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IRS Left Taxpayer Data Vulnerable and Lied About It

Bruce66423 writes with news that the IRS hasn’t made much progress improving its poor IT security. From the article: “The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration found that the IRS had only partially implemented 42 percent of the corrective plans it checked off as completed in recent years. … The review (PDF) showed that the IRS failed to properly track its progress toward completing many of the fixes auditors had recommended in recent years. The agency closed most of the cases without adequate documentation and did not always upload the necessary information into a database that helps ensure compliance. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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IRS Left Taxpayer Data Vulnerable and Lied About It

Detecting Chemicals Through Bone

MTorrice writes “To understand the brain and its chemical complexities, researchers would like to peer inside the skull and measure neurotransmitters levels as the brain at work. Unfortunately, research methods to measure levels of chemicals in the brain require drilling holes in the skull, and noninvasive imaging techniques, such as MRI, can’t detect specific molecules. Now, as a first step toward a new imaging tool, chemists report they can detect molecules hidden behind 3- to 8-mm-thick bone.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Detecting Chemicals Through Bone

Failed Software Upgrade Halts Transit Service

linuxwrangler writes “San Francisco Bay Area commuters awoke this morning to the news that BART, the major regional transit system which carries hundreds of thousands of daily riders, was entirely shut down due to a computer failure. Commuters stood stranded at stations and traffic backed up as residents took to the roads. The system has returned to service and BART says the outage resulted from a botched software upgrade.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Failed Software Upgrade Halts Transit Service

Hydrobee Lets You Charge A Battery From A Fast-Flowing River To Juice Up USB Devices Off-Grid

We’ve seen fire harnessed to power a phone charger for the great outdoors, with the nifty  FlameStower , now meet Hydrobee: another Kickstarter project aiming to provide an off-grid alternative for charging a battery you can then use to juice your phone. But, as its name suggests, Hydrobee is all about water. There’s two parts to Hydrobee. When wearing its ‘Stream Body’, the gizmo can be placed in a river or dragged behind a boat – so long as the water is flowing faster than 1.8m/s (or 4mph+) – and two to four hours later its battery will be fully charged. A smaller inner unit can also be attached directly to a flowing faucet to charge – so could be used as a back-up power generator for your phone during a power outage (so long as your taps don’t require electricity to pump the water to them). Once Hydrobee’s battery is juiced, you can then plug in a USB device to charge it – a secondary charging process that presumably takes several more hours. Hydrobee reminds me of a CDT project I worked on in school, where we stuck a dynamo on a paddle wheel-bearing rig designed to float in a river and stuck a micro bulb on top that we hoped would be powered by it… Long story short it didn’t work on demo day, but that’s technology demos for you. Hydrobee has clearly perfected the hydroelectric tech better than a bunch of schoolkids managed to. The prototype consists of a tiny hydropowered turbine sited in a can with rechargeable batteries and waterproofed electronics, and a USB 2.0 port – so you can juice up your phone or other USB-powered device. The internal batteries are 6 x 1.2V AA NiMH rechargeable cells of 2,500 mAh capacity, yielding a total of 15,000 mAh. It is still a prototype for now. And Hydrobee’s U.S.-based creator has put a call out for Kickstarter users to give him feedback on the sorts of things they’d like to be able to use the device for to help shape the final product. The campaign is looking to raise $48,000 in crowdfunding, with 17 days left to run. If it hits its funding target, Hydrobees will be shipped to backers next March. The Hydrobee turbine generator, which can be used to generate a charge from water from a running faucet or hose, is being offered to early Kickstarter backers for $24. Or it’s $78 for all the kit, including the floating Stream Body.

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Hydrobee Lets You Charge A Battery From A Fast-Flowing River To Juice Up USB Devices Off-Grid

Online Car Retailer Launching Nation’s First Car "Vending Machine"

cartechboy writes “Last year’s Gallup poll showed that car salespeople are the least trusted professionals in America, ranking even below members of Congress. Enter, Carvana, an online dealership operating in Atlanta, Georgia. They allow customers to shop for cars online, secure loans online, and pay for cars online. Now they have gone one step farther and are claiming to remove the despised car salesperson from test drives and even post-purchase pickup by creating, yes, a giant auto vending machine. The facility, which will open at the end of November, will be a fully digital, 24-7 interactive ‘vehicle-delivery center’ designed to offer customers pick-up options after purchasing a vehicle online. They’ll have floor-to-ceiling windows, custom LED lighting, flat screen TV’s plus interactive keypads that identify customers based on unique buyer credentials. There will be three car pickup bays to allow for simultaneous pickups. One thing they won’t have: car sales people (Note: there will be customer service reps there to answer questions). Carvana plans to expand on the idea, presumably if this Atlanta facility works.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Online Car Retailer Launching Nation’s First Car "Vending Machine"

Boston Cops Outraged Over Plans to Watch Their Movements Using GPS

Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes “The Boston Globe reports that the pending use of GPS tracking devices, slated to be installed in Boston police cruisers, has many officers worried that commanders will monitor their every move. Boston police administrators say the system gives dispatchers the ability to see where officers are, rather than wait for a radio response and supervisors insist the system will improve their response to emergencies. Using GPS, they say, accelerates their response to a call for a shooting or an armed robbery. ‘We’ll be moving forward as quickly as possible, ‘ says former police commissioner Edward F. Davis. ‘There are an enormous amount of benefits. . . . This is clearly an important enhancement and should lead to further reductions in crime.’ But some officers said they worry that under such a system they will have to explain their every move and possibly compromise their ability to court street sources. ‘No one likes it. Who wants to be followed all over the place?’ said one officer who spoke anonymously because department rules forbid police from speaking to the media without authorization. ‘If I take my cruiser and I meet [reluctant witnesses] to talk, eventually they can follow me and say why were you in a back dark street for 45 minutes? It’s going to open up a can of worms that can’t be closed.’ Meanwhile civil libertarians are relishing the rank and file’s own backlash. ‘The irony of police objecting to GPS technology for privacy reasons is hard to miss in the aftermath of United States v. Jones, ‘ says Woodrow Hartzog. ‘But the officers’ concerns about privacy illustrate just how revealing GPS technology can be. Departments are going to have to confront the chilling effect this surveillance might have on police behavior.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Boston Cops Outraged Over Plans to Watch Their Movements Using GPS

Your Phone Number Is Going To Get a Reputation Score

Jah-Wren Ryel writes “Yes, there’s yet another company out there with an inscrutable system making decisions about you that will affect the kinds of services you’re offered. Based out of L.A.’s ‘Silicon Beach, ‘ Telesign helps companies verify that a mobile number belongs to a user (sending those oh-so-familiar ‘verify that you received this code’ texts) and takes care of the mobile part of two-factor authenticating or password changes. Among their over 300 clients are nine of the ten largest websites. Now Telesign wants to leverage the data — and billions of phone numbers — it deals with daily to provide a new service: a PhoneID Score, a reputation-based score for every number in the world that looks at the metadata Telesign has on those numbers to weed out the burner phones from the high-quality ones.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Your Phone Number Is Going To Get a Reputation Score

Google’s Wind, Solar Power Investments Top $1B

Lucas123 writes “Google just announced it is investing another $80 million in six new solar power plants in California and Arizona, bringing its total investment in renewable energy to more than $1 billion. The new plants are expected to generate 160MW of electricity, enough to power 17, 000 typical U.S. homes. They are expected to be operational by early 2014. With the new plants, Google’s renewable power facilities will be able to generate a total of 2 billion watts (gigawatts) of energy, enough to power 500, 000 homes or all of the public elementary schools in New York, Oregon, and Wyoming for one year, it said. Currently, Google gets about 20% of its power from renewable energy, but it has set a goal of achieving 100% renewable energy.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Google’s Wind, Solar Power Investments Top $1B

Facebook’s Giant New Data Center Will Be Powered By Wind Alone

In a post today on Facebook, the company’s Data Center Energy Manager Vincent Van Son announced that its new data center in Iowa will be powered solely by wind energy . That’s right: Our insatiable hunger for online validation is indirectly helping to develop sustainable energy. Read more…        

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Facebook’s Giant New Data Center Will Be Powered By Wind Alone

The Second Operating System Hiding In Every Mobile Phone

Jah-Wren Ryel writes “Every smartphone or other device with mobile communications capability (e.g. 3G or LTE) actually runs not one, but two operating systems. Aside from the operating system that we as end-users see (Android, iOS, PalmOS), it also runs a small operating system that manages everything related to radio. So, we have a complete operating system, running on an ARM processor, without any exploit mitigation (or only very little of it), which automatically trusts every instruction, piece of code, or data it receives from the base station you’re connected to. What could possibly go wrong?” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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The Second Operating System Hiding In Every Mobile Phone