SoylentNews

martyb writes:

Even if you are a long-time reader of Slashdot (an outdated version of whose code became the basis for this site), the user interface for SoylentNews can be confusing. We've been averaging about two dozen new registered users per week. I cannot imagine that all of them have prior experience with our UI. What tips or settings have you found useful in getting the most out of this site?

Continued...

n1 writes:

Iceland Review Online reports:

The Pirate Party, which was the smallest in parliament after the 2013 election, has grown to become the third-largest political party in Iceland, according to the latest Capacent Gallup poll. More than 15 percent of respondents now support the party.

This is a surge in support for the Pirates, up from 5 percent in the election and 11 percent from Gallup’s survey in January, ruv.is reports. [in Icelandic - use your favourite translator]

The Independence Party of Finance Minister Bjarni Benediktsson remains the country’s largest with 26 percent (down from 27 percent in the 2013 election), followed by the opposition’s Social Democratic Alliance with 17 percent (up from 13 percent).

Gordon Shure writes:

India's Daughter is a BBC documentary which details the shocking gang rape and murder of Jyoti Singh, a young medical student from Delhi. In the days leading up to and following its broadcast, the Indian government have furiously protested its showing, and have enacted a ban to this effect. The film shows a remorseless testimony of victim blaming from one of the perpetrators speaking from death row. Jyoti's family meanwhile have praised the documentary makers, with her father stating that "everyone should watch the film". News of the ban has apparently spurred a backlash: as of yesterday, the film is available in full on a number of popular streaming websites such as Vimeo.

"gewg_" writes:

Cory Doctorow reports:

Har-har-f[...]k-you, said Albequerque's murderous, lawless police department, as they fulfilled a records request from Gail Martin, whose husband was killed by them, by sending her encrypted CDs with the relevant videos, then refusing to give her the passwords.

I really liked Cory's to-the-point description, but Boing Boing originally got the story from Tim Cushing at Techdirt.

Now the APD's being sued. The firm is seeking not only access to the password-protected videos, but also damages and legal fees. According to the firm, access to these videos is crucial to determining whether or not Gail Martin has a legitimate civil rights case. Without them, the firm is no better positioned to make this call than the general public, which has only seen the lead-in and aftermath of the shooting.

This isn't the APD's only legal battle related to its IPRA non-compliance. Late last year, KRQE of Albuquerque sued it for "serial violations" of the law. That's in addition to the one it filed over a 2012 incident, in which the PD stalled on its response to a journalist's public records request before releasing the requested footage at a press conference, basically stripping the reporter of her potential "scoop."

AnonTechie writes:

Scientists are developing ways to edit the DNA of tomorrow’s children. Should they stop before it’s too late?

If anyone had devised a way to create a genetically engineered baby, I figured George Church would know about it.

At his labyrinthine laboratory on the Harvard Medical School campus, you can find researchers giving E. Coli a novel genetic code never seen in nature. Around another bend, others are carrying out a plan to use DNA engineering to resurrect the woolly mammoth. His lab, Church likes to say, is the center of a new technological genesis—one in which man rebuilds creation to suit himself.

Article by Antonio Regalado, published in MIT Technology Review.

An Aeronautical Coward writes:

aero-news.net reports:

Southwest Airlines has agreed to remove a disciplinary action from the file of a mechanic who reported finding cracks in the fuselage of a Boeing 737 airplane, and will pay the mechanic's legal fees.

The mechanic was sent to inspect the hydraulic system and was disciplined after finding cracks, which caused that plane to be taken out of service for repair. Southwest claimed that he was working outside his job description. On appeal, a "Department of Labor Administrative Law Judge dismissed Southwest's motion for summary judgement, and granted a similar motion in favor of the mechanic."

In my experience, aircraft A&P's (airframe and power plant mechanics) are very methodical, observant, top notch mechanics... and usually under paid. If you have a job that calls for a mechanic (mechatronics, robotics, simulators, etc), consider hiring someone with an A&P background.

fliptop writes:

As reported in The Guardian:

Smartphones are psychologically addictive, encourage narcissistic tendencies and should come with a health warning, researchers have said.

A study by the University of Derby and published in the International Journal of Cyber Behaviour, Psychology and Learning found that 13% of participants in the study were addicted, with the average user spending 3.6 hours per day on their device.

[...] The study examined the responses of a self-selected sample of 256 smartphone users who were asked about how they used their device as well as questions intended to establish their personality traits.

Social networking sites were the most popularly used apps (87%), followed by instant messaging apps (52%) and then news apps (51%).

[...] "Narcissism is a negative personality trait and if a person is spending a lot of time on Facebook or Twitter they're more likely to display these types of traits," said [study Co-author from the University of Derby’s psychology department Dr. Zaheer] Hussain.

n1 writes:

Krebs on Security reports:

In response to questions from KrebsOnSecurity, upscale hotel chain Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group today confirmed that its hotels have been affected by a credit card breach.

[...] “We can confirm that Mandarin Oriental has been alerted to a potential credit card breach and is currently conducting a thorough investigation to identify and resolve the issue,” the company said in an emailed statement. “Unfortunately incidents of this nature are increasingly becoming an industry-wide concern. The Group takes the protection of customer information very seriously and is coordinating with credit card agencies and the necessary forensic specialists to ensure our guests are protected.”

[...] It should be interesting to see how much the stolen cards are worth, when and if and they go up for sale in the underground card markets. I’m betting these cards would fetch a pretty penny. This hotel chain is frequented by high rollers who likely have hi- or no-limit credit cards. According to the Forbes Travel Guide, the average price of a basic room in the New York City Mandarin hotel is $850 per night.

Hugh Pickens writes:

Ingrid Burrington writes in The Atlantic about a little-remembered incident that occurred in 1992 when activists Keith Kjoller and Peter Lumsdaine snuck into a Rockwell International facility in Seal Beach, California and in what they called an "act of conscience" used wood-splitting axes to break into two clean rooms containing nine satellites being built for the US government. Lumsdaine took his axe to one of the satellites, hitting it over 60 times. The Brigade's target was the Navigation Satellite Timing And Ranging (NAVSTAR) Program and the Global Positioning System (GPS). Both men belonged to the Lockheed Action Collective, a protest group that staged demonstrations and blockaded the entrance at the Lockheed Missiles & Space Co. test base in Santa Cruz in 1990. They said they intentionally took axes to the $50-million Navstar Global Position System satellite to bring the public's attention to what they termed the government's attempt to control the world through modern technology. "I had to slow the deployment of this system (which) makes conventional warfare much more lethal and nuclear war winnable in the eyes of some," an emotional Kjoller told the judge before receiving an 18-month sentence. "It's something that I couldn't let go by. I tried to do what was right rather than what was convenient."

Burrington recently contacted Lumsdaine to learn more about the Brigade and Lumsdaine expresses no regrets for his actions. Even if the technology has more and more civilian uses, Lumsdaine says, GPS remains “military in its origins, military in its goals, military in its development and [is still] controlled by the military.” Today, Lumsdaine views the thread connecting GPS and drones as part of a longer-term movement by military powers toward automated systems and compared today’s conditions to the opening sequence of Terminator 2, where Sarah Connor laments that the survivors of Skynet’s nuclear apocalypse “lived only to face a new nightmare: the war against the machines.” "I think in a general way people need to look for those psychological, spiritual, cultural, logistical, technological weak points and leverage points and push hard there," says Lumsdaine. "It is so easy for all of us as human beings to take a deep breath and step aside and not face how very serious the situation is, because it's very unpleasant to look at the effort and potential consequences of challenging the powers that be. But the only thing higher than the cost of resistance is the cost of not resisting."

"gewg_" writes:

Many people view webstats with a jaundiced eye--with good reason. (page)[1][2]

Linux advocate Robert Pogson finds these statistics interesting; while not taking the numbers as gospel, he finds the trends to be fascinating. In recent weeks, he noticed an upward trend in online Linux usage numbers that has continued.[3]

oiaohm,[4] in the 3rd comment,[2] suspects there is a correlation with the revelation of the preinstalled Superfish malware on Lenovo consumer PCs, with owners apparently abandoning their manufacturer-supplied "recovery" mechanisms, defecting from Redmond's easily-exploited OS, and going instead for Linux install media.

So, Soylentils, any other guesses on a cause? Any estimates on how long the current trend will last? Will it then decrease or increase?

• [1] The comment that was referenced was quickly removed by Ziff-Davis from their site, of course.
• [2] Comments on Pogson's blog are numbered top-to-bottom but appear chronologically bottom-to-top.
• [3] Did Internet Exploder ever get .SVG support?
• [4] oiaohm is a very knowledgeable guy but his dyslexia can make his writing difficult to decipher.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

9to5mac has a bunch of stories about Apple Watch, the wearable that will be the focus of major announcement from Apple at Monday's 'Spring Forward" event, and the company's first major new product launch since the passing of Steve Jobs.

• at least some models will be positioned as luxury items, in contrast to iPhone, iPad, and iPod which were "for the rest of us" type products. While the entry-level "Sport" (anodised aluminum) model will retail for $349, a stainless steel model is expected to cost $1,000, and an 18K gold model will probably cost thousands USD. It's a big deal for the company.
• lots of details have been leaked: the watch will sport a heart rate monitor (like existing smartwatches such as FitBit), as well as apps for weather, calendar, music, maps, and battery life. Prototype Apple Watches have come with 8 GB storage. While Apple says that the watch will need to be recharged daily, under heavy usage the battery life may fall below five hours.
• while Steve Jobs wasn't around for the development of Apple Watch, another legendary Apple employee - Jonathan Ive - was. Ive:

  I’m much more concerned about how we can make them as good as possible than how many we’ll sell. We’re brutally self-critical and go through countless iterations of each product.

• since it's an Apple device, it comes with apps, and lots of them. Including (according to rumors) games.

Appalbarry writes:

According to a report by security firm ProofPoint, a January 2014 bot-net attack used not just computers and routers, but televisions and at least one Internet connected fridge. (Insert joke here)

According to the company,

The global attack campaign involved more than 750,000 malicious email communications coming from more than 100,000 everyday consumer gadgets such as home-networking routers, connected multi-media centers, televisions and at least one refrigerator that had been compromised and used as a platform to launch attacks. ... in many cases, the devices had not been subject to a sophisticated compromise; instead, misconfiguration and the use of default passwords left the devices completely exposed on public networks, available for takeover and use.

Also see C-net coverage here.

JamesNZ writes:

It seems Ubuntu Vivid will come with systemd instead of upstart:

Hello all, it should be no secret any more, but it'll get serious now: we will switch Ubuntu Vivid to boot with systemd instead of upstart. That is, desktop, server, cloud/autopkgtests (that already happened two days ago), and all flavors. snappy has used systemd from day one. We will *not* switch Ubuntu Touch, however.

thomasdotnet writes:

In a particularly stunning example of the Einstein Cross, astronomers have discovered a supernova that can be observed again and again. Gravitational lensing effects result in the light from the stellar explosion taking 4 different routes, each route taking a different amount of time to reach Earth. The star SN Refsdal is/was 9.3 billion light years from Earth, while the lensing galaxy cluster MACS J1149.6+2223 sits a little closer at 5 billion light years distant.

While this isn't the first example of the Einstein Cross effect proposed in 1969, it is the first example of a supernova being viewed through one.

The full paper is available on Sciencemag.org for a fee, but Physics World has an adequate summary of the discovery.

CoolHand writes:

After the initial announcement by Valve of a new console machine with its own controller and based on its own rebranded Linux, many were very excited. However, after moving in "Steam Time" for awhile, that excitement died down. That all changed this week at GDC as Valve made official announcements of many "triple a" games coming to SteamOS, with a large sale on Steam for them to boot.

There were also many vendors takes on Steam Machines announced (although many seem overpriced), as well as a new VR headset system, the official announcement of the controller, and a small fifty dollar device called the "Link" to let you stream your games (or even applications) to a tv from a computer. With all these announcements, excitement seems to be building again for the chances of SteamOS and the future of Linux gaming (which has always been a sticking point for consumer desktop adoption).

Can this finally be the dawn of a new age in the Linux world thanks to Valve?