly reducing the amount of material published.

As a last note, I tried to make a polite comment to this effect on the article at NAD.org, but my comment has not passed moderation. Perhaps it will appear eventually; otherwise, it would seem that alternate opinions and open discussion are unwelcome at NAD.

frojack writes:

Dropbox and similar cloud storage services routinely get inquiries, warrants, non-disclosure NSLs (National Security Letters), etc. which demand information about their users and the content of those user's files. Because most of those services encrypt your data with THEIR key, (if at all). they can easily hand this data over. Many of these cloud services make an honest effort to protect their customers, but in the end they all too often must surrender the data and keep their mouth shut about it. Many of these services are publishing so-called "transparency reports" detailing (well after the fact) the nature and type of such government demands.

SpiderOak, published their most recent Transparency report covering all of 2014: only the Federal government requested user data, exactly ONCE, and they went away empty-handed and never came back.

By comparison, Dropbox also published their half-yearly report: they received 137 warrants, 116 Subpoenas, 2 Court Orders, and coughed up the user's data content in the vast majority of cases.

Of course, Dropbox is much bigger than SpiderOak, as is Google Drive, and Microsoft OneDrive.

But because SpiderOak does not know your encryption key, they can't give away the user's data. And apparently that simple fact, published on their Law Enforcement page is sufficient to make most agencies just walk away.

All of the services must reveal whether or not a properly identified person has an account and, perhaps, recently used IP addresses. But that is just about all SpiderOak can tell anyone.

Full Disclosure: I am a paying customer of SpiderOak and Dropbox, and a free account user of Google Drive, and Microsoft OneDrive.

"gewg_" writes:

Rookie NYPD Officer Peter Liang was arraigned February 11 on charges of second-degree manslaughter, criminally negligent homicide, assault, and official misconduct.

On November 20, 2014, Liang and his partner were conducting a "vertical patrol" in the pitch-black stairwell of a Brooklyn housing complex. A single shot from Liang's sidearm fatally struck an unarmed black man, Akai Gurley, 28.

"I'm gonna get fired", Liang told his partner. Liang argued with his partner then called his union representative. Liang waited a full four minutes to report the shooting to his superiors. When he did see the wounded Gurley in a puddle of blood on the floor, Liang stepped around the man without providing any medical aid. Gurley died from his wound.

Liang pleaded not guilty to all charges. The accused was not in handcuffs during his court appearance and he was released without bail. Liang and his partner are currently on "modified assignment".

The New York Daily News reports:

[Assistant District Attorney Marc] Fliedner said Liang, 27, had no reason to put his finger on the trigger of his weapon during what began as a routine patrol in the Pink Houses in East New York.

"There was absolutely no threat to him, his partner, or any resident" [...] "He mishandled his weapon, and as a result Akai Gurley is dead."

Hugh Pickens writes:

Reuters reports that managers at US oil refineries are going to the mats, sleeping on recently purchased mattresses inside rental trailers, as refinery workers enter the third week of their strike at nine US oil refineries that experts and some employees say raises concerns over safety and operations. For months, retired refinery worker John Ostberg from BP's Toledo Refinery has been warning his bosses in emails about their plans to run the refineries with replacement workers and supervisors if a strike occurred. He fears that replacement workers are not properly trained, or too far removed from the frontlines, to respond to unit upsets and other problems that can escalate quickly without experienced intervention. “Management says it’s safe. I disagree,” says Ostberg.

At least three of the nine US oil refineries targeted by a nationwide strike of USW members have reported upsets and unplanned repairs since their workers walked out on February 1 and one of the refineries has shut down completely. Criff Reyes, who has worked Tesoro's Martinez Refinery alkylation unit for 16 years, says he believes that Tesoro opted to shut down the plant — rather than restart it following maintenance — because managers are not qualified or experienced enough to run it after about 400 USW members walked out. Meanwhile Ostberg, who helped run the refinery operating center (ROC) — the heart of the plant — warns that if there is a problem with one unit at the refinery, it can quickly grow to other units and often takes more manpower to put under control. “I sit behind a blast-proof wall, so I’m not worried about my safety," says Ostberg. "But I fear for everyone else.”

Hugh Pickens writes:

Justin Gillis reports at the NYT that in the long-running political battles over climate change, the fight about what to call the various factions has been going on for a long time with people who reject the findings of climate science dismissed as “deniers” and “disinformers" and those who accept the science attacked as “alarmists” or “warmistas". The issue has recently taken a new turn, with a public appeal that has garnered 22,000 signatures asking the news media to abandon the most frequently used term for people who question climate science, “skeptic,” and call them “climate deniers” instead. The petition began with Mark B. Boslough, a physicist in New Mexico who grew increasingly annoyed by the term over several years. The phrase is wrong, says Boslough, because “these people do not embrace the scientific method.”

Last year, Boslough wrote a public letter on the issue, "Deniers are not Skeptics." and dozens of scientists and science advocates associated with the committee quickly signed it. According to Boslough real skepticism is summed up by a quote popularized by Carl Sagan, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” "[Senator] Inhofe’s belief that global warming is “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people” is an extraordinary claim indeed," says Boslough. "He has never been able to provide evidence for this vast alleged conspiracy. That alone should disqualify him from using the title skeptic."

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.