Archive for March, 2014
New H5N8 Avian Influenza Penetrated Biosecurity Defenses at Korea’s Premier Poultry Research Center
March 5th, 2014Via: Science: A new, deadly H5N8 strain of avian influenza penetrated the biosecurity defenses of a National Institute of Animal Science (NIAS) campus near Seoul, prompting authorities to cull all of the facility’s 11,000 hens and 5000 ducks. The devastating loss could set back poultry experiments at the NIAS lab for 2 years. “It will […]
Barrett Brown: Charges Related to Publishing URL Dropped
March 5th, 2014Via: IT News: United States prosecutors today said they have dropped eleven charges against journalist Barrett Brown – including for publishing a hyperlink in an online chat forum – in one of the closest watched digital liberties trials yet.
Windows XP Market Share Climbs Again as Customers Dig Their Heels In
March 5th, 2014Just about everyone I know with XP won’t budge, despite my warnings. Maybe Microsoft has plans to try to convert millions of XP users over to Windows 8 with the rumored Windows 8.1 with Bing, which will supposedly be free. Still, tens of millions of people will probably refuse to deal with the situation. I […]
Facebook Drones to Battle Google Balloons in the War of Airborne Internet
March 5th, 2014Via: Wired: The race for the airborne internet is on. According to multiple reports, Facebook is in talks to buy a drone maker whose solar-powered aircraft could operate as high-altitude wireless hot spots, circling in the stratosphere for years without refueling. That may seem far-fetched, but it’s not entirely surprising in the context of today’s […]
Obama Is Complicit in Suppressing the Truth About Torture
March 5th, 2014Via: The Atlantic: President Obama is complicit in suppressing the truth about CIA torture of prisoners. That’s clear from the fact that the Senate intelligence committee’s $40 million, 6,000-page torture report is still being suppressed 15 months after being adopted.
A Vast Hidden Surveillance Network Runs Across America, Powered by the Repo Industry
March 5th, 2014It’s not just law enforcement running those license plate scanners. This is absolutely nuts. Via: BetaBoston: Few notice the “spotter car” from Manny Sousa’s repo company as it scours Massachusetts parking lots, looking for vehicles whose owners have defaulted on their loans. Sousa’s unmarked car is part of a technological revolution that goes well beyond […]
Food Packaging Chemicals May be Harmful to Human Health Over Long Term
March 5th, 2014Via: British Medical Journal Press Release: The synthetic chemicals used in the packaging, storage, and processing of foodstuffs might be harmful to human health over the long term, warn environmental scientists in a commentary in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health. This is because most of these substances are not inert and can leach […]
Singapore: Young CEO of Crypto Currency Exchange Found Dead
March 5th, 2014Via: Tech in Asia: The startup community has lost one of its own. Autumn Radtke, CEO of First Meta, a Singapore-based virtual currency trading platform that also deals in bitcoin, has died last night, Tech in Asia has learned. She was 28 years old. The circumstances surrounding the death is unclear. Sources have suggested that […]
Critical Crypto Bug Leaves Several Linux Distributions, Hundreds of Apps Open to Eavesdropping
March 4th, 2014Via: Ars Technica: Hundreds of open source packages, including the Red Hat, Ubuntu, and Debian distributions of Linux, are susceptible to attacks that circumvent the most widely used technology to prevent eavesdropping on the Internet, thanks to an extremely critical vulnerability in a widely used cryptographic code library. The bug in the GnuTLS library makes […]
Barrett Brown Faces 100 Years in Prison for Posting Hyperlink to Site Containing Hacked Material in Chat Room
March 4th, 2014Update: Charges Related to Publishing URL Dropped *phew* Via: IT News: United States prosecutors today said they have dropped eleven charges against journalist Barrett Brown – including for publishing a hyperlink in an online chat forum – in one of the closest watched digital liberties trials yet. — Via: Guardian: Lawyers acting for Barrett Brown, […]
