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As manufacturing gets more distributed, it gets more anonymous in some ways: the parts for one computer might have been made in several countries, and even the assembly might have been split between more than one place; place of origin is complicated, and typically opaque for the purchaser of consumer goods. However, modern logistics and tracking mean that it doesn't have to be a mystery, and stages of a device's production can in theory be traced, which means that buyers and intermediaries can decide to buy essentially identical products and components based on factors like whether coffee is shade grown, or whether production line workers are treated in line with the buyer's own ethical demands. A slice from an article at Forbes about this kind of logistics-based practical ethics: An anonymous reader writes: Certain companies are taking this a step further, by using technology to assist workers in their day-to-day activities – for example, BMW is creating bespoke thermoplastic polyurethane thumb protectors for their factory workers. Others are working on ways of incentivizing behavior on top of these systems. Levi's is piloting a program where they offer cheaper short-term credit to companies that meet their safety levels. While it's true that this would result in an initial upfront cost, the whole reason CSR programs were created to begin with was to obtain legitimacy and the appearance of good corporate citizenship. If consumers wanted fair supply chains to be a priority, they could let their shopping habits speak louder than their words. Technologically speaking, we are not far off from a point where price tags could also include a QR code that has a geotagged history of all the places the item has been.

Lucas123 writes: Indiegogo announced at CES today that is now has a crowdfunding site exclusively for big businesses, which often have hundreds of internal R&D projects or ideas that never see the light of day and could benefit from getting public exposure online. Companies such as Google, Anheuser-Busch, GE and Hasbro have already run crowdsourcing campaigns on a pilot of the new site in order to raise money for projects, garner customer ideas, or validate pre-retail products. In July, GE ran a campaign to prove market demand for a countertop nugget ice-making machine for the home. GE offered the Opal icemaker for $399 to early buyers on Indiegogo, with a future retail price of $499. GE's Opal icemaker project raised $2.64 million total from 6,177 contributions by the end of the 30-day Indiegogo campaign. The campaign also garnered 510,000 page views and 15,000 Facebook shares. Natarajan Venkatakrishnan, head of R&D for GE Appliances, said crowdsourcing allows development and marketing to be conducted at a fraction of the cost of a traditional R&D project. "If it flops, no worries. Upfront costs were some 20 times less than a traditional product rollout, which can cost tens of millions of dollars," Venkatakrishnan said. "If we're going to fail, we want to fail fast."

The tiny Tardisk chip is a simple, easy way to extend system storage on a Macbook but demands some compromise -- chiefly in loss of the SD Card slot.

An anonymous reader writes: Programmers, raise your hand if you've been on a project where bugs keep piling up, management doesn't dedicate time to fix them, and the whole thing eventually bogs down. Gregory Brown summarizes that situation in one simple little graph from an issue tracker, and discusses why so many companies have problems with it. "This figure tells a story that is no way surprising to anyone who has worked on software projects before: demand for fixes and features is rapidly outpacing the supply of development time invested, and so the issue tracker is no longer serving as any sort of meaningful project planning tool. In all but the most well-funded, high functioning, and sustainable businesses — you can expect some degree of tension along these lines. The business side of the house may blame developers for not moving fast enough, while the developers blame the business for piling work on too quickly and not leaving time for cleanup, testing, and long-term investments. Typically, both sides have valid concerns, but they don't do an especially good job of communicating with one another." What methods have helped you deal with situations like this? What methods haven't helped?

An anonymous reader writes: At the end of November, BlackBerry announced it would pull its operations out of Pakistan after the country's government demanded access to BlackBerry's user data. The Pakistan government has now dropped that request, and BlackBerry will continue operating there as a result. In a statement, BlackBerry COO Marty Beard said, "We are grateful to the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority and the Pakistani government for accepting BlackBerry's position that we cannot provide the content of our customers' BES traffic, nor will we provide access to our BES servers."

schwit1 sends news about the effects of flexible working schedules on the people who try them. Research has found that many employees fall into a "grazing" pattern for work — constantly being interrupted while working, and continuing to keep up with work emails when not — which results in having elevated stress levels for a longer period of time. This can make such workers more susceptible to illness, and it shows distinct biological consequences to having a poor work-life balance. Flexible working policies can also raise the risk of poor working conditions, and create resentment among colleagues ... The findings are a blow to advocates of more sophisticated measures for enabling people to achieve a work-life balance in rich economies that tend to overwork some people while underutilising millions of others. With an estimated 10m working days lost to work-related stress in the UK last year, finding a good balance between the demands of home and the job now dominates concerns about the impact of work on health.

An anonymous reader writes: Back in August, an Indiegogo campaign raised $566,023 to produce Axanar, a Star Trek movie in development by an independent group of fans, who also happen to be film professionals. Now, unfortunately but predictably, Paramount and CBS have filed a lawsuit in California federal court claiming their intellectual property is being infringed upon. They are "demanding an injunction as well as damages for direct, contributory and vicarious copyright infringement." The guy running the crowdfunded film is a lawyer, and he said, "We've certainly been prepared for this and we certainly will defend this lawsuit. There are a lot of issues surrounding a fan film. These fan films have been around for 30 years, and others have raised a lot of money." He said CBS/Paramount weren't willing to provide guidelines on what types of fan productions would be tolerated (unlike Lucasfilm with Star Wars), because they worry about setting precedent.

An anonymous reader writes: Early on Friday, the U.S. Senate approved the 2,000 page 'omnibus' budget bill that allocated $1.15 trillion in government funding. Later in the day, President Obama signed it into law. Because the budget bill was so important, many other pieces of unrelated legislation were tacked onto it, including the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act, a bill notable for giving the government increased internet surveillance powers. Civil rights activists and tech experts largely consider it a "privacy disaster," and several lawmakers voted against the budget bill solely for CISA's inclusion. Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) said, "Unfortunately, this misguided cyber legislation does little to protect Americans' security, and a great deal more to threaten our privacy than the flawed Senate version. Americans demand real solutions that will protect them from foreign hackers, not knee-jerk responses that allow companies to fork over huge amounts of their customers' private data with only cursory review." Corporations in the U.S. will now have "legal immunity when sharing consumers' private data about hacks and digital breaches." The full omnibus is available online (PDF). The CISA provisions start on page 1,728.

StartsWithABang writes: Many of us dreamed of becoming astronauts as a child, but gave up on that dream for a number of reasons — the seemingly impossible odds, the demands of daily life, the rigors of preparation — and never even applied. But for a great many, that dream remains alive; the last time NASA had open applications, over 6,000 people threw their hat in the ring, with eight selected. Yesterday, NASA once again opened up astronaut applications, and one prospective applicant has written a manifesto about lessons learned in becoming an aspiring astronaut. While not all of us have the desire to strap ourselves to a rocket and orbit in a tin can above Earth, we all have something to learn from this perspective.

Lauren Weinstein says there are smart people in government, "who fully understand the technical realities of modern strong encryption systems and how backdoors would catastrophically weaken them," but asks So why do they continue to argue for these backdoor mechanisms, now more loudly than ever? The answer appears to be that they're lying to us. Or if lying seems like too strong a word, we could alternatively say they're being 'incredibly disingenuous' in their arguments. You don't need to be a computer scientist to follow the logic of how we reach this unfortunate and frankly disheartening determination regarding governments' invocation of terrorism as an excuse for demanding crypto backdoors for authorities' use.

MarkWhittington writes: The 43rd anniversary of the mission of Apollo 17, the last time men walked on the moon, has elicited a strange kind of nostalgia, and no little melancholia in some parts of the media. These qualities are captured in a story in IO9 that purports to tell us why no one has been back to the moon in over four decades and why we might soon return at last. Deadline Hollywood informs us that "The Last Man on the Moon," a documentary on Apollo moonwalker Gene Cernan, is set for a release to both theaters and video on demand in February, having been shown at film festivals for the past year or so,

1sockchuck writes: Data center providers are offering space with less power infrastructure than traditional mission-critical facilities, citing demand from customers looking to forego extra UPS and generators in return for more affordable pricing. The demand for "variable resiliency" space reflects a growing emphasis on controlling data center costs, along with a focus on application-level requirements like HPC and bitcoin mining. Data center experts differed on whether this trend toward flexible design was a niche, or a long-term trend. "In the next 12 months,data center operators will be challenged to deliver power to support both an HPC environment as well as traditional storage all under one roof," said Tate Cantrell, CTO at Iceland's Verne Global. "HPC will continue the trend to low resiliency options." But some requirements don't change. "Even when they say they're OK with lower reliability, they still want uptime," noted one executive.

coondoggie writes: The former U.S. Department of State man accused of hacking into hundreds of victims' e-mail and social media accounts, stealing thousands of sexually explicit photographs, and threatening at least 75 victims that he would post those photos and other personal information unless they agreed to his demands has entered a guilty plea to the nefarious attacks. Michael C. Ford, 36, of Atlanta, was indicted by a grand jury in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia on Aug. 18, 2015, with nine counts of cyberstalking, seven counts of computer hacking to extort and one count of wire fraud.

An anonymous reader writes: According to reports TAG Heuer is struggling to keep up with the high demand for its $1,500 TAG Heuer Connected Android Wear-powered smartwatch. Since its launch in November the company has sold about 100,000 units and plans to crank up production to 2,000 units per week. According to Slashgear: "Jean-Claude Biver, the CEO of Tag Heuer shares that more smartwatch models from the company will be unveiled at the end 2016 or early 2017 – with options of new materials and diamonds. Being the genius that revived brands such as Blancpain and Hublot, Biver has positioned Tag Heuer as the first luxury watchmaker that enters smartwatch business with a 'big bang' and ready to use large eco-system courtesy of Android Wear."

Patrick O'Neill writes: Just over week after a hacker breached a United Arab Emirates Bank, demanding a $3 million ransom to stop tweeting customers' information, he appears to have dumped tens of thousands of customer files online. The actual data appears to be real. And it's vast. One database analyzed by the Daily Dot includes the sensitive information of around 40,000 customers, including their full names, credit card numbers, and birthdays. One account contained 4,7174,962.38 dirham, or $12,844,589.77. Those accounts' total earnings add up to $110,736,002. One bank executive confirmed the hack to Farooqui, adding that, "This is blackmail."

An anonymous reader writes: Hackers have targeted three Greek banks for a third time in five days, demanding a ransom from each lender of 20,000 bitcoin (€7m), according to Greek police and the country's central bank. A group calling itself the Armada Collective demanded the bitcoin ransom after staging its first attacks last Thursday, and then threatened a full collapse of the unnamed banks' websites if they refused to pay up. These initial attacks took the form of a distributed denial of service — flooding the banks' websites with requests so that they crashed under the strain. On Thursday, they succeeded in disrupting electronic transactions at all three banks for a short period, but customer information was protected, a police official said.

An anonymous reader writes: A company-wide memo distributed throughout the Mozilla Foundation by chairperson Mitchell Baker argues that the organization should disentangle itself from the Thunderbird email client in order to focus on Firefox. She said, "Today Thunderbird developers spend much of their time responding to changes made in core Mozilla systems and technologies. At the same time, build, Firefox, and platform engineers continue to pay a tax to support Thunderbird." Both projects are wasting time helping each other, and those demands are only going to get worse. She says many within Mozilla want to see it support community-managed projects without doing the bulk of the work on it, and perhaps Thunderbird could be one of those projects. Baker stresses that no decisions have been made yet — they're starting the conversation early to keep the community involved in what happens to Thunderbird.

An anonymous reader writes with this lead from Help Net Security's story on a topic we've touched on here many times: the broad powers arrogated by the Federal government in the form of National Security Letters: On Monday, after winning an eleven-year legal battle, Nicholas Merrill can finally tell the public how the FBI has secretly construed its authority to issue National Security Letters (NSLs) to permit collection of vast amounts of private information on US citizens without a search warrant or any showing of probable cause. The PATRIOT Act vastly expanded the domestic reach of the NSL program, which allows the FBI to compel disclosure of information from online companies and forbid recipients from disclosing they have received an NSL. The FBI has refused to detail publicly the kinds of private data it believes it can obtain with an NSL. A key sentence from the same story: "Merrill is now able to reveal that the FBI believes it can force online companies to turn over the following information simply by sending an NSL demanding it: an individual’s complete web browsing history; the IP addresses of everyone a person has corresponded with; and records of all online purchases." Reader Advocatus Diaboli adds this, from The Intercept: One of the most striking revelations, Merrill said during a press teleconference, was that the FBI was requesting detailed cell site location information — cellphone tracking records — under the heading of "radius log" information. Traditionally, radius log refers to a user's attempts to connect to a server or a DSL line — a sort of anachronism given the progress of technology. "The notion that the government can collect cellphone location information — to turn your cellphone into a tracking device, just by signing a letter — is extremely troubling," Merrill said.

An anonymous reader writes: After years of rulings against The Pirate Bay around Europe, a Swedish court has now ruled that the country's ISPs can't be forced to block access to the torrent indexer. The case centers around copyright holders and an ISP called Bredbandsbolaget. The ISP refused to comply with demands that music pirates be cut off from internet access. When rightsholders couldn't get traction that way, they added Bredbandsbolaget to their list of targets. The court found that the ISP does not "participate" in copyright infringement carried out by its subscribers, and is thus not liable for any damages incurred.

judgecorp writes: The government-owned Russian energy company Rosenergoatom is building Russia's largest data center at its giant Kalinin nuclear power station. Most of the space will be available to customers, and the facility expects to be in demand, thanks to two factors: reliable power, and the data residency rules which require Russian citizens' data to be located within Russia. Facebook and Google don't have data centers within Russia yet — and Rosenergoatom has already invited them into the Kalinin facility.