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"gewg_" writes:

Boing Boing reports

The exceptionally broad new surveillance bill lets the government do nearly unlimited warrantless mass surveillance, even of lawyer-client privileged communications, and bans warrant canaries, making it an offense to "disclose information about the existence or non-existence" of a warrant to spy on journalists.

Despite that move away from retaining communications metadata by the EU and continuing concerns in the US about the National Security Agency's bulk phone metadata spying program, the Australian government was able to push through the amendments implementing data retention thanks to the support of the main opposition party. Labor agreed to vote in favor of the Bill once a requirement to use special "journalist information warrants" was introduced for access to journalists' metadata, with a view to shielding their sources. No warrant is required for obtaining the metadata of other classes of users, not even privileged communications between lawyers and their clients. Even for journalists, the extra protection is weak, and the definition of what constitutes a journalist is rather narrow--bloggers and occasional writers are probably not covered.

Warrant canaries can't be used in this context either. Section 182A of the new law says that a person commits an offense if he or she discloses or uses information about "the existence or non-existence of such a [journalist information] warrant." The penalty upon conviction is two years imprisonment.

During the relatively quick passage of the amendments, the Australian government made the usual argument that metadata needs to be retained for long periods in order to fight terrorism and serious crime--even though the German experience is that, in practice, data retention does not help. Toward the end of the debate, when concerns about journalist sources were raised, one senior member of the Australian government adopted a more unusual approach to calming people's fears.

"gewg_" writes:

The Register reports

In a paper published at [Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences] (abstract), the researchers claim capacitance of more than 1,100 Farads per cubic centimetre--or around 1,145 Farads per gram, which is about as much as they reckon you could get out of the manganese dioxide (MnO₂) in the cap.

Using a combination of graphene and MnO₂, the researchers say the energy density they can achieve can be as high as 42 Watt-hours per litre, which is getting close to that of a lead acid battery.

It's not much yet: the demonstrator pictured below from the UCLA California NanoSystems Institute is one-fifth the thickness of paper, however it can hold charge long enough to power the demo LED overnight.

That, the university claims, beats a thin-film lithium battery on a pound-for-pound (or rather gram-for-gram) basis.

Manganese dioxide is cheap and plentiful, and is good at storing charge--which is why it's popular in dry-cell batteries and alkaline batteries.

The combination of the MnO₂ and laser-etched graphene--the secret sauce in all of this--can be produced without dry rooms or extreme temperatures.

tynin writes:

An optical illusion created by MIT shows Marilyn Monroe from far away, but changes to Albert Einstein up close. The illusion offers clues as to how our brains process the details in images or scenes.
...
The experiments suggest that our brains prioritize different details within an image or scene. If we see a picture only very briefly, we’re left with “low spatial resolution” information — the overall shape of what we saw. If we see that same picture for a slightly longer period of time, we’re able to pick up on finer details. The MIT team believes our brain processes low spatial resolution information first, before it moves on to details.

Direct link to the video from the article.

"gewg_" writes:

AlterNet reports

In a classic case of "unintended consequences", the recently signed Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) in Indiana may have opened the door for the establishment of the First Church of Cannabis in the Hoosier State.

While Governor Mike Pence (R) was holding a signing ceremony for the bill allowing businesses and individuals to deny services to gays on religious grounds or values, paperwork for the First Church of Cannabis Inc. was being filed with the Secretary of State's office, reports RTV6.

Church founder Bill Levin announced on his Facebook page that the church's registration has been approved, writing, "Status: Approved by Secretary of State of Indiana - "Congratulations your registration has been approved!" Now we begin to accomplish our goals of Love, Understanding, and Good Health."

Levin is currently seeking $4.20 donations towards his non-profit church.

"gewg_" writes:

Despite the previous announcement at the Ubuntu Wiki, that said

Martin Pitt announces the date to switch Ubuntu Vivid to boot with systemd instead of upstart as Monday, March 9th. He says that the switch will affect the desktop, server, cloud, all flavors but not Ubuntu Touch, and that if there are too many regressions there is a simple upload to revert to upstart.

regarding Lubuntu, the Ubuntu Wiki now reports

LXQt is still in development, so Vivid Vervet [(*buntu 15.04, slated for release in April)] is another bug fix release. A late regression in the desktop installer for 32 bit means there is no Desktop installer for this milestone but it does not affect the alternate installer. Systemd is not the default init system.

LXQt is a light-ish desktop environment built with the Qt toolkit usually associated with KDE-compatible apps.
This announcement indicates that, for the time being, Lubuntu will be sticking with LXDE (Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment) built with the GTK+ toolkit usually associated with GNOME-compatible apps.

Upstart will remain the init system for Lubuntu for now.

davester666 writes:

Not sure why Snowden & friends are releasing this, as it is the traditional purpose of spying [and the one that virtually everybody but the people who actually do the spying think of].

"According to reports in the Argentine media, Britain was concerned that Argentina could launch another attempt to reclaim the Falkland Islands"

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-32172669

"gewg_" writes:

IT Pro Portal reports

In 2013, the former NSA contractor shocked the world by revealing the extent to which the US government is spying on its own citizens and indeed, people all over the world. Aided by investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald and filmmaker Laura Poitras, the documents that Snowden released have made the public re-think their position on privacy and national security.

While the Snowden files have previously been made available via Greenwald's personal website and the American Civil Liberties Union, now a University of Toronto graduate, George Raine, has created the Snowden Surveillance Archive to allow you to search all the documents released so far.

"This archive is a complete collection of all documents that former NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked in June 2013 to journalists Laura Poitras, Glenn Greenwald, and Ewen MacAskill, and subsequently were published by news media, such as The Guardian, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Der Spiegel, Le Monde, El Mundo, and The Intercept," the archive reads. "The leaked documents and their coverage have raised significant public concerns and had a major impact on intelligence policy debates internationally over issues of freedom of expression, privacy, national security, and democratic governance more broadly."

The archive is made up of approximately 400 documents, including files subsequently published by the US government to help individuals understand some of the leaked information. Given that Snowden was in possession of more than 50,000 files, there are plenty of revelations and stories yet to come regarding NSA surveillance.

For now, however, interested parties can use the search software in order to trawl through the documents and we've provided a run-down of how to do just that below.

Hugh Pickens writes:

David Knowles reports at Bloomberg that former Hewlett-Packard CEO and potential 2016 presidential candidate Carly Fiorina called out Apple CEO Tim Cook as a hypocrite for criticizing Indiana and Arkansas over their Religious Freedom Restoration Acts while at the same time doing business in countries where gay rights are non-existent. “When Tim Cook is upset about all the places that he does business because of the way they treat gays and women, he needs to withdraw from 90% of the markets that he’s in, including China and Saudi Arabia,” Fiorina said. “But I don’t hear him being upset about that.”

In similar criticism of Hillary Clinton on the Fox News program Hannity, Fiorina argued that Clinton's advocacy on behalf of women was tarnished by donations made to the Clinton Foundation from foreign governments where women's rights are not on par with those in America. ""I must say as a woman, I find it offensive that Hillary Clinton travels the Silicon Valley, a place where I worked for a long time, and lectures Silicon Valley companies on women's rights in technology, and yet sees nothing wrong with taking money from the Algerian government, which really denies women the most basic human rights. This is called, Sean, hypocrisy." While Hillary Clinton hasn't directly addressed Fiorina's criticisms, her husband has. “You’ve got to decide, when you do this work, whether it will do more good than harm if someone helps you from another country,” former president Bill Clinton said in March. “And I believe we have done a lot more good than harm. And I believe this is a good thing.”

"gewg_" writes:

Game Politics reports

[Epic Games, Inc., known for their Unreal Engine technology,] has selected three more developers that will receive money through its Unreal Dev Grant program. The recipients for March include Retro Yeti Games, Three One Zero, and PixelBeam.

Epic has given Retro Yeti Games a $13,000 grant for its Unreal Engine 4 powered game, 404Sight [...] that makes a statement about net neutrality.

[...]In the game, players try to run as fast as they can through levels before they get throttled by the evil Internet service provider. (Throttling was one of the many nefarious practices used by ISPs that the FCC effectively banned in its new net neutrality rules that were approved in late Feb.)

404Sight is set for launch on PC April 16 and will be free. You can learn more about it on its Steam product page or its official web site at 404sight.com.

tt0206634 writes:

In present day 2015, the available options for contraception aren’t great, and the burden still rests largely on women to mitigate the damages of our wanton impulses. Aside from the copper IUD, all the birth control devices and pharmaceuticals available to women alter our hormones with various weird side effects. When it comes to birth control for men, aside from condoms and pulling out (neither of which are very​ reliable in practice), a vasectomy has been the only other option for preventing unwanted pregnancies. Though there’s about a coin-flip chance of it being reversible, those odds aren’t enough to make it something guys under 40 typically consider. A few other male contraceptives are being explored, but there are no approved male contraceptive drugs in the United States.

But what if there was a simple way a man to fire blanks until he and his partner were ready to have a kid—without the snip s​nap?

The pro​cess takes about 15 minutes. A doctor injects a tiny dot of a synthetic gel into the sperm-carrying tube just outside of each testicle. Once injected, the gel sets in the tube and acts like a filter, allowing fluid to pass through but not sperm. “Like water might percolate through Jello,” said Elaine Lissner, director of the Parsemus Foundation.

This isn’t like a Depo-Provera shot you have to get once every few months either—once injected, the sperm-filtering gel would remain in place for 10 years. If the recipient decides he wants to take a shot at having kids at any point in between, all it takes is another injection of sodium bicarbonate (aka baking soda) to dissolve the liquid, and the sperm factory becomes operational again.

It may sound too good to be true, but clinical and animal trials in India have shown that the method works with near-pe​rfect results and no serious s​ide effects. And unlike the birth control pill and condoms, which have a real-life efficacy rate far lower than the ‘perfect use’ scenarios advertised on the packages, the birth control injection, like an IUD, comes with virtually no room for human error.

So why isn't this in widespread use? Well, one reason might be that commercially, there is more money to be made selling contraceptive pills than a 10-yearly injection, and secondly, I guess "needles in close proximity to testicles" is not something that many men like the sound of...

bzipitidoo writes:

Starting in 2006, every March The Consumerist has held a Worst Company in America contest modeled on the March Madness college basketball tournaments. The 2014 champion was Comcast. But this year, there was almost total silence. No contest. No news on why the contest was not being held. No discussion at all. It's like almost every post about a 2015 WCIA contest is being deleted. That includes all of the Internet outside The Consumerist website. Very few articles or blog posts exist trumpeting the contest for 2015.

Has interest in the contest declined that precipitously? The contest certainly had problems, with the worst being that it was an unpopularity contest focused on bad service rather than a merit based contest that considered more factors about why a company might be bad, with many companies worse than EA not even being seeded, and entire industries being ignored. For instance, not one member of the mining industry has ever been seeded, despite their horrible records on safety and environmental damage, such as the 2010 Upper Big Branch Mine disaster that killed 29 miners, and the 2014 Elk River chemical spill that poisoned the water supply of 300,000 people. A difficulty is that mining companies are more ephemeral, routinely transferring most assets to the owners, then going bankrupt to evade having to pay for clean-ups. The same lack of seeding goes for the prison-industrial complex, the photo enforcement industry, and the still active military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned about in 1961.

Or is it that The Consumerist website is slipping, being taken over by corporate interests or perhaps just incompetents, given that they killed off their user base when they wiped user accounts and disabled posting for months? Is this a demonstration of the growing power of the corporate propaganda machine, which would surely like to censor all negative publicity?

This is also a demonstration of the fragility of websites, when they become a single point of failure for the user community they build.

Hugh Pickens writes:

Shaun Walker writes at The Guardian that that more and more posts and commentaries on the internet are generated by professional trolls in Russia who receive a salary for perpetuating a pro-Kremlin dialogue online. Many emanate from Russia's most famous "troll factory," the Internet Research center, an unassuming building on St. Petersburg's Savushkina Street, which runs on a 24-hour cycle with hundreds of people working there in grinding, 12-hour shifts in exchange for 40,000 rubles ($700) a month.

According to Walker the work environment is humorless and draconian, with fines for being a few minutes late or not reaching the required number of posts each day. Trolls worked in rooms of about 20 people, each controlled by three editors, who would check posts and impose fines if they found the words had been cut and pasted, or were ideologically deviant. "There are production quotas, and for meeting your quota you get 45,000," says Marat Burkhard, who spent two months working at the troll factory. "The quota is 135 comments per 12-hour shift." Burkhart says that every city and village in Russia has its own municipal website with its own comments forum and the task of workers at the troll factory is to comment on each site. Burkhard explains how the professional trolls work in teams of three:

One of us would be the "villain," the person who disagrees with the forum and criticizes the authorities, in order to bring a feeling of authenticity to what we're doing. The other two enter into a debate with him -- "No, you're not right; everything here is totally correct." One of them should provide some kind of graphic or image that fits in the context, and the other has to post a link to some content that supports his argument. You see? Villain, picture, link.

We covered a similar story from BBC in March.

CoolHand writes:

Could the Tesla factor push the market for self driving cars faster than most anticipate.? Self-driving features may give them the edge on the increasing competition in the emerging electric vehicle market.

“Tech” is an attribute that is authentically a part of the Tesla brand. Self-driving features are essentially tech and in this area Tesla has been pushing out in front; most recently with an announcement that this summer an over-the-air update will enable their “Autopilot” feature on all Model Ss. (Autopilot will allow, as Tesla puts it, on-ramp to off-ramp self-driving.)

This new feature could be Tesla's saving grace, as well as a market force to more quickly push other automakers to use the new technology.

The convenience and safety of self-driving technologies offers Tesla a lifeline; “reasons to buy” for consumers who lack the environmental fervor of their early customers. And these reasons are compelling to a large number of car buyers; enough for many to overlook the limitations on an electric power-train–opening up a vastly larger market for Tesla.

Skyscrapers often darken adjacent neighborhoods with their shadow. Here's an innovative approach that uses reflection off one tall building to fill in the shadow cast by another. In the example given, the shadow from the first building typically falls over water so it doesn't affect a neighborhood. There is an animated gif in the article at weburbanist to illustrate the technique.

This building design technology might go a long way to preventing a catastrophe, as happened in another article on which weburbanist reported.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Recently, oral arguments were heard regarding a case about license plates and the first amendment. The Texas division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans has challenged a rejection of their proposed plate that had images of the Confederate flag.

The Texas solicitor general argued that, "Messages on Texas license plates are government speech ... [because] Texas etches its name onto each license plate and Texas law gives the state sole control and final approval authority over everything that appears on a license plate.”

Please share your ideas/comments on this case or your views on vanity plates in general.

Story: http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-supreme-court-confederate-license-plates-20150323-story.html
Case: http://www.oyez.org/cases/2010-2019/2014/2014_14_144
What a vanity plate is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanity_plate