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Britain's surveillance agency GCHQ, with aid from the US National Security Agency, intercepted and stored the webcam images of millions of internet users not suspected of wrongdoing, secret documents reveal.

between 2008 and 2010

the IRS appears to argue that because there might be some "non-charitable" uses of the software, the Foundation doesn't deserve non-profit status, which would make it exempt from certain taxes (and make donations tax deductible).

The software, known as PC Rental Agent, was developed by Pennsylvania-based DesignerWare. It was licensed by more than 1,617 rent-to-own stores in the US, Canada, and Australia to report the physical location of rented PCs. A feature known as Detective Mode also allowed licensees to surreptitiously monitor the activities of computer users. Managers of rent-to-own stores could use the feature to turn on webcams so anyone in front of the machine would secretly be recorded. Managers could also use the software to log keystrokes and take screen captures.

In some cases, webcam activations captured images of children, individuals not fully clothed, and people engaged in sexual activities, the complaint alleged. Rental agreements never disclosed the information that was collected, FTC lawyers said.

PC Rental Agent also had the capability to display fake registration pages for Microsoft Windows, Internet Explorer, Microsoft Office, and Yahoo Messenger. When customers entered their names, addresses, and other personal information in the forms, the data was sent to DesignerWare servers and then e-mailed to the rent-to-own licensees.

In all cases the asymmetry was tiny, but consistent, like flipping a not-quite-fair coin. “The scale of the asymmetry is as though we flip 20,000 coins again and again, and on average, 10,003 of them land on heads while 9,997 land on tails,” says Dreiling.

Using a two-story-tall microscope floating in an ultralow-vibration lab at Princeton's Jadwin Hall, the scientists captured a glowing image of a particle known as a "Majorana fermion" perched at the end of an atomically thin wire -- just where it had been predicted to be after decades of study and calculation dating back to the 1930s.

Despite combining qualities usually thought to annihilate each other -- matter and antimatter -- the Majorana fermion is surprisingly stable; rather than being destructive, the conflicting properties render the particle neutral so that it interacts very weakly with its environment. This aloofness has spurred scientists to search for ways to engineer the Majorana into materials, which could provide a much more stable way of encoding quantum information, and thus a new basis for quantum computing.

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Suicide Silence | Indienation.fm indienation.fm - At the RockStar Energy Mayhem Festival it was my great pleasure to sit down with Mark Heylmun the guitarist from Suicide Silence. If you have yet to hear their music, Suicide Silence performs an ex...