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Several Submissions at Once
[To Editors: the delay between being able to submit articles is putting a damper on the process. I'm putting several summaries with their categories in one submission, hoping you guys can process them faster than the hour it takes me the usual way. Cheers!]
Category: News
Title: The Declining Half-Life of Secrets
Link: https://www.justsecurity.org/24823/half-life-secrets/?utm_content=buffer00222&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer [justsecurity.org]
Summary:
The nature of secrets is changing. The “half-life of secrets” is declining sharply for many intelligence activities as secrets that in the past may have been kept successfully for 25 years or more, are now exposed well before.
For evidence, one need look no further than the 2015 breach at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), of personnel records for 22 million U.S. government employees and family members. OPM is just one instance in a long string of high-profile breaches, where hackers have gained access to personal information, trade secrets, or classified government material. The focus of the discussion needs to be on complementary trends in information technology, including the continuing effects of Moore’s Law, the sociology of the information technology community, and changed sources and methods for signals intelligence, all of which increase the likelihood that government secrets will not remain secret for long.
An age where secrets become known sooner, means that “the front-page” test will become far more important to decision-makers. Even if a secret operation is initially successful, the expected costs of disclosure become higher as the average time to disclosure decreases.
Are we on the verge of David Brin's Earth [wikipedia.org], where transparency is total and secrets are a dirty word?
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Category: Science
Title: The Open Science Movement
Link: http://opensource.com/resources/open-science [opensource.com]
Summary:
The Royal Society had the famous motto “Nullius in verba”, roughly translated to “take nobody’s word for it." This embodied a general tenet in science that all theories are open to being questioned, and stated results must be repeatable. This was in fact a general practice that was performed by the society in those early years. In recent years this practice has not been as common, with more and more science relying on closed elements, ultimately leading to errors that are more difficult to spot without full sharing of data, methods, and publications.
The open science movement broadly states that science must be done in an open, and reproducible fashion where all components of research are open. Many journals remain stuck in a mode where journals were physically printed, despite being largely distributed online in this day and age. They often still use PDFs as a form of “electronic paper” with fixed publications, closed peer review processes, and little to no access to data. This was most certainly the most efficient mode of disseminating scientific knowledge in the before the dawn of the Internet, but is now viewed by a growing number as far from optimal.
Open science embodies a number aspects, at the core this includes open access, open data, open source, and open standards that offer unfettered dissemination of scientific discourse. These things enable reproducible science by giving full access to the major components of scientific research. There are a number of additional components that are being explored too, such as open peer review where the reviewers of scientific publications post reviews openly with their name attached, and open notebook science where the (traditionally closed) notebooks are published openly online as research is conducted.
Funny that scientific peer review spawned Open Source Software, which is now spawning Open Science.
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Category: Digital Liberty
Title: What does the panopticon mean in the age of digital surveillance?
Link: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jul/23/panopticon-digital-surveillance-jeremy-bentham [theguardian.com]
Summary:
The looming interconnectivity between objects in our homes, cars and cities, generally referred to as the internet of things, will change digital surveillance substantially. With the advent of wider networked systems, heralded by the likes of Google’s Brillo and Apple’s HomeKit, everything from washing machines to sex toys will soon be able to communicate, creating a vast amount of data about our lives. And this deluge of data won’t only be passed back and forth between objects but will most likely wind its way towards corporate and government reservoirs.
With everything from heart-rate monitors in smartwatches to GPS footwear, a bright light is once again being thrown on our bodies. Will we feel exposed under the gaze of a central tower? Perhaps not, but with habits and physical stats charted against the norm, we will feel scrutinised nevertheless. Much of the justification of this is the alleged benefits to health and wellbeing. “Morals reformed – health preserved – industry invigorated” – not Apple marketing material but Bentham’s words on the panopticon.
There may not be a central tower, but there will be communicating sensors in our most intimate objects.
Bentham didn’t want the panopticon to be a tool for oppression, and in fact its failure eventually led him to develop a type of anti-panopticon later in life – where a minister sits in an exposed room and is surrounded by members of the public who listen and ask questions.
The idea is that this transparency holds power to account, because the most dangerous people in society can be rulers. It is important that they, as well as prisoners, workers and children, feel watched.
Bentham would have wanted government, corporations, and leaders subjected to total transparency, not us. Sounds good to me.
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Category: Science
Title: NASA Finds Closest Earth Twin Yet in Haul of 500 Alien Planets
Link: http://www.livescience.com/51653-earth-twin-kepler-452b-exoplanet-discovery.html [livescience.com]
Summary:
Kepler-452b lies 1,400 light-years away, and is the only planet known in its solar system. It's about 60 percent wider than Earth, which gives it a "better than even" chance of being rocky, researchers said. The planet is probably about five times more massive than our own, making it a so-called "super Earth." It likely possesses a thick atmosphere, lots of water and active volcanoes.
The exoplanet completes one orbit every 385 days, so its year is only slightly longer than Earth's. And Kepler-452b circles a sunlike star that's just 10 percent bigger and 20 percent brighter than the one that hangs in Earth's sky.
"It would feel a lot like home, from the standpoint of the sunshine that you would experience," said Jon Jenkins, Kepler data analysis lead at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. (Jenkins led the team that discovered Kepler-452b.)
All we need now is a wormhole to mysteriously appear near Saturn and a plucky corn farmer to pilot a spaceship into it [wikipedia.org] to take us there.
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Category: Science
Title: What Do Women Want in a Penis? The Whole Package
Link: http://www.livescience.com/51647-penis-appearance-survey.html [livescience.com]
Summary:
What makes a penis attractive? Not sure? Well, don't rely on your opinion to answer that question — science has the answer.
A new survey, published yesterday (July 23) in the Journal of Sexual Medicine, aimed to find out which qualities women consider most carefully when deciding whether a penis is attractive. Researchers from the University of Zurich in Switzerland first asked a group of 105 women, ranging in age from 16 to 45, to look at pictures of male genitalia and rate how "normal looking" they found each penis to be.
...
So, what penile qualities do women care about? It turns out that ladies are looking for the total package, so to speak. Survey participants ranked the overall cosmetic appearance of a penis to be the most important quality they consider when assessing a man's genitals. But more specifically, they cared about hair — pubic hair, that is. The survey found that the appearance of body hair was the second-most important quality that women consider. Tied for third were girth and the appearance of penis skin, followed by the shape of the tip.
So the results are in, just in case you were wondering...
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Category: Hardware
Title: Modder gets Half-Life running on an Android smartwatch
Link: http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/07/modder-gets-half-life-running-on-an-android-smartwatch-2/ [arstechnica.com]
Summary:
While traditional Internet wisdom tells us that no gadget is worth its salt unless it can run Doom—see the likes of the TI-85 calculator, the Commodore 64, and an ancient Kodak digital camera—time and technology moves on. These days, Doom is barely a challenge. With that in mind, an enterprising modder has instead got Valve's seminal first-person-shooter classic Half-Life, which features far more demanding 3D graphics, on an Android-powered LG G Watch.
Yes, instead of playing Half-Life with a comfy keyboard and mouse, you can now fumble around with tiny touch-screen buttons, and squint at a 1.65-inch screen on your wrist. Hooray!
OK, so playing Half-Life on a smartwatch is more proof of concept than something you'd actually want to do, but it just goes to show how quickly wearable tech is evolving. To get the game running on the LG G Watch, modder Dave Bennett used the SDLash app, which is able to emulate the GoldSource game engine used in Half-Life.
"At times, the game got as high as 30 FPS, and other times as low as 2 FPS," writes Bennett over on his blog. "Of course, things such as the lava graphics and special lighting caused a huge drop in FPS. Also, trying to play a game on Android Wear is a nightmare within itself. The app offers touchscreen controls, but on a 1.65-inch screen, they are almost impossible to use. Also, swiping to the left causes the screen to go back to the previous window. Are you still interested in doing this?"
Pffft, Doom on a SmartWatch is nothing. I have Zork [wikipedia.org] running on my hearing aid.
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Category: Hardware
Title: “Teledildonics” patent used to sue six nascent cybersex companies
Link: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/07/teledildonics-patent-used-to-sue-six-nascent-cybersex-companies/ [arstechnica.com]
Summary:
Patent trolls are so prolific these days that you don't really need to be successful to draw lawsuits. Case in point, a recently formed California company called TZU Technologies is demanding cash from six different players in the "virtual sex" industry—which barely even exists.
TZU is using US Patent No. 6,368,268 to sue six companies working in the touch-over-Internet arena: Comingle, Holland Haptics, Vibease, Internet Service, Frixion, and Winzz.
The patent was invented by Warren Sandvick, president of a Texas company called HasSex, which has an extremely trollish website and licensed the patent several times. Filed in 1998, and granted in 2002, the patent lays broad claim to a remotely controlled sexual "stimulation system," one version of which involved a "second user interface" located remotely from the first.
This year, Sandvick apparently sold the patent to TZU, which has bigger plans for the patent. Earlier this week, TZU filed six lawsuits.
The guy sat TZU sound like a bunch of tools.
