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tt0396171 writes:

He's a bloodhound for the digital age. Much the way other dogs can pick up the scent of a fugitive or a cache of cocaine, Bear the labrador can smell the components of electronic media, even a micro-card as small as a fingernail that a suspect could easily hide.

From the article:

The 2-year-old rescue pooch nosed out a thumb drive that humans had failed to find during a search of Fogle's Indiana house in July, several weeks before he agreed to plead guilty to having X-rated images of minors and paying to have sex with teenage girls.

Original Submission

kurenai.tsubasa writes:

The Root reports that “Almost half of Americans hate their police department:”

It's important to note that on the graphs shown in the article, even an A grade represents negative sentiment.

More data and a description of the methodology are available at DrugAbuse.com, including graphs of tweet sentiment involving alcohol, drugs, and marijuana. DrugAbuse.com used the commercial IBM service AlchemyAPI to analyze the tweets.

Original Submission

bradley13 writes:

So far this is only in Switzerland, but there is every reason to suppose it will come up in Germany and other countries. In Switzerland, on the request of the Pirate Party, the governmental data protection office is having a look at Windows 10 (article in German, Here is a Google translation).

If the office determines that Windows 10 violates Swiss privacy laws, they can recommend changes to Windows 10. If Microsoft were to refuse to make those changes, the office would have the option of banning Windows 10 within the country. As the article points out, a similar process forced Google to make substantial changes to StreetView, so it can be effective.

Personal opinion: Switzerland is too small by itself. However, if the Pirate Party in Germany, France and elsewhere could initiate similar actions, Europe as a whole could force real change. And, hey, it will show that the Pirate Party hasn't totally lost its way.

HughPickens.com writes:

A police officer is directing traffic in the intersection when he sees a self-driving car barreling toward him and the occupant looking down at his smartphone. The officer gestures for the car to stop, and the self-driving vehicle rolls to a halt behind the crosswalk. "This seems like a pretty plausible interaction. Human drivers are required to pull over when a police officer gestures for them to do so. It’s reasonable to expect that self-driving cars would do the same." But Will Oremus writes that while it's clear that police officers should have some power over the movements of self-driving cars, "what’s less clear is where to draw the line." Should an officer be able to "do the same if he suspects the passenger of a crime? And what if the passenger doesn’t want the car to stop—can she override the command, or does the police officer have ultimate control?"

According to a RAND Corp. report on the future of technology and law enforcement “the dark side to all of the emerging access and interconnectivity is the risk to the public’s civil rights, privacy rights, and security.” It added, “One can readily imagine abuses that might occur if, for example, capabilities to control automated vehicles and the disclosure of detailed personal information about their occupants were not tightly controlled and secured.”

Arthur T. Knackerbracket lodged this report from The Register:

Between 2008 and 2009, hotel chain Wyndham Worldwide – which runs hotels under the Days Inn, Howard Johnson, Ramada, Super 8, and Travelodge brands – suffered three computer intrusions. The hackers stole the personal information and credit card numbers of over 619,000 customers, causing at least $10.6m in thefts.

In June 2012, the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) filed suit against Wyndham, claiming that the firm had "unreasonably and unnecessarily" exposed their customers to risk. Wyndham has fought back in the case, claiming unreasonable government oversight.

[...] The suit cites the fact that the company was storing credit card numbers on its servers in plain text, had easily guessable administrator passwords, little or no firewalls, and didn't check what operating systems its subsidiaries were using. In one case, a hotel was using an outdated operating system that hadn't been patched for three years.

The agency also claims that the Wyndham network left ports open and unchecked for third-party suppliers to use, didn't inform its hotel network about the attacks, and didn't follow up on them – allowing the hackers to use the same mechanism to gain access to corporate servers in subsequent attacks.

[...] In April 2008, attackers thought to be from Russia attacked a hotel in Phoenix and brute-forced their way into an administrator's account. In March 2009, they did it again, and Wyndham only became aware of the attacks after customers complained. Even then, attackers managed another breach later that year.

"Today's Third Circuit Court of Appeals decision reaffirms the FTC's authority to hold companies accountable for failing to safeguard consumer data," said FTC Chairwoman Edith Ramirez in a statement.

"It is not only appropriate, but critical, that the FTC has the ability to take action on behalf of consumers when companies fail to take reasonable steps to secure sensitive consumer information."

The ruling [PDF].

mendax writes:

The ever-interesting El Reg published a story that tells the world that the FBI investigated the late, lamented science fiction author Ray Bradbury because he wrote stories that were depressing and bad-mouthed the American way of life:

Their interest was apparently sparked by Martin Berkeley (Wikipedia), an enthusiastic anti-Communist and testator to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), who told the FBI the author of Fahrenheit 451 was "probably sympathetic with certain pro-Communist elements".

"He noted that some of Bradbury's stories have definitely slanted against the United States and its capitalistic form of government", the report adds.

"Informant observed that Communists have found fertile opportunities for development; for spreading distrust; and lack of confidence in America [sic] institutions in the area of science fiction writing", the FOI document states.

If they watched Ray Bradbury for 10 years over writing things like Fahrenheit 451, you would have thought they never stopped investigating Philip K. Dick. But they apparently had little interest in him.

Original Submission

kurenai.tsubasa writes:

According to Science, a privately funded company called Tri Alpha Energy has shown success holding plasma in a steady state using a field-reversed configuration machine:

Might this technique bring nuclear fusion power closer than being perpetually 20 years away?

Original Submission

AnonTechie writes:

In a computer operating system, the file system is the part that writes data to disk and tracks where the data is stored. If the computer crashes while it's writing data, the file system's records can become corrupt. Hours of work could be lost, or programs could stop working properly.

At the ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles in October, MIT researchers will present the first file system that is mathematically guaranteed not to lose track of data during crashes. Although the file system is slow by today's standards, the techniques the researchers used to verify its performance can be extended to more sophisticated designs. Ultimately, formal verification could make it much easier to develop reliable, efficient file systems.

"What many people worry about is building these file systems to be reliable, both when they're operating normally but also in the case of crashes, power failure, software bugs, hardware errors, what have you," says Nickolai Zeldovich, an associate professor of computer science and engineering and one of three MIT computer-science professors on the new paper. "Making sure that the file system can recover from a crash at any point is tricky because there are so many different places that you could crash. You literally have to consider every instruction or every disk operation and think, 'Well, what if I crash now? What now? What now?' And so empirically, people have found lots of bugs in file systems that have to do with crash recovery, and they keep finding them, even in very well tested file systems, because it's just so hard to do."

Originally seen at MIT.edu.

[Also Covered By]: MIT researchers create file system guaranteed not to lose data even if a PC crashes

[Related]: Hoare logic

Original Submission

Arthur T. Knackerbracket writes in with a shiny new toy from CNET:

When you can 3D print with more than one material at once in the same printer, it makes creating complex objects a lot easier, removing the need for assembly once the print is finished. This is called multimaterial 3D printing, and it applies not just to creating objects with more than one colour, but also to creating objects that have both plastic and metal components, for example.

Researchers at MIT's Computer Science and Artifical Intelligence Laboratory have demonstrated that it's possible to build a 3D printer that can print in 10 different materials at once in a single print, and they were able to do so for less than $7,000 using off-the-shelf components.

Current multimaterial 3D printers are limited to three materials at one time and start at around $150,000.

But it's not just the printer's multimaterial capabilities that make it interesting. The team has also built machine vision into the printer, so that it can self-calibrate, self-correct and even scan already existing objects. This last point means that objects, like circuits and sensors for example, can be embedded directly into a printed object. The printer scans the 3D geometry of an object and is able to create a build around it. Or you could place a smartphone in the printbed and have the printer build a case for it.

But the self-correcting capabilities of the machine save time, effort and wasted material. As the printer builds an object, the printer scans it in 3D, checking to make sure the object matches the 3D model used to print it. If there are errors in the build, the printer can then adjust accordingly, correcting the build before the error means the object has to be scrapped.

Original Submission

Arthur T. Knackerbracket writes in with this story from Wired:

If fieldwork be your folly, then specimens be your burden. Hiking, stooping, bottling, bagging, cataloging, and then lugging back to the laboratory is a time honored tradition dating back to the earliest days of microscope-endowed natural philosophy.

Good riddance. Last year, researchers debuted a pocket-sized origami microscope, and sent out 10,000 Foldscopes to scientists, students, and science enthusiasts around the world. One of these scientists used his Foldscope for his Amazonian research, and gave us some of his field data. As far as stress tests go, you can't get much nastier than squishing bugs onto slides while hiking through a muddy rainforest.

Microscopes are clunky enough, heavy enough, and fragile enough that there's rarely enough room for one in a field work inventory. Even worse, microscopes in the tropics are constantly assaulted by humidity, which allows fungi to grow on the lenses and tiny moving parts. "At one point there was a microscope at the research center, but it just got wrecked by jungle humidity," says Aaron Pomerantz, who studies insects at the Tambopata Research Center in the Peruvian rainforest.

To avoid those issues, scientists usually just ship home samples that look the most interesting—but that can be a serious drawback for medical experts in the developing world who are are trying to track, treat, and contain disease outbreaks.

With these problems in mind, a few Stanford scientists invented Foldscope, which uses magnets to latch on to your smartphone's camera and magnify its images. Made of paper, it's light enough to lug without effort, and cheap enough (the raw materials for a single 'scope amount to less than $1) that if it gets wrecked it's not a big deal. Just pull another one out of a plastic baggy and continue your inquiry.

...

His model has two lenses, one that magnifies at 100x, and another at 480x. Because it's made of paper, set your expectations accordingly. "It's not going to replace a microscope that costs hundreds of dollars," says Pomerantz. "But for doing quick and dirty critter IDs, looking at things that are a couple of millimeters big, it's very useful." Researchers are also testing another version of the Foldscope meant to help diagnose diseases like malaria, Chagas disease, and leishmaniasis, with much higher magnification rates.

Original Submission

HughPickens.com writes:

In the mid-1980s, a University of Arizona surgery professor, Marlys H. Witte, proposed teaching a class entitled “Introduction to Medical and Other Ignorance" because far too often, she believed, teachers fail to emphasize how much about a given topic is unknown. "Textbooks spend 8 to 10 pages on pancreatic cancer,” said Witte, “without ever telling the student that we just don’t know very much about it.” Now Jamie Holmes writes in the NYT that many scientific facts simply aren’t solid and immutable, but are instead destined to be vigorously challenged and revised by successive generations. According to Homes, presenting ignorance as less extensive than it is, knowledge as more solid and more stable, and discovery as neater also leads students to misunderstand the interplay between answers and questions.

In 2006, a Columbia University neuroscientist, Stuart J. Firestein, began teaching a course on scientific ignorance after realizing, to his horror, that many of his students might have believed that we understand nearly everything about the brain. "This crucial element in science was being left out for the students," says Firestein."The undone part of science that gets us into the lab early and keeps us there late, the thing that “turns your crank,” the very driving force of science, the exhilaration of the unknown, all this is missing from our classrooms. In short, we are failing to teach the ignorance, the most critical part of the whole operation." The time has come to “view ignorance as ‘regular’ rather than deviant,” argue sociologists Matthias Gross and Linsey McGoey. Our students will be more curious—and more intelligently so—if, in addition to facts, they were equipped with theories of ignorance as well as theories of knowledge.

Original Submission

The Mighty Buzzard writes:

Jeremy Hsu over at IEEE Spectrum brings news of a routing system that can keep your data from ever entering the tubes of a nation you don't trust:

Whenever someone sends a website request or email, Internet data packets crossing the world can run afoul of data censorship or modification in certain countries, such as China. A new system provides a way for Internet users to route their data around specified “forbidden” countries and gives proof of whether or not the routing succeeded, its inventors revealed last week.

The Alibi Routing system relies on a peer-to-peer network to relay data packets around specified forbidden countries on their way to a final destination. In this case, the “peers” are other Internet users running the Alibi Routing software. The system provides proof of successful or unsuccessful routing by calculating whether a packet was at a specific geographic location far enough away from the undesired countries so that data could not have passed through.

Which is all fine and good but what if the country you trust the least is your own?

Original Submission

AnonTechie writes:

Stuff that falls into a black hole is gone forever, right? Not so, says Stephen Hawking.

“If you feel you are in a black hole, don’t give up,” he told an audience at a public lecture in Stockholm, Sweden, yesterday. He was speaking in advance of a scientific talk today at the Hawking Radiation Conference being held at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. “There’s a way out.”

You probably know that black holes are stars that have collapsed under their own gravity, producing gravitational forces so strong that even light can’t escape. Anything that falls inside is thought to be ripped apart by the massive gravity, never to been seen or heard from again.

What you may not know is that physicists have been arguing for 40 years about what happens to the information about the physical state of those objects once they fall in. Quantum mechanics says that this information cannot be destroyed, but general relativity says it must be – that’s why this argument is known as the information paradox.

Now Hawking says this information never makes it inside the black hole in the first place. “I propose that the information is stored not in the interior of the black hole as one might expect, but on its boundary, the event horizon,” he said today.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn28090-stephen-hawking-says-he-has-a-way-to-escape-from-a-black-hole/

Original Submission

GlennC writes:

From Naked Security: https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2015/08/25/pirate-sites-ban-windows-10-over-privacy-worries/

There's been a good amount of privacy freak-out over Windows 10. Concerns have been sparked by things such as the Wi-Fi password sharing feature and the fact that Windows 10 by default shares a lot of your personal information - contacts, calendar details, text and touch input, location data, and what Ars Technica calls "a whole lot more" - with Microsoft's servers.

It's gotten to the point where, as TorrentFreak reports, some smaller pirate sites have become so concerned that Windows 10 systems will phone home with too many hints about their users, that the sites' administrators have started blocking Windows users from the BitTorrent trackers hosted on their sites.

One of those sites, iTS, released a statement which referred to Windows 10's "outrageous privacy violations", which, it says, include...

        [sending] the contents of your local disks directly to one of their servers.

Thus, since Thursday, Windows 10 has officially been banned from iTS until "special versions" surface that undo this purported privacy wreckage.

On a personal note, I'd like to see this "Special Version" too.

Original Submission

The Mighty Buzzard writes:

Another year passes and everyone gets a just little bit older, including everyone's favorite penguin-mascotted OS. This day in 1991, Linus Torvalds announced the first release of the Linux kernel. At its birth, it was a paltry 10,239 lines of code with abysmal hardware support. Since then it's grown to nearly twenty million lines and pretty much everything you plug in just works. It's gone from a hobbyist OS that you really needed mad tech chops to even install to something most grandmothers could use without batting an eye. From running on a few select platforms to providing a stable platform for PCs, TVs, DVRs, routers, phones, tablets, cylons, etc... So, happy birthday, Linux. Here's to twenty-four years with many more to come.

Now normally in an article like this we'd end up reminiscing, saying things about how awesome linux is, and arguing with *BSD/Windows fanbois and the ever-present trolls in the comments. Let's try a little something different this time. What do you remember about Linux's early days that completely and utterly sucked but that new users will never have to experience?

Original Submission