skids - Slashdot User

Submission + - Study shows wearable sensors can predict illness

Submitted by skids on Thursday January 12, 2017 @04:52PM

skids writes: Wearable sensors that monitor heart rate, activity, skin temperature and other variables can reveal a lot about what is going on inside a person, including the onset of infection, inflammation and even insulin resistance, according to a study by researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine. ... Participants wore between one and eight commercially available activity monitors and other monitors that collected more than 250,000 measurements a day. ... "We want to study people at an individual level," said Michael Snyder, PhD, professor and chair of genetics. ... "We have more sensors on our cars than we have on human beings," said Snyder. In the future, he said, he expects the situation will be reversed and people will have more sensors than cars do.

IT security being in the state it is, will we face the same decision about our actual lives that we already face about our social lives/identities: either risk very real hazards of misuse of your personal data, or get left behind?

Submission + - MA "Right To Repair" initiative still on Tuesday ballot, may override compromise (masslive.com) 1

Submitted by skids on Monday November 05, 2012 @01:03PM

skids writes: MA voters face a complex technical and economic question Tuesday about just how open automobile makers should be with their repair and diagnostic interfaces. A legislative compromise struck in July may not be strong enough for consumer's tastes. Proponents of the measure had joined opponents in asking voters to skip the question once the legislature, seeking to avoid legislation by ballot, struck the deal. Weeks before the election they have reversed course and are again urging voters to pass the measure. Now voters have to decide whether the differences between the ballot language and the new law are too hard on manufacturers, or essential consumer protections. At stake is a mandated standard for diagnostic channels in a significant market.

Submission + - House Panel Approves Bill Forcing ISPs Log Users (cnet.com) 2

Submitted by skids on Friday July 29, 2011 @10:09AM

skids writes: Under the guise of fighting child pornography, the House Judiciary Committee approved legislation on Thursday that would require Internet service providers (ISPs) to collect and retain records about Internet users’ activity. The 19 to 10 vote represents a victory for conservative Republicans, who made data retention their first major technology initiative after last fall's elections. A last-minute rewrite of the bill expands the information that commercial Internet providers are required to store to include customers' names, addresses, phone numbers, credit card numbers, bank account numbers, and temporarily-assigned IP addresses. Per dissenting Rep. John Conyers (D-MI): 'The bill is mislabeled ... This is not protecting children from Internet pornography. It's creating a database for everybody in this country for a lot of other purposes.'

Submission + - CIA drones may have used illegal, inaccurate code (theregister.co.uk)

Submitted by skids on Friday September 24, 2010 @12:35PM

skids writes: Coders hate having to rush code out the door before it's ready. They also hate it when the customer starts making unreasonable demands. What they hate even more is when the customer reverse engineers the product and starts selling their own inferior product. But what really ticks them off is when that buggy knockoff product might be used to target military unmanned drone attacks, and the bugs introduce errors up to 13 meters. That's what purportedly happened to software developer IISi based on an ongoing boardroom/courtroom drama that will leave any hard-pressed coder appreciating just how much worse their job could get. The saddest part? The CIA assumed the bug was a feature. The tinfoil-hat-inducing part? The alleged perpetrators just got bought by IBM.

Submission + - Hacking Big Brother with help from Revlon (theregister.co.uk)

Submitted by skids on Friday April 23, 2010 @01:59PM

skids writes: All those futuristic full-face eyeliner jobs in distopian cyberpunk fiction might not be that far off the mark. A New York University student spent his thesis time exploring computer vision technology (OpenCV) for ways in which one could confound first-stage algorithms that initially lock onto faces. Then he mixed in a bit of fashion sense to predict future geek chic. Now, whether you want to go for the coal-miner look just to stay out of the data mine, that's up to you...

Submission + - Digital Photocopiers Loaded With Secrets (cbsnews.com)

Submitted by skids on Tuesday April 20, 2010 @11:26AM

skids writes: File this under "no, really?" CBS news catches up with the fact that photocopiers, whether networked or not, tend to have a much longer memory these days. When they eventually get tossed, very few companies bother to scrub them. Coupled with the tendency of older employees to consider hard-copy to be "secure", and your most protected secrets may be shipped directly to information resellers — no hacking required. "The day we visited the New Jersey warehouse, two shipping containers packed with used copiers were headed overseas — loaded with secrets on their way to unknown buyers in Argentina and Singapore."

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