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Sunday, December 22nd, 2013
| Time | Event |
| 4:25p | Privacy Advocate Jacob Appelbaum Reports Break-In Of Berlin Apartment Jacob Appelbaum isn't shy about his role as a pro-privacy (and anti-secrecy) activist and hacker. A long-time contributor to the Tor project, and security researcher more generally, Appelbaum stood in for the strategically absent Julian Assange at HOPE in 2010, and more recently delivered Edward Snowden's acceptance speech when Snowden was awarded the Government Accountability Project's Whistleblower Prize. Now, he reports, his Berlin apartment appears to have been burglarized, and his computers tampered with. As reported by Deutsche Welle, "Appelbaum told [newspaper the Berliner Zeitung] that somebody had broken into his apartment and used his computer in his absence. 'When I flew away for an appointment, I installed four alarm systems in my apartment,' Appelbaum told the paper after discussing other situations which he said made him feel uneasy. 'When I returned, three of them had been turned off. The fourth, however, had registered that somebody was in my flat - although I'm the only one with a key. And some of my effects, whose positions I carefully note, were indeed askew. My computers had been turned on and off.'" It's not the first time by any means that Appelbaum's technical and political pursuits have drawn attention of the unpleasant variety.    Read more of this story at Slashdot.  |
| 5:24p | Ask Slashdot: Working With Others, As a Schizophrenic Developer? An anonymous reader writes: "I hope there are a few open source developers on Slashdot who understand this. As a developer who works alone and remotely (while living with my own family) — and is schizophrenic — there would be times I would feel very high (a surge of uncontrollable thoughts), or low because of the kind of failures that some patients with mental illness would have, and because of the emotional difficulty of being physically alone for 8 hours a day. This led me to decide to work physically together with my co-workers. Have you been in this situation before? If you have, how well did you manage it? (Medications are a part of the therapy as well.)" Read more of this story at Slashdot.  |
| 6:23p | Evad3rs Announce iOS 7 Jailbreak For Latest Apple Devices hypnosec writes "Evad3rs, the famous iOS jailbreak team, has announced an iOS 7 jailbreak that will work in all iDevices including iPhone 5S, iPhone 5C and iPad Air running iOS 7.0 through to iOS 7.0.4. The iOS 7 jailbreak was announced without much of a hype, unlike the one for iOS 6. 'Merry Christmas! The iOS 7 jailbreak has been released at http://evasi0n.com/! All donations will go to @publicknowledge, @eff and @ffii,' tweeted evad3rs." Reader FrogBlastTheVentCore adds a note of caution: "They recommend restoring your device to iOS 7.0.4 if it has received OTA updates before attempting to jailbreak." Read more of this story at Slashdot.  |
| 7:24p | Is Computer Science Education Racist and Sexist? theodp writes "What's wrong with this picture?" asked Code.org at its launch earlier this year, lamenting the lack of Computer Science students in a race and gender reference-free infographic. But as the organization has grown via public/private partnerships and inked agreements to drive the CS curriculum for the Chicago and NYC school systems, the same stats webpage has adopted a new gender and racial equity focus, positioning Computer Science education as "a chance to level the playing field" for women, Hispanic and African American students. The new message is consistent with the recently-forged Code.org partnership with the NSF-funded Exploring Computer Science (ECS, "a K-12/university partnership committed to democratizing computer science") and Computer Science Principles (CSP, "a new course under development that seeks to broaden participation in computing and computer science"). According to The Research Behind ECS, an "insidious 'virtual segregation' that maintains inequality" is to blame for keeping the number of African Americans and Latino/as CS students disproportionately low. So, what might the future of Code.org's proposed equity-based U.S. K-12 CS education look like? "Including culturally relevant instructional materials represented a driving focus of our course development," explained ECS Team members who now advise Code.org. "Cultural design tools encourage students to artistically express computing design concepts from Latino/a, African American, or Native American history as well as cultural activities in dance, skateboarding, graffiti art, and more. These types of lessons are important for students to build personal relationships with computer science concepts and applications – an important process for discovering the relevance of computer science for their own life." And — ironically for Code.org — it could mean less coding." Read more of this story at Slashdot.  |
| 8:22p | FBI's Secret Interrogation Manual: Now At the Library of Congress McGruber writes "The FBI Supervisory Special Agent who authored the FBI's interrogation manual submitted the document for copyright protection — in the process, making it available to anyone with a card for the Library of Congress to read. The story is particularly mind-boggling for two reasons. First, the American Civil Liberties Union fought a legal battle with the FBI over access to the document. When the FBI relented and released a copy to the ACLU, it was heavily redacted — unlike the 70-plus page version of the manual available from the Library of Congress. Second, the manual cannot even qualify for a copyright because it is a government work. Anything 'prepared by an officer or employee of the United States government as part of that person's official duties' is not subject to copyright in the United States." Read more of this story at Slashdot.  |
| 9:19p | UK Govt's Censorware Blocks Tech, Civil Liberties Websites A few days ago, we mentioned that the UK's ISP-level censorware software not only does a poor job of its stated job (blocking porn), but blocks at least some sex education sites, too; now, reader badger.foo writes to say that's not all: "It fell to the UK Tories to actually implement the Nanny State. Too bad Nanny Tory does not want kinds to read up on tech web sites such as slashdot.org, or civil liberties ones such as the EFF or Amnesty International. Read on for a small sample of what the filter blocks, from a blocked-by-default tech writer." Read more of this story at Slashdot.  |
| 10:22p | Asm.js Gets Faster mikejuk writes "Asm.js is a subset of standard JavaScript that is simple enough for JavaScript engines to optimize. Now Mozilla claims that with some new improvements it is at worst only 1.5 times slower than native code. How and why?The problem with JavaScript as an assembly language is that it doesn't support the range of datatypes that are needed for optimization. This is good for human programmers because they can simply use a numeric variable and not worry about the difference between int, int32, float, float32 or float64. JavaScript always uses float64 and this provides maximum precision, but not always maximum efficiency. The big single improvement that Mozilla has made to its SpiderMonkey engine is to add a float32 numeric type to asm.js. This allows the translation of float32 arithmetic in a C/C++ program directly into float32 arithmetic in asm.js. This is also backed up by an earlier float32 optimization introduced into Firefox that benefits JavaScript more generally. Benchmarks show that firefox f32 i.e. with the float32 type is still nearly always slower than native code, it is now approaching the typical speed range of native code. Mozilla think that this isn't the last speed improvement they can squeeze from JavaScript. So who needs native code now?" Read more of this story at Slashdot.  |
| 11:25p | Run Netflix On OpenSUSE sfcrazy writes "Ironically while Netflix's infrastructure runs on Linux and Open Source technologies, the service doesn't support Linux, the platform. Netflix is available for Mac, Windows, iOS, Android and Chrome OS but not for desktop Linux. One of the reasons could be that Netflix still uses Microsoft's Silverlight which is not supported on Linux. However Linux users have managed to get it to work on their distros. Now openSUSE users can also run Netflix using Pipelight." Read more of this story at Slashdot.  |
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