A tiny technical change in iOS 8 could stop marketers spying on you

The original source of this article appears to be WWDC session 715, "User Privacy on iOS and OS X," presented by Apple Product Security and Privacy representatives David Stites and Katie Skinner.

Source: Quartz

Whenever you walk around a major Western city with your phone’s Wi-Fi turned on, you are broadcasting your location to government agencies, marketing companies and location analytics firms.
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At the core of such tracking is the MAC address, a unique identification number tied to each device. Devices looking for a Wi-Fi network send out their MAC address to identify themselves. 
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Apple’s solution, as discovered by a programmer, is for iOS 8, the new operating system for iPhones which will be out later this year, to generate a random MAC addresses while scanning for networks. 

We Are Now In Command of the ISEE-3 Spacecraft

Hooray for the nerds who made contact with a NASA probe that has survived well beyond its planned mission!
The International Sun-Earth Explorer (ISEE-3) is a spacecraft that was launched in 1978 to study Earth's magnetosphere and repurposed in 1983 to study two comets. Since 1983 the ICEE-3 probe has been traveling in a heliocentric orbit slightly faster than Earth and it will return close to Earth in August.  NASA has insufficient funding to communicate with ICEE-3 and therefore gave a private project team permission to communicate and control the probe.
Donations helped fund the project and the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico was updated with a Software Defined Radio and a custom-made amplifier. Today the team was successful in communicating with the probe and they believe that they can order the probe to burn a thruster and move into orbit near earth until it can later be directed to observe a comet.

Source: Space College

By Keith Cowing on May 29, 2014 4:07 PM

The ISEE-3 Reboot Project is pleased to announce that our team has established two-way communication with the ISEE-3 spacecraft and has begun commanding it to perform specific functions. Over the coming days and weeks our team will make an assessment of the spacecraft's overall health and refine the techniques required to fire its engines and bring it back to an orbit near Earth.

First Contact with ISEE-3 was achieved at the Arecibo Radio Observatory in Puerto Rico. We would not have been able to achieve this effort without the gracious assistance provided by the entire staff at Arecibo. In addition to the staff at Arecibo, our team included simultaneous listening and analysis support by AMSAT-DL at the Bochum Observatory in Germany, the Space Science Center at Morehead State University in Kentucky, and the SETI Institute's Allen Telescope Array in California.

Of course this effort would not have been possible without the assistance of NASA and the Space Act Agreement crafted by NASA Headquarters, NASA Ames Research center, and the System Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute (SSERVI).

Why China is fixated on the Moon

Source: BBC News

I asked him if the idea of a Chinese moonbase extracting minerals was remotely plausible.

"It's perfectly plausible from the technical point of view, absolutely plausible from the finance point of view because they have great buying power, so I think, yes, there's nothing at all to stop them doing that probably within something like 10 years."

So a great deal is riding on the Chang'e 3 launch - national prestige, the quest for technological prowess and the desire to harness all available natural resources.

If all goes according to plan, the spacecraft will take six days to reach the Moon and then face the challenge of a soft landing.

How to Hack the Backbone of the Internet

Source: The Motherboard blog at Vice Magazine

The highlight of the NSA’s Powerpoint presentation is a hand-drawn slide of two circles that shows where the public internet meets Google's private cloud. That meeting point is a prime spot for the NSA to intercept traffic,  encryption is “added and removed here!” as the slide states, with a smiley face no less.

5 Fun Facts From the Latest NSA Leak

Source: Wired - Threat Level

1) The NSA generally destroys communication of U.S. persons that are collected incidental to collecting data on foreign individuals — unless the communication is encrypted...

2) The NSA maintains a massive database of U.S. email addresses and phone numbers...

3) The NSA also maintains a database of information incidentally collected from GSM and Home Location Registers...

4) When the NSA does pick up purely domestic communications, it can still use or pass the intercepted call or email to the FBI or other federal agencies if there is evidence of a crime or a national security leak...

5) If the NSA intercepts data between an attorney and client, it will still be retained...

Adobe kills Creative Suite, moves software entirely to cloud

Adobe's future looks cloudy with a strong chance of monthly recurring revenue.

Source: San Jose Mercury News

Adobe Systems said Monday that it will not release new versions of its Creative Suite software package. Instead, the maker of Photoshop, Illustrator and Acrobat, is shifting focus to Creative Cloud, which makes its software available through a monthly subscription that starts at $50 for an individual if they sign up for at least a year.

"Customers have to come to terms with the end of perpetually licensed software," said IDC analyst Al Hilwa. "Adobe is ahead of the game."

Scott Morris, a senior marketing director at Adobe, said the shift will help the San Jose-based company respond to changes in the marketplace much faster. Adobe's engineers, he said, will be freed up to release updates and improvements much faster than the company's traditional 18 to 24-month upgrade cycle.

Bitcoin Really Us an Existential Threat to the Modern Liberal State

Source: Bloomberg

Technology enabled governments to grow more powerful and more centralized in the 19th and 20th centuries, as Tyler Cowen, an economist at George Mason University, has argued. The intriguing possibility is that technologies of the 21st century -- such as Bitcoin -- might push the other way.