The hacktivist group Anonymous hacked the U.S. federal sentencing website early Saturday, using the page to make a brazen and boisterous declaration of "war" on the U.S. government.

The group claims mysterious code-based "warheads," named for each of the Supreme Court Justices, are about to be deployed.

As of midnight Pacific time, the front page of Ussc.gov — the Federal agency that establishes sentencing policies and practices for the Federal courts — is filled with a long screed in green on black, together with this YouTube video:

All areas of ussc.gov other than the front page appear to be functioning normally. In other words, there's no denial of service attack or widespread vandalism. (Update, an hour later: it's getting a little slow and has all the hallmarks of a DDoS.)

At the bottom of the page is a series of nine files, mirrored three times. Each file is named for a current U.S. Supreme Court Justice.

The statement opens with a lament for Aaron Swartz, the Reddit programmer and Internet activist who committed suicide earlier this month. Promising revenge for his treatment at the hands of a federal prosecutor, the screed veers into some of the most inflammatory — dare we say hyperbolic — language we've seen on a simple front page hack.

The group talks of planting "multiple warheads" on "compromised systems" on various unnamed websites, and encourages members to download a given file from ussc.gov that is "primed, armed and quietly distributed to numerous mirrors." It has given the warhead "launch" the name of "Operation Last Resort," the text said:

There has been a lot of fuss recently in the technological media regarding such operations as Red October, the widespread use of vulnerable browsers and the availability of zero-day exploits for these browsers and their plugins. None of this comes of course as any surprise to us, but it is perhaps good that those within the information security industry are making the extent of these threats more widely understood.
Still, there is nothing quite as educational as a well-conducted demonstration...
Through this websites and various others that will remain unnamed, we have been conducting our own infiltration. We did not restrict ourselves like the FBI to one high-profile compromise. We are far more ambitious, and far more capable. Over the last two weeks we have wound down this operation, removed all traces of leakware from the compromised systems, and taken down the injection apparatus used to detect and exploit vulnerable machines.
We have enough fissile material for multiple warheads. Today we are launching the first of these. Operation Last Resort has begun...

Here's the list of files the group is encouraging its followers to download:

What's in the files, and does it have anything to do with the recent "Red October" series of security breaches, thought to be prevalent in China and Russia? Anonymous plays coy:

The contents are various and we won't ruin the speculation by revealing them. Suffice it to say, everyone has secrets, and some things are not meant to be public. At a regular interval commencing today, we will choose one media outlet and supply them with heavily redacted partial contents of the file. Any media outlets wishing to be eligible for this program must include within their reporting a means of secure communications.
We have not taken this action lightly, nor without consideration of the possible consequences. Should we be forced to reveal the trigger-key to this warhead, we understand that there will be collateral damage. We appreciate that many who work within the justice system believe in those principles that it has lost, corrupted, or abandoned, that they do not bear the full responsibility for the damages caused by their occupation.
It is our hope that this warhead need never be detonated.

What "collateral damage" is the hacktivist group talking about — and is there anything to their threats? We're continuing to update this story, but give us your take in the comments.

From Chris Taylor 

The universe can be a very strange place. While groundbreaking ideas such as quantum theory, relativity and even the Earth going around the Sun might be commonly accepted now, science still continues to show that the universe contains things you might find it difficult to believe, and even more difficult to get your head around. 

10. Negative energy

Theoretically, the lowest temperature that can be achieved is absolute zero, exactly ?273.15°C, where the motion of all particles stops completely. However, you can never actually cool something to this temperature because, in quantum mechanics, every particle has a minimum energy, called “zero-point energy,” which you cannot get below. Remarkably, this minimum energy doesn’t just apply to particles, but to any vacuum, whose energy is called “vacuum energy.” To show that this energy exists involves a rather simple experiment– take two metal plates in a vacuum, put them close together, and they will be attracted to each other. This is caused by the energy between the plates only being able to resonate at certain frequencies, while outside the plates the vacuum energy can resonate at pretty much any frequency. Because the energy outside the plates is greater than the energy between the plates, the plates are pushed towards each other. As the plates get closer together, the force increases, and at around a 10 nm separation this effect (called the Casimir effect) creates one atmosphere of pressure between them. Because the plates reduce the vacuum energy between them to below the normal zero-point energy, the space is said to have negative energy, which has some unusual properties.

One of the properties of a negative-energy vacuum is that light actually travels faster in it than it does in a normal vacuum, something that may one day allow people to travel faster than the speed of light in a kind of negative-energy vacuum bubble. Negative energy could also be used to hold open a transversible wormhole, which although theoretically possible, would collapse as soon as it was created without a means to keep it open. Negative energy also causes black holes to evaporate. Vacuum energy is often modeled as virtual particles popping into existence and annihilating. This doesn’t violate any energy conservation laws as long as the particles are annihilated shortly afterwards. However, if two particles are produced at the event horizon of a black hole, one can be moving away from the black hole, while the other is falling into it. This means they won’t be able to annihilate, so the particles both end up with negative energy. When the negative energy particle falls into the black hole, it lowers the mass of the black hole instead of adding to it, and over time particles like these will cause the black hole to evaporate completely. Because this theory was first suggested by Stephen Hawking, the particles given off by this effect (the ones that don’t fall into the black hole) are called Hawking radiation. It was the first accepted theory to unite quantum theory with general relativity, making it Hawking’s greatest scientific achievement to date.

9. Frame Dragging

One prediction of Einstein’s theory of general relativity is that when a large object moves, it drags the space-time around it, causing nearby objects to be pulled along as well. It can occur when a large object is moving in a straight line or is rotating, and, although the effect is very small, it has been experimentally verified. The Gravity Probe B experiment, launched in 2004, was designed to measure the space-time distortion near Earth. Although sources of interference were larger than expected, the frame-dragging effect has been measured to an uncertainty of 15%, with further analysis hoping to reduce this further.

The expected effects were very close to predictions: due to the rotation of the Earth, the probe was pulled from its orbit by around 2 meters per year, an effect purely caused by the mass of the Earth distorting the space-time surrounding it. The probe itself would not feel this extra acceleration because it is not caused by an acceleration on the probe, but rather on the space-time the probe is traveling through–analogous to a rug being pulled under a table, rather than moving the table itself.

8. Relativity of Simultaneity

The relativity of simultaneity is the idea that whether two events occur simultaneously or not is relative and depends on the observer. It is a strange consequence of the special theory of relativity, and applies to any events that happen that are separated by some distance. For example, if a firework is let off on Mars and another on Venus, one observer traveling through space one way might say they happen at the same time (compensating for the time light takes to reach them), while another observer traveling another way might say the one on Mars went off first, and yet another might say the one on Venus went off first. It is caused by the way different viewpoints become distorted compared to each other in special relativity. And because they are all relative, no observer can be said to have the correct viewpoint.

This can lead to very unusual scenarios, such as an observer witnessing effect before cause (for example, seeing a bomb go off, then later seeing someone light the fuse). However, once the observer sees the effect, they cannot interact with the cause without traveling faster than the speed of light, which was one of the first reasons faster-than-light travel was believed to be forbidden, because it is akin to time travel, and a universe where you can interact with the cause after the effect makes no sense.

7. Black Strings

One of the longest outstanding mysteries in physics is how gravity is related to the other fundamental forces, such as electromagnetism. One theory, first proposed in 1919, showed that if an extra dimension is added to the universe, gravity still exists in the first four dimensions (three space dimensions and time), but the way this four dimensional space curves over the extra fifth dimension, naturally produces the other fundamental forces. However, we cannot see or detect this fifth dimension, so it was proposed that the extra dimension was curled up, and hence became invisible to us. This theory was what ultimately led to string theory, and is still included at the heart of most string theory analysis.

Since this extra dimension is so small, only tiny objects, such as particles, can move along it. In these cases, they ultimately just end up where they started, since the extra dimension is curled up on itself. However, one object that becomes much more complex in five dimensions is a black hole. When extended to five dimensions, it becomes a “black string,” and unlike a normal 4D black hole, it is unstable (this ignores the fact that 4D black holes eventually evaporate). This black string will destabilize into a whole string of black holes, connected by further black strings, until the black strings are pinched off entirely and leave the set of black holes. These multiple 4D black holes then combine into one larger black hole. The most interesting thing about this is that, using current models, the final black hole is a “naked” singularity. That is, it has no event horizon surrounding it. This violates the Cosmic Censorship Hypothesis, which says that all singularities must be surrounded by an event horizon, in order to avoid the time-travel effects that are believed to happen near a singularity from changing the history of the entire universe, as they can never escape from behind an event horizon.

6. Geon

As is best shown in the equation E=MC2, energy and matter are fundamentally connected. One effect of this is that energy, as well as mass, creates a gravitational field. A geon, first investigated by John Wheeler, in 1955, is an electromagnetic or gravitational wave whose energy creates a gravitational field, which in turn holds the wave itself together in a confined space. Wheeler speculated that there may be a link between microscopic geons and elementary particles, and that they might even be the same thing. A more extreme example is a “kugelblitz” (German for “ball lightning”), which is where such intense light is concentrated at a particular point that the gravity caused by the light energy becomes strong enough to collapse into a black hole, trapping the light inside. Although nothing is thought to prevent the formation of a kugelblitz, geons are now only believed to be able to form temporarily, as they will inevitably leak energy and collapse. This unfortunately indicates that Wheeler’s initial conjecture was incorrect, but this has not been definitively proven.

5. Kerr Black Hole

The type of black hole most people are familiar with, which has an event horizon on the outside acting as the “point of no return” and a point singularity of infinite density on the inside, actually has a more specific name: a Schwarzschild black hole. It is named after Karl Schwarzschild, who found the mathematical solution of Einstein’s field equations for a spherical, non-rotating mass in 1915, only a month after Einstein actually published his general theory of relativity. However, it wasn’t until 1963 that mathematician Roy Kerr found the solution for a rotating spherical mass. Hence, a rotating black hole is called a Kerr black hole, and it has some unusual properties.

At the centre of a Kerr black hole, there is no point singularity, but rather a ring singularity—a spinning one-dimensional ring held open by its own momentum. There are also two event horizons, an inner and outer one, and an ellipsoid called the ergosphere, inside which space-time itself rotates with the black hole (because of frame dragging) faster than the speed of light. When entering the black hole, by passing through the outer event horizon, space-like paths become time-like, meaning that it is impossible to avoid the singularity at the centre, just like in a Schwarzschild black hole. However, when you pass through the inner event horizon, your path becomes space-like again. The difference is this: space-time itself is reversed. This means gravity near the ring singularity becomes repulsive, actually pushing you away from the centre. In fact, unless you enter the black hole exactly on the equator, it is impossible to hit the ring singularity itself. Additionally, ring singularities can be linked through space-time, so they can act as wormholes, although exiting the black hole on the other side would be impossible (unless it was a naked singularity, possibly created when the ring singularity spins fast enough). Traveling through a ring singularity might take you to another point in space-time, such as another universe, where you could see light falling in from outside the black hole, but not leave the black hole itself. It might even take you to a “white hole” in a negative universe, the exact meaning of which is unknown.
 

4. Quantum Tunneling

 

 

 

The next time humans set foot on an alien world, they may not travel alone. Small, lightweight "bug boxes" packed full of engineered microbes could make life on hostile planets a lot more liveable.

Pioneering settlers on a distant world will require food, fuel and shelter if they are to survive, but bringing bulky supplies from Earth is far too costly. Synthetic biology offers another option. Microbes weigh precious little, and would take up next to no space on a spacecraft, but once the mission lands - on Mars, say - they could multiply by feeding on the materials available there. The products of their labour could provide the building blocks essential for a human settlement.

NASA has already begun research to realise this dream, says Lynn Rothschild at the Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. Rothschild is leader of NASA's new Synthetic Biology Initiative, which aims to build designer microbes for future crewed space missions. She shared her vision at last week's BioDesign Forum in Cambridge, UK.

Synthetic biology lies at the crossroads of biology and engineering. Its practitioners have built a biological toolkit consisting of chunks of genes, called biobricks, each of which performs a specific function - making a bacterium generate natural antifreeze molecules, for example. Biobricks can be inserted into other microbes to give them that function.

Using the approach, a microbe with the potential to survive on an alien world can become one that could sustain human life there.

Take the need for energy. Many earthly microbes would die in extraterrestrial atmospheres rich in carbon dioxide and nitrogen - the two main constituents of Martian air. An ancient cyanobacterium called Anabaena thrives in those conditions, though, metabolising both gases to make sugars. "As long as it has warmth and some shielding from ultraviolet light radiation, it should do well on gases in the Mars atmosphere," says Rothschild.

Naturally enough, Anabaena uses most of the energy it produces from CO2 and nitrogen, but synthetic biologists can encourage the cyanobacteria to share its supplies. Last year, at a synthetic biology competition - International Genetically Engineered Machines (iGEM) - a team from Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, and Stanford University in California showed how inserting genetic machinery from E. coli makes Anabaena excrete more of its energy as sugar. The team even showed that they could support colonies of other bacteria on the sugar. In theory, such microbial colonies could make oil, plastics or fuel for the astronauts.

The team, led by recent Brown graduate André Burnier and advised by Rothschild, has also come up with a way to supply human settlers on Mars with bricks and mortar. They began with a bacterium called Sporosarcina pasteurii, which, unusually, breaks down urea - the principle waste product in urine - and excretes ammonium. This makes the local environment alkaline enough for calcium carbonate cements to form.

The idea is that the waste produced by astronauts could feed the microbes. The microbes, in turn, would help cement together fine rocky material on a planet's surface to create bricks.

As a proof of principle, Burnier's team confirmed in experiments that loose material can be cemented together in about two weeks to create a house brick with the compressive strength of concrete. They also managed to isolate the cement-building genetic component of the bacterium, creating a biobrick that they have inserted into E. coli to give this hardy bacterium the same cement-enabling properties.

The proposals are compelling, says Jim Haseloff, a synthetic biologist working on plants at the University of Cambridge.

"Every gram delivered to Mars or other planets translates into huge additional costs and energy demands," says Paul Dear at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. "Biology rather than physical engineering is the only realistic way to do things on a planetary scale."

Dear cautions that it would be cavalier to introduce earthly bugs into alien environments before we know whether such planets have, or have ever had, microbes of their own. But it will be decades before a bug box is used by astronauts, says Rothschild, making the contamination point moot for now.

"The most appropriate way forward would be tests on robotic missions," she says. Only after they've been tested successfully by the robots would bug boxes be considered for crewed missions.

Dear agrees with the robot-first approach. "It takes a lot of faith to trust your life to a bacterium."

Source...

A new study, published in the journal Science, details how scientists have created a tiny, fully functional electronic device capable of vanishing within their environment, like in the body or in water, once they are no longer needed or useful. There are already implants that dispense drugs or provide electrical stimulation but they do not dissolve.

The latest creation is an early step in a technology that may benefit not only medicine, like enabling the development of medical implants that don't need to be surgically removed or the risk of long-term side effects, but also electronic waste disposal.

Researchers led by John Rogers, a materials scientist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Fiorenzo Omenetto, a biomedical engineer at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, and Youggang Huang of Northwestern University have already designed an imaging system that monitors tissue from inside a mouse, a thermal patch that prevents infection after a surgical site is stitched up, solar cells as well as strain and temperature sensors.

While most electronic devices are built to last, the latest device is made up of silicon and a tiny magnesium oxide circuit encapsulated in a protective layer of silk that can easily and harmlessly be absorbed by body fluids.

"We refer to this type of technology as transient electronics," Rogers, a professor of engineering at the University of Illinois, said in a statement. "From the earliest days of the electronics industry, a key design goal has been to build devices that last forever -- with completely stable performance. But if you think about the opposite possibility -- devices that are engineered to physically disappear in a controlled and programmed manner -- then other, completely different kinds of application opportunities open up."

The researchers, who have already developed "electronic tattoos," sensors that bend and stretch with the skin, say that they can now make just about any kind of dissolving high-performance electronic or optical device using transient electronics, according to Nature News.

In the latest experiment, researchers had created tiny computer chip-like devices that were designed to generate heat to kill germs and fight infection after surgery. They found that the devices worked in mice for more than a week until their silk coating dissolved enough for bodily fluids to break down key parts of the device. They found that after three weeks, the tiny gadgets had completely vanished.

The latest technology could also be used to develop cell phones and other common gadgets that dissolve after a number of years rather than ending up in landfills, according to researchers.

"These electronics are there when you need them, and after they've served their purpose they disappear. This is a completely new concept," Huang said.

Google just announced an update to its Flight Search feature that makes it easier for tablet users to search for and book travel from the couch. According to a recent study, 47 percent of all U.S. tablet owners who search for travel on their tablets also end up making 

purchases on the device. Starting today, travelers who use their iPads or Nexus 7s to use Flight Search will get to see this new tablet-optimized user interface.


This new UI, says Google, will allow you to “easily explore places to visit on the map and see prices updated in real-time for each destination.” All of the usual Flight Search features are available through the tablet interface, including the ability to find the cheapest dates to travel (something Google does faster than any other flight search tool), as well as the ability to see your flight on a map and filter by number of stops, airline (and airline alliance), price, duration, and connecting airports.

         

Google launched its long-awaited Flight Search feature last September after the U.S. Justice Department cleared the company’s acquisition of flight search and airline logistics specialist ITA Software in April 2011. The first version of Flight Search was somewhat limited (and rightly labeled as a beta), but since then, Google has continuously improved the service. Earlier this year, for example, it finally added international destinations.

 Two possible pyramid complexes might have been found in Egypt, according to a Google Earth satellite imagery survey.

Located about 90 miles apart, the sites contain unusual grouping of mounds with intriguing features and orientations, said satellite archaeology researcher Angela Micol of Maiden, N.C.

One site in Upper Egypt, just 12 miles from the city of Abu Sidhum along the Nile, features four mounds each with a larger, triangular-shaped plateau.

The two larger mounds at this site are approximately 250 feet in width, with two smaller mounds approximately 100 feet in width.

NEWS: Egyptian Pyramids Found With NASA Satellite

The site complex is arranged in a very clear formation with the large mound extending a width of approximately 620 feet -- almost three times the size of the Great Pyramid.

"Upon closer examination of the formation, this mound appears to have a very flat top and a curiously symmetrical triangular shape that has been heavily eroded with time," Micol wrote in her website Google Earth Anomalies.

Intriguingly, when zooming in on the top of the triangular formation, two circular, 20-foot-wide features appear almost in the very center of the triangle.



Some 90 miles north near the Fayoum oasis, the second possible pyramid complex contains a four-sided, truncated mound that is approximately 150 feet wide.

ANALYSIS: Satellite Views Reveal Early Human Settlements

"It has a distinct square center which is very unusual for a mound of this size and it almost seems pyramidal when seen from above," Micol wrote.

Located just 1.5 miles south east of the ancient town of Dimai, the site also contains three smaller mounds in a very clear formation, "similar to the diagonal alignment of the Giza Plateau pyramids," Micol stated in a press release.

"The color of the mounds is dark and similar to the material composition of Dimai's walls which are made of mudbrick and stone," the researcher wrote.

HOWSTUFFWORKS: Building the Pyramids
 Founded in the third century B.C. under the Ptolemaic king Ptolemy II Philadelphus (309 B.C.–246 B.C.), Dimai was built on top of an earlier neolithic settlement.

Also known as Dimeh al-Siba, Dimeh of the Lions, the town is surrounded by a mudbrick wall that stretches up to 32 feet high and 16 feet thick, and features at its center a ruined stone temple dedicated to the crocodile god Soknopaios.

Indeed, the town's Greek name, Soknopaiou Nesos, means "Island of Soknopaios."


Well known to scholars for the amount of papyri and other inscribed material found among its ruins, Dimai reached its peak during the first and second century A.D. thanks to a major trade route. It was abandoned during the mid-third century A.D.

According to Micol, both sites have been verified as undiscovered by Egyptologist and pyramid expert Nabil Selim, whose findings include the pyramid called Sinki at Abydos and the Dry Moat surrounding the Step pyramid complex at Saqqara.

Selim found that the smaller 100-foot mounds at the site near Abu Sidhum are a similar size as the 13th Dynasty Egyptian pyramids, if a square base can be discovered.

BIG PIC: Man Etches Name in Sand, Visible from Space

"The images speak for themselves. It's very obvious what the sites may contain but field research is needed to verify they are, in fact, pyramids," Micol said.

The researcher has previously located several possible archaeological sites with Google Earth, including a potential underwater city off the coast of the Yucatan peninsula.

She believes the use of infrared imagery will allow scientists to see the extent of the complexes in greater detail.

The sites have been sent to Egyptologists and researchers for further investigation and "ground truthing," she said.

Photos: The site near Abu Sidhum contains four mounds with a larger, triangular-shaped plateau. Credit: Angela Micol;
-- Enhanced image of the 150 foot wide, four-sided mound near the ancient town of Dimai. Credit: Angela Micol;
-- The site also contains three smaller mounds in a formation similar to the diagonal alignment of the Giza Plateau pyramids. Credit: Angela Micol.

Rising security incidents and poorly defended phones suggest 2012 could be a risky year for smart-phone users.

A recent rise in Android malware—combined with increased efforts to combat the threat—highlight the fact that, just like tech companies, app makers, and users, hackers are fast turning their attention to mobile devices. What's more, experts say, such devices are often configured in ways that make it easier for malware to thrive.

Several new types of Android malware have been spotted "in the wild" in recent weeks, and they demonstrate growing sophistication. One specimen, dubbed Opfake, is a bogus Web browser that automatically makes calls to premium phone lines. Opfake exhibits a powerful trick previously seen only in desktop malware, whereby the code repeatedly mutates to make anti-virus detection more difficult.

To counter the rising tide of threats, Google last week announced it had launched an app prescreening tool called Bouncer that runs a server-based simulation to check apps for malicious behavior—such as attempts to access or send personal data, or simply send out pricey text messages. Google blocks them before they get into the official Android Market.

Bouncer has been used quietly for several months; in the second half of 2011, the Android market saw a 40 percent decrease in malware apps identified as potentially malicious, compared to the first half of the year, wrote Hiroshi Lockheimer, Google's Android engineering vice president, in a blog post.


In a similar move, the mobile security firm Lookout says it is testing new methods for Android users that quarantine and scan downloaded apps. Whereas many existing tools screen the phone for already installed malware, a new tool would allow users to delay installation of a downloaded app until a check was complete. "For many users who install apps outside of Android Market, there is a need for pre-installation detection," says Derek Halliday, senior security manager at Lookout.

Lookout found, at the end of 2011, that 4 percent of Android users were likely to encounter malware over the course of the year—up from 1 percent of users a year ago, though part of the increase may be a function of improved detection, Halliday says.

Android is the most popular smart-phone operating system in the world, with 52.5 percent of the global market at the end of 2011, according to Gartner.

By David Talbot

                                     Some photos just don't need to see the light of the next day.

Facebook is still working on deleting photos from its servers in a timely manner nearly three years after Ars first brought attention to the topic. The company admitted on Friday that its older systems for storing uploaded content "did not always delete images from content delivery networks in a reasonable period of time even though they were immediately removed from the site," but said it's currently finishing up a newer system that makes the process much quicker. In the meantime, photos that users thought they "deleted" from the social network months or even years ago remain accessible via direct link.

The problem: "deleted" photos never go away

When we first investigated this phenomenon in 2009, we discovered that photos "deleted" from Facebook seemingly never go away if you have a direct link to the image file on Facebook's servers. Users who might have had second thoughts about posting a photo—whether it was because they didn't want retaliation from an employer, wanted to avoid family drama, or uploaded a photo of a friend without their permission—could certainly remove the image from Facebook's main user interface, but as long as someone had a direct link to the .jpg file in question, the photo would remain accessible for an indefinite amount of time. When we asked Facebook about it, we were told that the company was "working with our content delivery network (CDN) partner to significantly reduce the amount of time that backup copies persist."

But when we followed up on the story more than a year later, our "deleted" photos were still accessible via direct link. That's when the reader stories started pouring in: we were told horror stories about online harassment using photos that were allegedly deleted years ago, and users who were asked to take down photos of friends that they had put online.

There were plenty of stories in between as well, and panicked Facebook users continue to e-mail me, asking if we have heard of any new way to ensure that their deleted photos are, well, deleted. For example, one reader linked me to a photo that a friend of his had posted of his toddler crawling naked on the lawn. He asked his friend to take it down for obvious reasons, and so the friend did—in May of 2008. As of this writing in 2012, I have personally confirmed that the photo is still online, as are several others that readers linked me to that were deleted at various points in 2009 and 2010.

(Amusingly, after publishing the 2010 followup, Facebook appeared to delete my photos from its CDN that I had linked in the piece. The company never offered me any explanation, but my photos were the only ones that were deleted at that time. Other "deleted" photos that I had saved links to—ones that weren't from my account and were deleted even earlier than mine—remained online.)

It's 2012, and things aren't much different—yet

After confirming once again that all the photos that my friends and Ars readers had sent in were still online, I reached out to Facebook once again, looking for an answer as to why this is still going on nearly three years after the company first promised it was "working" on the issue.

"The systems we used for photo storage a few years ago did not always delete images from content delivery networks in a reasonable period of time even though they were immediately removed from the site," Facebook spokesperson Frederic Wolens told Ars via e-mail.

Wolens explained that photos remaining online are stuck in a legacy system that was apparently never operating properly, but said the company is working on a new system that will delete the photos in a mere month and a half. For really real this time.

"We have been working hard to move our photo storage to newer systems which do ensure photos are fully deleted within 45 days of the removal request being received," Wolens said. "This process is nearly complete and there is only a very small percentage of user photos still on the old system awaiting migration, the URL you provided was stored on this legacy system. We expect this process to be completed within the next month or two, at which point we will verify the migration is complete and we will disable all the old content."

Long story short, Wolens claims that Facebook is on the verge of fixing up its content systems so that "deleted" photos are really, truly deleted from the CDN within 45 days. But with the process not expected to be finished until a couple months from now—and unfortunately, with a company history of stretching the truth when asked about this topic—we'll have to see it before we believe it.

It's hard to believe that we've been following this story over a period of years and the problem hasn't been fixed yet. But unlike the past, we do have some semblance of confidence that Facebook might actually be working on it this time. We'll continue to follow this story until the new changes are actually in place. In the meantime, does anyone have any new Facebook horror stories to share?

The huge success of online shopping and advertising—led by giants like Amazon and Google—is in no small part thanks to software that logs when you visit Web pages and what you click on. Startup Prism Skylabs offers brick-and-mortar businesses the equivalent—counting, logging, and tracking people in a store, coffee shop, or gym with software that works with video from security cameras.

"There's a lot of wonderful information locked up in video, and 40 million security cameras in the U.S. collecting it, but it's data that's not been available," says Steve Russell, cofounder and CEO of Prism, based in San Francisco. "We want to free up that information."

Prism's software can count people that come into a business, measure the length of the line at checkout, and produce static or animated visualizations showing how people moved around a store. It is designed so that it cannot identify or track individuals. One national wireless carrier is already using Prism's technology to generate heat maps of where visitors go in their showrooms, to compare the level of interest in different devices—valuable data to them and to the device makers.

Prism's software can also be used to turn security footage into a live version of Google's Street View, says Ron Palmeri, Prism's president and other cofounder. "We give the ability to go beyond the facades of businesses and show you the inside and even how busy it is, using very effectively privacy-protected imagery."
 

That imagery can show people blurred into anonymous ghosts, in what Russell calls "Predator vision" (a pixelated image), or have people disappear altogether to be replaced with a "heat map," on which colors signal the density of people. One gym in San Francisco trialing the technology plans to use it to show customers a live view of how busy it is.

Although security cameras are typically low quality, Prism uses computational photography techniques to combine multiple frames to produce images with higher quality and resolution than the original video. "We can remove the ugly, grainy quality of surveillance footage," says Russell.

Prism's software is designed to be used with existing security cameras. Software installed on a computer linked to the cameras digests the raw video into a compressed form that is sent to cloud servers, where Prism's software does the hard work. It sends back the visualizations, statistics, and other data it extracts to a PC, smart phone, or tablet.

Since surveillance cameras are static, Prism's software can work out which parts of a scene are fixed in place, such as walls, flooring, and furniture. Anything that moves against that background is clipped out and subjected to further processing. Russell hints that he hopes to eventually offer more sophisticated analysis by taking advantage of emerging computational photography techniques—for example, Lytro's light field cameras, which produce images that can be refocused after they have been taken.

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Alarma ha provocado el anuncio que hace algunos días hizo Twitter respecto del cambio en sus términos y condiciones de uso. En ellas, señalan que (la traducción es mía)

    En la medida que continuamos creciendo a nivel internacional, entraremos en países que tienen ideas distintas sobre los contornos de la libertad de expresión. Algunas son tan distintas de las nuestras que no vamos a ser capaces de existir allí. Otras son similares, pero por razones históricas o culturales, restringen ciertos tipos de contenido, como Francia o Alemania, que prohíben el contenido pro-nazi.

    Hasta ahora, la única manera de hacerse cargo de los límites existentes en esos países era remover el contenido a nivel mundial. A partir de hoy, tendremos la capacidad de reactivamente retener el contenido de los usuarios en un país determinado, quedando disponible para el resto del mundo.

La cosa es así. Si en Argentina usted decide que la fotografía que filtró su amante en la red social, puede recurrir a tribunales y solicitar la bajada de dicho contenido. En Argentina, de hecho, hay muchos casos así. Hasta ahora, el efecto que tendría dicha orden judicial, sería de carácter global, impidiendo a cualquier poder acceder a esa imagen. La nueva política implicaría que en lugar de tener efectos mundiales, el bloqueo tendrá efectos solo locales, permitiendo a usuarios de otras jurisdicciones poder acceder a dichos contenidos no obstante estar bloqueados en un determinado país.

Esos son los hechos. Ahora, dos reflexiones.
UNO.

Antes de hablar de censura y abuso en los nuevos términos de uso hay que tomar en cuenta que hoy se bajan contenidos de redes sociales. Todos los días. Y todos lo hacen, algunos con mayor transparencia (Twitter, Google), otros con menos (Facebook). Y esto, por lo demás, es razonable que ocurra. Es un derecho vinculado a la protección de la privacidad poder solicitar la bajada de ciertos contenido bajo las circunstancias que la ley local establezca para la protección de cierta información personal. Esto no va a cambiar con las nuevas políticas.

La diferencia entre lo que sucede hoy y las nuevas políticas es que ahora dicho bloqueo sólo tendrá efectos locales. De censura poco puede haber si las bajadas de contenido se hacen 1) Localmente; y 2) bajo las reglas establecidas en las leyes locales y no de manera arbitraria.

Más aún, Twitter ha señalado que colaborarán aún más estrechamente con el proyecto Chilling Effects del Berkman Center de Harvard que monitorea las bajadas de contenido en internet. O sea, más encima con transparencia.
DOS.

Si existe un problema, éste es normativo, no de los términos de uso de Twitter. Y se me ocurren al menos dos problemas.

    Twitter lidia con ser una empresa con domicilio en Estados Unidos que presta servicios para el resto del mundo. Como tal, tiene dos opciones. O bien pretende estar por sobre las leyes del resto y aplica la jurisdicción de California ante cualquier evento -lo que implicaría quedar fuera de países con estándares legales diferentes (de libertad de expresión, privacidad o derechos de autor)- o bien se adapta a la normativa local. Y tengo la impresión que la nueva política apunta a lo segundo. Con lo que lidia, en definitiva, Twitter, es con el carácter global de internet y, en mi opinión, no lo hace de la peor manera. Si en Irán los jueces estiman que hacer bromas con la religión es un acto prohibido no creo que sea razonable para el resto del mundo estar sujetos a dicha prohibición.
    Mi colega Alberto Cerda me hacía ver el problema vinculado a la jurisdicción internacional. Si existe un tratamiento similar para la, digamos, protección de datos personales en una serie de países, no parece razonable que los efectos de una sentencia judicial en un país de aquellos no pueda tener los mismos efectos en el resto. Esto pensando especialmente en la posibilidad de demandar por perjuicios. Ahora claro, este es, de nuevo, un problema de la normativa, no de las ToS. Tengo dudas que un servicio privado tenga la obligación de tener mejores estándares que lo que establecen las leyes locales.

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Google has brought innovation to our lives since its inception, offers free services of high quality and a lot of functions we are sometimes overwhelmed by because all of the functions they offer. Here we look at 5 things you can do thanks to Google and possibly many people doesn't know, because they are not familiar with the subject or because until now had not thought of the possibilities they had with this computer giant.

1. Check unwanted access to your email (Gmail)

Gmail, allows to verify access to your account according to each IP address, so you know if someone else is accessing your email without permission and see in a detailed way if you are the victim of an unwanted entry. To verify this, at the bottom right corner of the Gmail screen, you see text that says "Last account activity" and in the bottom of a link with detailed information. Here we can see the IP, approximate location, date and time of access, so you can be sure if someone enters your account without your permission.

2. Customize your start page (iGoogle)

Google lets you customize your browser, not just special wallpapers and attractive themes, but also with applications that allow you to access a lot of information and customize the home page details.

Through the web address google.com/ig and entering the information from your Gmail account, you can store your changes to this screen on iGoogle. On this site you can customize your home page with widgets, so you can add applications that allow you to control your Gmail email, check your tweets (Twitter), check the news from Google News, and even play and share with your friends your applications. Additionally, iGoogle also lets you customize your background with a lot of themes and cool designs.

3. Install applications (Google Chrome)
Chrome, Google's browser, has been characterized by its speed and efficiency in resource consumption, becoming a strong competitor to FireFox and Internet Explorer in the browser market. One of the strengths of Chrome is that it has the ability to use applications, expanding and facilitating the use that this browser has to offer.

By visiting chrome.google.com / webstore , you can find a lot of applications (mostly free), sorted into different categories, they may be used regardless of operating system, since they work directly in Chrome. To take advantage of Chrome apps you just have to have a Gmail account.

Additionally, thanks to Chrome allows you to synchronize our options, history and data, the Google browser sync also allows to have our applications in different computers as we like. Some of the most prominent, are, Google Docs, which lets you create and share documents like Microsoft Office; Angry Birds, a game that stands out especially in the mobile market for addiction; Chrome Desktop, a utility that let you share with anyone (with Chrome) your desktop remotely, and a lot more of free applications, allowing also synchronization between devices.

4. Editing documents (Google Docs)

Speaking of outstanding applications, we have Google Docs ( docs.google.com ), although many already know, not all have given it the importance it deserves, in addition to many or at least the main functions with which we can count on Microsoft Office, it has a few extras that make it attractive to its users. First of all, Google Docs is completely free, second, it has the ability to share and edit a documents with multiple people simultaneously, which facilitates access and editing on-line between co-workers without any problem of overwriting. Also, If you install the application in Chrome, Google Docs lets you use offline documents you have stored and they will automatically sync when an Internet connection is available.

Also, as all documents are stored with your Google Account (Gmail) you dont have to worry about losing or being unable to access them, because you can do that from any place with Internet access, even from a cell phone or tablet, you can access Google Docs thanks to its application for Android. This lets you work with great freedom, ease of editing and creating documents from anywhere you work.

5. Printing on Cloud (Google Cloud Print)
A great tool that not a lot of people know is Google Cloud Print ( google.com / CloudPrint ), a service for Chrome that allows you to print documents remotely via the Internet, sharing printers you have installed on your computer. This way, working at home, you can send to print a file in your office. To use it, you just have to install Chrome and enable your printers with Google Cloud Print so that you can access them from anywhere.

Cloud Print allows you to share your printer with anyone, from any Internet-connected device, facilitating print jobs from your tablet, cell phone, office computer, or from basically anywhere.

These services are a part of the large number of utilities that Google provides us, and continues to provide us more and generally all of them free of charge. Should be noted that all these applications are linked from your Gmail account, allowing quick synchronization, without export information every time you want to use any of them.

Thanks Google :D

Written by: @rahksO

Today at Apple’s education event, the company introduced iBooks 2, a textbook platform that effectively transforms $200 textbooks into iPad apps at a much more reasonable price. But of course, a textbook platform isn’t worth a thing without the educational powerhouse publishers behind it.

Luckily, the first up to the bat on the iBooks 2 platform are names we know well: Pearson, McGraw Hill and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. They’re responsible for 90 percent of the textbooks sold.

Pearson will be offering Algebra 1, Biology, Environmental Science and Geometry, while McGraw Hill offers Algebra 1, Biology, Chemistry, Geometry and Physics. All of McGraw Hill’s offerings are available today, and Pearson’s Biology and High School Science are also available today, with its other textbooks to follow.

Apple is also working with DK Publishing, which has four books launching today: Dinosaurs and Prehistoric Life, Natural History Insects, Natural History Animals, and My First ABC.

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Having shut down its tracker server a little over a year ago, The Pirate Bay's now removing the torrent files themselves from its service. This step began today as it made magnet links the default across the site, which allow people to add torrents without downloading a file first — ultimately the same service via different means. The implication here is that even less potentially incriminating data is stored on The Pirate Bay's servers — it's far easier for them to claim that they're purely a search engine if users don't have to download files in order to find content. Torrent Freak has been told that by next month, the torrent download links will be removed, and only magnet links will remain.

The Pirate Bay says that the decision is based on magnet links taking far lower bandwidth, making it easier to use them through a proxy. This is particularly significant in light of the Dutch court order banning the website. The site's faced protracted battles over the past few years over the legal implications of hosting torrents, with the founders receiving prison sentences in Sweden for copyright infringement. Whether this new strategy will fare better in the eyes of the law — or escape the censorship of SOPA — remains to be seen.

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Researchers at Samsung have developed a smart phone that can detect people's emotions. Rather than relying on specialized sensors or cameras, the phone infers a user's emotional state based on how he's using the phone.

For example, it monitors certain inputs, such as the speed at which a user types, how often the "backspace" or "special symbol" buttons are pressed, and how much the device shakes. These measures let the phone postulate whether the user is happy, sad, surprised, fearful, angry, or disgusted, says Hosub Lee, a researcher with Samsung Electronics and the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology's Intelligence Group, in South Korea. Lee led the work on the new system. He says that such inputs may seem to have little to do with emotions, but there are subtle correlations between these behaviors and one's mental state, which the software's machine-learning algorithms can detect with an accuracy of 67.5 percent.

The prototype system, to be presented in Las Vegas next week at the Consumer Communications and Networking Conference, is designed to work as part of a Twitter client on an Android-based Samsung Galaxy S II. It enables people in a social network to view symbols alongside tweets that indicate that person's emotional state. But there are many more potential applications, says Lee. The system could trigger different ringtones on a phone to convey the caller's emotional state or cheer up someone who's feeling low. "The smart phone might show a funny cartoon to make the user feel better," he says.

Further down the line, this sort of emotion detection is likely to have a broader appeal, says Lee. "Emotion recognition technology will be an entry point for elaborate context-aware systems for future consumer electronics devices or services," he says. "If we know the emotion of each user, we can provide more personalized services."
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Samsung's system has to be trained to work with each individual user. During this stage, whenever the user tweets something, the system records a number of easily obtained variables, including actions that might reflect the user's emotional state, as well as contextual cues, such as the weather or lighting conditions, that can affect mood, says Lee. The subject also records his or her emotion at the time of each tweet. This is all fed into a type of probabilistic machine-learning algorithm known as a Bayesian network, which analyzes the data to identify correlations between different emotions and the user's behavior and context.

The accuracy is still pretty low, says Lee, but then the technology is still at a very early experimental stage, and has only been tested using inputs from a single user. Samsung won't say whether it plans to commercialize this technology, but Lee says that with more training data, the process can be greatly improved. "Through this, we will be able to discover new features related to emotional states of users or ways to predict other affective phenomena like mood, personality, or attitude of users," he says.

Reading emotion indirectly through normal cell phone use and context is a novel approach, and, despite the low accuracy, one worth pursuing, says Rosalind Picard, founder and director of MIT's Affective Computing Research Group, and cofounder of Affectiva, which last year launched a commercial product to detect human emotions. "There is a huge growing market for technology that can help businesses show higher respect for customer feelings," she says. "Recognizing when the customer is interested or bored, stressed, confused, or delighted is a vital first step for treating customers with respect," she says.

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