Slashdot Mirror

linuxwrangler writes "NSA's new Utah data-center has been suffering numerous power-surges that have caused as much as $100,000 damage per event. The root cause is 'not yet sufficiently understood' but is suspected to relate to the site's 'inability to simultaneously run computers and keep them cool.' Frustrating the analysis and repair are 'incomplete information about the design of the electrical system' and the fact that "regular quality controls in design and construction were bypassed in an effort to fast track the Utah project."" Ars Technica has a short article, too, as does ITworld.

Nerval's Lobster writes "The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) wants developers to consider building "virtual consequences" for mayhem into their video games. 'Gamers should be rewarded for respecting the law of armed conflict and there should be virtual penalties for serious violations of the law of armed conflict, in other words war crimes,' read the ICRC's new statement on the matter. 'Game scenarios should not reward players for actions that in real life would be considered war crimes.' Like many a concerned parent or Congressional committee before it, the ICRC believes that violent video games trivialize armed conflict to the point where players could see various brands of mayhem as acceptable behavior. At the same time, the ICRC's statement makes it clear that the organization doesn't want to be actively involved in a debate over video-game violence, although it is talking to developers about ways to accurately build the laws of armed conflict into games. But let's be clear: the ICRC doesn't want to spoil players' enjoyment of the aforementioned digital splatter. 'We would like to see the law of armed conflict integrated into the games so that players have a realistic experience and deal first hand with the dilemmas facing real combatants on real battlefields,' the statement continued. 'The strong sales of new releases that have done this prove that integrating the law of armed conflict does not undermine the commercial success of the games.'"

Dawn Kawamoto writes "Alcatel-Lucent is planning to cut 10,000 workers by 2015. The telecom equipment maker's newly minted CEO calls this restructuring part of his Shift Plan. Under this plan, Alcatel-Lucent wants to save 1 billion Euros in costs and refocus its operations on next-gen IP networking, cloud and ultra-broadband access and away from legacy technologies like its 2G and 3G wireless. In the meantime, Wall Street thinks it may be cleaning itself up for a sale of some of its assets or its operations to Nokia, which will need to bolster its telecom equipment business after selling its smartphone operations to Microsoft. But a Nokia-Microsoft deal may be too little, too late."

An anonymous reader writes "NVIDIA was caught removing features from their Linux driver and days later Linux developers have caught and confirmed AMD imposing artificial limitations on their graphics cards in the DVI-to-HDMI adapters that their driver will support. Over years AMD has quietly been adding an extra EEPROM chip to their DVI-to-HDMI adapters that are bundled with Radeon HD graphics cards. Only when these identified adapters are detected via checks in their Windows and Linux Catalyst driver is HDMI audio enabled. If using a third-party DVI-to-HDMI adapter, HDMI audio support is disabled by the Catalyst driver. Open-source Linux developers have found this to be a self-imposed limitation and that the open-source AMD Linux driver will work fine with any DVI-to-HDMI adapter."

sciencehabit writes "A do-it-yourself neuroscience experiment that allows students to create their own 'cyborg' insects is sparking controversy amongst scienitsts and ethicists. RoboRoach #12 is a real cockroach that a company called BackyardBrains ships to school students. The students fit the insect with a tiny backpack, which contains electrodes that feed into its antennae and receive signals by remote control — via the Bluetooth signals emitted by smartphones. A simple swipe of an iPhone can turn the insect left or right. Though some scientists say the small cyborg is a good educational tool, others say it's turning kids into psychopaths." Fitting the backpack requires poking a hole in the roach's thorax and clipping its antennae to insert electrodes.

waderoush writes "Startup founders in California can breathe a little easier today — they won't be getting bills from the state for up to $120 million in back taxes. On Friday California Governor Jerry Brown signed a bill prohibiting the state from levying retroactive taxes on founders and other small-business investors who took advantage of a tax break invalidated last year by a state appeals court. California Business Defense, a coalition of entrepreneurs, spent most of 2013 trying to reverse the California Franchise Tax Board's interpretation of the court ruling, under which it planned to hit Californians with new tax bills on the sale of small-business stock going back to 2008 (a story that Slashdot picked up in January). Two bills on the matter reached Governor Brown's desk in September, one fully restoring the investment incentive through 2016, the other partially restoring it. Brown signed AB1412, the bill granting full relief. 'For a bunch of political greenhorns operating in an environment where political partisanship is at an all-time high, we did all right,' writes Brian Overstreet, one of the co-founders of California Business Defense. 'But it should never have been this hard.'"

v3rgEz writes "A veritable FOIA frenzy ensued in 2013 following a series of leaks about NSA surveillance programs, recently released documents show. From June 6 to September 4, the National Security Agency's FOIA load increased 1,054 percent over its 2012 intake. In that three-month span, the agency received 3,382 public records requests. For comparison, the NSA received just 293 requests over the same period in 2012. While a few have netted new details about NSA surveillance operations, such as a contract with French security firm VUPEN, the majority appear to have been rejected. MuckRock has a guide on filing with the NSA to maximize your chances of actually getting something back."

The original Warcraft and Diablo games hold a special status in the hearts of many gamers. Each game brought its genre into focus, and their success elevated the status of Blizzard Entertainment and Blizzard North to the point that further games are still hotly anticipated more than 15 years later. In an effort to discover and document that part of gaming history, author David L. Craddock conducted extensive interviews with early Blizzard developers. His intent was to investigate how both of the Blizzard studios succeeded at breaking into a saturated and competitive industry, and how their design process influenced both their acclaimed releases and the projects they discarded along the way. He's writing a series of books about the history of Blizzard, titled Stay Awhile and Listen. The first is due out on October 31st, and David has agreed to answer your questions about his investigation into those early games. David will be joined by Blizzard North co-founders David Brevik and Max Schaefer. As usual, ask as many as you'd like, but please, one question per post.

Nerval's Lobster writes "A subset of Oakland, California residents have decided to crowd-fund a set of private security patrols, via a trio of campaigns on a crowdfunding Website named Crowdtilt. The three patrols, if adequately funded, will cover Lower Rockridge North/West, Lower Rockridge South/West, and Lower Rockridge 'including part of the Uplands.' Each campaign has a different (Facebook verified, apparently) sponsor, and wants between $20,000 and $25,000 to make the dream of private patrols a reality. Unlike Kickstarter, the Crowdtilt campaigns don't feature fabulous prizes for contributing; gifting $100, for example, won't entitle you to 'One (1) free "accidental" shooting of your choice.' That aside, dozens of residents have contributed cash to the loosely allied projects. 'What occurred last week at the Casual Carpool has ignited our neighborhood to act,' reads one of the campaign descriptions, referring to the broad-daylight stickup of commuters waiting in a carpool line on Oakland's Hudson Street. 'While the city and the police are doing what they can, we feel it's time for us as a community to begin exploring a wide range of ideas and taking some action on our own.' All three crowdfunding pages want to hire VMA Security Group for a four-month trial period through February 2014, possibly followed by a continuing contract if everything works out. That security company already patrols the Rockridge commercial district during the holiday season, and protects a number of Oakland businesses and households. While the VMA Security Group's officers are certified to carry firearms, one of the crowdfunding pages plans to ask any of them assigned to the neighborhood to remain unarmed 'unless they feel they cannot accomplish their duties otherwise.' Upscale neighborhoods pay for private security all the time, of course. The question is whether crowdfunding — better known for financing things such as games and indie movies, at this point — could catch on as a way of funding residential projects."

theodp writes "Over at Wired, Vashant Dhar poses a provocative question: What If IBM's Watson Dethroned the King of Search? 'If IBM did search,' Dhar writes, 'Watson would do much better than Google on the tough problems and they could still resort to a simple PageRank-like algorithm as a last resort. Which means there would be no reason for anyone to start their searches on Google. All the search traffic that makes Google seemingly invincible now could begin to shrink over time.' Mixing supercomputers with a scalable architecture of massive amounts of simple processors and storage, Dhar surmises, would provide a formidable combination of a machine that can remember, know, and think. And because the costs of switching from Google search would not be prohibitive for most, the company is much more vulnerable to disruption. 'The only question,' Dhar concludes, 'is whether it [IBM] wants to try and dethrone Google from its perch. That's one answer Watson can't provide.'"

Kevin Fu is a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of Michigan. He heads a research group on medical-device security, Archimedes, that works to find vulnerabilities in medical equipment. WattsUpDoc, a system that can detect malware on medical devices by monitoring changes in power consumption, is based on his work. Professor Fu has agreed to put down the pacemakers for a moment and answer your questions about his work and medical device security in general. As usual, ask as many as you'd like, but please, one question per post.

In response to both of my previous articles raising questions about the Fifth Amendment, people sent me a link to a famous video titled "Don't Talk To Cops" delivered by Regents University law professor James Duane. Whether his conclusion is correct or not, I think the argument is flawed in several ways. Please continue reading below to see what I think is wrong with his position.

In my first article about the Fifth Amendment, I asked: Why is it a good thing that the Fifth Amendment allows a suspect to refuse to answer "Yes" or "No" as to whether they committed a crime or not? (I was emphatically not saying that a suspect should have to answer questions that are nobody else's business -- if you weren't at the scene of the crime, you should be free to say, "I wasn't at the scene of the crime, but I would prefer not to tell you where I was." However, the Fifth Amendment lets you refuse to answer the question of whether you even committed the crime at all, and I didn't see what was so great about that, because it is everybody's legitimate business whether or not you committed the crime.)

In the second article, I asked a different question: If you do accept the rationale for allowing a suspect to refuse to answer the question of whether they committed the crime or not, why don't we extend the same protection to third-party witnesses? In other words, if Bob commits a crime and Alice is a witness, and the police ask Bob and Alice the same question -- "Did Bob do it?" -- and both refuse to answer, then Bob is allowed to do this but Alice can go to jail for remaining silent, even though Bob might be guilty, and Alice is the one who is known to be innocent! That seems crazy.

The full arguments are given in each of the articles linked above (and dissected further in the comments) and I don't want to rehash either of them here, but in response to both articles, multiple people sent me the link to Professor Duane's "Don't Talk To Cops" video, which has been viewed about 2 million times on Youtube. (Professor Duane also ceded half his presentation time to police officer George Bruch, giving him the chance to offer a 'rebuttal', which has been uploaded as a separate video -- Bruch's video has been viewed about 1 million times.) I've watched Professor Duane's presentation twice, and one problem I have with the video is that I don't know what Professor Duane's actual position is. Yes, he says that he would "never talk to any police officer under any circumstances, ever", but does that really mean that if he witnessed a violent altercation on the street and the cops wanted to ask him about it, that he wouldn't say a word to them? Or, if he got pulled over for speeding, would he really hand over his license and registration and then sit silently in the driver's seat refusing to respond the cop's questions (which pretty much eliminates your chance at being let off with a warning)? What if his house got broken into, would he really refuse to call the cops and tell them? And, uh, there's a police officer who co-presents in the video with him, didn't Professor Duane have to talk to him to get him in the video? In fact, he speaks directly to the cop on camera! Busted!

"Oh, stop being so literal, Bennett, you know that's not what he meant!" OK, but what did he mean? One problem with staking out a fairly extreme position to begin with, is that if you describe it hyperbolically, there's no way for people to know what your actual position is. I emailed Professor Duane to ask if he could clarify, but didn't get a response. (Since his video has been viewed over 2 million times, possibly my email got lost in the pile of mails he gets every week saying, "Oh shit I got arrested and I opened my big mouth, you got any ideas for what I should do now??")

For the purpose of this discussion, let's assume that Professor Duane means that if the police approached him with questions about a crime (and excluding "hot pursuit" situations such as when the police are chasing a mugger and ask "Which way did he go?"), he would refuse to talk to them. In that case, I have a couple of points to make in response to the video, but first, if you haven't seen it, you may want to watch it now, along with the 'rebuttal' offered by police officer George Bruch, and see if you come up with the same objections that I did.

Everybody back? OK, here are my thoughts:

1. The video is answering a different question from the one I asked. The video weighs the costs and benefits to the individual, of remaining silent; I was asking whether the defendant's right to remain silent is good for society as a whole. Of course if you're innocent, then it's in both your interest and society's interest for you to go free. If you're guilty, on the other hand, you may want to walk free, but it's usually in your society's interest for you to be convicted. (You could argue an exception for pot laws or whatever, but generally speaking, we do want criminals to get caught.)

Professor Duane, beginning at the 24:50 mark, specifically invokes Martha Stewart, Marion Jones, and Michael Vick, as examples of people who he thinks would have gotten lighter sentences, or gotten off completely, if they had remained silent throughout their legal ordeals. Yes, but all three of those people were guilty (Martha Stewart, very probably; Jones and Vick, beyond any doubt), so while it may have been better for them to remain silent, it would not have been better for the legal system as a whole. (All three of them had supporters who said the laws they were being charged under, were unjust in the first place, but that's a separate problem.)

This is not an explicit error on Professor Duane's part -- since he was arguing that remaining silent is good for the individual, not for society -- but it does mean the video is not precisely a response to the point I was making.

2. The argument about the danger of talking to cops is based on a sampling error. Professor Duane says that criminal defense attorneys "always, always say it was a bad idea for their client to talk to the police". But this sample obviously only includes people who talked to the police and ended up getting arrested, and charged, and needing a criminal defense attorney. The sample wouldn't include anyone that the police talked to and decided not to arrest -- whether they were initially brought in as a suspect but then convinced the police that they were innocent, or whether they were simply third-party witnesses who volunteered information to the police that they thought was useful.

In fact, in the 'rebuttal' video from Officer Bruch, he says at the 6:20 mark:

"You're going to lose [in the police interrogation room], unless you're purely innocent. On the other side of it, I don't want to put anyone who's innocent in jail. I try not to bring anyone in to the interview room who's innocent. And there are a couple that I have let walk away because they were innocent."

This appears to contradict Professor Duane, who said repeatedly that even if you're innocent, "it CANNOT help" to talk to the police, and that "you CANNOT talk to the police out of arresting you". Unless Bruch was lying, then Duane's statement was wrong, although neither of them seemed to notice. But if you did talk the police out of arresting you, then you wouldn't end up in Professor Duane's sample of people whose ended up needing a defense lawyer.

And even this sample is restricted to people who are brought into the interrogation room, where Officer Bruch said he tried not to bring anybody in at all unless the thought they were probably guilty. If you include all the people that the cops try and talk to, who the police don't think are guilty -- people casually stopped on the street, or called on the phone, or visited in their house, because they might have relevant information -- then your sample becomes much larger, and the proportion who talk to the cops and do not subsequently get in trouble, goes way up.

Also, of course, Professor Duane's sample includes people who talked to the police and were convicted, who were in fact guilty. Their defense attorneys may wish that their clients had kept silent and possibly walked free as a result, but that wouldn't be good for the rest of us.

3. His advice ignores the benefits of leniency if you're guilty and you're almost positive you'll be caught anyway. For most of this discussion I've been focusing on the merits of talking to the police if you're innocent. But Officer Bruch also says that if people in the interrogation room answer questions and cooperate, then even if they're ultimately convicted, the police do testify to the judge that you were cooperative, and the judge can take that into account and reduce your prison sentence. That is at least theoretically another legitimate reason to violate Professor Duane's "Don't Talk To Cops" rule, if you're 99% sure that the police will find enough evidence to convict you anyway, you can hope for leniency by cooperating. That's essentially why I do talk to the police if I get pulled over for speeding -- I've gotten off with a warning a few times, whereas I'm pretty sure that if I'd just sat silently and stared straight ahead, I would have gotten the ticket.

4. Professor Duane's argument is about talking to the cops; I'm asking about the merits of the Fifth Amendment as it applies in a courtroom as well. At the 15:22 mark, for example, Professor Duane gives the fictional example of a suspect who says to the police:

"I don't know what you are talking about. I didn't kill Jones and I don't know who did. I wasn't anywhere near that place. I don't have a gun, and I have never owned a gun in my life. I don't even know how to use a gun. Yeah, sure I never liked the guy, but who did? I wouldn't kill him. I've never hurt anybody in my life, and I would never do such a thing."

Professor Duane continues: "Let's suppose every word of that is true, 100% of it is true. What will the jury hear at trial? 'Officer Bruch, was there anything about your interrogation, your interview with the suspect that made you concerned that he might be the right one?' 'Yes sir there was. He confessed to me that He never liked the guy.'"

Even if that scenario is a valid reason not to talk to the police, it wouldn't be possible in a courtroom, where all of your answers are recorded, and it will be obvious if someone is trying to distort the meaning of something that you said earlier.

This is also not an error on Professor Duane's part, since his talk was called "Don't Talk To Cops", not "Don't Ever Answer Questions In Court". (While he's right that most criminal defense attorneys wish that their clients had not talked to the police, some criminal defense attorneys do encourage their clients to take the stand at trial.) So it's not relevant to the question of whether society benefits from giving defendants a Fifth Amendment right to remain silent in a courtroom.

5. Finally, are the police really that corrupt and/or stupid? Go back up to Professor Duane's hypothetical in which a suspect protests his innocence, and Duane imagines that Officer Bruch -- Professor Duane's real-life co-presenter in this talk! -- takes five words out of context and testifies in court, "He confessed to me, 'I never liked the guy'."

When the real Officer Bruch gave his 'rebuttal', he started out by started out by saying, "Everything he just said was true. And it was right, and it was correct." If I had been in the room at the time, I would have asked him, "Seriously? Were you listening when Professor Duane said that if a suspect protested his innocence in the way that he described, you would take that out-of-context quote and only tell the jury that he said 'I never liked the guy?'" Well, we already know that George Bruch didn't really agree with everything that Professor Duane said, since Bruch contradicted him on some points, such as Duane's claim that "talking to the police cannot possibly help you even if you're innocent". But I would have liked for Officer Bruch to say if he thinks the police are anywhere as stupid and corrupt as Professor Duane was implying that they are.

More to the point -- and I went into this in my first article about the Fifth Amendment -- if the police and the courts are even remotely that corrupt and incompetent, then that's a wide-ranging problem that applies to all types of evidence gathered in the case, not just statements from suspect. And if that's the case, then the Fifth Amendment is just a band-aid that only solves the stupid-cops-and-courts problem as it applies to suspect statements specifically. It doesn't solve the problem as it applies to circumstantial evidence, unreliable eyewitness testimony, false memories, evaluating the credibility of other witnesses, and other factors.

In other words, if you're arrested, suppose the cops really are so dumb and/or evil that they would quote your "I never liked the guy" out of context to try and get you convicted. So, taking Professor Duane's advice, you say nothing. Do you still trust those same police officers to handle the other aspects of your case fairly? To make sure any exculpatory evidence is brought to light? To interrogate other witnesses without leading them towards a pre-set conclusion?

As I said in my first article, that doesn't mean that this is not a valid argument for the Fifth Amendment. But it means that if this is the primary argument in favor of the Fifth Amendment, then what the people making this argument are really saying, is that the whole system is broken.

The Weekly Standard published a more devastating rebuttal to Professor Duane's video, in which the author describes the devastating effects that the "Don't Snitch" movement has had on high-crime neighborhoods, as a result of large numbers of people following Professor Duane's philosophy to the letter. The article quoted one rap celebrity saying that he wouldn't even tell the police about a known murderer living next door to him. Professor Duane may not endorse that view directly, but he could hardly disagree that it follows logically from his admonition to "never talk to the police under any circumstances, ever". This is essentially the same logic error that I pointed out in point #2 -- if you focus only on people who talked to the police and ended up getting arrested, you're ignoring the benefits of people talking to the police who not only don't get arrested, but may help stop a crime or catch a criminal. It might still be a bad idea on balance to talk the police, but you couldn't make that argument by limiting your sample to the people who get arrested.

More generally, there may be an argument why either the individual or society benefits from the legal right to remain silent -- but it would have to be based on a sample drawn from all innocent people who talk to the cops, and the proportion who subsequently benefit as a result, and the proportion who are subsequently penalized, and weighing the magnitude of the benefits versus the drawbacks, and the likelihood of each. The "Don't Talk To Cops" video doesn't do that.

In response to both of my previous articles raising questions about the Fifth Amendment, people sent me a link to a famous video titled "Don't Talk To Cops" delivered by Regents University law professor James Duane. Whether his conclusion is correct or not, I think the argument is flawed in several ways. Please continue reading below to see what I think is wrong with his position.

In my first article about the Fifth Amendment, I asked: Why is it a good thing that the Fifth Amendment allows a suspect to refuse to answer "Yes" or "No" as to whether they committed a crime or not? (I was emphatically not saying that a suspect should have to answer questions that are nobody else's business -- if you weren't at the scene of the crime, you should be free to say, "I wasn't at the scene of the crime, but I would prefer not to tell you where I was." However, the Fifth Amendment lets you refuse to answer the question of whether you even committed the crime at all, and I didn't see what was so great about that, because it is everybody's legitimate business whether or not you committed the crime.)

In the second article, I asked a different question: If you do accept the rationale for allowing a suspect to refuse to answer the question of whether they committed the crime or not, why don't we extend the same protection to third-party witnesses? In other words, if Bob commits a crime and Alice is a witness, and the police ask Bob and Alice the same question -- "Did Bob do it?" -- and both refuse to answer, then Bob is allowed to do this but Alice can go to jail for remaining silent, even though Bob might be guilty, and Alice is the one who is known to be innocent! That seems crazy.

The full arguments are given in each of the articles linked above (and dissected further in the comments) and I don't want to rehash either of them here, but in response to both articles, multiple people sent me the link to Professor Duane's "Don't Talk To Cops" video, which has been viewed about 2 million times on Youtube. (Professor Duane also ceded half his presentation time to police officer George Bruch, giving him the chance to offer a 'rebuttal', which has been uploaded as a separate video -- Bruch's video has been viewed about 1 million times.) I've watched Professor Duane's presentation twice, and one problem I have with the video is that I don't know what Professor Duane's actual position is. Yes, he says that he would "never talk to any police officer under any circumstances, ever", but does that really mean that if he witnessed a violent altercation on the street and the cops wanted to ask him about it, that he wouldn't say a word to them? Or, if he got pulled over for speeding, would he really hand over his license and registration and then sit silently in the driver's seat refusing to respond the cop's questions (which pretty much eliminates your chance at being let off with a warning)? What if his house got broken into, would he really refuse to call the cops and tell them? And, uh, there's a police officer who co-presents in the video with him, didn't Professor Duane have to talk to him to get him in the video? In fact, he speaks directly to the cop on camera! Busted!

"Oh, stop being so literal, Bennett, you know that's not what he meant!" OK, but what did he mean? One problem with staking out a fairly extreme position to begin with, is that if you describe it hyperbolically, there's no way for people to know what your actual position is. I emailed Professor Duane to ask if he could clarify, but didn't get a response. (Since his video has been viewed over 2 million times, possibly my email got lost in the pile of mails he gets every week saying, "Oh shit I got arrested and I opened my big mouth, you got any ideas for what I should do now??")

For the purpose of this discussion, let's assume that Professor Duane means that if the police approached him with questions about a crime (and excluding "hot pursuit" situations such as when the police are chasing a mugger and ask "Which way did he go?"), he would refuse to talk to them. In that case, I have a couple of points to make in response to the video, but first, if you haven't seen it, you may want to watch it now, along with the 'rebuttal' offered by police officer George Bruch, and see if you come up with the same objections that I did.

Everybody back? OK, here are my thoughts:

1. The video is answering a different question from the one I asked. The video weighs the costs and benefits to the individual, of remaining silent; I was asking whether the defendant's right to remain silent is good for society as a whole. Of course if you're innocent, then it's in both your interest and society's interest for you to go free. If you're guilty, on the other hand, you may want to walk free, but it's usually in your society's interest for you to be convicted. (You could argue an exception for pot laws or whatever, but generally speaking, we do want criminals to get caught.)

Professor Duane, beginning at the 24:50 mark, specifically invokes Martha Stewart, Marion Jones, and Michael Vick, as examples of people who he thinks would have gotten lighter sentences, or gotten off completely, if they had remained silent throughout their legal ordeals. Yes, but all three of those people were guilty (Martha Stewart, very probably; Jones and Vick, beyond any doubt), so while it may have been better for them to remain silent, it would not have been better for the legal system as a whole. (All three of them had supporters who said the laws they were being charged under, were unjust in the first place, but that's a separate problem.)

This is not an explicit error on Professor Duane's part -- since he was arguing that remaining silent is good for the individual, not for society -- but it does mean the video is not precisely a response to the point I was making.

2. The argument about the danger of talking to cops is based on a sampling error. Professor Duane says that criminal defense attorneys "always, always say it was a bad idea for their client to talk to the police". But this sample obviously only includes people who talked to the police and ended up getting arrested, and charged, and needing a criminal defense attorney. The sample wouldn't include anyone that the police talked to and decided not to arrest -- whether they were initially brought in as a suspect but then convinced the police that they were innocent, or whether they were simply third-party witnesses who volunteered information to the police that they thought was useful.

In fact, in the 'rebuttal' video from Officer Bruch, he says at the 6:20 mark:

"You're going to lose [in the police interrogation room], unless you're purely innocent. On the other side of it, I don't want to put anyone who's innocent in jail. I try not to bring anyone in to the interview room who's innocent. And there are a couple that I have let walk away because they were innocent."

This appears to contradict Professor Duane, who said repeatedly that even if you're innocent, "it CANNOT help" to talk to the police, and that "you CANNOT talk to the police out of arresting you". Unless Bruch was lying, then Duane's statement was wrong, although neither of them seemed to notice. But if you did talk the police out of arresting you, then you wouldn't end up in Professor Duane's sample of people whose ended up needing a defense lawyer.

And even this sample is restricted to people who are brought into the interrogation room, where Officer Bruch said he tried not to bring anybody in at all unless the thought they were probably guilty. If you include all the people that the cops try and talk to, who the police don't think are guilty -- people casually stopped on the street, or called on the phone, or visited in their house, because they might have relevant information -- then your sample becomes much larger, and the proportion who talk to the cops and do not subsequently get in trouble, goes way up.

Also, of course, Professor Duane's sample includes people who talked to the police and were convicted, who were in fact guilty. Their defense attorneys may wish that their clients had kept silent and possibly walked free as a result, but that wouldn't be good for the rest of us.

3. His advice ignores the benefits of leniency if you're guilty and you're almost positive you'll be caught anyway. For most of this discussion I've been focusing on the merits of talking to the police if you're innocent. But Officer Bruch also says that if people in the interrogation room answer questions and cooperate, then even if they're ultimately convicted, the police do testify to the judge that you were cooperative, and the judge can take that into account and reduce your prison sentence. That is at least theoretically another legitimate reason to violate Professor Duane's "Don't Talk To Cops" rule, if you're 99% sure that the police will find enough evidence to convict you anyway, you can hope for leniency by cooperating. That's essentially why I do talk to the police if I get pulled over for speeding -- I've gotten off with a warning a few times, whereas I'm pretty sure that if I'd just sat silently and stared straight ahead, I would have gotten the ticket.

4. Professor Duane's argument is about talking to the cops; I'm asking about the merits of the Fifth Amendment as it applies in a courtroom as well. At the 15:22 mark, for example, Professor Duane gives the fictional example of a suspect who says to the police:

"I don't know what you are talking about. I didn't kill Jones and I don't know who did. I wasn't anywhere near that place. I don't have a gun, and I have never owned a gun in my life. I don't even know how to use a gun. Yeah, sure I never liked the guy, but who did? I wouldn't kill him. I've never hurt anybody in my life, and I would never do such a thing."

Professor Duane continues: "Let's suppose every word of that is true, 100% of it is true. What will the jury hear at trial? 'Officer Bruch, was there anything about your interrogation, your interview with the suspect that made you concerned that he might be the right one?' 'Yes sir there was. He confessed to me that He never liked the guy.'"

Even if that scenario is a valid reason not to talk to the police, it wouldn't be possible in a courtroom, where all of your answers are recorded, and it will be obvious if someone is trying to distort the meaning of something that you said earlier.

This is also not an error on Professor Duane's part, since his talk was called "Don't Talk To Cops", not "Don't Ever Answer Questions In Court". (While he's right that most criminal defense attorneys wish that their clients had not talked to the police, some criminal defense attorneys do encourage their clients to take the stand at trial.) So it's not relevant to the question of whether society benefits from giving defendants a Fifth Amendment right to remain silent in a courtroom.

5. Finally, are the police really that corrupt and/or stupid? Go back up to Professor Duane's hypothetical in which a suspect protests his innocence, and Duane imagines that Officer Bruch -- Professor Duane's real-life co-presenter in this talk! -- takes five words out of context and testifies in court, "He confessed to me, 'I never liked the guy'."

When the real Officer Bruch gave his 'rebuttal', he started out by started out by saying, "Everything he just said was true. And it was right, and it was correct." If I had been in the room at the time, I would have asked him, "Seriously? Were you listening when Professor Duane said that if a suspect protested his innocence in the way that he described, you would take that out-of-context quote and only tell the jury that he said 'I never liked the guy?'" Well, we already know that George Bruch didn't really agree with everything that Professor Duane said, since Bruch contradicted him on some points, such as Duane's claim that "talking to the police cannot possibly help you even if you're innocent". But I would have liked for Officer Bruch to say if he thinks the police are anywhere as stupid and corrupt as Professor Duane was implying that they are.

More to the point -- and I went into this in my first article about the Fifth Amendment -- if the police and the courts are even remotely that corrupt and incompetent, then that's a wide-ranging problem that applies to all types of evidence gathered in the case, not just statements from suspect. And if that's the case, then the Fifth Amendment is just a band-aid that only solves the stupid-cops-and-courts problem as it applies to suspect statements specifically. It doesn't solve the problem as it applies to circumstantial evidence, unreliable eyewitness testimony, false memories, evaluating the credibility of other witnesses, and other factors.

In other words, if you're arrested, suppose the cops really are so dumb and/or evil that they would quote your "I never liked the guy" out of context to try and get you convicted. So, taking Professor Duane's advice, you say nothing. Do you still trust those same police officers to handle the other aspects of your case fairly? To make sure any exculpatory evidence is brought to light? To interrogate other witnesses without leading them towards a pre-set conclusion?

As I said in my first article, that doesn't mean that this is not a valid argument for the Fifth Amendment. But it means that if this is the primary argument in favor of the Fifth Amendment, then what the people making this argument are really saying, is that the whole system is broken.

The Weekly Standard published a more devastating rebuttal to Professor Duane's video, in which the author describes the devastating effects that the "Don't Snitch" movement has had on high-crime neighborhoods, as a result of large numbers of people following Professor Duane's philosophy to the letter. The article quoted one rap celebrity saying that he wouldn't even tell the police about a known murderer living next door to him. Professor Duane may not endorse that view directly, but he could hardly disagree that it follows logically from his admonition to "never talk to the police under any circumstances, ever". This is essentially the same logic error that I pointed out in point #2 -- if you focus only on people who talked to the police and ended up getting arrested, you're ignoring the benefits of people talking to the police who not only don't get arrested, but may help stop a crime or catch a criminal. It might still be a bad idea on balance to talk the police, but you couldn't make that argument by limiting your sample to the people who get arrested.

More generally, there may be an argument why either the individual or society benefits from the legal right to remain silent -- but it would have to be based on a sample drawn from all innocent people who talk to the cops, and the proportion who subsequently benefit as a result, and the proportion who are subsequently penalized, and weighing the magnitude of the benefits versus the drawbacks, and the likelihood of each. The "Don't Talk To Cops" video doesn't do that.

In response to both of my previous articles raising questions about the Fifth Amendment, people sent me a link to a famous video titled "Don't Talk To Cops" delivered by Regents University law professor James Duane. Whether his conclusion is correct or not, I think the argument is flawed in several ways. Please continue reading below to see what I think is wrong with his position.

In my first article about the Fifth Amendment, I asked: Why is it a good thing that the Fifth Amendment allows a suspect to refuse to answer "Yes" or "No" as to whether they committed a crime or not? (I was emphatically not saying that a suspect should have to answer questions that are nobody else's business -- if you weren't at the scene of the crime, you should be free to say, "I wasn't at the scene of the crime, but I would prefer not to tell you where I was." However, the Fifth Amendment lets you refuse to answer the question of whether you even committed the crime at all, and I didn't see what was so great about that, because it is everybody's legitimate business whether or not you committed the crime.)

In the second article, I asked a different question: If you do accept the rationale for allowing a suspect to refuse to answer the question of whether they committed the crime or not, why don't we extend the same protection to third-party witnesses? In other words, if Bob commits a crime and Alice is a witness, and the police ask Bob and Alice the same question -- "Did Bob do it?" -- and both refuse to answer, then Bob is allowed to do this but Alice can go to jail for remaining silent, even though Bob might be guilty, and Alice is the one who is known to be innocent! That seems crazy.

The full arguments are given in each of the articles linked above (and dissected further in the comments) and I don't want to rehash either of them here, but in response to both articles, multiple people sent me the link to Professor Duane's "Don't Talk To Cops" video, which has been viewed about 2 million times on Youtube. (Professor Duane also ceded half his presentation time to police officer George Bruch, giving him the chance to offer a 'rebuttal', which has been uploaded as a separate video -- Bruch's video has been viewed about 1 million times.) I've watched Professor Duane's presentation twice, and one problem I have with the video is that I don't know what Professor Duane's actual position is. Yes, he says that he would "never talk to any police officer under any circumstances, ever", but does that really mean that if he witnessed a violent altercation on the street and the cops wanted to ask him about it, that he wouldn't say a word to them? Or, if he got pulled over for speeding, would he really hand over his license and registration and then sit silently in the driver's seat refusing to respond the cop's questions (which pretty much eliminates your chance at being let off with a warning)? What if his house got broken into, would he really refuse to call the cops and tell them? And, uh, there's a police officer who co-presents in the video with him, didn't Professor Duane have to talk to him to get him in the video? In fact, he speaks directly to the cop on camera! Busted!

"Oh, stop being so literal, Bennett, you know that's not what he meant!" OK, but what did he mean? One problem with staking out a fairly extreme position to begin with, is that if you describe it hyperbolically, there's no way for people to know what your actual position is. I emailed Professor Duane to ask if he could clarify, but didn't get a response. (Since his video has been viewed over 2 million times, possibly my email got lost in the pile of mails he gets every week saying, "Oh shit I got arrested and I opened my big mouth, you got any ideas for what I should do now??")

For the purpose of this discussion, let's assume that Professor Duane means that if the police approached him with questions about a crime (and excluding "hot pursuit" situations such as when the police are chasing a mugger and ask "Which way did he go?"), he would refuse to talk to them. In that case, I have a couple of points to make in response to the video, but first, if you haven't seen it, you may want to watch it now, along with the 'rebuttal' offered by police officer George Bruch, and see if you come up with the same objections that I did.

Everybody back? OK, here are my thoughts:

1. The video is answering a different question from the one I asked. The video weighs the costs and benefits to the individual, of remaining silent; I was asking whether the defendant's right to remain silent is good for society as a whole. Of course if you're innocent, then it's in both your interest and society's interest for you to go free. If you're guilty, on the other hand, you may want to walk free, but it's usually in your society's interest for you to be convicted. (You could argue an exception for pot laws or whatever, but generally speaking, we do want criminals to get caught.)

Professor Duane, beginning at the 24:50 mark, specifically invokes Martha Stewart, Marion Jones, and Michael Vick, as examples of people who he thinks would have gotten lighter sentences, or gotten off completely, if they had remained silent throughout their legal ordeals. Yes, but all three of those people were guilty (Martha Stewart, very probably; Jones and Vick, beyond any doubt), so while it may have been better for them to remain silent, it would not have been better for the legal system as a whole. (All three of them had supporters who said the laws they were being charged under, were unjust in the first place, but that's a separate problem.)

This is not an explicit error on Professor Duane's part -- since he was arguing that remaining silent is good for the individual, not for society -- but it does mean the video is not precisely a response to the point I was making.

2. The argument about the danger of talking to cops is based on a sampling error. Professor Duane says that criminal defense attorneys "always, always say it was a bad idea for their client to talk to the police". But this sample obviously only includes people who talked to the police and ended up getting arrested, and charged, and needing a criminal defense attorney. The sample wouldn't include anyone that the police talked to and decided not to arrest -- whether they were initially brought in as a suspect but then convinced the police that they were innocent, or whether they were simply third-party witnesses who volunteered information to the police that they thought was useful.

In fact, in the 'rebuttal' video from Officer Bruch, he says at the 6:20 mark:

"You're going to lose [in the police interrogation room], unless you're purely innocent. On the other side of it, I don't want to put anyone who's innocent in jail. I try not to bring anyone in to the interview room who's innocent. And there are a couple that I have let walk away because they were innocent."

This appears to contradict Professor Duane, who said repeatedly that even if you're innocent, "it CANNOT help" to talk to the police, and that "you CANNOT talk to the police out of arresting you". Unless Bruch was lying, then Duane's statement was wrong, although neither of them seemed to notice. But if you did talk the police out of arresting you, then you wouldn't end up in Professor Duane's sample of people whose ended up needing a defense lawyer.

And even this sample is restricted to people who are brought into the interrogation room, where Officer Bruch said he tried not to bring anybody in at all unless the thought they were probably guilty. If you include all the people that the cops try and talk to, who the police don't think are guilty -- people casually stopped on the street, or called on the phone, or visited in their house, because they might have relevant information -- then your sample becomes much larger, and the proportion who talk to the cops and do not subsequently get in trouble, goes way up.

Also, of course, Professor Duane's sample includes people who talked to the police and were convicted, who were in fact guilty. Their defense attorneys may wish that their clients had kept silent and possibly walked free as a result, but that wouldn't be good for the rest of us.

3. His advice ignores the benefits of leniency if you're guilty and you're almost positive you'll be caught anyway. For most of this discussion I've been focusing on the merits of talking to the police if you're innocent. But Officer Bruch also says that if people in the interrogation room answer questions and cooperate, then even if they're ultimately convicted, the police do testify to the judge that you were cooperative, and the judge can take that into account and reduce your prison sentence. That is at least theoretically another legitimate reason to violate Professor Duane's "Don't Talk To Cops" rule, if you're 99% sure that the police will find enough evidence to convict you anyway, you can hope for leniency by cooperating. That's essentially why I do talk to the police if I get pulled over for speeding -- I've gotten off with a warning a few times, whereas I'm pretty sure that if I'd just sat silently and stared straight ahead, I would have gotten the ticket.

4. Professor Duane's argument is about talking to the cops; I'm asking about the merits of the Fifth Amendment as it applies in a courtroom as well. At the 15:22 mark, for example, Professor Duane gives the fictional example of a suspect who says to the police:

"I don't know what you are talking about. I didn't kill Jones and I don't know who did. I wasn't anywhere near that place. I don't have a gun, and I have never owned a gun in my life. I don't even know how to use a gun. Yeah, sure I never liked the guy, but who did? I wouldn't kill him. I've never hurt anybody in my life, and I would never do such a thing."

Professor Duane continues: "Let's suppose every word of that is true, 100% of it is true. What will the jury hear at trial? 'Officer Bruch, was there anything about your interrogation, your interview with the suspect that made you concerned that he might be the right one?' 'Yes sir there was. He confessed to me that He never liked the guy.'"

Even if that scenario is a valid reason not to talk to the police, it wouldn't be possible in a courtroom, where all of your answers are recorded, and it will be obvious if someone is trying to distort the meaning of something that you said earlier.

This is also not an error on Professor Duane's part, since his talk was called "Don't Talk To Cops", not "Don't Ever Answer Questions In Court". (While he's right that most criminal defense attorneys wish that their clients had not talked to the police, some criminal defense attorneys do encourage their clients to take the stand at trial.) So it's not relevant to the question of whether society benefits from giving defendants a Fifth Amendment right to remain silent in a courtroom.

5. Finally, are the police really that corrupt and/or stupid? Go back up to Professor Duane's hypothetical in which a suspect protests his innocence, and Duane imagines that Officer Bruch -- Professor Duane's real-life co-presenter in this talk! -- takes five words out of context and testifies in court, "He confessed to me, 'I never liked the guy'."

When the real Officer Bruch gave his 'rebuttal', he started out by started out by saying, "Everything he just said was true. And it was right, and it was correct." If I had been in the room at the time, I would have asked him, "Seriously? Were you listening when Professor Duane said that if a suspect protested his innocence in the way that he described, you would take that out-of-context quote and only tell the jury that he said 'I never liked the guy?'" Well, we already know that George Bruch didn't really agree with everything that Professor Duane said, since Bruch contradicted him on some points, such as Duane's claim that "talking to the police cannot possibly help you even if you're innocent". But I would have liked for Officer Bruch to say if he thinks the police are anywhere as stupid and corrupt as Professor Duane was implying that they are.

More to the point -- and I went into this in my first article about the Fifth Amendment -- if the police and the courts are even remotely that corrupt and incompetent, then that's a wide-ranging problem that applies to all types of evidence gathered in the case, not just statements from suspect. And if that's the case, then the Fifth Amendment is just a band-aid that only solves the stupid-cops-and-courts problem as it applies to suspect statements specifically. It doesn't solve the problem as it applies to circumstantial evidence, unreliable eyewitness testimony, false memories, evaluating the credibility of other witnesses, and other factors.

In other words, if you're arrested, suppose the cops really are so dumb and/or evil that they would quote your "I never liked the guy" out of context to try and get you convicted. So, taking Professor Duane's advice, you say nothing. Do you still trust those same police officers to handle the other aspects of your case fairly? To make sure any exculpatory evidence is brought to light? To interrogate other witnesses without leading them towards a pre-set conclusion?

As I said in my first article, that doesn't mean that this is not a valid argument for the Fifth Amendment. But it means that if this is the primary argument in favor of the Fifth Amendment, then what the people making this argument are really saying, is that the whole system is broken.

The Weekly Standard published a more devastating rebuttal to Professor Duane's video, in which the author describes the devastating effects that the "Don't Snitch" movement has had on high-crime neighborhoods, as a result of large numbers of people following Professor Duane's philosophy to the letter. The article quoted one rap celebrity saying that he wouldn't even tell the police about a known murderer living next door to him. Professor Duane may not endorse that view directly, but he could hardly disagree that it follows logically from his admonition to "never talk to the police under any circumstances, ever". This is essentially the same logic error that I pointed out in point #2 -- if you focus only on people who talked to the police and ended up getting arrested, you're ignoring the benefits of people talking to the police who not only don't get arrested, but may help stop a crime or catch a criminal. It might still be a bad idea on balance to talk the police, but you couldn't make that argument by limiting your sample to the people who get arrested.

More generally, there may be an argument why either the individual or society benefits from the legal right to remain silent -- but it would have to be based on a sample drawn from all innocent people who talk to the cops, and the proportion who subsequently benefit as a result, and the proportion who are subsequently penalized, and weighing the magnitude of the benefits versus the drawbacks, and the likelihood of each. The "Don't Talk To Cops" video doesn't do that.

theodp writes "Q. What do you get when Bill Gates and Rupert Murdoch put their heads together? A. inBloom (aka SLC), the Gates Foundation-bankrolled and News Corp. subsidiary-implemented collaboration whose stated mission is to 'inform and involve each student and teacher with data and tools designed to personalize learning.' It's noble enough sounding, but as the NY Times reports, the devil is in the details when it comes to deciding who sees students' academic and behavioral data. inBloom execs maintain their service has been unfairly maligned, saying it is entirely up to school districts or states to decide which details about students to store in the system and with whom to share them. However, a video on inBloom's Web site suggesting what this techno-utopia might look like may give readers of 1984 some pause. In one scene, a teacher with a tablet crouches next to a second-grader evaluating how many words per minute he can read: 55 words read; 43 correctly. Later, she moves to a student named Tyler and selects an e-book 'for at-risk students' for his further reading. The video follows Tyler home, where his mom logs into a parent portal for an update on his status — attendance, 86%; performance, 72% — and taps a button to send the e-book to play on the family TV. And another scene shows a geometry teacher reassigning students' seating assignments based on their 'character strengths', moving a green-coded female student ('actively participates: 98%') next to a red-and-yellow coded boy ('shows enthusiasm: 67%'). The NYT also mentions a parent's concern that school officials hoping to receive hefty Gates Foundation Grants may not think an agreement with the Gates-backed inBloom completely through."

The partial government shut-down that the U.S. is experiencing right now is about to enter its second week. Various government functions and services have been disrupted (including some web sites, whether it's a good idea or not), and lots of workers on the Federal payroll have been furloughed. But since the U.S. government is involved in so many aspects of modern American life, you don't have to work for the government to be affected by the budget politics at play. So, whether or not you work for the government in any capacity, the question we'd like to hear your answer to is this: What does the shutdown mean to you, in practical terms, whether the effects are good, bad, or indifferent?

The partial government shut-down that the U.S. is experiencing right now is about to enter its second week. Various government functions and services have been disrupted (including some web sites, whether it's a good idea or not), and lots of workers on the Federal payroll have been furloughed. But since the U.S. government is involved in so many aspects of modern American life, you don't have to work for the government to be affected by the budget politics at play. So, whether or not you work for the government in any capacity, the question we'd like to hear your answer to is this: What does the shutdown mean to you, in practical terms, whether the effects are good, bad, or indifferent?

Nick Bilton at the New York Times has been writing skeptically for years about the FAA's ban on even the most benign electronic devices during takeoff and landing on commercial passenger flights. He writes in the NYT's Bits column about the gradual transformation that may (real soon now) result in slightly more sensible rules; a committee established to review some of those in-flight rules has recommended the FAA ease up, at least on devices with no plausible negative effect on navigation. From the article: "The New York Times employed EMT Labs, an independent testing facility in Mountain View, Calif., to see if a Kindle actually gave off enough electromagnetic emissions to affect a plane. The findings: An Amazon Kindle emitted less than 30 microvolts per meter when in use. That is only 0.00003 of a volt. A Boeing 747 must withstand 200 volts per square meter. That is millions of Kindles packed into each square meter of the plane. Still, the F.A.A. said “No.” ... But then something started to change: society." Of course, the rules that committees recommend aren't always the ones that prevail on the ground or in the sky.

Despite the number of companies shipping or promising them, smart watches aren't the easiest sell, and Ars Technica's review of Samsung's entry illustrates why. Despite all the processing power inside, the watch is "sluggish" even for the kind of at-a-glance convenience features that are touted as the reason to have a phone tethered to an (even smarter) phone, and for the most part seems to weakly imitate features already found on that phone. There are a few features called out as cool, like a media control app, but for the most part reviewer Rob Amadeo finds little compelling in the Galaxy Gear.

Despite the number of companies shipping or promising them, smart watches aren't the easiest sell, and Ars Technica's review of Samsung's entry illustrates why. Despite all the processing power inside, the watch is "sluggish" even for the kind of at-a-glance convenience features that are touted as the reason to have a phone tethered to an (even smarter) phone, and for the most part seems to weakly imitate features already found on that phone. There are a few features called out as cool, like a media control app, but for the most part reviewer Rob Amadeo finds little compelling in the Galaxy Gear.

Microsoft made some confident sounding claims about sales of its first-generation Surface tablets before it became clear that the tablets weren't actually selling very well. So make what you will of the company's claim that the second version is "close to selling out." As the linked article points out, the company has "fallen short of offering any real explanation as to just how “close” to selling out the Surface 2 and Pro 2 really are – nor have they indicated how many were on hand to order in the first place."

Boston Dynamics has been making eye-catching (and sort of creepy) military-oriented robots for several years, and we've noted several times the Big Dog utility robot. The newest creation is the untethered, gas-powered Wildcat; this is definitely not something I want chasing after me. (Not as fast as the previous, tethered version — yet.)

Boston Dynamics has been making eye-catching (and sort of creepy) military-oriented robots for several years, and we've noted several times the Big Dog utility robot. The newest creation is the untethered, gas-powered Wildcat; this is definitely not something I want chasing after me. (Not as fast as the previous, tethered version — yet.)

Boston Dynamics has been making eye-catching (and sort of creepy) military-oriented robots for several years, and we've noted several times the Big Dog utility robot. The newest creation is the untethered, gas-powered Wildcat; this is definitely not something I want chasing after me. (Not as fast as the previous, tethered version — yet.)

Boston Dynamics has been making eye-catching (and sort of creepy) military-oriented robots for several years, and we've noted several times the Big Dog utility robot. The newest creation is the untethered, gas-powered Wildcat; this is definitely not something I want chasing after me. (Not as fast as the previous, tethered version — yet.)

Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Arik Hesseldahl writes that James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, says that the NSA tried to penetrate and compromise Tor, but it was only because terrorists and criminals use it, too and our "interest in online anonymity services and other online communication and networking tools is based on the undeniable fact that these are the tools our adversaries use to communicate and coordinate attacks against the United States and our allies." It was all legal and appropriate, Clapper argues, because, "Within our lawful mission to collect foreign intelligence to protect the United States, we use every intelligence tool available to understand the intent of our foreign adversaries so that we can disrupt their plans and prevent them from bringing harm to innocent Americans. Our adversaries have the ability to hide their messages and discussions among those of innocent people around the world. They use the very same social networking sites, encryption tools and other security features that protect our daily online activities." Clapper concludes that "the reality is that the men and women at the National Security Agency and across the Intelligence Community are abiding by the law, respecting the rights of citizens and doing everything they can to help keep our nation safe.""

Techdirt has an interesting followup on the arrest and indictment of Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht, in connection to which the FBI seized 26,000 or so Bitcoins. From the Techdirt piece: "However, in the criminal complaint against Ulbricht, it suggested that his commissions were in the range of $80 million -- or about 600,000 Bitcoins. You might notice the disconnect between the 26,000 Bitcoins seized and the supposed 600,000 Ulbright made. It now comes out that those 26,000 Bitcoins aren't even Ulbricht's. Instead, they're actually from Silk Road's users. In other words, these were Bitcoins stored with user accounts on Silk Road. Ulbricht's actual wallet is separate from that, and was apparently encrypted, so it would appear that the FBI does not have them, nor does it have any way of getting at them just yet. And given that some courts have argued you can't be forced to give up your encryption, as it's a 5th Amendment violation, those Bitcoins could remain hidden -- though, I could see the court ordering him to pay the dollar equivalent in restitution (though still not sure that would force him to decrypt the Bitcoins)." The article also notes that the FBI's own Bitcoin wallet has been identified, leading to some snarky micropayment messages headed their direction.

Techdirt has an interesting followup on the arrest and indictment of Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht, in connection to which the FBI seized 26,000 or so Bitcoins. From the Techdirt piece: "However, in the criminal complaint against Ulbricht, it suggested that his commissions were in the range of $80 million -- or about 600,000 Bitcoins. You might notice the disconnect between the 26,000 Bitcoins seized and the supposed 600,000 Ulbright made. It now comes out that those 26,000 Bitcoins aren't even Ulbricht's. Instead, they're actually from Silk Road's users. In other words, these were Bitcoins stored with user accounts on Silk Road. Ulbricht's actual wallet is separate from that, and was apparently encrypted, so it would appear that the FBI does not have them, nor does it have any way of getting at them just yet. And given that some courts have argued you can't be forced to give up your encryption, as it's a 5th Amendment violation, those Bitcoins could remain hidden -- though, I could see the court ordering him to pay the dollar equivalent in restitution (though still not sure that would force him to decrypt the Bitcoins)." The article also notes that the FBI's own Bitcoin wallet has been identified, leading to some snarky micropayment messages headed their direction.

Nerval's Lobster writes "Earlier this week, a small helicopter drone tumbled out of the sky over midtown Manhattan, crashing to the sidewalk near Grand Central Station. On the way down it almost hit a businessman, who plucked out the video card from the wreckage and handed it over to a local television-news station. In the video, the drone (a Phantom Quadcopter) lifts off from what looks like an apartment terrace and buzzes its merry way toward some nearby skyscrapers, pausing for a few panoramic surveys of the Manhattan skyline. But the operator is clearly inexperienced, crashing the vehicle against the side of a building, and the flight lasts a mere three minutes before a final collision sends it to the street. Drone enthusiasts and engineers blamed the Quadcopter's poor performance on the pilot's possible reliance on GPS mode; when flying in an area crowded with tall buildings (and they don't get much taller or more crowded than in Manhattan) that block GPS signals, a vehicle can quickly think it's off-target and attempt to correct, leading to crashes. In theory, the FAA forbids the operation of unmanned aerial vehicles over crowded areas such as Manhattan, but that hasn't stopped any number of hobbyists from launching drones. And hobbyists aside, the industry for commercial drones is picking up: over the summer, the FAA approved a pair of small, unmanned aircraft systems for flight, and Airware (which builds autopilot computers for drones) recently accepted funding from Google Ventures. That's led legislators to begin exploring ways to regulate domestic drone use (particularly with regard to use by law enforcement), and it begs the question: should drones be regulated? And if so, how?" A similar incident just happened in Australia, where a small drone operated by an unknown owner crashed into the Sydney Harbor Bridge. Counter-terrorism officials felt they had to investigate, of course.

An anonymous reader writes "Valve has revealed their first Steam Machines prototype details. The first 300 Steam Machine prototypes to ship will use various high-end Intel CPUs and NVIDIA GPUs while running their custom SteamOS Linux distribution. The Intel Haswell CPU + NVIDIA GPU combination should work well on Linux with the binary drivers. Using a range of CPUs/GPUs in the prototypes will allow them to better gauge the performance and effectiveness. Valve also said they will be releasing the CAD design files to their custom living room console enclosure for those who'd like to reproduce them." Valve is careful to point out that these specs aren't intended as a standard: "[T]o be clear, this design is not meant to serve the needs of all of the tens of millions of Steam users. It may, however, be the kind of machine that a significant percentage of Steam users would actually want to purchase — those who want plenty of performance in a high-end living room package. Many others would opt for machines that have been more carefully designed to cost less, or to be tiny, or super quiet, and there will be Steam Machines that fit those descriptions."

MojoKid writes "Although Intel is Chipzilla, the company can't help but extend its reach just a bit into the exciting and growing world of DIY makers and hobbyists. Intel announced its Galileo development board, a microcontroller that's compatible with Arduino software and uses the new Quark X1000 processor (400MHz, 32-bit, Pentium-class, single- core and thread) that Intel announced at the IDF 2013 keynote. The board makes use of Intel's architecture to make it easy to develop for Windows, Mac, and Linux, but it's also completely open hardware (PDF). Galileo is 10cm x 7cm (although ports protrude a bit beyond that), and there are four screw holes for secure mounting. Ports include 10/100 Ethernet, USB client/host ports, RS-232 UART and 3.5mm jack, mini PCIe slot (with USB 2.0 host support); other features include 8MB Legacy SPI Flash for firmware storage, 512KB embedded SRAM, 256MB DRAM, 11KB EEPROM programmed via the EEPROM library, and support for an additional 32GB of storage using a microSD card."

KentuckyFC writes "Sentiment analysis relies on vast databases of common words which are marked as positive, negative or neutral and associated with one of the eight fundamental emotions: joy, trust, fear, surprise, sadness, discuss, anger and anticipation. It is then a straightforward matter to search Tweets, novels and even fairy tales to see what emotions appear. Now, researchers have carried out the first large-scale study of sentiment in workplace emails. They examined the emotions associated with words in over 30,000 emails and analyzed the emotional differences between messages sent by men and women. It turns out that women use more cheerful words in emails than men, that men use more fear words, especially when communicating with other men, and that both men and women are far more likely to use anticipation words when emailing a member of the opposite sex. The same researchers say they are developing a Google app that will allow users to track their own emotions towards the people they correspond with in Gmail. And they plan to make a public call for volunteers willing to share their data for research purposes."

First time accepted submitter starr802 writes "Scientists from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology in Daejeon, South Korea, have developed a 'jellyfish terminator' robot set out to detect the marine coelenterate and kill it. Scientists started developing the robots three years ago after South Korea experienced jellyfish attacks along its southwest coast, where they clogged fishing nets and ate fish eggs and plankton, Discovery News reports. The Jellyfish Elimination Robotic Swarm or JEROS has two motors that let it move forward, backwards and rotate at 360 degrees." In related news, the Oskarshamn nuclear plant in southeastern Sweden was shut down recently after moon jellyfish overwhelmed the screens and filters in cooling pipes."

crookedvulture writes "Seagate's solid-state hybrid drives have finally made it to the desktop. The latest generation of SSHDs debuted with a 2.5" notebook model that was ultimately hampered by its slow 5,400-RPM spindle speed. The Desktop SSHD has the same 8GB flash payload and Adaptive Memory caching scheme. However, it's equipped with 2TB of much faster 7,200-RPM mechanical storage. The onboard flash produces boot and load times only a little bit slower than those of full-blown SSDs. It also delivers quicker response times than traditional hard drives. That said, the relatively small cache is overwhelmed by some benchmarks, and its mechanical sidekick isn't as fast as the best traditional hard drives. The price premium is a little high, too: an extra $30 for the 1TB model and $40 for the 2TB variant, which is nearly enough to buy a separate 32GB SSD. Seagate's software-independent caching system works with any operating system and hardware platform, so it definitely has some appeal. But dual-drive setups are probably the better solution for most desktop users."

Nerval's Lobster writes "The upcoming movie Gravity features a pair of astronauts (George Clooney and Sandra Bullock) stranded in orbit after their space shuttle is destroyed by floating debris. Faced with dwindling oxygen levels, they struggle to reach the nearby International Space Station (ISS). It's a movie, so some deviations from reality are expected, but it also opens up an opportunity to talk with a NASA astronaut about what it's like to live in space. Catherine 'Cady' Coleman, who has spent thousands of hours aboard the Space Shuttle Columbia and the International Space Station, who gave Bullock advice on the role, suggests that the real NASA has the whole orbital-debris issue well in hand, but that it takes a lot of training (and on-the-job experience) to get the hang of living in space. 'When we get up to space and the people up there run around and show us stuff — that's really, really effective and there was nothing like that compared to the classroom.' Despite the physical and mental demands, and the the time spent away from family, she sees the endeavor as supremely worth it. 'We're all very privileged to do this job,' Coleman says. 'They spend a lot of money making you ready, and you have a responsibility to do your job.'"

That things are bigger in Texas is sometimes more than just a cliche. A few weeks ago, on the way to LinuxCon, I stopped by what is certainly the biggest hackerspace that I've ever seen; is it the biggest in the world? Whatever the answer is to that, Houston's TX/RX Labs is not just big — it's busy, and booked. Unlike some spaces we've highlighted here before (like Seattle's Metrix:CreateSpace and Brooklyn's GenSpace), TX/RX Labs has room and year-round sunshine enough to contemplate putting a multi-kilowatt solar array in the backyard. Besides an array of CNC machines, 3-D printers, and both wood- and metal-working equipment, TX/RX has workbenches available for members to rent. (These are serious workspaces, made in-house of poured concrete and welded steel tubing.) Member Steve Cameron showed me around, but TX/RX Labs is so large that we broke the tour into two parts, with the other one set to display next week.

That things are bigger in Texas is sometimes more than just a cliche. A few weeks ago, on the way to LinuxCon, I stopped by what is certainly the biggest hackerspace that I've ever seen; is it the biggest in the world? Whatever the answer is to that, Houston's TX/RX Labs is not just big — it's busy, and booked. Unlike some spaces we've highlighted here before (like Seattle's Metrix:CreateSpace and Brooklyn's GenSpace), TX/RX Labs has room and year-round sunshine enough to contemplate putting a multi-kilowatt solar array in the backyard. Besides an array of CNC machines, 3-D printers, and both wood- and metal-working equipment, TX/RX has workbenches available for members to rent. (These are serious workspaces, made in-house of poured concrete and welded steel tubing.) Member Steve Cameron showed me around, but TX/RX Labs is so large that we broke the tour into two parts, with the other one set to display next week.

First time accepted submitter slack_justyb writes "Matthew Garrett, former employee of Red Hat, comments on the current state of XMir and Canonical's recent decision to not ship XMir as the default display server in Ubuntu 13.10. Noting the current issues outstanding in XMir, the features yet to be implemented, the security loopholes, and Intel's recent rejection to support Mir in general. All of this leading Garrett to the conclusion that 'It's clear that XMir has turned into a larger project than Canonical had originally anticipated, but that's hardly surprising.'"

First time accepted submitter slack_justyb writes "Matthew Garrett, former employee of Red Hat, comments on the current state of XMir and Canonical's recent decision to not ship XMir as the default display server in Ubuntu 13.10. Noting the current issues outstanding in XMir, the features yet to be implemented, the security loopholes, and Intel's recent rejection to support Mir in general. All of this leading Garrett to the conclusion that 'It's clear that XMir has turned into a larger project than Canonical had originally anticipated, but that's hardly surprising.'"

Robotron23 writes "Further charges have been made against Silk Road founder Ross William Ulbricht, aka 'Dread Pirate Roberts'. Yesterday saw the shutdown of Silk Road, a website Ulbricht founded which specialized in the sale of illegal items such as recreational drugs. As well as paying for a hit on a forum member, Ulbricht later requested an undercover agent murder an arrested employee of Silk Road, terming it 'the right move.' Upon receiving staged photos of torture and eventually the corpse, Ulbricht paid in full."

Nerval's Lobster writes "Former NSA technology boss Prescott Winter has a word for the kind of security he sees even at large, technologically sophisticated companies: Appalling. Companies large enough to afford good security remain vulnerable to hackers, malware and criminals because they tend to throw technological solutions at potential areas of risk rather than focusing on specific and immediate threats, Winter said during his keynote speech Oct. 1 at the Splunk Worldwide User's Conference in Las Vegas. 'As we look at the situation in the security arena we see an awful lot of big companies – Fortune 100-level companies – with, to be perfectly candid, appalling security. They have fundamentally no idea what they're doing,' Winter said, according to a story in U.K. tech-news site Computing. During almost 28 years at the National Security Agency (NSA), Winter established the spy agency's Technology Directorate and served as the agency's first CTO. He also held positions as the NSA's CIO, its deputy chief of Defensive Information Operations and, oddly, as chief of Customer Response. He is currently managing director of Chertoff Group, the strategic management and security consultancy established by Michael Chertoff, secretary of the Dept. of Homeland Security under Pres. George W. Bush and co-author of the USA Patriot Act."

GregLaden writes "Last week Popular Science shut down comments on their web pages citing the damage being done to the public perception of science as their reason. Earlier research suggested this might be a good idea because trollish, negative comments can color the perception by readers of a news story. However, some have taken Popular Science's move to be anti-science, implying that science itself is positively affected by web and blog comments, as though these comments contributed to the science being done itself. Here, I take exception to this and suggest that while comments are important in relation to the public perception of science (which itself is important) blog and web commentary never, or only rarely, influences the process of scientific inquiry itself."

KentuckyFC writes "Last month, NASA declared that Earth's most distant probe had finally left the Solar System. But the announcement may now turn out to be premature. It was prompted by a dramatic increase in the density of plasma in the region of space the spacecraft is now in. However, there has been no change in the local magnetic field, which is what astrophysicists would expect if Voyager had entered interstellar space. Instead, space scientists think the probe may be caught inside a magnetic portal known as an interstellar flux transfer event. This occurs when the magnetic fields from two different objects briefly become connected through a tube-like magnetic structure. This process happens between the Earth and Sun's magnetic field about every eight minutes, so similar events are expected between the Sun's field and the interstellar field. This magnetic tube would allow particles in from outside the Solar System, increasing the density of plasma, while maintaining the same magnetic field. If so, Voyager 1 hasn't yet left the Solar System after all."

Lucas123 writes "After beginning as an art project 3 years ago in Manhattan to thwart government online spying and offer a physical depiction of our digitally-connected society, a trend of embedding USB thumb drives in walls has caught on and spread to every continent but Antarctica. Dead Drops, as the anonymous P2P files sharing network is called, now has more than 1,200 locations worldwide and has morphed as participants have become more creative in not only where they place the drives, but how they share files, including creating WiFi locations. The thumb drives, which range in size from a few megabytes to 60GB, have allowed people to share music, video, personal photos, poetry, political discourse, or artwork anonymously. Dead Drops creator, German artist Aram Bartholl, said the project is a way to 'un-cloud' file sharing."

Nerval's Lobster writes "Valve has announced SteamOS, Steam Machines, and a Steam controller — the components necessary for it to create a viable living-room gaming experience. Valve's strategy with these releases seems pretty clear: create a platform based on openness (SteamOS is a Linux-based operating system), in contrast to the closed systems pushed by console rivals such as Sony and Microsoft. If Valve chooses to release Half-Life 3 in conjunction with its Steam Machines' rollout, it could help create further buzz for the system, given the years' worth of pent-up demand for the next chapter in the popular FPS saga. But can Valve's moves allow it to actually compete against Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony on equal terms? What do you think?"

An anonymous reader writes "Ubuntu 13.10 is due for release later this month, and the Ubuntu developers were planning to replace the native X Server with Mir/XMir as Canonical's next-generation Ubuntu display server. However, they have now decided Mir will not be the Ubuntu 13.10 default on the desktop over the XMir X11 compatibility layer suffering multi-monitor issues and other problems. Canonical still says they will use Mir for Ubuntu Touch 13.10 images and remain committed to the Mir project."

darthcamaro writes "In March of this year, we saw the first ever 100 Gigabit DDoS attack, which was possible due to a DNS Reflection Amplification attack. Now word is out that a new 100 Gigabit attack has struck using raw bandwidth, without any DNS Reflection. 'The most outstanding thing about this attack is that it did not use any amplification, which means that they had 100 Gigabits of available bandwidth on their own,' Incapsula co-founder Marc Gaffan said. 'The attack lasted nine hours, and that type of bandwidth is not cheap or readily available.'"

itwbennett writes "As part of the project to preserve the world's first website and all of the accompanying technology, CERN last week launched a line mode browser emulator. To make the browser experience authentic, the developers recreated how terminals would draw one character at a time by covering the page in black and then revealing each character by erasing a character-sized rectangle from that cover, one-by-one, line-by-line. They also recreated the sound of typing on older keyboards, specifically an IBM RS/6000 keyboard, by using HTML5 audio elements."

Nerval's Lobster writes "One of the largest nuclear-power plants in the world was forced to shut down temporarily Sept. 29, after pipes that bring Baltic Sea water in to cool the plant's turbines became clogged with tons of jellyfish. The sudden influx of common moon jellyfish overwhelmed the screens and filters that keep flotsam and most sea life out of the Oskarshamn nuclear plant in southeastern Sweden. The plant was forced to shut down its No. 3 reactor – the largest boiling-water reactor in the world, which generates 1,400 megawatts of electricity when it is jellyfish-free and running at full power. The reactor stayed down until early Oct. 1, after the jellyfish had been cleared out and engineers approved the cooling system as invertebrate-free. It's not easy to overwhelm the cooling system for a nuclear power plant, but Oskarshamn's is unusually resilient. There is a separate intake- and cooling system for each reactor, all of which were designed for the brackish, polluted water in that area of the Baltic Sea. Most datacenters are too far inland to worry about jellyfish in their cooling water, though green-IT-promoters Vertatique estimated that a 5,000-sq.-ft. datacenter would consume almost 9 million gallons of water for cooling. That means ocean-side datacenters that use sea water for cooling (such as Google's datacenter in Hamina, Finland — also on the Baltic Sea) are just as susceptible to jellyfish attacks as nuclear power plants."

Slashdot's biggest redesign effort ever is now in beta and you're invited to help guide it. This redesign has been shaped by feedback from community members over the past few months (a big thanks to those of you who participated in our alpha testing phase!), and we'd like your thoughts on it, too. This new design is meant to be richer but also simpler to use, while maintaining the spirit of what Slashdot is all about: News for Nerds. Stuff that matters. Read on for the details of what's included, or read this blog post. Update: 10/02 19:16 GMT by T : Since this post went live, we've been reading through the comments below as well as your (hundreds!) of emails. These are all valuable, as we continue to implement our current features into the Beta. Keep 'em coming; we love the feedback. Please keep in mind that this is called Beta for a reason; we've still folding in lots of improvements. One important thing to bear in mind is that the images are optional: check out the Classic mode by clicking on the view selection widget (just above the stories) on the Beta page. What's in the Beta?

• Cleaner, simpler homepage design with option to view stories in three different layouts (Standard, Classic and Headline View)
• More community-promoted content in the All Stories view
• Improved profile pages to give you a snapshot of other community members
• Better, more prominent filters to view stories in different dimensions
• Easier browsing of popular topics straight from the main page.

Please keep in mind that this is a beta and some features are not yet available or fully baked. For features not yet available, you'll see a "Coming Soon" bubble if you hover your mouse over those areas of the site. Here are a few key areas we are still working on:

• Sign up
• moderation
• story submission
• replying to comments

Update: 10/01 20:54 GMT by S : For those of you who would rather browse Slashdot without pictures, click the icon at the top right of the story column, and switch to Classic View.