Jvitak

Mississippi has 12 grounds for divorce, including impotency, adultery, habitual drunkenness and incurable mental illness. But a bill that would have added domestic violence to the list died in the senate last week.

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I use and love Waze every day to make driving in Los Angeles manageable for me. I still use it despite periodic bursts of tech news reports that the app leaves me vulnerable to security attacks and surveillance.

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Image: Hungju Lu/Flickr

Last month, the FBI pushed back against a court order to reveal the full malware code it used to hack suspected visitors of a dark web child pornography site.

Now, in a partially redacted motion filed on Monday, opposing lawyers are arguing that the government either needs to comply with the order and reveal its malware, or drop the case.

“The Government has now made plain that the FBI will not comply with the Court's discovery order,” wrote Colin Fieman and Linda Sullivan, attorneys representing Jay Michaud, one of those arrested as part of the FBI's investigation into child pornography site Playpen.

Michaud was arrested after the FBI deployed a network investigative technique (NIT)—the agency's term for a hacking tool, or malware—in order to identify the site's users.

Michaud’s lawyers add that if the FBI continues its stalemate, then the judge should throw out the case himself

The FBI has been resisting an order to reveal the code for this NIT since February, when a judge said “you can either produce [the discovery] or move to dismiss.”

Defense lawyers have echoed that ultimatinum.

“The consequences are straightforward: the prosecution must now choose between complying with the court's discovery order and dismissing the case,” Fieman and Sullivan continue.

The motion was in response to a sealed filing from the government, which asked the judge to reconsider providing the malware code to the defense. Several large sections of the defenses' latest filing are redacted, as it quotes parts of the government's own motion. (The attorneys are also seeking to have the government's argument unsealed.)

There are parts that hint at what arguments the government has made, however. “It has flatly refused to adopt additional security measures for discovery that would address any legitimate security concerns,” the attorneys write, indicating that the government may have argued that any exposure of the NIT, even to defense lawyers under a protective order, could put the malware at risk of being distributed more widely.

Experts have previously said that, judging by the effort that the FBI is going to in order to keep its hacking tool underwraps, it may still work.

The attorneys then point to similar cases where the FBI would rather lose convictions than divulge details of its surveillance techniques. With regards to Stingrays, devices that are capable of tracking cellphones and sometimes intercepting communications, “the FBI in fact ordered local prosecutors to dismiss cases or reduce felonies to minor charges rather than comply with discovery orders,” they write.

They also note that the number of Playpen users increased dramatically while the FBI was operating the site in order to deliver its NIT. The two possible reasons given are that the FBI deliberately drew new users to the site, or that a small tweak in the homepage made by the administrator before the site was seized could have led users to not understand that they were about to log into a child pornography site. Both of these theories are unsubstanisted, however.

Last week, in a related case, a judge threw out evidence obtained via the NIT. That reasoning, however, had little to do with the malware itself or any discovery issues, and instead circled around the one warrant used to authorise the FBI's hacking campaign.

As for the Michaud case, the defense indicate that the FBI really has no intention of handing over its malware code.

“The FBI has announced that it will not comply with the Court's discovery order,” the attorneys write.

Michaud’s lawyers add that if the FBI continues its stalemate, then the judge should throw out the case himself.

The Tigers are comfortably ahead of the Oakland A’s this evening in Detroit thanks to Miguel Cabrera knocking in a pair of dingers off Kendall Graveman. In the sixth inning, Tigers center fielder Tyler Collins missed an easy fly ball by a few feet after he lost it in the lights, and Tigers fans were none too happy with him.

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There’s still a lot to learn about how birds fly, like how they so skillfully navigate turbulence and changing wind patterns. Uncovering how they’re able to do this could help humans better design small aircraft, like drones.

In a new video, researchers from Stanford University show off the sweet bird tunnel they built in order to try and figure out some of the flying animal’s secrets.

“Birds are masters of maneuverability, in ways that we are only beginning to understand,” Dan Quinn, a postdoctoral research fellow who worked on the project says in the video.

The wind tunnel allows researchers to study how a bird flies up close, in ways that would be impossible in the animal’s natural habitat. Researchers can vary the speed the wind inside the tunnel extremely precisely, and it’s equipped with a turbulence generation system to simulate unsteady movement in the air.

So far, the researchers have been using small birds, such as parrotlets and lovebirds in their experiments in the tunnel. Ultimately, they’re trying to figure out how birds are able to skillfully navigate complex conditions, and stay on course even when the skies get choppy.

The scientists are especially concerned with finding out how birds fly in cities, where winds are often unpredictable. There’s also the fact that in the future, most small drones are going to take flight in urban environments, so studying conditions there is the best way to translate their research to real-world applications.

Get ready for bird-like drones, coming soon to a city near you.

Get Link Info protects you from being rickrolled, linked to malware or otherwise misled with a link: punch in a short URL from any of the big URL shortening services, see the real one before you go there. There's a browser plugin for Firefox and IE; for Chrome users, Redditor NickPapa suggests Nope, which doesn't quite do that, but does warn about links that redirect. [via]

Joseph Cox, reporting for Motherboard: Over seven million user accounts belonging to members of Minecraft community "Lifeboat" have been hacked, according to security researcher Troy Hunt. Hunt said he will upload the data to his breach notification website "Have I Been Pwned?", which allows people to check if their account is compromised, on Tuesday, and that it includes email addresses and weakly hashed passwords -- meaning that hackers could likely obtain full passwords from some of the data. "The data was provided to me by someone actively involved in trading who's sent me other data in the past," Hunt, who has verified the data and sent Motherboard a redacted screenshot of some of it, said in an email.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader cites an article on CNN:The situation at Mitsubishi Motors just went from bad to much, much worse. The Japanese automaker admitted Tuesday that it had falsified fuel efficiency tests for the past quarter century (warning: annoying autoplay videos, alternate source), the latest revelation in a scandal that has rocked the company. The automaker said last week that it had used improper fuel economy tests on hundreds of thousands of vehicles, including some sold to Nissan. Cars with inflated fuel efficiency ratings were sold only in Japan. Mitsubishi said it would ask lawyers from outside the company to investigate the tests.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_SmM9KuhIQ

A UK inquest determined Tuesday that the Hillsborough disaster, a 1989 stadium crowd crush that claimed 96 lives, was the fault of police. The jury's verdict follows decades of tabloid lies and police cover-ups that began immediately after the incident in Sheffield, England, attempting to blame the victims for their own deaths.

After a 27-year campaign by victims' families, the behaviour of Liverpool fans was exonerated. The jury found they did not contribute to the danger unfolding at the turnstiles at the Leppings Lane end of Sheffield Wednesday's ground on 15 April 1989. Nine jurors reached unanimous decisions on all but one of the 14 questions at the inquests into Britain's worst sporting disaster. The coroner Sir John Goldring said he would accept a majority decision about whether the fans were unlawfully killed - seven jurors agreed they were.

The incident, at a huge and decrepit stadium, saw countless fans admitted by police to a standing-only zone with few points of escape. As the situation worsened, according to the jury's verdict, police failed to open gates, caused the crush on the terraces, responded slowly to the emergency, and exacerbated it through their actions.

In the aftermath, police blamed fans and stonewalled the first inquiry, which forced changes to stadiums but lacked the remit to condemn the authorities. Here's how the UK's largest-circulation daily tabloid, The Sun, reported the incident (with its decades-late apology on the right.)

As part of the verdict, police Chief Superintendent David Duckenfield was held "responsible for manslaughter by gross negligence."

The video above shows the horror of the crush in still images. Below is coverage of the game from the BBC and Irish broadcaster RTE; the crush can be seen in the margins of footage, getting worse and worse, until cameramen and the referee notice the seriousness of the situation as the crowd spills onto the field.

https://youtu.be/4z2HDjuu8Cw?t=6m25s

https://youtu.be/4SdGtCWrvlo?t=5m25s

Here's a 2013 BBC documentary about the disaster and its aftermath:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XaBnY-SnwxA

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Plus, Android users who install apps outside of Google Play are 10 times more likely to have installed a potentially harmful application, according to new Google Android Security Year in Review report.

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 There are an estimated 30 million surveillance cameras in the U.S. today, of which only 5 percent are monitored by a human at any given time. Instead, the majority of them are simply recording footage, providing little value other than evidence long after any kind of crime or accident has occurred. Ninety-five percent of all security cameras offer no real-time benefits — there just… Read More

schwit1 quotes a report from Politico: In a just-released court opinion, a federal court judge overseeing government surveillance programs said he was "extremely concerned" about a series of incidents in which the Federal Bureau of Investigation and National Security Agency deviated from court-approved limits on their snooping activities. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court Judge Thomas Hogan sharply criticized the two agencies over the episodes, referred to by intelligence gatherers as "compliance incidents." He also raised concerns that the government had taken years to bring the NSA-related issues to the court's attention and he said that delay might have run afoul of the government's duty of candor to the court. Yesterday, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has filed a lawsuit against the Department of Justice to reveal whether or not they ever forced a company to provide technical surveillance assistance in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

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In the bottom of the seventh inning of last night’s Giants-Diamondbacks game, a Giants fan sitting near the left-field line accidentally reached out and grabbed a fair ball. This happens all the time at baseball games, but things took a turn for the tragic in this instance.

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Donning a Samsung Gear VR headset in a crowded hotel lobby at 5 PM on a sunny Barcelona afternoon at Mobile World Congress this year, it was jarring to think that within a few seconds I’d be transported to a plush apartment room somewhere in California to receive oral sex from two women who couldn’t keep their hands off either each other or me.

I looked down and, confronted with a bronzed six-pack that clearly wasn’t mine, my brain started to wrestle with its senses, fighting itself from being tricked into thinking I was where my eyes were telling me I was.

But after a minute my senses gave way, and I was fully immersed into the virtual reality world of porn. The only problem? It was the same porn.

***

Virtual reality offers porn studios a new medium to create with, but some think that the technology needs to get into the hands of independent producers and directors who argue that they’re making porn for everyone, not just for men.

Erika Lust filming. Image: Erika Lust

Erika Lust, Swedish feminist porn pioneer and producer, told me she thinks there’s a danger of virtual reality porn heading down the road of a “made for men, by men” narrative.

“The VR adult films I've seen have all been very, very mainstream and poorly made. And by mainstream, I mean the same old silicone fantasy that has been the hallmark of the porn genre for years and years,” said Lust. “Mechanical sex and fake orgasms, no passion, no context. Women as objects, men as penises. I think we have a long way to go before we can get a pleasurable experience in VR.”

Browsing online forums like Reddit and looking at the VR porn movies already on offer online today, it’s clear to see that a majority of studios are making the same sorts of mainstream porn already on offer without VR.

But Lust believes that independent studios could well take advantage of VR if costs of the technology start to come down, giving their productions a whole new audience and diversifying the porn available.

***

Pornography, as much as people still don’t want to talk about it openly, is a technology master. An early adopter, pornography pioneered many internet technologies years before the giants that now grace our everyday internet-led lives. Dutch porn makers Red Light District started one of the first internet video streaming sites way back in 1994. The pornography industry basically forged the video-as-a-service model used by later upstarts YouTube and Hulu more than a decade later.

So it’s no surprise that with the recent explosion of virtual reality devices available for consumers, such as the upcoming Oculus Rift, the DIY Google Cardboard, and the smartphone-powered Samsung Gear VR, porn is up there leading the charge.

This year there are scores of sites offering virtual reality porn for users to download and stream in the comfort of their own virtual reality. Pornhub, one of the biggest porn sharing websites on the internet, announced a dedicated section for VR porn in March. One porn company I spoke to, Naughty America, is churning out more than two new VR videos a week, and offers various subscription packages for its VR customers.

But with new technology comes new opportunities, and some hope VR could be a tool for creating porn that appeals to a wider range of preferences when it comes to gender and sexuality.

I asked prominent UK sex blogger and author Girl On The Net about her thoughts on whether VR porn can offer a new medium to create and share porn without having to deal with the traditional, mainstream porn industry that consists, with few exceptions, of plenty of male executives.

“Yes, definitely, but it needs to get cheaper first,” she said.

“I think it could be incredibly revolutionary. Most notably because VR porn gives us the chance to inhabit different bodies and experience sex from different perspectives—for instance I can shag someone with a strap-on while he's watching VR porn that has him in the body of a girl getting shagged, and vice versa.”

Girl On The Net argues that when the price of virtual reality technology comes down, independent and feminist studios who want to make porn will be able to do far more “imaginative” stuff that what the mainstream studios are doing with it.

“People [will] sit up and pay attention to indie producers and start opening their wallets to support their work; mainstream studios realise they have to raise their game; then comes the revolution,” she said.

"VR porn gives us the chance to inhabit different bodies and experience sex from different perspectives."

Ultimately, the point of virtual reality is to bring you closer to the action, to give you the lead (or indeed submissive) role, and independent, feminist studios like Lust’s claim their porn does far more for the movement to make porn for everyone than the traditional studios drip-feeding mostly male audiences with the same clichéd porn scenes.

But as Girl On The Net points out, costs are currently locking out most indie producers with smaller budgets. Lust says that producing a VR film would cost her around €20,000, but for fairly established studios, VR technology isn’t the biggest expense. Smaller studios or those just starting may have trouble coughing up the cost of today’s VR camera. A 360-degree camera like this new Orah 4i starts at around £2,500. GoPro’s cheapest VR camera is around £2,000, with the company’s premium Odyssey rig selling for £10,000. Sites like Brazzers and Pornhub are capitalising on their already-established revenues to produce heaps of VR porn, but indie studios offering VR experiences are still few and far between.

***

Lust says that the mainstream production houses making virtual reality porn today have the most money, and that with this new technology, porn is falling into its old patterns with the producers able to exercise their “conservative” porn ideas with virtual reality thanks to their economic power.

Erika Lust filming. Image: Erika Lust

But she is overwhelmingly optimistic about virtual reality’s potential, not only in porn, but as a greater immersive cultural experience as a whole.

“That can be a great thing for women, and for people in general,” she said. “Just in terms of expanding empathy, imagine everything you could do with VR. Imagine putting someone into the position of being a woman walking home in the night and being followed... Scary, yes, but a reality for many,” she said.

Lust told me that she has plans to implement virtual reality technology in her productions this year, with a passion ignited from “dreadfully stereotyped” mainstream porn.

“When I do I'll make sure to include my values: creativity, realism, diversity, pleasure and making sure there's a narrative there,” she said. “Our biggest sex organ is our brain—and it deserves to be stimulated with all the senses. I'll definitely have that in mind when I start using this new technology.”

For now, those using virtual reality porn the most are arguably just getting the “old ideals” of pornography, but strapped to their heads. In time, with a demanding and eager market, we could see this new technology draw from new ideals of porn watchers around the world.

“Besides, women as consumers is a force to be reckoned with,” finished Erika. “It's not just white, heterosexual men who watch porn—there has to be a wider selection of VR content for a commercial reason too.”

Silicon Divide is a series about gender inequality in tech and science. Follow along here.

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Some drivers say the Tesla Model X's windshield causes double vision at night. The post Why Tesla's Model X Is Giving Some Drivers Double Vision appeared first on WIRED.

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 A mattress company out of Spain is marketing a new smart mattress, brilliantly named ‘Smartress’, that detects whenever the bed is in “use.” As you likely realize, the main purpose of this is to see if your partner is cheating on you. And the video promoting the smart mattress isn’t shy about that functionality. The mattress by Durmet has sensors embedded in it… Read More

As the Panama Papers story unfolds and we learn more about the systematic world-scale corruption of offshore tax-havens, the usual suspects have mounted a charm-offensive top defend anonymous offshore bank accounts as critical to democracy and a check against the rise of fascism (no, really). (more…)

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An anonymous reader writes: Politicians in the Netherlands have proposed a law which could put a ban on sales of diesel and petrol cars by 2025. A majority of the lower house in the Dutch parliament approved a motion where all fossil fuel powered cars -- including hybrids -- would be banned. Yahoo News further reports, 'While it's still unclear whether the proposal will pass and become law, the ambitious plan would involve car manufacturers getting on board to produce enough electric vehicles to meet demand. The latest electric cars have shorter charging times and longer ranges, benefits that emission-free car evangelists hope will help make them appeal to users of traditional petrol and diesel cars." More details on this here.

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Reader theodp writes: Four months after its one hour Minecraft "infomercial" ran in schools around the world as part of the Hour of Code, Microsoft announced the release of Minecraft: Education Edition. From the announcement: "Minecraft: Education Edition early access will be available in 11 languages and 41 countries. During the summer months, we are also going to be focused on working with educators on building out lesson plans, sharing learning activity ideas, and creating re-usable projects." Microsoft bought Minecraft for $2.5 billion back in 2014. "What many may not realize," said Microsoft last November as it announced a Minecraft-themed tutorial that it would inspire students to learn computer science skills, and "that Minecraft has the power to transform learning on a global scale. By creating a virtual world and then advancing in it, students can learn digital citizenship, empathy, social skills and even improve their literacy "while getting real-time feedback on their problem-solving skills from the teacher." At the time, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told teachers that Minecraft is key to getting girls involved in computer science. So is Minecraft really all that?

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This Tumblr gives new software-development titles to old paintings.

“Engineering manager returning from a budget meeting” Ilya Repin, Oil paint, 1888

“Front end programmer” Giovanni Battista Moroni, 1570–1575

“Sysadmin grants sudo privileges to developer on production web server” - Andrea del Verrocchio and Leonardo da Vinci, 1425-1475, Oil on wood

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Two men, possibly inebriated, exchanged boasts and insults and lawsuit threats on a JetBlue flight from Long Beach to Sacramento last Friday. From Fusion:

“I’m 28, I make $4 million a year. What do you do?”

For several minutes, the man and the other passengers exchanged heated words, including calling each other “Losers” and “Mr. Bald,” ABC reported.

At one point, the man-child says, “You’re right, I’m a loser… I own six houses.”

Finally, as the confrontation nears an end, he announces, “I’ve got 20/20 vision with a 176 IQ.”

The plane returned to the gate and the passengers were removed before they had a chance to unzip their flies and compare penis lengths.