Slashdot Mirror

An anonymous reader writes "Wired reports that the chat logs between Bradley Manning and Julian Assange that were used as evidence in Manning's trial have made it onto the web, at least briefly. One of those logs contained something very interesting on page 4, which was picked up on by the News of Iceland, which reports, '"Jesus Christ. I think that we have recordings of all phone calls to and from the Icelandic parliament during the past four months". This text can be found in documents that the US military published on its website and is said to be part of the conversations between Julian Assange and Bradley Manning. According to the documents, Assange claims to have phone call recordings from Althingi, the Icelandic parliament, but this is the first time that the existence of such data is mentioned publicly. ... According to Icelandic laws, it is required to inform the person you are speaking with if the phone call is being recorded. Given that the parliament is not violating laws it is clear that Assange or his associates would have to have installed recording devices or wiretaps in the parliament.' — What makes it even more interesting is that Wired also reports in this recent story: Someone's Been Siphoning Data Through a Huge Security Hole in the Internet."

First time accepted submitter Austrian Anarchy writes with this story via Reason (and based on a report at Wired) about a maker of physical Bitcoin tokens. Quoting from Reason's take: "Mike Caldwell ran a business called Casascius that printed physical tokens with a bitcoin digital key on it, key hidden behind a tamper proof strip. He'd charge $50 worth of bitcoin to print a bitcoin key you sent him via computer on this token. Cool stuff--a good friend of mine found one sitting unnoticed in her tip jar from an event at which she sold her artisan lamps from 2011 and was naturally delighted given the nearly 1000x increase in value of a bitcoin since then. So, you're making something fun, useful, interesting, harmless--naturally the federal government is very concerned and wants to hobble you. 'Just before Thanksgiving, [Caldwell] received a letter from the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FINCEN, the arm of the Treasury Department that dictates how the nation’s anti-money-laundering and financial crime regulations are interpreted. According to FINCEN, Caldwell needs to rethink his business. "They considered my activity to be money transmitting," Caldwell says. And if you want to transmit money, you must first jump through a lot of state and federal regulatory hoops Caldwell hasn't jumped through.'"

An anonymous reader writes "The U.S. Centers for Disease Control have announced that measles cases in the U.S. spiked this year, rising to three times their recent average rate. It's partly due to a greater number of people traveling to the U.S. when they're infectious, but also because a frustrating number of people are either failing to have their children vaccinated, or are failing to do so in a timely manner. Dr. Thomas Friedman said, 'Around 90 percent of the people who have had measles in this country were not vaccinated either because they refused, or were not vaccinated on time.' Phil Plait adds, 'In all three of these outbreaks, someone who had not been vaccinated traveled overseas and brought the disease back with them, which then spread due to low vaccination rates in their communities. It's unclear how much religious beliefs themselves were behind the outbreaks in Brooklyn and North Carolina; it may have been due to widespread secular anti-vax beliefs in those tight-knit groups. But either way, a large proportion of the people in those areas were unvaccinated.'"

Kristian vonBengtson writes "Wanna build your own space capsule capable of doing an atmospheric re-entry on a suborbital mission? Well, here are some production hints and a visual guide." The initial stages begin with sketches on paper before moving to 3D design software. He writes, "A whole bunch of sketches were done to get some kind of initial idea of the size, subsystems layout and how to actually produce the capsule while keeping an open structure for further development and potential changes. One of the main concerns was the small size and the ability to easy install and replace avionics. This led to the decision that all external side panels will have to accommodate being taken on and off – no welding, only on the main structure." Afterward, he moves on to show the final metal cuts and how the pieces are put together via bolts and welding.

stigmato writes "Once upon a time the MacBook Pro line was well-regarded amongst IT professionals for their quality, performance, serviceability & upgradeability. As appealing as the new Retina displays are, I don't want a device I cannot upgrade or repair. Glued in batteries and soldered in RAM with high prices have made me look to other manufacturers again. What are you buying, /. community? System76? Dell? Old article but still rings true with the latest models. I post this from my 2010 MBP 13" with a 256GB SSD, 1TB HDD in the optical bay, 8GB (possibly 16GB soon) and a user replaced battery."

Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Health authorities have been struggling to convince the public that the threat of totally drug-resistant bacteria is a crisis. Earlier this year, British chief medical officer Sally Davies described resistance to antibiotics as a 'catastrophic global threat' that should be ranked alongside terrorism. In September, Dr. Thomas Frieden, the director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, issued a blunt warning: 'If we're not careful, we will soon be in a post-antibiotic era. For some patients and some microbes, we are already there.' Now Maryn McKenna writes that we are on the verge of entering a new era in history and asks us to imagine what our lives would be like if we really lost antibiotics to advancing drug resistance. We'll not just lose the ability to treat infectious disease; that's obvious. But also: The ability to treat cancer, and to transplant organs, because doing those successfully relies on suppressing the immune system and willingly making ourselves vulnerable to infection. We'll lose any treatment that relies on a permanent port into the bloodstream — for instance, kidney dialysis. We'd lose any major open-cavity surgery, on the heart, the lungs, the abdomen. We'd lose implantable devices: new hips, new knees, new heart valves. We'd lose the ability to treat people after traumatic accidents, as major as crashing your car and as minor as your kid falling out of a tree. We'd lose the safety of modern childbirth. We'd lose a good portion of our cheap modern food supply because most of the meat we eat in the industrialized world is raised with the routine use of antibiotics, to fatten livestock and protect them from the conditions in which the animals are raised. 'And it wouldn't be just meat. Antibiotics are used in plant agriculture as well, especially on fruit. Right now, a drug-resistant version of the bacterial disease fire blight is attacking American apple crops,' writes McKenna. 'There's currently one drug left to fight it.'"

Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Health authorities have been struggling to convince the public that the threat of totally drug-resistant bacteria is a crisis. Earlier this year, British chief medical officer Sally Davies described resistance to antibiotics as a 'catastrophic global threat' that should be ranked alongside terrorism. In September, Dr. Thomas Frieden, the director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, issued a blunt warning: 'If we're not careful, we will soon be in a post-antibiotic era. For some patients and some microbes, we are already there.' Now Maryn McKenna writes that we are on the verge of entering a new era in history and asks us to imagine what our lives would be like if we really lost antibiotics to advancing drug resistance. We'll not just lose the ability to treat infectious disease; that's obvious. But also: The ability to treat cancer, and to transplant organs, because doing those successfully relies on suppressing the immune system and willingly making ourselves vulnerable to infection. We'll lose any treatment that relies on a permanent port into the bloodstream — for instance, kidney dialysis. We'd lose any major open-cavity surgery, on the heart, the lungs, the abdomen. We'd lose implantable devices: new hips, new knees, new heart valves. We'd lose the ability to treat people after traumatic accidents, as major as crashing your car and as minor as your kid falling out of a tree. We'd lose the safety of modern childbirth. We'd lose a good portion of our cheap modern food supply because most of the meat we eat in the industrialized world is raised with the routine use of antibiotics, to fatten livestock and protect them from the conditions in which the animals are raised. 'And it wouldn't be just meat. Antibiotics are used in plant agriculture as well, especially on fruit. Right now, a drug-resistant version of the bacterial disease fire blight is attacking American apple crops,' writes McKenna. 'There's currently one drug left to fight it.'"

Wired reports that IceCube, the detection facility built just to detect such things, has seen just what it was looking for, even though the researchers involved didn't know it at the time. High-energy neutrinos, the target that IceCube was seeking, weren't showing up as had been hoped, but it turns out that there were quite a few (nearly 30 already, with 2013's data still being recorded) in the three years that the detector has been operating — they just weren't obvious until the data was combed for it. "Most of the 28 high-energy neutrinos so far detected originate from parts of the night sky that don’t include the Milky Way, making it quite likely that they are arriving from a distant source. There are still too few neutrinos to make any specific conclusions about AGNs or gamma-ray bursts, but the IceCube team will continue gathering new data."

theodp writes "In June, Google unveiled Project Loon to acclaim from the press for its "moonshot" project that aims to use high-altitude balloons to cheaply provide internet connectivity to rural, remote, and underserved areas of the developing world. So it's interesting to see that a just-published Google patent application for Balloon Clumping to Provide Bandwidth Requested in Advance, which pre-dated the Loon launch by a year, paints a not entirely altruistic picture of balloon-powered Internet access technology. Google describes the invention — which had been kept secret with a non-publication request — as just the ticket for those well-to-do enough to pay a tiered-pricing premium to get faster internet access while attending concerts, conferences, air shows, music festivals, and sporting events where a facility's overtaxed Wi-Fi simply won't do. Hope this revelation doesn't make Bill Gates think any less of the project!"

Frequent correspondent Bennett Haselton writes with a forward-looking response to a recent ruling that peer-to-peer network participants have little privacy interest in files stored on their computer and that they have made available via P2P. Writes Bennett: "A court rules that law enforcement did not improperly 'search' defendants' computers by downloading files that the computers were sharing via P2P software. This seems like a reasonable ruling, but such cases may become rare if P2P software evolves to the point where all downloads are routed anonymously through other users' computers." Read on for the rest.

The police had used an automated P2P search tool to find evidence that child pornography was being shared from the defendants' computers, and then used that evidence to obtain probable cause warrants for searching their computers (where they subsequently found child porn being stored, and the defendants were charged accordingly). Last Friday, District Court Judge Christina Reiss ruled that the P2P search tool did not violate the defendants' 4th Amendment rights against unreasonable search, as they had argued.

I'm all for strong privacy rights and the right to exclude evidence at trial that was gathered improperly, but it's hard to see how the defendants thought they had a leg to stand on here. When you share a file on a P2P network where other users can download directly from your computer, by definition you are advertising that you have that file. Now, some of the time you might be sharing that file not out of the goodness of your heart, but because you're required to share the file in order to earn "credits" that you can use to continue your own downloads (BitTorrent requires sharing for this reason). But even then, you would still know that you were sharing the file (unless you really never realized how file sharing software works, but since it's actually called "file sharing software", that's kind of on you).

However, as I wrote in January, there's no reason why popular P2P programs couldn't re-route each download through a different user's connection, so that if you were downloading a file from another computer's IP address, you would never know if the file resided on that computer's hard drive. Obviously I'm not endorsing the use of such software by creeps like the ones who were arrested; I'm saying that regardless of how we feel about it, it's inevitable that proxified re-routed connections will become the de facto standard for P2P file sharing, if the following conditions remain true:

• It remains legal to run the software at all. This seems like a reasonable assumption in a mostly-free country like the U.S., where although piracy is illegal, file-sharing programs like BitTorrent are still legal even if they are frequently used for piracy.

• A user cannot be held liable for unknowingly forwarding data packets on behalf of someone else, even if the data packets comprise an illegal file (whether it's child pornography or a pirated movie).

• Bandwidth continues to get faster and cheaper. Today, if you download a 100-megabyte file by routing your download through three other users' computers, it will usually be much slower and more inconvenient than if you'd downloaded the file directly. In a few years, you won't notice the difference.

• If the police raid a suspect's house and seize their computer, if they see that the computer has an encrypted partition, the suspect can invoke their Fifth Amendment right to refuse to give the police the decryption password. You know how I feel about that, but the latest rulings on the question seem to affirm that you can refuse to decrypt your hard drive for law enforcement. So a good P2P client for "illicit" file trading would come with built-in support for an encrypted hard drive partition, where all saved files would be stored. (The software would probably come with a "kill switch" that you could use to instantly dismount your encrypted partition if you heard a knock on your door, and a five-minute inactivity timeout after which the drive would dismount automatically.)

In that previous article, I described a protocol in which any time a P2P user X (the "downloader") downloaded a file from another P2P user Y (the "sharer"), the connection would be routed through the computer of at least one "go-between" user Z (and possibly a chain of users Z1, Z2,... Zn). Each of the go-betweens simply downloads bytes from the next computer "up" the chain and sends those bytes on to the next computer "down" the chain, and none of the go-betweens know how far the chain extends in either direction. Because of the design of the protocol, from the point of view of any of the go-betweens, there is only a 40% chance that the computer they're downloading from, is the original "sharer." (See the January article for details on how this would be achieved.)

Now, does the analysis change if your adversary is the FBI looking for child pornographers, rather than the MPAA looking for movie pirates? Here are the variables that I think matter:

• The standard of proof to punish you is higher. In a civil lawsuit, the MPAA would only have to prove their case against you by a "preponderance of the evidence" (i.e. greater than 50%); to obtain a criminal conviction, the court would have to prove your guilt "beyond a reasonable doubt." However in both cases, if all that the court knows is that the defendant's computer was identified as passing along bits and bytes of an illegal file, and the court understands that there's only a 40% chance that the computer owner actually possessed the illegal file, then this falls below the standard of proof in both cases. (Of course, this is contingent on no other evidence turning up to implicate you. If the police raid your house and find child pornography printouts lying around your desk, then so much for the "40% chance of guilt" figure.)

• In a civil trial, the defendant can be called to the stand and made to answer questions (unlike a criminal trial, where the defendant can refuse to testify under the Fifth Amendment). So even if the MPAA's lawyer knew there was only a 40% chance that they had sued the right defendant, they could ask the defendant under oath, "Did you download this movie?" (Or they could sue 10 defendants at once, and argue, correctly, that on average about 4 of those defendants were probably guilty.) The defendant could invoke their Fifth Amendment rights and refuse to answer, however, in a civil trial, the court is free to consider this refusal to be evidence weighing in favor of the defendant's guilt. In theory, a defendant could simply say "No," and there would be no way to prove they were lying. In practice, the MPAA's lawyer might try to intimidate a defendant into confessing, telling them that the worst that can happen to them if they confess is just a monetary judgment, but if they lie under oath they could go to jail, etc.

• The punishment for getting caught for possession of child pornography is much more severe. I'm not sure if this changes the analysis though. It's not a case of "a 40% chance of losing a lawsuit vs. a 40% chance of going to jail." If the court in both cases can never establish your guilt with a probability of more than 40%, then since that's not enough to get a criminal conviction or a civil judgment, you actually have a 0% chance of losing in either case, provided you don't make any other errors (leaving illegal printouts by your computer), and provided the court actually understands that the "evidence" only establishes about a 40% chance of your guilt.

• The cost of being accused of possessing child pornography is much higher, even if you ultimately win in court. If the MPAA sues you for downloading a pirated movie (even if they know there's only a 40% chance they've got the right person), that would probably just increase your street cred among your friends. If you're a middle-aged computer nerd accused of downloading child pornography, not so much. Even if you're ultimately acquitted, your reputation will probably be ruined.

This last point suggests the only "attack" that I can think of that law enforcement could use successfully against this protocol. The police know in advance that if they arrest someone for transmitting an illegal file from their IP address, and if the defendant refuses to testify and the defendant's hard drive is encrypted, the state won't be able to get a conviction since there's only a 40% chance that the defendant was actually in possession of the file. However, if the defendant's life will be ruined by going to trial anyway, law enforcement could use this as a bludgeon to scare people away from even running the P2P protocol. Saying, in essence, "We're going to go out and do searches for illegal files to download, and we will file charges against any person whose IP address re-transmits an illegal file to us. Even though we know we won't be able to get a conviction, we'll ruin the lives of anyone we can identify in this way, so that's the risk that you're taking by installing this software, even if you yourself don't do anything illegal."

Whether this attack would be effective, depends on whether the courts would tolerate these kinds of "intimidation" prosecutions, where the law enforcement knows going in that they can never establish more than a 40% chance of the defendant's guilt (and hence no chance of conviction unless the defendant "cracks"), but they press charges anyway. I would call that an abuse of state power, and say that any prosecutor who knowingly pursues a losing case should be fired and compensation should be paid to the victim, but the courts might not see it that way, especially if the prosecutor finds a way to work the phrase "child porn" into every sentence.

Frequent correspondent Bennett Haselton writes with a forward-looking response to a recent ruling that peer-to-peer network participants have little privacy interest in files stored on their computer and that they have made available via P2P. Writes Bennett: "A court rules that law enforcement did not improperly 'search' defendants' computers by downloading files that the computers were sharing via P2P software. This seems like a reasonable ruling, but such cases may become rare if P2P software evolves to the point where all downloads are routed anonymously through other users' computers." Read on for the rest.

The police had used an automated P2P search tool to find evidence that child pornography was being shared from the defendants' computers, and then used that evidence to obtain probable cause warrants for searching their computers (where they subsequently found child porn being stored, and the defendants were charged accordingly). Last Friday, District Court Judge Christina Reiss ruled that the P2P search tool did not violate the defendants' 4th Amendment rights against unreasonable search, as they had argued.

I'm all for strong privacy rights and the right to exclude evidence at trial that was gathered improperly, but it's hard to see how the defendants thought they had a leg to stand on here. When you share a file on a P2P network where other users can download directly from your computer, by definition you are advertising that you have that file. Now, some of the time you might be sharing that file not out of the goodness of your heart, but because you're required to share the file in order to earn "credits" that you can use to continue your own downloads (BitTorrent requires sharing for this reason). But even then, you would still know that you were sharing the file (unless you really never realized how file sharing software works, but since it's actually called "file sharing software", that's kind of on you).

However, as I wrote in January, there's no reason why popular P2P programs couldn't re-route each download through a different user's connection, so that if you were downloading a file from another computer's IP address, you would never know if the file resided on that computer's hard drive. Obviously I'm not endorsing the use of such software by creeps like the ones who were arrested; I'm saying that regardless of how we feel about it, it's inevitable that proxified re-routed connections will become the de facto standard for P2P file sharing, if the following conditions remain true:

• It remains legal to run the software at all. This seems like a reasonable assumption in a mostly-free country like the U.S., where although piracy is illegal, file-sharing programs like BitTorrent are still legal even if they are frequently used for piracy.

• A user cannot be held liable for unknowingly forwarding data packets on behalf of someone else, even if the data packets comprise an illegal file (whether it's child pornography or a pirated movie).

• Bandwidth continues to get faster and cheaper. Today, if you download a 100-megabyte file by routing your download through three other users' computers, it will usually be much slower and more inconvenient than if you'd downloaded the file directly. In a few years, you won't notice the difference.

• If the police raid a suspect's house and seize their computer, if they see that the computer has an encrypted partition, the suspect can invoke their Fifth Amendment right to refuse to give the police the decryption password. You know how I feel about that, but the latest rulings on the question seem to affirm that you can refuse to decrypt your hard drive for law enforcement. So a good P2P client for "illicit" file trading would come with built-in support for an encrypted hard drive partition, where all saved files would be stored. (The software would probably come with a "kill switch" that you could use to instantly dismount your encrypted partition if you heard a knock on your door, and a five-minute inactivity timeout after which the drive would dismount automatically.)

In that previous article, I described a protocol in which any time a P2P user X (the "downloader") downloaded a file from another P2P user Y (the "sharer"), the connection would be routed through the computer of at least one "go-between" user Z (and possibly a chain of users Z1, Z2,... Zn). Each of the go-betweens simply downloads bytes from the next computer "up" the chain and sends those bytes on to the next computer "down" the chain, and none of the go-betweens know how far the chain extends in either direction. Because of the design of the protocol, from the point of view of any of the go-betweens, there is only a 40% chance that the computer they're downloading from, is the original "sharer." (See the January article for details on how this would be achieved.)

Now, does the analysis change if your adversary is the FBI looking for child pornographers, rather than the MPAA looking for movie pirates? Here are the variables that I think matter:

• The standard of proof to punish you is higher. In a civil lawsuit, the MPAA would only have to prove their case against you by a "preponderance of the evidence" (i.e. greater than 50%); to obtain a criminal conviction, the court would have to prove your guilt "beyond a reasonable doubt." However in both cases, if all that the court knows is that the defendant's computer was identified as passing along bits and bytes of an illegal file, and the court understands that there's only a 40% chance that the computer owner actually possessed the illegal file, then this falls below the standard of proof in both cases. (Of course, this is contingent on no other evidence turning up to implicate you. If the police raid your house and find child pornography printouts lying around your desk, then so much for the "40% chance of guilt" figure.)

• In a civil trial, the defendant can be called to the stand and made to answer questions (unlike a criminal trial, where the defendant can refuse to testify under the Fifth Amendment). So even if the MPAA's lawyer knew there was only a 40% chance that they had sued the right defendant, they could ask the defendant under oath, "Did you download this movie?" (Or they could sue 10 defendants at once, and argue, correctly, that on average about 4 of those defendants were probably guilty.) The defendant could invoke their Fifth Amendment rights and refuse to answer, however, in a civil trial, the court is free to consider this refusal to be evidence weighing in favor of the defendant's guilt. In theory, a defendant could simply say "No," and there would be no way to prove they were lying. In practice, the MPAA's lawyer might try to intimidate a defendant into confessing, telling them that the worst that can happen to them if they confess is just a monetary judgment, but if they lie under oath they could go to jail, etc.

• The punishment for getting caught for possession of child pornography is much more severe. I'm not sure if this changes the analysis though. It's not a case of "a 40% chance of losing a lawsuit vs. a 40% chance of going to jail." If the court in both cases can never establish your guilt with a probability of more than 40%, then since that's not enough to get a criminal conviction or a civil judgment, you actually have a 0% chance of losing in either case, provided you don't make any other errors (leaving illegal printouts by your computer), and provided the court actually understands that the "evidence" only establishes about a 40% chance of your guilt.

• The cost of being accused of possessing child pornography is much higher, even if you ultimately win in court. If the MPAA sues you for downloading a pirated movie (even if they know there's only a 40% chance they've got the right person), that would probably just increase your street cred among your friends. If you're a middle-aged computer nerd accused of downloading child pornography, not so much. Even if you're ultimately acquitted, your reputation will probably be ruined.

This last point suggests the only "attack" that I can think of that law enforcement could use successfully against this protocol. The police know in advance that if they arrest someone for transmitting an illegal file from their IP address, and if the defendant refuses to testify and the defendant's hard drive is encrypted, the state won't be able to get a conviction since there's only a 40% chance that the defendant was actually in possession of the file. However, if the defendant's life will be ruined by going to trial anyway, law enforcement could use this as a bludgeon to scare people away from even running the P2P protocol. Saying, in essence, "We're going to go out and do searches for illegal files to download, and we will file charges against any person whose IP address re-transmits an illegal file to us. Even though we know we won't be able to get a conviction, we'll ruin the lives of anyone we can identify in this way, so that's the risk that you're taking by installing this software, even if you yourself don't do anything illegal."

Whether this attack would be effective, depends on whether the courts would tolerate these kinds of "intimidation" prosecutions, where the law enforcement knows going in that they can never establish more than a 40% chance of the defendant's guilt (and hence no chance of conviction unless the defendant "cracks"), but they press charges anyway. I would call that an abuse of state power, and say that any prosecutor who knowingly pursues a losing case should be fired and compensation should be paid to the victim, but the courts might not see it that way, especially if the prosecutor finds a way to work the phrase "child porn" into every sentence.

An anonymous reader writes "Bill Gates has written an article in Wired outlining his strategy to improve people's lives through philanthropy and investment in technology and the sciences. He says, 'We want to give our wealth back to society in a way that has the most impact, and so we look for opportunities to invest for the largest returns. That means tackling the world's biggest problems and funding the most likely solutions. That's an even greater challenge than it sounds. I don't have a magic formula for prioritizing the world's problems. You could make a good case for poverty, disease, hunger, war, poor education, bad governance, political instability, weak trade, or mistreatment of women. ...I am a devout fan of capitalism. It is the best system ever devised for making self-interest serve the wider interest. This system is responsible for many of the great advances that have improved the lives of billions—from airplanes to air-conditioning to computers. But capitalism alone can't address the needs of the very poor. This means market-driven innovation can actually widen the gap between rich and poor. ... We take a double-pronged approach: (1) Narrow the gap so that advances for the rich world reach the poor world faster, and (2) turn more of the world's IQ toward devising solutions to problems that only people in the poor world face.'"

Copenhagen Suborbitals says their mission is "very simple. We are working towards launching a human being into space." That doesn't sound so simple, really, but they're approaching this gargantuan task with an intentionally simple approach: a small team, relatively unhampered by bureaucratic hassles, who are taking advantage of existing, off-the-shelf high-tech solutions when they make sense, and low-tech solutions when possible; if the parable of the Soviet space pencil hadn't worked its way into the mythology of space technology, it could have been based on the Copenhagen Suborbitals point of view. I talked with project co-founder Kristian von Bengston about the project's progress so far, as well as what the next steps are. Among those next steps: in summer 2014, the Suborbitals team plans to launch their HEAT2X lift vehicle loaded with the TDS-80 capsule; you can download the preliminary trajectory projections for both the launcher and the capsule.

Dave Knott writes "Just over one week ahead of the launch of the Playstation 4, Wired has posted an article with a full teardown of Sony's new device. In an accompanying video Sony engineering director Yasuhiro Ootori dismantles the PS4 piece by piece, describing each component and showing just what is contained inside the sleek black box."

Dave Knott writes "Just over one week ahead of the launch of the Playstation 4, Wired has posted an article with a full teardown of Sony's new device. In an accompanying video Sony engineering director Yasuhiro Ootori dismantles the PS4 piece by piece, describing each component and showing just what is contained inside the sleek black box."

New submitter GODISNOWHERE writes "Nortel went bankrupt in 2009. In 2011, it held an auction for its massive patent portfolio. The winners of the auction were Apple, Microsoft, Sony, RIM, and others, who bought the patents for $4.5 billion as a consortium named Rockstar Bidco. At the time, many people speculated those patents would be used against Google, who bid separately but lost. It turns out they were right. Rockstar has filed eight lawsuits in federal court targeting Google and Android device manufacturers. 'The complaint (PDF) against Google involves six patents, all from the same patent "family." They're all titled "associative search engine," and list Richard Skillen and Prescott Livermore as inventors. The patents describe "an advertisement machine which provides advertisements to a user searching for desired information within a data network. The oldest patent in the case is US Patent No. 6,098,065, with a filing date of 1997, one year before Google was founded. The newest patent in the suit was filed in 2007 and granted in 2011. The complaint tries to use the fact that Google bid for the patents as an extra point against the search giant.'"

rcastro0 writes "What looks like a CPU's heat sink worn around the wrist apparently may be able to make you feel cool even while it is hot — or warm while it is cold. As Wired reports, this termoelectric device explores human physiology and how we perceive temperature to fool our body and make us comfortable. The device is called Wristify, and Mashable has a video."

schwit1 tips this news from Wired: "An appellate court has finally supplied an answer to an open question left dangling by the Supreme Court in 2012: Do law enforcement agencies need a probable-cause warrant to affix a GPS tracker to a target's vehicle? The justices said the government's statement 'wags the dog rather vigorously,' noting that the primary reason for a search cannot be to generate evidence for law enforcement purposes. They also noted that 'Generally speaking, a warrantless search is not rendered reasonable merely because probable cause existed that would have justified the issuance of a warrant.' The justices also rejected the government's argument that obtaining a warrant would impede the ability of law enforcement to investigate crimes."

Kristian vonBengtson writes "A DIY, manned space program like Copenhagen Suborbitals is kept alive by keeping total independence, cutting the red tape and simply just doing it all in a garage. We basically try to stay below the radar at all time and are reluctant in engagements leading to signing papers or do things (too much) by the books. But now there might be trouble ahead. (Saul Goodman! We need you...) During the last 5 years we have encountered many weird legal cases which does not make much sense and no one can explain their origin. If we were to fix up a batch of regular black gunpowder (which we use for igniters) we are entitled for serving time in jail. Even a few grams. But no one give a hoot about building a rocket fueled with 12 tonnes of liquid oxygen and alcohol. Thats is perfectly legal. If Copenhagen Suborbitals fly a rocket into space for the first time there are likely legal action that must be dealt with. At my time at the International Space University we had lectures and exams in space law and I remember the Outer Space Treaty which is the most ratified space treaty with over 100 countries including Denmark and U.S. And here is the matter – in which I seek some kind of advice or what you may call it: Outer Space Treaty, Article 6 states: 'the activities of non-governmental entities in outer space, including the Moon and other celestial bodies, shall require authorization and continuing supervision by the appropriate State Party to the Treaty.' Does this mean that Denmark (or any other country for that matter – if it was your project) suddenly have to approve what we are doing and will be kept responsible for our mission, if we launch into space?" von Bengston adds a related article about the organization's testing process. They had originally intended to burn Nitrocellulose as a way to open lids and deploy parachutes. It worked fine in the garage, but upon testing in low-pressure situations, they found that the chemical reaction slowed too much to be useful. The article includes videos of their tests.

Kristian vonBengtson writes "A DIY, manned space program like Copenhagen Suborbitals is kept alive by keeping total independence, cutting the red tape and simply just doing it all in a garage. We basically try to stay below the radar at all time and are reluctant in engagements leading to signing papers or do things (too much) by the books. But now there might be trouble ahead. (Saul Goodman! We need you...) During the last 5 years we have encountered many weird legal cases which does not make much sense and no one can explain their origin. If we were to fix up a batch of regular black gunpowder (which we use for igniters) we are entitled for serving time in jail. Even a few grams. But no one give a hoot about building a rocket fueled with 12 tonnes of liquid oxygen and alcohol. Thats is perfectly legal. If Copenhagen Suborbitals fly a rocket into space for the first time there are likely legal action that must be dealt with. At my time at the International Space University we had lectures and exams in space law and I remember the Outer Space Treaty which is the most ratified space treaty with over 100 countries including Denmark and U.S. And here is the matter – in which I seek some kind of advice or what you may call it: Outer Space Treaty, Article 6 states: 'the activities of non-governmental entities in outer space, including the Moon and other celestial bodies, shall require authorization and continuing supervision by the appropriate State Party to the Treaty.' Does this mean that Denmark (or any other country for that matter – if it was your project) suddenly have to approve what we are doing and will be kept responsible for our mission, if we launch into space?" von Bengston adds a related article about the organization's testing process. They had originally intended to burn Nitrocellulose as a way to open lids and deploy parachutes. It worked fine in the garage, but upon testing in low-pressure situations, they found that the chemical reaction slowed too much to be useful. The article includes videos of their tests.

Phoghat writes "The guys at Glassdoor have compiled a list of the 25 tech companies with the best salaries for software engineers. Google and Facebook made the list, of course. So did Apple and Twitter. But the company at the very top is a bit of a surprise: networking gear maker Juniper Networks."

The newest iteration of Windows has begun rolling out, and is winning positive reviews. (Here's an in-depth review from Ars, and a more concise one from Wired — both give 8.1 a thumbs-up). Kelerei wrote with the above-linked TechDirt article on the release, noting that it is a staged rollout rather than global. Starting this morning, though, 8.1 is available to some customers. Kelerei writes: "The upgrade is optional (and free) for existing Windows 8 users, though if one looks at the changes, it's hard to imagine why those already on it wouldn't upgrade." Also at Slash BI.

Daniel_Stuckey writes "Where's the Uber-like interactivity for getting a bus to come to you after a tap on your cell phone? In Finland, actually. The Kutsuplus is Helsinki's groundbreaking mass transit hybrid program that lets riders choose their own routes, pay for fares on their phones, and summon their own buses. It's a pretty interesting concept. With a ten-minute lead time, you summon a Kutsuplus bus to a stop using the official app, just as you'd call a livery cab on Uber. Each minibus in the fleet seats at least nine people, and there's room for baby carriages and bikes. You can call your own private Kutsuplus, but if you share the ride, you share the costs — it's about half the price of a cab fare, and a dollar or two more expensive than old school bus transit. You can then pick your own stop, also using the app."

Covalent writes "RMS describes how much surveillance is too much (hint: it's all too much) and how to combat, circumvent, and prevent future surveillance. How much of what is suggested is plausible? How much is just a pipe dream? Discuss!" The article contains an extensive list of things we do that give too much data to centralized organization, and offers solutions to combat all of them. From the article: "The goal of making journalism and democracy safe therefore requires that we reduce the data collected about people by any organization, not just by the state. We must redesign digital systems so that they do not accumulate data about their users. If they need digital data about our transactions, they should not be allowed to keep them more than a short time beyond what is inherently necessary for their dealings with us."

Lasrick writes "Danielle N. Lee, Ph.D, the Urban Scientist blogger at Scientific American, has been mistreated twice: once by the blog editor at biology-online.org and now by SciAm itself. The blog editor asked Dr. Lee to contribute a blog post at Biology-Online, and when she declined (presumably for lack of monetary compensation), the blog editor asked her whether she was 'an urban scientist or an urban whore.' Then, SciAm deleted her blog post, in which she wrote about the incident."

An anonymous reader writes "Cadillac has officially unveiled its Tesla S alternative, but at $5,000 more than the Tesla, it may not be the cheaper option you've been looking for. 'Cadillac is touting the ELR's 8-inch touchscreen powered by its CUE infotainment system — which two years in is still a buggy mess — along with a range of safety and convenience features, including lane departure warning, forward collision alert, and a 24-hour concierge service to answer questions. There's also a "regen on demand" feature that allows the driver to boost the brake regeneration, slowing the vehicle and recouping energy by pulling on the flappy paddles behind the steering wheel. GM's bean counters are quick to point out that depending on what federal and state tax incentives buyers are eligible for, the net pricing could be as low as $68,495, but that's still a tough sell considering you're basically getting a Volt with more presence and less practicality.'"

Okian Warrior writes "Attendees to this year's New York Comic Con convention were allowed to pre-register their RFID-enabled badges online and connect their social media profiles to their badges — something, the NYCC registration site explained, that would make the 'NYCC experience 100x cooler! For realz.' Most attendees didn't expect "100x cooler" to translate into 'we'll post spam in your feed as soon as the RFID badge senses that you've entered the show,' but that seems to be what happened."

An anonymous reader writes "According to Wired, 'Today's big data is noisy, unstructured, and dynamic rather than static. It may also be corrupted or incomplete. ... researchers need new mathematical tools in order to glean useful information from the data sets. "Either you need a more sophisticated way to translate it into vectors, or you need to come up with a more generalized way of analyzing it," [Mathematician Jesse Johnson] said. One such new math tool is described later: "... a mathematician at Stanford University, and his then-postdoc ... were fiddling with a badly mangled image on his computer ... They were trying to find a method for improving fuzzy images, such as the ones generated by MRIs when there is insufficient time to complete a scan. On a hunch, Candes applied an algorithm designed to clean up fuzzy images, expecting to see a slight improvement. What appeared on his computer screen instead was a perfectly rendered image. Candes compares the unlikeliness of the result to being given just the first three digits of a 10-digit bank account number, and correctly guessing the remaining seven digits. But it wasn't a fluke. The same thing happened when he applied the same technique to other incomplete images. The key to the technique's success is a concept known as sparsity, which usually denotes an image's complexity, or lack thereof. It's a mathematical version of Occam's razor: While there may be millions of possible reconstructions for a fuzzy, ill-defined image, the simplest (sparsest) version is probably the best fit. Out of this serendipitous discovery, compressed sensing was born.'"

Nerval's Lobster writes "Nest (based in Palo Alto, and headed by former Apple executive Tony Fadell) is out to reinvent the ugly, blocky devices—starting with the thermostat—that we bolt to our walls and ceilings out of necessity. Its new Nest Protect, looks more like something for streaming music or movies than a smoke detector; inside its chic shell, the device packs an embedded system-on-a-chip and a handful of sensors, capable of connecting to other devices via wireless. 'Would this be a cherished product? Can it be more than a rational purchase — can it be an emotional one?' is the thought process that Fadell uses when evaluating new products for Nest-ification, according to Wired. That sounds like something Apple designer Jony Ive would say about the latest iDevice; your own mileage may vary on whether you consider that a good thing. Whether or not Nest actually succeeds, its emphasis on friendly design and function could serve as a template for helping popularize the so-called 'Internet of Things,' or the giant networks of interconnected devices that everybody seems to think is coming in a few short years: by giving stodgy hardware an iPhone-like sheen, complete with all sorts of bells and whistles, you could potentially change consumer mindsets from 'Do I really need to buy this thing?' to 'I want to buy this thing.' Some privacy advocates are already crying foul ('My dear privacy enthusiast: activity sensors?' The Kernel's Greg Stevens wrote, tongue somewhat in cheek, about Nest Protect in a recent blog posting. 'Ladies and gentlemen, how can you possibly stay silent about the possible abuses of such a device?'), but since when have concerns over privacy prevented people from buying the next 'cool' device?"

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.'"

cartechboy writes "The Tesla Model S fire that, to date, is either electric car Armageddon or 'no big deal' has been fun Internet theatre combined with a dose of crowd-sourced battery-pack pseudo-expertise. Now the actual car owner (and Tesla investor) weighs in with his take, which is, basically, 'nothing to see here and yes, I can't wait to get back into a Tesla.' Owner Robert Carlson wrote an email in response to contact by Tesla's vice president of sales and service, Jerome Guillen, saying he found the car had 'performed very well under such an extreme test. The batteries went through a controlled burn which the Internet images really exaggerates.' Carlson had no comment on the guy who videoed his car fire, who is now Internet infamous for shooting video in portrait mode." You can read Elon Musk's take, along with Carlson's correspondence.

cartechboy writes "The Tesla Model S fire that, to date, is either electric car Armageddon or 'no big deal' has been fun Internet theatre combined with a dose of crowd-sourced battery-pack pseudo-expertise. Now the actual car owner (and Tesla investor) weighs in with his take, which is, basically, 'nothing to see here and yes, I can't wait to get back into a Tesla.' Owner Robert Carlson wrote an email in response to contact by Tesla's vice president of sales and service, Jerome Guillen, saying he found the car had 'performed very well under such an extreme test. The batteries went through a controlled burn which the Internet images really exaggerates.' Carlson had no comment on the guy who videoed his car fire, who is now Internet infamous for shooting video in portrait mode." You can read Elon Musk's take, along with Carlson's correspondence.

An anonymous reader writes "Consumer genomics company 23andMe has developed a system for helping prospective parents choose the traits of their offspring, from disease risk to hair color. The patent — number 8543339, "Gamete donor selection based on genetic calculations" — describes a technology that would take a customer's preferences for a child's traits, compute the likely genomic outcomes of combinations between a customer's sperm or egg and other people's sex cells, and describe which potential reproductive matches would most likely produce the desired baby."

jest3r writes "Lavabit won a victory in court and were able to get the secret court order [which led to the site's closure] unsealed. The ACLU's Chris Soghoian called it the nuclear option: The court order revealed the FBI demanded Lavabit turn over their root SSL certificate, something that would allow them to monitor the traffic of every user of the service. Lavabit offered an alternative method to tap into the single user in question but the FBI wasn't interested. Lavabit could either comply or shut down. As such, no U.S. company that relies on SSL encryption can be trusted with sensitive data. Everything from Google to Facebook to Skype to your bank account is only encrypted by SSL keys, and if the FBI can force Lavabit to hand over their SSL key or face shutdown, they can do it to anyone."

Kristian von Bengtson writes with a link to a short guest post at Wired with an explanation of how his amateur rocket organization Copenhagen Suborbitals managed to obtain GPS receivers without U.S. military limits for getting accurate GPS information at altitude. Mostly, the answer is in recent relaxations of the rules themselves, but it was apparently still challenging to obtain non-limited GPS hardware. "I expect they only got the OK to create this software modification for us," von Bengston writes, "since we are clearly a peaceful organization with not sinister objectives – and also in a very limited number of units. Basically removing the limits is a matter of getting into the hardware changing the code or get the manufacturers to do it. Needless to say, diplomacy and trust is the key to unlock this."

jrepin points out an article by Richard Stallman following up on the 30th anniversary of the start of his efforts on the GNU Project. RMS explains why he thinks we should continue to push for broader adoption of free software principles. He writes, "Much has changed since the beginning of the free software movement: Most people in advanced countries now own computers — sometimes called “phones” — and use the internet with them. Non-free software still makes the users surrender control over their computing to someone else, but now there is another way to lose it: Service as a Software Substitute, or SaaSS, which means letting someone else’s server do your own computing activities. Both non-free software and SaaSS can spy on the user, shackle the user, and even attack the user. Malware is common in services and proprietary software products because the users don’t have control over them. That’s the fundamental issue: while non-free software and SaaSS are controlled by some other entity (typically a corporation or a state), free software is controlled by its users. Why does this control matter? Because freedom means having control over your own life. ... Schools — and all educational activities — influence the future of society through what they teach. So schools should teach exclusively free software, to transmit democratic values and the habit of helping other people. (Not to mention it helps a future generation of programmers master the craft.) To teach use of a non-free program is to implant dependence on its owner, which contradicts the social mission of the school. Proprietary developers would have us punish students who are good enough at heart to share software or curious enough to want to change it."

the agent man writes "Wired Magazine is exploring how early kids should learn to code. One of the challenges is to find the proper time in schools to teach programming. Are teachers at elementary and middle school levels really able to teach this subject? The article suggests that even very young kids can learn to program and lists a couple of early experiments as well as more established ideas including the Scalable Game Design curriculum. However, the article also suggests that programming may have to come at the cost of Foreign language learning and music."

New submitter newbie_fantod writes "Ignoring the fact that the surest way to get a child to do something is to tell them not to, the RIAA and MPAA have developed an anti-piracy curriculum for kindergarten through grade 6. The pilot project is scheduled for testing in California schools later this year." Mitch Stoltz, an EFF attorney, isn't impressed: “It suggests, falsely, that ideas are property and that building on others’ ideas always requires permission,” Stoltz says. “The overriding message of this curriculum is that students’ time should be consumed not in creating but in worrying about their impact on corporate profits.”

Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Bruce Schneier writes that lots of people discount the seriousness of the NSA's actions by saying that it's just metadata — after all the NSA isn't really listening in on everybody's calls — they're just keeping track of who you call. 'Imagine you hired a detective to eavesdrop on someone,' writes Schneier. 'He might plant a bug in their office. He might tap their phone.' That's the data. 'Now imagine you hired that same detective to surveil that person. The result would be details of what he did: where he went, who he talked to, what he looked at, what he purchased — how he spent his day. That's all metadata.' When the government collects metadata on the entire country, they put everyone under surveillance says Schneier. 'Metadata equals surveillance; it's that simple.'"

An anonymous reader writes "Wired profiles a homeless man who's supporting himself primarily through Bitcoin. Jesse Angle, a former network engineer, earns small amounts throughout the day by visiting various websites that pay him to look at ads. He then converts it to gift certificates and uses the certificates to buy food. '"It's a lot less embarrassing," he says. "You don't have to put yourself out there." And unlike panhandling in Pensacola, using an app like Bitcoin Tapper won't put him on the wrong side of the law. This past May, Pensacola — where Angle has lived since April — passed an ordinance that bans not only panhandling but camping on city property.' Angle learned about Bitcoin from a charity organization called Sean's Outpost that wanted something better than PayPal for accepting donations over the internet. The organization has even opened an outreach center paid for solely with Bitcoins. Founder Jason King said, 'Bitcoin beats the s#!% out of regular money, We've resonated so well with people because it's direct action. There's no chaff between donation and helping people.'"

cold fjord writes with this excerpt from Wired: "Most of what humanity knows about the outer planets came back to Earth on plutonium power. ... The characteristics of this metal's radioactive decay make it a super-fuel. ... there is no other viable option. Solar power is too weak, chemical batteries don't last, nuclear fission systems are too heavy. So, we depend on plutonium-238, a fuel largely acquired as by-product of making nuclear weapons. But there's a problem: We've almost run out. 'We've got enough to last to the end of this decade. That's it,' said Steve Johnson, a nuclear chemist at Idaho National Laboratory. And it's not just the U.S. reserves that are in jeopardy. The entire planet's stores are nearly depleted. ... what's left has already been spoken for and then some. ... Political ignorance and shortsighted squabbling, along with false promises from Russia, and penny-wise management of NASA's ever-thinning budget still stand in the way of a robust plutonium-238 production system." The plutonium shortage has been deepening for a long time, leading to some creative solutions. The Wired article alludes to the NASA project underway to create more, but leans toward gloom.

Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Liz Stinson reports that 'Shadow,' a new app recently launched on Kickstarter, will make recording and remembering your dreams simple. 'There's a lot going on in the subconscious mind that if you can start to pull out little details, you start to get a wider picture of yourself,' says designer Hunter Lee Soik. Most of the time, alarm clocks abruptly blast through your consciousness, ripping you from the depths of sleep. In contrast, Shadow's alarm system gradually transitions users through their hypnopompic state, that not-quite-asleep, not-quite-awake phase, which has be proven to help you better remember your dreams. Once you deactivate the alarm, users are prompted to record their dreams either via voice or typing text. The app then transcribes your dreams and stores them in an ever-growing digital dream journal that keeps track of your long-term dream and sleep patterns and helps you visualize patterns and make connections between your sleep patterns, daily life, and what you dream about. 'We're socialized to think of sleep as inactivity, but certain parts of our brain — the parts that handle things like problem solving and memory — are most active while we're sleeping,' says Soik. 'That's a huge amount of potential data we're forgetting each morning.'" I prefer a notebook on the nightstand, myself.

theodp writes "To paraphrase Sean Parker: "Flying your fleet of planes using NASA-discounted fuel isn't cool, you know what's cool? Flying your fleet of planes using zero-cost fuel." Having piqued CEO Larry Page's interest with its solar and battery-powered aircraft, Solar Impulse is partnering with Google to promote its goal of circumnavigating the globe in 2015, a Green Movement take on Wiley Post's 1933 achievement."

MikeatWired writes "It wasn't ever seriously in doubt, but the FBI yesterday acknowledged that it secretly took control of Freedom Hosting last July, days before the servers of the largest provider of ultra-anonymous hosting were found to be serving custom malware designed to identify visitors. Freedom Hosting's operator, Eric Eoin Marques, had rented the servers from an unnamed commercial hosting provider in France, and paid for them from a bank account in Las Vegas. It's not clear how the FBI took over the servers in late July, but the bureau was temporarily thwarted when Marques somehow regained access and changed the passwords, briefly locking out the FBI until it gained back control. The new details emerged in local press reports from a Thursday bail hearing in Dublin, Ireland, where Marques, 28, is fighting extradition to America on charges that Freedom Hosting facilitated child pornography on a massive scale. He was denied bail today for the second time since his arrest in July. On August 4, all the sites hosted by Freedom Hosting — some with no connection to child porn — began serving an error message with hidden code embedded in the page. Security researchers dissected the code and found it exploited a security hole in Firefox to identify users of the Tor Browser Bundle, reporting back to a mysterious server in Northern Virginia. The FBI was the obvious suspect, but declined to comment on the incident. The FBI also didn't respond to inquiries from WIRED today. But FBI Supervisory Special Agent Brooke Donahue was more forthcoming when he appeared in the Irish court yesterday to bolster the case for keeping Marque behind bars."

MikeatWired writes "It wasn't ever seriously in doubt, but the FBI yesterday acknowledged that it secretly took control of Freedom Hosting last July, days before the servers of the largest provider of ultra-anonymous hosting were found to be serving custom malware designed to identify visitors. Freedom Hosting's operator, Eric Eoin Marques, had rented the servers from an unnamed commercial hosting provider in France, and paid for them from a bank account in Las Vegas. It's not clear how the FBI took over the servers in late July, but the bureau was temporarily thwarted when Marques somehow regained access and changed the passwords, briefly locking out the FBI until it gained back control. The new details emerged in local press reports from a Thursday bail hearing in Dublin, Ireland, where Marques, 28, is fighting extradition to America on charges that Freedom Hosting facilitated child pornography on a massive scale. He was denied bail today for the second time since his arrest in July. On August 4, all the sites hosted by Freedom Hosting — some with no connection to child porn — began serving an error message with hidden code embedded in the page. Security researchers dissected the code and found it exploited a security hole in Firefox to identify users of the Tor Browser Bundle, reporting back to a mysterious server in Northern Virginia. The FBI was the obvious suspect, but declined to comment on the incident. The FBI also didn't respond to inquiries from WIRED today. But FBI Supervisory Special Agent Brooke Donahue was more forthcoming when he appeared in the Irish court yesterday to bolster the case for keeping Marque behind bars."

Nerval's Lobster writes "Apple's iPhone 5S features a fingerprint scanner embedded in the home button. Of course, fingerprint-scanning technology isn't new: Bloomberg Terminals feature a built-in fingerprint reader to authenticate users, for example, and various manufacturers have experimented with laptops and smartphones that require a thumb to login. But the technology has thus far failed to become ubiquitous in the consumer realm, and it remains to be seen whether the new iPhone — which is all but guaranteed to sell millions of units — can popularize something that consumers don't seem to want. Security experts seem to be adopting a wait-and-see attitude with regard to Apple's newest trick. 'I'd caution right away, let's see how it tests and what people come up with to break it,' Brent Kennedy, an analyst with the U.S. Computer Emergency and Readiness Team, told Forbes. 'I wouldn't rely on it solely, just as I wouldn't with any new technology right off the bat.' And over at Wired, technologist Bruce Schneier is suggesting that biometric authentication could be hacked like anything else. 'I'm sure that someone with a good enough copy of your fingerprint and some rudimentary materials engineering capability — or maybe just a good enough printer — can authenticate his way into your iPhone,' he wrote. 'But, honestly, if some bad guy has your iPhone and your fingerprint, you've probably got bigger problems to worry about.'"

cartechboy writes "Stephen King has sold more than 300 million books of horror, suspense, science fiction and fantasy. The guy has written so many works, and words, that he actually needs a "continuity adviser" to fact check him when he picks old stories up as a new book. Enter Rocky Wood — who is the world-wide leading expert on Stephen King's work. So much so, that King hired Wood (who has authored a 6000+ page encyclopedia on CD-ROM on every single aspect of King's work — including 26,000 different King characters) to fact check himself when he writes."

An anonymous reader writes "Thanks to an EFF lawsuit, the office of the Director of National Intelligence is releasing declassified redacted versions of various documents relating to the NSA's domestic surveillance activities. The documents are being released on the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks." The EFF is hosting the documents, which are searchable. A few initial findings were posted yesterday evening; they include (thanks to another anonymous reader) the NSA illegally using phone data for three years, and evidence that Clapper knowingly mislead the public about metadata collection.

New submitter Maser_24 writes with news about continued action against Google for snooping on unsecured Wi-Fi networks when collecting data for Street View. From the article: "A federal appeals court this week ruled that Google could be held liable for civil damages for the company's 2011 scandal involving the company's collection of Wi-Fi data from unsecured hotspots using their Street View vehicles. To come to that conclusion, the court followed a rather unique logic path; according to the court, unsecured Wi-Fi hotspots are not 'radio communications' that are 'readily accessible' to the general public and therefore Google violated the Wiretap Act." This despite being cleared of wrongdoing by the FCC.

Lasrick writes "Maryn McKenna at Wired explores fears of a pandemic of MERS after October's hajj to Saudi Arabia, the annual pilgrimage to Islam's holy sites: 'The reason is MERS: Middle East respiratory syndrome, a disease that has been simmering in the region for months. The virus is new, recorded in humans for the first time in mid-2012. It is dire, having killed more than half of those who contracted it. And it is mysterious, far more so than it should be—because Saudi Arabia, where the majority of cases have clustered, has been tight-lipped about the disease's spread, responding slowly to requests for information and preventing outside researchers from publishing their findings about the syndrome.'"