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Divers

  • Everything we think we know about the Moto X (Ars Technica)
    Still no official announcements, but rumors about the supposed superphone won't stop.
  • No, Jimmy Fallon, the PS4 isn’t the only console with used games (Ars Technica)
    "Late Night" host shows Microsoft has an Xbox One messaging problem to solve.
  • Microsoft reverses controversial game licensing policies [Updated] (Ars Technica)
    Online check-ins, used game restrictions, and more are dead.
  • FBI head says it’s using surveillance drones in US skies “very seldom” (Ars Technica)
    Director Robert Mueller says the bureau is working on privacy guidelines, too.
  • Petition the NSA to Subject its Surveillance Program to Public Comment (Schneier on Security)

    I have signed a petition calling on the NSA to "suspend its domestic surveillance program pending public comment." This is what's going on:

    In a request today to National Security Agency director Keith Alexander and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, the group argues that the NSA's recently revealed domestic surveillance program is "unlawful" because the agency neglected to request public comments first. A federal appeals court previously ruled that was necessary in a lawsuit involving airport body scanners.

    "In simple terms, a line has been crossed," Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, told CNET. "The agency's function has been transformed, and we think the public should have an opportunity to say something about that."

    It's an ambitious -- and untested -- legal argument. No court appears to have ever ruled that the Administrative Procedure Act, which can require agencies to solicit public comment, has applied to the supersecret intelligence community. The APA explicitly excludes from judicial review, for instance, "military authority exercised in the field in time of war."

    EPIC is relying on a July 2011 decision (PDF) it obtained from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit dealing with installing controversial full-body scanners at airports. The Transportation Security Agency, the court said, was required to obtain comment on a rule that "substantively affects the public."

    This isn't an empty exercise. While it's unlikely that a judge will order the NSA to suspend the program pending public approval, the process will put pressure on Washington to subject the NSA to more oversight, and pressure the NSA into more transparency. We've used these tactics before. Two decades ago, EPIC launched a similar petition against the Clipper Chip, a process that eventually led to the Clinton administration and the FBI abandoning the effort. And EPIC's more recent action against TSA full-body scanners is one of the reasons we have privacy safeguards on the millimeter wave scanners they are still using.

    The more people who sign this petition, this, the clearer the message it sends to Washington: a message that people care about the privacy of their telephone records, Internet transactions, and online communications. Secret judges should not be allowed to use secret interpretations of secret laws to authorize the NSA to engage in domestic surveillance. Sooner or later, a court is going to recognize that. Until then, the more noise the better.

    Add your voice here. It just might work.

  • LibreOffice : mise à jour avant la 4.1 (Génération NT: logiciels)
    The Document Foundation annonce la version finale de LibreOffice 4.0.4. La prochaine annonce sera pour LibreOffice 4.1.
  • Finding Sociopaths on Facebook (Schneier on Security)

    On his blog, Scott Adams suggests that it might be possible to identify sociopaths based on their interactions on social media.

    My hypothesis is that science will someday be able to identify sociopaths and terrorists by their patterns of Facebook and Internet use. I'll bet normal people interact with Facebook in ways that sociopaths and terrorists couldn't duplicate.

    Anyone can post fake photos and acquire lots of friends who are actually acquaintances. But I'll bet there are so many patterns and tendencies of "normal" use on Facebook that a terrorist wouldn't be able to successfully fake it.

    Okay, but so what? Imagine you had such an amazingly accurate test...then what? Do we investigate those who test positive, even though there's no suspicion that they've actually done anything? Do we follow them around? Subject them to additional screening at airports? Throw them in jail because we know the streets will be safer because of it? Do we want to live in a Minority Report world?

    The problem isn't just that such a system is wrong, it's that the mathematics of testing makes this sort of thing pretty ineffective in practice. It's called the "base rate fallacy." Suppose you have a test that's 90% accurate in identifying both sociopaths and non-sociopaths. If you assume that 4% of people are sociopaths, then the chance of someone who tests positive actually being a sociopath is 26%. (For every thousand people tested, 90% of the 40 sociopaths will test positive, but so will 10% of the 960 non-sociopaths.) You have postulate a test with an amazing 99% accuracy -- only a 1% false positive rate -- even to have an 80% chance of someone testing positive actually being a sociopath.

    This fallacy isn't new. It's the same thinking that caused us to intern Japanese-Americans during World War II, stop people in their cars because they're black, and frisk them at airports because they're Muslim. It's the same thinking behind massive NSA surveillance programs like PRISM. It's one of the things that scares me about police DNA databases.

    Many authors have written stories about thoughtcrime. Who has written about genecrime?

    BTW, if you want to meet an actual sociopath, I recommend this book (review here) and this blog.

  • Gigabit Wi-Fi is here, but device makers can go faster if they want to (Ars Technica)
    Samsung Galaxy Mega and Galaxy S4 the first certified 802.11ac Wi-Fi phones.
  • Sony pulls PS3 firmware update on reports of bricked systems (Ars Technica)
    Booting to safe mode seems to get around the problems, for now.
  • The good news: HBO Go, WatchESPN coming to Apple TV (Ars Technica)
    Inevitably lame bad news: You still need cable to actually watch anything.
  • Intel présente ses nouveaux Xeon Phi (MacBidouille)

    Dans la foulée de l'annonce du supercalculateur chinois, Intel a dévoilé sa nouvelle gamme de Xeon Phi.

    Au nom de Knights Landing, cette nouvelle génération a surtout pour but d'améliorer son efficacité énergétique. Les cœurs seront gravés en 14nm et Intel a beaucoup travaillé à maximiser la bande passante mémoire afin d'optimiser la collaboration de tous les cœurs et donc en fin de compte la puissance de calcul. Le modèle le plus puissant doté maintenant de 16 Go de RAM (le double de la génération précédente) atteindra les 1,2 TFlops dans les calculs en double précision.

    Sur ce marché, Intel a fait un choix plutôt décalé avec ses Xeon Phi. La société s'est surtout trouvée obligée de réagir à la percée des cartes graphiques comme les Tesla dans les supercalculateurs desquels les processeurs classiques sont de moins en moins utilisés pour les calculs massivement parallèles. D'ailleurs, l'efficacité énergétique par TéraFlop annoncée par Intel est très proche de celle des derniers produits Nvidia.

  • Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 800 benchmarked, sports extremely fast GPU (Ars Technica)
    But Qualcomm is keeping quiet on power consumption for now.
  • Nvidia throws open the licensing doors on its Kepler GPU technology (Ars Technica)
    GPU core and visual computing patents will be available to device manufacturers.
  • NSA head defends spying, says it has disrupted more than 50 plots (Ars Technica)
    In Congressional hearing, officials call people like Snowden "a huge problem."
  • Two accelerators find signs of a particle that nobody can explain (Ars Technica)
    There seem to be four quarks involved, but nobody's sure how they're linked.
¡ aun une !
-- Schulz, Rémi