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Planet Launches Satellite Constellation to Image the Whole Planet Daily

February 14, 2017, 19:58 PST Today Planet successfully launched 88 Dove satellites to orbit—the largest satellite constellation ever to reach orbit. This is not just a launch (or a world record, for that matter!); for our team this is a major milestone. With these satellites in orbit, Planet will…

Feb 15, 2017

It’s Easy to Make Enemies of People We Only Read About - Facts So Romantic - Nautilus

nautil.us

Photograph by Nicolas Alejandro / Flickr L ast week, Marco Rubio, a United States senator from Florida, found himself in an unfamiliar position. He felt compelled to remind his more senior colleagues in the Senate of the value of rational debate. Word of this didn’t really catch on until The…

Feb 15, 2017

Government-grade spyware hits Mexican advocates of soda tax

bendbulletin.com

By Nicole Perlroth • New York Times News Service SAN FRANCISCO — Last summer, Dr. Simón Barquera’s phone started buzzing with a series of disturbing text messages from unknown numbers. One said his daughter had been in a serious accident. Another claimed to be from a friend whose father had died —…

Feb 14, 2017

Propaganda as Literature: A Distant Reading of the Korean Central News Agency’s Headlines

xmarquez.github.io

Xavier Marquez Dramatis Personae: Who does KCNA talk about? Anger and Reverence: What emotions does KCNA express? Cult calendars: what days are special for KCNA? Ceremonial Language: How does KCNA speak about the Kims? The Uniformity of Propaganda Ceremonial Propaganda? Data and code details…

Feb 14, 2017

Now sites can fingerprint you online even when you use multiple browsers

arstechnica.co.uk

Enlarge / System architecture of a cross-browser tracking system. Cao et al. Researchers have recently developed the first reliable technique for websites to track visitors even when they use two or more different browsers. This shatters a key defense against sites that identify visitors based on…

Feb 14, 2017

Top 10 Sites to Receive SMS Online without a Phone • Raymond.CC

raymond.cc

It is very common nowadays that you will need to at least provide your email address in order to sign up for a service offered by a website or to participate in a discussion at a forum or even leaving a comment on a blog. If you don’t care about receiving a reply or are not comfortable in providing…

Feb 13, 2017

James Stanley - Encrypted email is still a pain in 2017

incoherency.co.uk

James Stanley Encrypted email is still a pain in 2017 Mon 13 February 2017 Tagged: cryptography Today I sent an email to somebody who specified that he "prefers GPG mail". I didn't have any GPG set up, so Ijust sent a normal email, which worked perfectly well. But it made me look in to GPG, and this…

Feb 13, 2017

The U.S. military's stats on deadly airstrikes are wrong. Thousands have gone unreported

militarytimes.com

The American military has failed to publicly disclose potentially thousands of lethal airstrikes conducted over several years in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, a Military Times investigation has revealed. The enormous data gap raises serious doubts about transparency in reported progress against the…

Feb 8, 2017

I am going to eradicate the inbound Windows Support scam

jollyrogertelephone.com

UPDATE: This post is getting some traction on reddit (thanks reddit!), so I wanted to address a couple things. First, I love telecommunications and I vow to never use this technology for mischief or malice. I built these bots to handle INBOUND telemarketer scammers, but about 10 days ago I got a…

Feb 8, 2017

Five arrests in 'fully loaded' Kodi streaming box raids

bbc.com

Five people have been arrested, accused of selling set-top boxes modified to stream subscription football matches, television channels and films for free. The sale of so-called "fully loaded Kodi boxes" has been called a "top priority" by the Federation Against Copyright Theft (Fact). The five…

Feb 8, 2017

FBI axes FOIA requests by email, so dust off your fax machine

social.techcrunch.com

As tech-savvy government efforts like 18F and the USDS take technological strides forward, other parts of the government are abandoning modern technology altogether. Starting next month, the FBI will no longer accept Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests by email. In lieu of its popular email…

Feb 7, 2017

How an obscure oriental cult converted a vast, pagan Roman empire – Michael Kulikowski | Aeon Essays

aeon.co

The Roman empire became Christian during the fourth century CE. At the century’s start, Christians were – at most – a substantial minority of the population. By its end, Christians (or nominal Christians) indisputably constituted a majority in the empire. Tellingly, at the beginning of the century,…

Feb 7, 2017

How Romania is developing its own culture of protest: view | Euronews

euronews.com

By Henry Rammelt, PhD, Triangle ( UMR 5206), France That corruption pervades everyday life in Romania is a bit of a cliché, on both a domestic and international level. That people are not satisfied with the state of affairs is also not surprising. What is unexpected is Romanians’ resilience in the…

Feb 7, 2017

Silicon Valley Hedge Fund Takes On Wall Street With AI Trader

bloomberg.com

Babak Hodjat believes humans are too emotional for the stock market. So he's started one of the first hedge funds run completely by artificial intelligence. "Humans have bias and sensitivities, conscious and unconscious," says Hodjat, a computer scientist who helped lay the groundwork for Apple's…

Feb 7, 2017

Dramatic new discoveries illuminate the lost Indus civilization

arstechnica.com

The Indus city of Dholavira in western India had impressive water infrastructure, such as this deep reservoir. The Indus people needed a way to conserve their water supply because rainy seasons were unpredictable. Each city came up with slightly different solutions to the water problem. Rama's Arrow…

Feb 6, 2017

A Peanut History of Philosophy | Darren Allen

expressiveegg.org

(Note: this piece is the barest, and, I must say, quite unsatisfactory, sketch of a vast, vast subject, which I will be treating in far greater depth in the future. I was going to remove it from the site, but, despite its shortcomings and generalisations, it does still present in outline my approach…

Feb 6, 2017

The Netherlands Keeps Closing Prisons Because It Doesn't Have Enough Prisoners

fastcoexist.com

The drop in supply of prisoners is because of two factors. One is that simply fewer crimes are being committed. Rates are falling around 0.9% per year. This, says the Dutch News , means 3,000 prison cells and 300 youth detention places will not longer be needed by 2021. Former justice minister Ard…

Feb 6, 2017

Uber Hires Veteran NASA Engineer to Develop Flying Cars

bloomberg.com

In 2010, an advanced aircraft engineer at NASA’s Langley Research Center named Mark Moore published a white paper outlining the feasibility of electric aircrafts that could take off and land like helicopters but were smaller and quieter. The vehicles would be capable of providing a speedy…

Feb 6, 2017

Whatever happened to Winamp? (which you can still download, by the way)

rocknerd.co.uk

Fifteen to twenty years ago, Winamp was the MP3 player that everyone used. It was the first MP3 player not to suck: playlists, shuffle, convenience. I asked friends on Facebook earlier and am surprised at how many people I know still swear by it. Justin Frankel started Winamp (and the company,…

Feb 6, 2017

Californians are paying billions for power they don't need

latimes.com

T he bucolic orchards of Sutter County north of Sacramento had never seen anything like it: a visiting governor and a media swarm — all to christen the first major natural gas power plant in California in more than a decade. At its 2001 launch, the Sutter Energy Center was hailed as the nation’s…

Feb 6, 2017

The High Cost of a Home Is Turning American Millennials Into the New Serfs

thedailybeast.com

Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast American greatness was long premised on the common assumption was that each generation would do better than previous one. That is being undermined for the emerging millennial generation. The problems facing millennials include an economy where…

Feb 6, 2017

Russians Engineer a Brilliant Slot Machine Cheat—And Casinos Have No Fix

wired.com

In early June 2014, accountants at the Lumiere Place Casino in St. Louis noticed that several of their slot machines had—just for a couple of days—gone haywire. The government-approved software that powers such machines gives the house a fixed mathematical edge, so that casinos can be certain of how…

Feb 6, 2017

Op-ed: Windows 10 0day exploit goes wild, and so do Microsoft marketers

arstechnica.com

Johannes Hemmerlein There's a zero-day exploit in the wild that exploits a key file-sharing protocol in most supported versions of Windows, including Windows 10, the latest and most secure version of the Microsoft operating system. The exploit is probably not worth worrying about, but you'd never…

Feb 6, 2017

What It Takes To Truly Delete Data

fivethirtyeight.com

In February of 2014 , New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced the creation of IDNYC, a municipal identification card primarily designed to ease bureaucratic burdens for the city’s immigrant population. When the card became available a year later, de Blasio described the program as “fraud-proof,…

Feb 3, 2017

The surgeon giving his patients VR instead of sedatives

bbc.com

Ana Maria has never been to Machu Picchu. The 61-year-oldalways wanted to visit the mountain ruins but she suffers from hypertension, and doctors warned that the extreme altitude could cause her blood pressure to rise dangerously high. Today, dressed in a white gown and hairnet, she will explore its…

Feb 3, 2017

Windows DRM Files Used to Decloak Tor Browser Users

bleepingcomputer.com

Downloading and trying to open Windows DRM-protected files can deanonymize Tor Browser users and reveal their real IP addresses, security researchers from Hacker House have warned. Attacks using DRM-protected multimedia files in Windows have been known since 2005 , but until recently , they've only…

Feb 3, 2017

During World War II, the U.S. Saw Italian-Americans as a Threat to Homeland Security

smithsonianmag.com

Frank DiCara is 90 years old, but he still remembers what it felt like to wake up an enemy in his hometown. It was 1941, and he was a 14-year-old kid in Highlandtown, an Italian-American neighborhood in Baltimore, when news broke that Japan had bombed Pearl Harbor, bringing the U.S. into war with…

Feb 3, 2017

The Warbot Builders of the Middle East Spill Their Secrets

wired.com

The face of homebrew, remote-controlled military robotics in Iraq is a man named Ali Hashem al-Daraji, better known by the nickname Abu Ali. In 2014 he was a policeman for Iraq’s interior ministry, but in June of that year, when the Iraqi Security Forces collapsed as ISIS took over Mosul, Abu Ali…

Feb 2, 2017

Data from man's pacemaker led to arson charges

journal-news.com

MIDDLETOWN — Investigators used the data from a Middletown man’s pacemaker to help get an indictment in a fire that caused about $400,000 in damages. Ross Compton, 59, has been indicted on felony charges of aggravated arson and insurance fraud for allegedly starting the fire on Sept. 19 at his Court…

Feb 2, 2017

Lychee identified as cause for mystery deadly childhood illness in India

abc.net.au

Email For more than two decades, apparently healthy children in the Indian region of Bihar suffered sudden seizures and lost consciousness. A third of them died, leaving doctors baffled. But a team of American and Indian scientists say they have found the cause of the mystery illness, which killed…

Feb 2, 2017

Radioactive Diamond Batteries: Making Good Use Of Nuclear Waste

forbes.com

A research team at the University of Bristol has developed a way to use a type of nuclear waste to generate electricity in a nuclear-powered battery that is an actual diamond. Diamonds are made from carbon under high pressures, which we can synthesize. If you make them from radioactive carbon-14…

Feb 2, 2017

America’s system of checks and balances might struggle to contain a despot

economist.com

THE most troubling interpretation of the executive order that Donald Trump signed on January 27th, temporarily banning visitors from seven mainly Muslim countries, is not that the president means to honour his campaign promises. It is that he will find ways to do so even where what he promised—in…

Feb 2, 2017

Can there be a science of collective intelligence?

keplerlounge.com

There’s strong phenomenological evidence that human organisations are much greater than the sum of their parts. In spite of this, psychologists have until very recently focused on black-box theories of ’individual’ intelligence whose value and credibility is often exaggerated. Now, you might argue,…

Feb 2, 2017

First Urban ‘Agrihood’ In America Feeds 2,000 Households For Free

intelligentnow.org

Have you ever contemplated the fact that humans are the only species on Earth that pays to live on the planet? This continues, despite the fact that there is presently more than enough resources to care for every citizen. As a matter of fact, enough food is produced around the world to feed 10…

Feb 2, 2017

Inside the brutal, thorough process of vetting refugees

vox.com

An Iraqi refugee in a camp in Syria. DELIL SOULEIMAN/AFP/Getty Images Vox's home for compelling, provocative narrative essays. What kind of knife was the man that killed your father holding? Can you remember how many stars were on the jacket of the military officer that raped you? How many hours…

Feb 2, 2017

Closest Earth-Size Planet May Get Robot Visitors—Here’s How

news.nationalgeographic.com

Just a few months ago, astronomers revealed that there is an Earth-size world orbiting Proxima Centauri, the next star over . Now, a team of astrophysicists thinks there’s a way to pay that planet a nice long visit sometime in the not-so-distant future. The method involves something similar to the…

Feb 2, 2017

The Multiverse Is an Ancient Idea - Cosmos on Nautilus

cosmos.nautil.us

T he multiverse—the idea that there are an infinite number of other universes out there besides our own—strikes many as not only odd, but also exceptionally modern, arising from contemporary physics. But in fact, the notion that there are many worlds besides ours is ancient, stretching back at least…

Feb 1, 2017