New submitter clorkster writes "I am looking to upgrade my mobile phone. I have always bought the cheapest possible phone with the least features since I only use it to make calls and text. Further, I am opposed to paying for internet access twice and my home access is certainly more important and necessary. I am now running into the issue that my phone is too archaic to receive text messages from newer smart phones (they somehow become picture messages). Any thoughts on a good smart phone without data plan or an almost smart phone solution?"
jfruh writes "Last night the White House hastily arranged a phone conference at which a 'Privacy Bill of Rights' was announced. It's an important document, not least because it affirms the idea that our data belongs to us, not to companies that happen to collect it. But it has a number of shortcomings, not least among them the companies aren't required to respect the rules laid out."
alphadogg provides this extract from Network World: "The Metro Ethernet Forum has updated its Carrier Ethernet specification, hoping to standardize the use of Ethernet for global multicarrier services. 'With Carrier Ethernet 2, we're expanding Quality-of-Service [QoS] well beyond best efforts, and will now allow carriers to interconnect to provide worldwide [Ethernet] service,' said Bob Metcalfe, co-inventor of Ethernet, during a Metro Ethernet Forum Web conference held Thursday to announce the specification. The forum introduced Carrier Ethernet in 2005 as a set of extensions that describe how data communications carriers should use Ethernet in a consistent manner. The new specification, Carrier Ethernet 2, establishes an additional set of rules."
suraj.sun writes with this excerpt from Ars Technica: "A new Web standard proposal authored by Google, Microsoft, and Netflix seeks to bring copy protection mechanisms to the Web. The Encrypted Media Extensions draft defines a framework for enabling the playback of protected media content in the Web browser. The proposal is controversial and has raised concern among some parties that are participating in the standards process. In a discussion on the W3C HTML mailing list, critics questioned whether the proposed framework would really provide the level of security demanded by content providers. The aim of the proposal is not to mandate a complete DRM platform, but to provide the necessary components for a generic key-based content decryption system. It is designed to work with pluggable modules that implement the actual decryption mechanisms."
smitty777 writes "An Australian woman who was being used by a group of Nigerian scam artists stole over $33,000 from the group who employed her. Her bank account was being used to funnel the cash from a dodgy internet car sales website. Irony aside, it makes one wonder how these folks ever got the nerve to go to the police with this matter. Those of you wondering, this article offers some answers to the question of why so many of these scams originate from this area."
An anonymous reader writes "How are you using smartphones and other portable devices to take charge of your medical care? The NY Times has an article about attachments to the iPhone for tracking blood sugar and blood pressure. There are also glorified web cams that take pictures of your ear drum, teeth or eyes to save you a trip to the doctor's. Some people are tracking the changes in their moles with an iPhone App. Is this the beginning of Med 2.0?" Odd as it sounds, I was able to be more quickly and reliably diagnosed with Lyme disease last fall because I'd taken some pictures on my phone of the lesion I'd wrongly thought was the result of a spider bite. Any camera would have worked, but I had my camera-equipped phone with me, rather than any other kind.
StormDriver writes "According to writer Marc Prensky, most of us come from a generation of digital immigrants. It basically means the modern web developed during our lifetime, it is a place we migrated to, discovering its potential. But people aged 20 and younger are not like that at all. They are digital natives, they've spent their whole lives here. 'Hey, let's do a digital version of our college facebook' is a digital immigrant's idea, just like 'Hey, let's make something like a classifieds section of a newspaper, only this one will be online.' Or 'Hey, let's make an online auction housel.' 'Hey, let's make a place for online video rentals.' The thing is, recreating items, ideas and interactions from the physical realm on the Web already ran its course." To me, this sounds like the gripe that "Everything that can be invented, has been invented." There are a lot of real-life services and experiences that have yet to be replicated, matched, or improved upon in the online realm; I wouldn't want people to stop taking inspiration from "old fashioned" goods as starting points for digital products.
retroworks writes "Great piece in The Atlantic by Kyle Wiens of IFIXIT.org, who visited and photographed the Molycorp Mountain Pass rare earth facility in California's Mojave Desert. The mine is the only source of rare earths in North America, one of the only alternatives to the mineral cartels in China, and one of the only sources for the key metals such as tantalum needed in cell phones. There is of course actually one other source of rare earth metals in the USA — recycled cell phones. Is the best 'state of the art' mining as good as the worst state of the art recycling? If the U.S. Department of Energy subsidizes the mine, will China open the floodgates and put it out of business? Or will electronics be manufactured with alternative materials before the mine ever becomes fully scaleable?"
OverTheGeicoE writes "Here's a familiar story: a breast cancer survivor's mastectomy scars showed up on a TSA scan, which forced a horrifying pat-down ('feel-up' in her words) of the affected area. The woman decided that she would not subject herself to that again, and was barred from a later flight from Seattle to Juneau for that reason. But now the story takes an interesting turn: the woman is Alaska State Rep. Sharon Cissna, and once she finally made it back to Alaska she started sponsoring legislation to restrict TSA searches. Her many bills, if passed, would criminalize both pat-downs and 'naked scanning,' as well as require better health warnings for X-ray scanners and even studies of airport screenings' physical and psychological effects. Other states, including Utah and Texas, are considering similar legislation. For example, Texas State Rep. David Simpson is preparing to reintroduce his Traveler Dignity Act again in 2013 if he is re-elected. The last time that bill was being considered the Federal government threatened to turn all of Texas into a 'no-fly zone'."
Hugh Pickens writes "BBC reports that a growing body of evidence from both science and history suggests that eight-hours of uninterrupted sleep may be unnatural as a wealth of historical evidence reveals that humans used to sleep in two distinct chunks called first and second sleep. A book by historian Roger Ekirch, At Day's Close: Night in Times Past, unearths more than 500 references to a segmented sleeping pattern — in diaries, court records, medical books and literature, from Homer's Odyssey to an anthropological account of modern tribes in Nigeria. 'It's not just the number of references — it is the way they refer to it, as if it was common knowledge,' says Ekirch. References to the first and second sleep started to disappear during the late 17th Century with improvements in street lighting, domestic lighting and a surge in coffee houses — which were sometimes open all night. Today most people seem to have adapted quite well to the eight-hour sleep, but Ekirch believes many sleeping problems may have roots in the human body's natural preference for segmented sleep which could be the root of a condition called sleep maintenance insomnia, where people wake during the night and have trouble getting back to sleep. 'Our pattern of consolidated sleep has been a relatively recent development, another product of the industrial age, while segmented sleep was long the natural form of our slumber, having a provenance as old as humankind,' says Ekrich, adding that we may 'choose to emulate our ancestors, for whom the dead of night, rather than being a source of dread, often afforded a welcome refuge from the regimen of daily life.'"
theodp writes "The WSJ reports that a coalition of Internet giants including Google has agreed to support a do-not-track button to be embedded in most Web browsers — a move that the industry had been resisting for more than a year. The new do-not-track button isn't going to stop all Web tracking. The companies have agreed to stop using the data about people's Web browsing habits to customize ads, and have agreed not to use the data for employment, credit, health-care or insurance purposes. But the data can still be used for some purposes such as 'market research' and 'product development' and can still be obtained by law enforcement officers. Meanwhile, after Google got caught last week bypassing privacy settings on Safari, and was accused of also circumventing IE's P3P Privacy Protection feature, CBS MoneyWatch contacted Mozilla to see if it had noticed Google bypassing Firefox's privacy controls. After reports that Google ponied up close to a billion dollars to Mozilla to beat out a Microsoft bid, this seems to be one of those have-you-stopped-beating-your-wife type questions that has no good answer. Anyway, according to a statement attributed to Alex Fowler, global privacy and public policy lead for Mozilla: 'Our testing did not reveal any instances of Google bypassing user privacy settings.'"
ananyo writes "One hundred academics at the University of Sydney, Australia, have this week been told they will lose their jobs for not publishing frequently enough. The move is part of a wider cost-cutting plans designed to pay for new buildings and refurbishment to the university. Letters were posted to researchers on Monday 20 February, informing them their positions were being terminated because they hadn't published at least four 'research outputs' over the past three years. It is unclear which research fields the academics work in. Another 64 academics were told they had a choice between leaving and moving to a teaching-only position, he said."
First time accepted submitter TempestRose writes "The trials and tribulations of the time zone database sued by an astrology software company are finally over. From the article: 'The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is pleased to announce that a copyright lawsuit threatening an important database of time zone information has been dismissed. The astrology software company that filed the lawsuit, Astrolabe, has also apologized and agreed to a 'covenant not to sue' going forward, which will help protect the database from future baseless legal actions and disruptions.'"
itwbennett writes "Don't believe recent claims made by a blogger that non-functioning batteries in the Tesla Roadster cause the electric cars to be bricked, says IDC analyst Sam Jaffe. 'Here's the primary fact that the blogger in question doesn't understand: the Tesla battery pack is not a battery,' says Jaffe. 'It's a collection of more than 8,000 individual batteries. Each of those cells is independently managed. So there's only two ways for the entire battery pack to fail. The first is if all 8,000 cells individually fail (highly unlikely except in the case of something catastrophic like a fire). The second failure mechanism is if the battery management system tells the pack to shut down because it has detected a dangerous situation, such as an extremely low depth of discharge. If that's the case, all that needs to be done is to tow the vehicle to a charger, recharge the batteries and then reboot the battery management system. This is the most likely explanation for the five 'bricks' that the blogger claims to have heard about.'"
Scientists have produced the most precise measurement of a fundamental particle called the W boson. It will help them search for the elusive Higgs boson, the discovery of which would be an epoch-making event.
The White House announced Thursday a new ¿Consumer Bill of Rights¿ for online privacy and that the net¿s biggest online ad networks that build profiles will respect a ¿Do Not Track¿ setting in browsers.
Google spokeswoman Niki Fenwick declined to comment on the report, as Motorola's acquisition has not been closed.
A federal appeals court Thursday upheld a voter-approved measure requiring California authorities to take a DNA sample from every adult arrested on felony accusations in the Golden State.
What's a "Fuel" point? It¿s an arbitrary metric of how much one runs, walks, skips or jumps while wearing Nike+¿s FuelBand exercise monitor, which went on sale Wednesday. We submit our first impressions.
Seeking to blur the lines between cloud services and in-house data centers, Amazon Web Services has released Simple Workflow Service (SWF). Initial developer reception is positive, but will the service usher a bigger shift to the cloud?
As part of a new promotion for its forthcoming sci-fi role-playing game, BioWare is launching copies of Mass Effect 3 into Earth's upper atmosphere in San Francisco, California on Thursday, the company said in a press release this week.
Dimension Data cannon-balled into the cloud pool today with a number of new enterprise cloud services, mostly acquired with its purchase of OpSource in June of last year.
A federal appeals court is rejecting an appeal from a bank-fraud defendant who has been ordered to decrypt her laptop so its contents can be used in her criminal case.
A pilot preparing for an around-the-world flight in a solar plane sounds remarkably bright and alert after 60 hours in a flight simulator. Landing could be tricky, but he's not worried.
There are thieves out there who want your luggage, which is why you should never leave it unattended. There are also spies who want your confidential documents about your next-gen spy drone. You probably don't want to leave those alone either.
Joseph Gutheinz is on a mission for the moon. Decades ago, after NASA¿s best and brightest brought back 850 pounds of rocks from their lunar journeys, the U.S. gave them away as "goodwill" gifts to the world¿s nations. Then many of them disappeared, stolen or lost in the aftermath of political turmoil, offered for millions on the black market. Gutheinz, first as a NASA investigator and now leading a ragtag group of students, has dedicated himself to getting them back. In a wild story of geopolitics, crime, and science, author Joe Kloc tracks one man's obsession to make sure the moon doesn¿t fall into the wrong hands.
Google, Microsoft, and Netflix have teamed up to propose a copy protection protocol-- AKA DRM -- for HTML5 video. It's just a draft right now, but already the response from other W3C members has been overwhelmingly negative.
The Pentagon is spending $100 million on no fewer than six different kinds of laser guns designed to fry bombs from a safe distance. And that's just the tally of the laser, microwave or radio-frequency blasters that are currently in development.
After finding gaseous clouds of buckyballs in space last year, astronomers have now discovered the carbon balls in a solid form, around a pair of stars some 6,500 light-years from Earth.
The Persona project is Mozilla's latest effort to move identity management from the web to the browser. The Firefox of the future may not only remember your passwords, but handle the entire login process for you.
Intel is opening up its manufacturing facilities to third parties, as it takes the further tentative steps toward building a chip-to-order foundry business. The microprocessor giant announced last year that it would build FPGAs for Achronix Semiconductor, and on Tuesday a second FPGA designer, Tabula, said that it would have its chips built by Intel.
The industry's biggest awards still won't recognize the amazing work being done by actors and effects people who are changing the face of movies.
How does a do-it-yourself space architect keep his capsule upright? With soda pop carbonation canisters, of course. Rocket Shop blogger and Copenhagen Suborbitals co-founder Kristian von Bengston explains why.
The Stringbike is a bicycle from another world, a cat's cradle of strings, springs and pulleys. But it's so expensive, it may never win the public's acceptance.
The U.S. military used to obsess over how many Taliban laid down their arms, calling it key to ending the war. But it turns out that nearly two years into a heavily promoted "reintegration" program, barely 12 percent of the Taliban are quitting the fight. So the military has started saying the (anemic) numbers don't tell the real story.
A nasty strain of drug-resistant bacteria called MRSA originated in humans but jumped to pigs on farms. There, it acquired a raft of resistance -- and then jumped back to humans, according to a new study. Superbug blogger Maryn McKenna reports.
Google's daily brainteaser helps hone your search skills.
AppSense Labs today released a new product aimed at making free-wheeling consumer cloud practices such as synching of mobile devices more acceptable at work. But while Dropbox is popular and DataLocker is welcome for encypting mobile data, the bigger question facing IT soon will be what to do about iCloud on Macs and SkyDrive on Windows 8.
The alleged accomplice of an accused cable-modem hacker testified in court on Wednesday that the suspect taught him how to pirate cable service using hacked firmware and cloned Mac addresses.