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After the disastrous technological launch of the healthcare.gov website, built by political cronies rather than companies who understand the internet, there has been plenty of discussion as to why the code wasn't open sourced. At that link, there's a good discussion from On the Media, with Paul Ford, discussing what a big mistake it was that the government decided not to open source the code and be much more transparent about the process. It discusses the usual attacks on open source and why they almost certainly don't apply to this situation.

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).

Free and Open Another reason there are so many audio codecs: silly licensing restrictions. Would you base a business on technology a competitor controls? That's why the Opus specification and complete source are Free, Open, and available for any use whatsoever without IP restrictions, explicit licensing or royalties. Opus was developed and tested in a public, fully transparent process within the IETF, proof that open collaboration can produce a better audio codec than proprietary, secretive, patent-encumbered systems. Open standards benefit-- and benefit from-- open source organizations and traditional commercial software companies alike. Opus itself is the result of a collaboration including Broadcom, Google, the IETF, Microsoft (through Skype), Mozilla, Octasic and Xiph.Org.

The attack is described by one source, a former U.S. official familiar with the attacks, as being "significant and ongoing" and looking to cause "functional and significant damage." Also, one source suggested the attacks were in response to U.S. sanctions on Iranian banks.

There was no report of an attack on the New York Stock Exchange.

Still, that moratorium on spying didn't extend beyond those world leaders, and Reuters, translating from the BamS source, writes that the source said, “We have had the order not to miss out on any information now that we are no longer able to monitor the chancellor's communication directly.” Specifically, Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere, one of Merkel's confidants, was called out as being a target of the NSA's increased spying efforts.

Early Monday morning, Foxconn released a statement indicating that the riot started as a personal disagreement between factory workers in a dormitory and was eventually brought under control by police, but this clashes with reports trickling in from users of China's version of Twitter, Sina Weibo. Much like with the situations in Egypt and other Arab Spring countries earlier this year, microbloggers are painting a different picture than the one presented by official sources; numerous Weibo posts indicate that the riots were started not by a fight between workers in off-campus housing, but instead by security guards beating one or more workers nearly to death. Regardless of the cause, pictures leaking out from the scene show some destruction, including broken windows and a toppled guard post building.

last year the company described a prototype solid state lithium superionic conductor battery in an article in the journal Nature Materials that was based on a three dimensional framework. And just this month the company announced plans to introduce several new lines of hybrid and all electric vehicles over the next three years (after also announcing that the Prius hybrid now accounts for ten percent of all sales). The sticking point has been and remains, the batteries used in such vehicles which can account for up to half their cost to consumers.

The new battery, first described last year, uses Li10GeP2S12 in a layered three dimensional framework where cells are sandwiched together to create a stack of seven tiers with each having a voltage of four volts for a total of twenty eight at normal temperatures. The result, they say is a battery with five times the output density of previous varieties. To demonstrate its progress in refining the battery, the prototype was demonstrated recently to a group attending a green technology seminar as a power source for an electric scooter.

“The Art of Deception: Training for Online Covert Operations.”

Among the core self-identified purposes of JTRIG are two tactics: (1) to inject all sorts of false material onto the internet in order to destroy the reputation of its targets; and (2) to use social sciences and other techniques to manipulate online discourse and activism to generate outcomes it considers desirable. To see how extremist these programs are, just consider the tactics they boast of using to achieve those ends: “false flag operations” (posting material to the internet and falsely attributing it to someone else), fake victim blog posts (pretending to be a victim of the individual whose reputation they want to destroy), and posting “negative information” on various forums. 

Critically, the “targets” for this deceit and reputation-destruction extend far beyond the customary roster of normal spycraft: hostile nations and their leaders, military agencies, and intelligence services. In fact, the discussion of many of these techniques occurs in the context of using them in lieu of “traditional law enforcement” against people suspected (but not charged or convicted) of ordinary crimes or, more broadly still, “hacktivism”, meaning those who use online protest activity for political ends. The title page of one of these documents reflects the agency’s own awareness that it is “pushing the boundaries” by using “cyber offensive” techniques against people who have nothing to do with terrorism or national security threats, and indeed, centrally involves law enforcement agents who investigate ordinary crimes:

Documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden show that the NSA created and promulgated a flawed formula for generating random numbers to create a "back door" in encryption products, the New York Times reported in September. Reuters later reported that RSA became the most important distributor of that formula by rolling it into a software tool called Bsafe that is used to enhance security in personal computers and many other products.Undisclosed until now was that RSA received $10 million in a deal that set the NSA formula as the preferred, or default, method for number generation in the BSafe software, according to two sources familiar with the contract. Although that sum might seem paltry, it represented more than a third of the revenue that the relevant division at RSA had taken in during the entire previous year, securities filings show.

RSA, meanwhile, was changing. Bidzos stepped down as CEO in 1999 to concentrate on VeriSign, a security certificate company that had been spun out of RSA. The elite lab Bidzos had founded in Silicon Valley moved east to Massachusetts, and many top engineers left the company, several former employees said.And the BSafe toolkit was becoming a much smaller part of the company. By 2005, BSafe and other tools for developers brought in just $27.5 million of RSA's revenue, less than 9% of the $310 million total."When I joined there were 10 people in the labs, and we were fighting the NSA," said Victor Chan, who rose to lead engineering and the Australian operation before he left in 2005. "It became a very different company later on."By the first half of 2006, RSA was among the many technology companies seeing the U.S. government as a partner against overseas hackers.New RSA Chief Executive Art Coviello and his team still wanted to be seen as part of the technological vanguard, former employees say, and the NSA had just the right pitch. Coviello declined an interview request.An algorithm called Dual Elliptic Curve, developed inside the agency, was on the road to approval by the National Institutes of Standards and Technology as one of four acceptable methods for generating random numbers. NIST's blessing is required for many products sold to the government and often sets a broader de facto standard.RSA adopted the algorithm even before NIST approved it. The NSA then cited the early use of Dual Elliptic Curve inside the government to argue successfully for NIST approval, according to an official familiar with the proceedings.RSA's contract made Dual Elliptic Curve the default option for producing random numbers in the RSA toolkit. No alarms were raised, former employees said, because the deal was handled by business leaders rather than pure technologists.

“In the same way that a laser is a hell of a lot more powerful than a light bulb, room-temperature superconductivity would completely change how you transport electricity and enable new ways of using electricity,” said Louis Taillefer, a professor of physics at the University of Sherbrooke in Quebec.

ripples of electrons inside the superconductors that are called charge density waves. The fine-grained structure of the waves, reported in two new papers by independent groups of researchers, suggests that they may be driven by the same force as superconductivity. Davis and his colleagues directly visualized the waves in a study posted online in April, corroborating indirect evidence reported in February by a team led by Riccardo Comin, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto.

Taken together, the various findings are at last starting to build a comprehensive picture of the physics behind high-temperature superconductivity. “This is the first time I feel like we’re making real progress,” said Andrea Damascelli, a professor of physics at the University of British Columbia who led two recent studies on charge density waves. “A lot of different observations which have been made over decades did not make sense with each other, and now they do.”

A search warrant obtained by TheDC indicates that the August raid allowed law enforcement to search for firearms inside her home.

The document notes that her husband, Paul Flanagan, was found guilty in 1986 to resisting arrest in Prince George’s County. The warrant called for police to search the residence they share and seize all weapons and ammunition because he is prohibited under the law from possessing firearms. But without Hudson’s knowledge, the agents also confiscated a batch of documents that contained information about sources inside the Department of Homeland Security and the Transportation Security Administration, she said.

A team of computer security experts at Tel Aviv University (Israel) has come up with a new potentially much simpler method that lets you steal data from computers — Just Touch it — literally.

In order to victimize any computer, all you need to do is wear a special digitizer wristband and touch the exposed part of the system. The wristband will measure all the tiny changes in the ground electrical potential that can reveal even stronger encryption keys, such as a 4,096-bit RSA key.

in some cases, you don't even have to touch the system directly with your bare hands. You can intercept encryption keys from attached network and video cables as well. Researchers called it a side-channel attack.