Slashdot Mirror

schwit1 writes: FCC's Enforcement Bureau today announced a $750,000 settlement with Smart City Holdings, LLC for blocking consumers' Wi-Fi at various convention centers around the United States. Smart City, an Internet and telecommunications provider for conventions, meeting centers, and hotels, had been blocking personal mobile 'hotspots' that were being used by convention visitors and exhibitors who used their own data plans rather than paying Smart City substantial fees to use the company's Wi-Fi service.

An anonymous reader writes: As part of Trump's comprehensive immigration overhaul, his plan not only addresses immigrants who enter or stay in the country illegally, but also the H-1B visa program and its well-documented abuses. Parts of the proposal include requirements to offer positions to U.S. STEM graduates and effectively requiring a minimum wage for hiring out of the country that would make it prohibitive to do so.

szotz writes: Mars One CEO Bas Lansdorp has a bizarre definition of the word "plan". Last week he debated two MIT aerospace engineers who were co-authors on a report that said that astronauts would suffocate on Mars if they tried to grow their own food with existing tech. The question on the table: Is the Mars One plan feasible? And the answer seemed to be "it depends on what your definition of a plan is". The stated plan is to send the first humans to Mars for $6 billion by 2027 (twice delayed already). Lansdorp admits they probably won't stick to that schedule or that budget, but that has nothing to do with whether they're going or not. IEEE Spectrum has a write-up of the debate and a link to the MIT team's presentation. It seems the company's looking for $15 million now to fund--you guessed it--more studies.

WearDuino, now being developed by PDX Wearable Health Lab, is the brainchild of Mark Leavitt, MD, PhD; "an experimenter, maker, mentor and consultant in wearable health technologies, drawing on his lifelong experience in the fields of engineering and medicine." The WearDuino, he says, "is an open source wearable wireless sensor." The prototype fits in a FitBit case because, according to Dr. Leavitt, there are millions of unused ones out there, both surplussed by people who bought Fitbits and then stopped using them, and in the form of aftermarket cases sold to make your Fitbit cuter than when it came from the factory. In any case, WearDuino is still in the prototype stage. Dr. Leavitt plans to look for funding through Crowd Supply, but isn't "there" yet, so if you want to get on board with this health wearables project, you'll want to sign up for their Google Group or follow them on Twitter. You might also want to check out Quantified Self (tag line: "self knowledge through numbers"), and even if you vastly prefer videos to text articles, check out the text transcript ("Show/Hide Transcript") attached to this article, because it contains nearly twice as much information as the video, and goes a little deeper than the video into Dr. Leavitt's reasons for building the WearDuino -- none of which are financial gain, believe it or not.

Keith Henson is an electrical engineer and writer on space engineering, space law, cryonics, and evolutionary psychology. He co-founded the L5 society in 1975, which sought to promote space colonization. In addition to being an outspoken critic and target of the Church of Scientology, Keith has recently been working on the design of an orbiting power satellite (video here). The proposed satellite would collect solar energy, send it to Earth via microwaves, and Henson has a plan on how to launch it cheaply. Keith has agreed to give us some of his time and answer any questions you might have. As usual, ask as many as you'd like, but please, one question per post.

theodp writes: Plans for Rupert Murdoch & Co. to teach your children to code just hit a bump in the road. Murdoch's News Corp. last week announced it plans to exit the education business as it announced a $371 million write-down of the investment in its Amplify education unit, which aimed to reinvent education via digital tools, tablets and curriculum reinforced with snazzy graphics. The news may help to explain why Amplify MOOC, the entity that offered online AP Computer Science A to high school students, was re-dubbed Edhesive ("online education that sticks") a couple of months ago. Tech-backed Code.org, whose $1+ million "Gold Supporters" include the James and Kathryn Murdoch-led Quadrivium Foundation, announced a partnership with Edhesive to bring CS to schools in June, around the same time Edhesive LLC was formed.

An anonymous reader writes: The UK Government wants to increase the maximum prison sentence for online copyright infringement from two years to ten. A number legal experts and activists are pushing back against the plan. One such group, The British and Irish Law, Education and Technology Association (BILETA) has concluded that changes to the current law are not needed. "legitimate means to tackle large-scale commercial scale online copyright infringement are already available and currently being used, and the suggested sentence of 10 years seems disproportionate," the group writes.

An anonymous reader writes: We've previously discussed Soylent, the self-proclaimed "meal replacement." The product has not been without controversy, and now it's likely to see some more: As You Sow, a non-profit foundation dedicated to corporate responsibility, plans to bring legal action against Soylent for failing to provide sufficient warning about the amount of lead and cadmium in it. They allege that a serving of Soylent contains 12 to 25 times the concentration of lead at which point consumers in the state of California must be warned. The concentration of cadmium, they say, is four times the current maximum. Soylent has acknowledged the results of heavy metal tests but says the levels present in Soylent are not toxic. As You Sow maintains that Soylent's marketing focus on replacing food suggests chronic exposure, which is more of an issue than an occasional indulgence.

dkatana writes: London's mayor Boris Johnson had to fight its way through stiff resistance to the new Cycle Superhighways to see his vision of a cycling capital become reality.

Detractors included the Taxi Drivers Association (LTDA), which threatened legal action, but ultimately backed away when it became apparent that a judicial review of TfL's plans would simply delay rather than stop the new routes. Property firm Canary Wharf Group had also been vocal, producing an anonymous briefing (which it later acknowledged) that called the planned route "extremely damaging for London." An unnamed borough was threatened with powers to seize control of their roads if cycle superhighways were blocked.

Now the two new segregated bike paths will crisscross the city and open up speedy, safe cycling that will ease pollution and traffic for everyone, non-cyclists, too, Boris Johnson says.

Think of C.H.I.P as a tablet computer that runs Linux instead of Android, "without the tablet bits," says interviewee Dave, who gave a talk -- which was mostly live demos -- at OSCON 2015. 50,000 C.H.I.P.s have already sold for $9 through their successful Kickstarter campaign, and Next Thing Co. plans to stick with the $9 price for the foreseeable future -- plus add-on boards (that they call "shields") they hope to sell you, but that won't flatten any but the skinniest wallets; given the projected price scale, you'll have trouble spending as much as $50 for a fully-accessorized C.H.I.P. unit.

"But," you may ask, "is C.H.I.P. Open Source?" You bet! No hedging here, just flat-out Open Source, from the bottom to the top, with all software (and hardware specs) freely available via GitHub. And lastly, the "I'll Be Your $9 Computer Today' statement in the headline above is allegorical, not factual. We've seen projected shipping dates for C.H.I.P ranging from "by the end of 2015" to a simple "2016." Either way, we're waiting with bated breath.

DaneTerry88 writes: Highways England plans to test under-road wireless charging equipment that could be buried beneath motorways to top-up cars as they drive. Charge-as-you-drive technologies have already been used in the South Korean town of Gumi. The town has a 12km (7.5 miles) route that allows buses to be charged as they drive over it. In a press release the agency says: "The trials are expected to begin later this year following the completion of an ongoing procurement process. The trials will involve fitting vehicles with wireless technology and testing the equipment, installed underneath the road, to replicate motorway conditions. Full details of the trials will be publicised when a successful contractor has been appointed."

New submitter SMABSA writes: With British Prime Minister David Cameron announcing plans for porn users to be required to register their bank account/debit card as a means of age verification, Spiked-Online writer Stephen Beard explores the privacy implications, technical feasibility and motivations of such a plan. Here's an excerpt that gives a feel for Beard's take: Not only are the plans to regulate porn sites intrusive, they are also technically infeasible (as are many bright ideas that come from central government). In the amount of time, for example, it would take to identify a site not complying with the new rules, that site could be mirrored multiple times. Such ineffectiveness has been evident in the government’s futile attempts to censor torrent tracker Pirate Bay. The posturing about protecting children is irksome, too. To pretend that children in decades past haven’t been sneaking a look at mucky images, albeit in magazines and newspapers, is naive at best.

HughPickens.com writes: Michael Rosenwald writes at the Columbia Journalism Review that global online ad revenue continues to rise, reaching nearly $180 billion last year. But analysts say the rise of ad blocking threatens the entire industry—the free sites that rely exclusively on ads, as well as the paywalled outlets that rely on ads to compensate for the vast majority of internet users who refuse to pay for news. A new report from Adobe and one of several startups helping publishers fight ad blocking shows that 198 million people globally are now blocking ads, up 41 percent from 2014. In the US, ad blocking grew 48 percent from last year, to 45 million users. "Taken together, ad blockers are hitting publishers in their digital guts," writes Rosenwald. "Adobe says that $21.8 billion in global ad revenue will be blocked this year."

Publishers have been banking on the growth of mobile, where the ad blocking plugins either don't work or are cumbersome to install. A Wells Fargo analyst wrote in a report on ad blocking that "the mobile migration should thwart some of the growth" of ad blockers. But Apple recently revealed that its new operating system scheduled for release this fall will allow ad blocking on Safari. Apple is trying to pull iPhone and iPad users off the web. It wants you to read, watch, search, and listen in its Apple-certified walled gardens known as apps. It makes apps, it approves apps, and it profits from apps. But, for its plan to work, the company will need those entertainers and publishers to funnel their content to where Apple wants it to be. As the company makes strategic moves to devalue the web in favor of apps, those content creators dependent on ads to stay afloat may be forced to play along with Apple. Adblock Plus has released a browser for mobile Android devices that blocks ads, and it's planning to release a similar product for Apple devices. "The desire to figure out how to bring ad blocking to mobile consumers is a worldwide phenomenon," says Roi Carthy Ad blocking, he says, "is an inalienable right."

Bismillah writes: Samsung Electronics has proposed a network consisting of 4,600 micro-satellites that could act as backhaul for terrestrial cellular networks and take low-cost internet access worldwide. They project that by 2028, cellular and Wi-Fi traffic will exceed 1 zettabyte/month, and their goal is to design a system with equivalent capacity (PDF). "With the satellite-based backhaul, cellular and wi-fi deployments become practical in remote regions of the earth where there is no wired Internet infrastructure." The plan would require significant amounts of wireless spectrum, as well as satellites capable of 1 Tb/s or higher.

An anonymous reader writes: Today the OpenSSH project maintainers announced the release of version 7.0. This release is focusing on deprecating weak and unsafe cryptographic methods, though some of the work won't be complete until 7.1. This release removes support for the following: the legacy SSH v1 protocol, the 1024-bit diffie-hellman-group1-sha1 key exchange, ssh-dss, ssh-dss-cert-* host and user keys, and legacy v00 cert format. There were also several bug fixes, security tweaks, and new features. In the next release, they plan to retire more legacy cryptography. This includes refusing RSA keys smaller than 1024 bits, disabling MD5-based HMAC algorithms, and disabling these ciphers: blowfish-cbc, cast128-cbc, all arcfour variants and the rijndael-cbc aliases for AES.

An anonymous reader writes: One of the more interesting aspects of Microsoft's Windows 10 push is their desire to see it running on hobbyist hardware platforms. Today they released Windows 10 IoT Core for the Raspberry Pi 2 and the MinnowBoard Max. They say, "Windows 10 IoT Core is a new edition for Windows targeted towards small, embedded devices that may or may not have screens. For devices with screens, Windows 10 IoT Core does not have a Windows shell experience; instead you can write a Universal Windows app that is the interface and "personality" for your device." Microsoft has posted a list of release notes for this version, calling out improved support for Python and Node.js, significantly improved GPIO performance, and more electronics support for breakout boards. Under a heading cheekily named 'Developers, Developer, Developers,' they lay out their plan for language support and provide a code sample.

An anonymous reader writes: After the Fukushima meltdown, all of Japan's nuclear power plants were shut down, the last in late 2013. This week the government plans on starting up reactor No.1 at the Sendai nuclear power plant. Energy prices have risen 30% since 2011, and it is hoped that the plant will soon be producing a surplus of electricity. Not everyone is happy about the plant restarting. This weekend, about 2,000 protesters marched around the plant and voiced their opposition. "Past arguments that nuclear plants were safe and nuclear energy was cheap were all shown to be lies," said writer Satoshi Kamata, one of the demonstration organizers. "Kyushu Electric is not qualified to resume operations because it has not completed an anti-quake structure to oversee a possible accident as well as a venting facility."

An anonymous reader writes: When shops mostly ran on mainframes, it was relatively easy to do capacity planning because systems and programs were mostly monolithic. But today is very different; we use a plethora of technologies and systems are more distributed. Many applications are decentralized, running on multiple servers either for redundancy or because of multi-tiering architecture. Some companies run legacy systems alongside bleeding-edge technologies. We're also seeing many innovations in storage, like compression, deduplication, clones, snapshots, etc.

Today, with many projects, the complexity make it pretty difficult to foresee resource usage. This makes it hard to budget for hardware that can fulfill capacity and performance requirements in the long term. It's even tougher when the project is still in the planning stages. My question: how do you do capacity planning and performance management for such decentralized systems with diverse technologies? Who is responsible for capacity planning in your company? Are you mostly reactive in adding resources (CPU, memory, IO, storage, etc) or are you able to plan it out well beforehand?

jfruh writes: Over the past two decades, China's relatively high skill, low cost workforce made the country a powerhouse of tech and electronics manufacturing. But in a sign that things might be changing, several large Chinese companies, including Foxconn and Huawei, are investing billions to start manufacturing in India. Xiaomi is expected to announce its first India-made phone today, as well. The article says that Foxconn's planned factory in Maharashtra "would create employment for at least 50,000 people, state chief minister Devendra Fadnavis said after the signing of the agreement at which Foxconn CEO Terry Gou was present."

An anonymous reader writes: Like many people reading this site, I have several older phones around as well as my newest, fanciest one; I have a minimal service plan on one of these (my next-to-most-recent), and no service plan (only WI-Fi, as available) on the others. Most of them have some reason or other that I like them, so even without service I've kept them around to act as micro-tablets. Some have a better in-built camera than my current phone, despite being older; some are nice on occasion for being small and pocketable; I like to use one as a GPS in the car without dedicating my phone to that purpose; I can let my young relatives use an older one as a camera, etc. Besides, some people have only one phone at all, and can't reasonably afford a new one -- and that probably means a phone that's not cutting edge. So: in light of the several recent Android vulnerabilities that have come to light, and no reason to think they're the last of these, what's a smart way to use older Android phones? Is CyanoGen Mod any less vulnerable? Should I be worried that old personally identifying information from online transactions is still hanging around somewhere in the phone's recesses? I don't want to toss still-useful hardware, but I know I won't be getting any OS upgrades to 3-year-old phones. How do you use older phones that are not going to get OTA updates to address every security issue?