SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Apple Strikes a Blow Against Location Tracking
Microsoft Patches Windows 8 But Leaves Flaws in W7
Joseph and Marion Marschalek developed a diffing (comparison) tool dubbed DiffRay which compares Windows 8 with 7, and logs any safe functions absent in the older platform. In a demonstration of DiffRay, the researchers found four missing safe functions in Windows 7 that were present in 8. Future work will extend DiffRay's capabilities to find potential vulnerabilities in Windows 8.1 (PDF), add intelligence to trace input values for functions and incorporate more intelligent signatures used to find potential holes. "If we get one zero-day from this project, it's worth it," says Joseph.
Russians Tricked Snowden Into Seeking Asylum
According to Karpichkov, who fled Moscow on a false passport in 1998 after spying on his native Latvia for the KGB and its successor, the FSB, Russian intelligence services are not interested in how US spy agencies harvested data on international phone calls and emails and even snooped on foreign leaders. They want to know exactly how America and Britain encrypt and decrypt secret information. "Codebreakers are the top targets of every secret service," says Karpichkov adding that the Russians plan to keep Snowden in Moscow for another three years. "He will stay in Russia until they have got everything they want from him. They need the time to extract all the classified intelligence he possesses about the operational methods and tactics of Western security agencies."
Rising Sea Levels Threaten South Florida
Gov. Rick Scott, who is running for re-election, has worked with the Republican-controlled Legislature to dismantle Florida's fledgling climate change initiatives that were put into place by his predecessor and current opponent, Democrat Charlie Crist. "I'm not a scientist," says Scott when asked about anthropogenic global warming during a stop in Miami. Meanwhile, Miami Beach is bracing for another season of punishing tides. "We're suffering while everyone is arguing man-made or natural," says Christine Florez, president of the West Avenue Corridor Neighborhood Association. "We should be working together to find solutions so people don't feel like they've been left on a log drifting out to sea."
Book review: "The Martian"
"In space. no one can hear you scream like a little girl." -Mark Watney
I'll be succinct before I become verbose: This is the best book I've read in years, including the ones I wrote.
If you like my stuff, you'll love this book. This guy writes like me only a lot better. Seriously. What's more, he looks to be half my age so damn it, you'll read more of his books than I will, I'm ageing.
This is his first book. I want a second.
I went to the library to return a couple of books and see if Nobots was on the shelves yet. Nope. Damn, they're slow. I'd reserved a Pratchett book I hadn't yet read that morning and didn't expect it to be ready (it wasn't) so I looked at the new science fiction section. I read the back cover blurbs but usually don't take any stock in them, but two caught my eye, one by one of the greats and one of my favorite authors, Larry Niven, who was quoted as saying "Gripping. Shapes up like DeFoe's Robinson Crusoe as written by someone brighter."
But the one that caught my interest was Chris Hadfield, and if you don't know who he is, what are you doing here? He says on the back cover "It has the rare combination of a good, original story, interestingly real characters, and..." what especially caught me eye, "and fascinatingly technical accuracy."
I had to read this book, and damn, it was good. Pratchett and Adams good, I laughed all the way through it; Whitney's sense of humor is his biggest weapon against the hostile Mars that's trying to kill him.
Whitney gets stranded on Mars and survives (oops, spoiler alert?) against all odds and with... well, very little.
RTFB. It's a damned good book and is at his website.
This book's history is interesting, too. I wanted to see what other books he'd written because I want more, but there was just the one. But the one, according to wikipedia, had a history. He'd submitted it to publishers and been rejected (much like Rowling and her Harry Potter) and released it on his web site in HTML and as a 99 cent Amazon e-book, which soared to the top of Amazon's charts.
So a major publisher has given him six figures for the rights. Lucky (and talented) guy. Wikipedia says that Ridley Scott will direct the movie, so fuck. The book made me laugh more than once, I can't see a Ridley Scott movie making me laugh. "Blade Runner, the Comedy?" Can't see it.
Happy 30th Birthday Tetris!
Peter Hartlaub says that the problem with writing a tribute to "Tetris" is that there are no great moments associated with it which is pretty much the point of the game. It's about taking the player out of the moment, and into a sort of high-functioning intellectual limbo. "Tetris isn't about letting your mind wander to a different world: It's about shutting it down altogether," says Hartlaub. "It creates almost a meditative state. The DNA of Tetris, still popular in its own right, is evident in some of the most popular games in 2014, including the equally escapist "Bejeweled" and "Candy Crush Saga." Tetris perfected downtime, and this was no small thing. In defending my role as pop culture critic, I often try to explain that there's honor in making someone's BART commute seem to go by more quickly. Some of us create fine art, others craft a way to pass the time."
Virginia DMV Orders Uber, Lyft to Stop Operations
Officials at both companies say they will continue to operate in the state, despite the order. "We've reviewed state transportation codes and believe we are following the applicable rules," says Lyft spokeswoman Chelsea Wilson. "We'll continue normal operations as we work to make policy progress. Virginia residents have enthusiastically embraced Lyft as an affordable and reliable transportation alternative that increases safety by going above and beyond what is required by existing transportation services." ""People like this service, they always say it's better than cab," says Fateh El-Ja-Rarri, an UberX driver who adds that Virginia should be praising the app-based service for creating jobs and not trying to shut drivers like himself down.
Using mobile apps to connect passengers with part-time drivers of private cars, oftentimes for less than the cost of a traditional taxi or car service, both companies have grown in popularity in recent years and expanded to cities around the US and world. Lyft, which launched in 2012, operates in 60 US cities while Uber's four-year-old service has a presence in 35 countries and more than 100 cities. But those journeys have not been without regulatory roadblocks. Resistance to the model has been particularly heated in New York, where taxi officials initially stopped Uber and other car hailing apps from entering the market. Uber was able to prevail in New York City and now runs its peer-to-peer service using drivers who are licensed by the Taxi and Limousine Commission.
GM Fires Employees for the "Switch From Hell'
A far back as 2002, General Motors engineers starting calling it the "switch from hell" but it would take a dozen years, more than 50 crashes and at least 13 deaths for the automaker to recall the ignition switch, used in millions of small cars. GM's own internal investigation never explains how a lone engineer in a global automaker could approve a less expensive part that failed to meet GM standards. Nor does it illuminate why the same engineer could substitute an improved design without changing the part number, a move critics cite as evidence of a cover-up. After the first cars with the switch went on sale, GM heard complaints from customers, employees and dealers. But "group after group and committee after committee within GM that reviewed the issue failed to take action or acted too slowly," the report said. A unique series of mistakes was made," said Barra. And the problem was misunderstood to be one of owner satisfaction and not safety. GM engineers didn't understand that when the switches failed, they cut power to the airbags.
Nucleon tidbit and a link to take ownership of an AC comment
Mostly for my own sake: AC comment.
I find NUCLEON interesting in all sorts of ways, one example would be that the resource requirements could be tiny compared to a lot of the other stuff. There's also a sort of a phreak angle to it, phreaking on steroids where it's not "just" about dial tones any more but voices. It feels very tangible (wrong word) or even tactile (even worse word) but then again I really am a weird nut who enjoys listening to my computers sing (relatively new ones, I'm not talking about ancient beasts). If it's warm, humid, and otherwise silent my ears can easily pick up various electrical components chirping etc., I did say weird! XD
I guess that part is a bit similar to the fun that can be had experiencing a beam blast of static electricity from turning on an unused old terminal. Still weird? Okay lol.
The main thing however would be to consider NUCLEON in combination with the digital nature of modern telephone systems. Not even normal landlines are POTS in the original sense of it any more, they might still be called or referenced as POTS but that's mostly just for convenience; the centrals are digital. Although I doubt it I guess the US could still be some weird exception as they often are but in Europe this change happened during the nineties in at least some countries, maybe all. That's roughly twenty years ago and I've gotten the impression that the changes these days are the potential dismantlement of the lines themselves, switching to the competing technologies, however that could be an extreme example: I wouldn't know. Of course in other countries (like in the developing world) it's nearly all mobile infrastructure anyways which was always digital.
What I was getting to is that most people don't know a thing about old telephone systems beyond "cups on a string" and that even with the prevalence of mobile phones (no string) the NUCLEON thing psychologically takes a solid step into "the physical world" in ways that a lot of the other NSA things don't appear to in the same manner. A lot of people still have a different take on telephones than computers and when it comes to actual voices I think it would become even more "real" for many of the ordinary citizens who might have trouble relating to what is going on.
I have no idea why nobody seems to be talking about it. There's a lot of that going around if you ask me, some of it might be information overload.
Marc Andreessen Calls Snowden a 'Textbook Traitor'
Andreessen added that NSA leaks may well wind up getting used as a cudgel by foreign governments against American companies that depend on overseas sales. "There's a big open question right now how successful our companies will be when they go sell products overseas," says Andreessen. "I think there are a lot of foreign companies that are very envious of Silicon Valley and America's domination of tech and wish that they could implement protection policies. And they are going to use this whole affair as a reason to do that ... as an excuse."
