With an Eye Toward Disaster, NYC Debuts Solar Charging Stations
Nerval's Lobster writes "When hurricane Sandy pummeled New York City last fall, it left a sizable percentage of the metropolis without electricity. Residents had trouble keeping their phones and tablets charged, and often walked across whole neighborhoods to reach zones with power. Come the next disaster, at least a few citizens could communicate a little easier thanks to 25 solar-powered charging stations going up around the city. The stations—known as 'Street Charge' — are the result of a partnership between AT&T, Brooklyn design studio Pensa, and portable solar-power maker Goal Zero (with approval by the city's Parks Department). The first unit will deploy in Brooklyn's Fort Green Park on June 18, followed in short order by others in Union Square, Central Park, the Rockaways, and other locations. Each station incorporates lithium-ion batteries in addition to solar panels; charging a phone to full capacity could take as long as two hours, but the time necessary for a partial charge ...
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A Handy Guide For Comparing Spying Vs. Terrorism Disaster Scenarios
The week’s news has been a fear-mongering marathon between civil libertarians who are convinced we’re on the road to becoming North Korea, and security hawks who are building bunkers for the inevitable post-cyberattack hell scape. Unfortunately, because the most important facts about the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs are top secret, the entire debate has consisted of fear-driven hypotheticals. We can’t change that fact. But! We can make NSA disaster scenarios easier to compare by detailing the relative harms of privacy invasion vs. terrorist threats in a handy guide on their probability and scope. In ascending order of paranoia, I compare privacy vs. security trade-offs, and conclude with a section that makes sense of why some people fear surveillance more than terrorists. Paranoia Level: Reads A Newspaper - Defense Tax Bill Vs. Fear Staycations Cost Comparison: $85 Billion Vs. $75 Billion We know for sure that both defense and fear of terrorists is burning ...
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Perforce unveils collaboration and code review tool Swarm
Programmers can use Swarm to hook into their colleagues' code and receive feedback on their own code. It can also be used to display and review sections of code side by side
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Mozilla, EFF, Reddit And 83 Other Organizations Launch StopWatching.Us To Protest NSA Snooping
It’s still not quite clear what PRISM really is, but what has become clear is that the NSA is doing its best to tap into as much online communications as it can. To protest this, Mozilla, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Reddit, the ACLU and numerous other organizations with both technical and political backgrounds have launched StopWatching.Us. The campaign, Mozilla’s Alex Fowler writes, wants to call on “citizens and organizations from around the world to demand a full accounting of the extent to which our online data, communications and interactions are being monitored.” Given last week’s revelations that the NSA is likely tapping into a wide array of Internet communications, it’s no surprise that a number of Internet-based organizations are now banding together to protest the agency’s surveillance programs. As Mozilla’s Fowler notes, we now have a number of technical means to help us protect our privacy online, but “exposures resulting from government-sponsored online ...
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Startup Famo.us Gets A Quick Demo On-Stage At WWDC
Apple usually shares the spotlight at its WWDC keynote with a few of its developers and partners. Today, the big winner was probably Andreessen Horowitz-backed AI startup Anki, but what also caught our attention was a brief demo of Famo.us, the startup that launched at our Disrupt conference last fall. The demo itself was pretty short. It came during the announcement of OS X Mavericks, specifically the section on improvements to Safari. One of the big emphases was Safari's performance compared to other browsers, and at one point, Apple's Craig Federighi said he wanted to try out a website that's heavy on power consumption. So he opened up the Famo.us homepage, which is a demo table of elements designed to show off Famo.us' Javascript framework. Federighi showed the audience that when using Famo.us, the power meter for CPU usage is about halfway up, then he hid the window behind iTunes and the meter dropped.
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