[Absolutely fascinating. -egg]

The disease that sours oranges and leaves them half green, already ravaging citrus crops across the world, had reached the state’s storied groves. Mr. Kress, the president of Southern Gardens Citrus, in charge of two and a half million orange trees and a factory that squeezes juice for Tropicana and Florida’s Natural, sat in silence for several long moments.“O.K.,” he said finally on that fall day in 2005, “let’s make a plan.”

In the years that followed, he and the 8,000 other Florida growers who supply most of the nation’s orange juice poured everything they had into fighting the disease they call citrus greening.

To slow the spread of the bacterium that causes the scourge, they chopped down hundreds of thousands of infected trees and sprayed an expanding array of pesticides on the winged insect that carries it. But the contagion could not be contained.

They scoured Central Florida’s half-million acres of emerald groves and sent search parties around the world to find a naturally immune tree that could serve as a new progenitor for a crop that has thrived in the state since its arrival, it is said, with Ponce de León. But such a tree did not exist.

“In all of cultivated citrus, there is no evidence of immunity,” the plant pathologist heading a National Research Council task force on the disease said.

In all of citrus, but perhaps not in all of nature. With a precipitous decline in Florida’s harvest predicted within the decade, the only chance left to save it, Mr. Kress believed, was one that his industry and others had long avoided for fear of consumer rejection. They would have to alter the orange’s DNA — with a gene from a different species.

via A Race to Save the Orange by Altering Its DNA – NYTimes.com.

[I know I’ve been posting a lot of Schneier stuff lately, but we so desperately need an expert voice of sanity right now. -egg]

At a Senate hearing in March, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper assured the committee that his agency didn’t collect data on hundreds of millions of Americans. He was lying, too. He later defended his lie by inventing a new definition of the word “collect,” an excuse that didn’t even pass the laugh test.

As Edward Snowden’s documents reveal more about the NSA’s activities, it’s becoming clear that we can’t trust anything anyone official says about these programs.

Google and Facebook insist that the NSA has no “direct access” to their servers. Of course not; the smart way for the NSA to get all the data is through sniffers.

Apple says it’s never heard of PRISM. Of course not; that’s the internal name of the NSA database. Companies are publishing reports purporting to show how few requests for customer-data access they’ve received, a meaningless number when a single Verizon request can cover all of their customers. The Guardian reported that Microsoft secretly worked with the NSA to subvert the security of Outlook, something it carefully denies. Even President Obama’s justifications and denials are phrased with the intent that the listener will take his words very literally and not wonder what they really mean.

via Schneier on Security: Restoring Trust in Government and the Internet.

[Totally fascinating. Medium.com has been running some really interesting stuff lately, I’ve noticed. -egg]

During the car sales pitch, there is a moment when you first get behind the wheel. You hit the ignition, the engine turns over, and the car comes to life. You are bathed in the sound of countless mechanical and electrical parts as they spin, twist, push, pull, and rub against one another. It’s Kara Gordon’s job to make sure you like what you hear.Gordon is a noise and vibration performance engineer with GM. She’s been doing this since 1999 and is part of the team that designed and tested the soundscape of the new Chevy Impala. GM is pushing the luxury car as their quietest full-size sedan, ever. While they’ve clearly put a great deal of effort into isolating and sealing the cabin, what’s more interesting is the effort they put into the sounds you do hear.

via How GM makes a car sound like what a car is supposed to sound like — Thoughtful Design — Medium.

riotclitshave, crassetination: Tattoos 01: Beautiful Body Art ….

[Bruce Sterling being opinionated, insightful, and very funny indeed about Snowden, Manning, Assange, et al. -egg]

But Snowden sure is a dissident defector, and boy is he ever. Americans don’t even know how to think about characters like Snowden — the American Great and the Good are blundering around on the public stage like blacked-out drunks, blithering self-contradictory rubbish. It’s all “gosh he’s such a liar” and “give us back our sinister felon,” all while trying to swat down the jets of South American presidents.

via The Ecuadorian Library — Geek Empire — Medium.

The object of Cargo-bot is to write programs that control a robotic arm to move, sort, and stack colored crates. The computer language is a simple instruction set consisting of of squares that tell the arm which direction to move, and whether or not to perform an action based on the color of the crate. You write the programs by dragging and dropping the instruction squares into a sequence that causes the arm to perform the assigned task. You can also write programs that execute other programs you’ve written. (This is important because each program has space for just 8 squares, so you need to be able to write efficient code to complete the challenges). The challenges start out easy but become maddeningly difficult as you progress. With subroutines, if-then statements, and plenty of opportunities to practice debugging, it’s a good way to get kids to think like a programmer. You can also record a video of your program in action and share it to YouTube.

via Cool Tools – Cargo-Bot.

[Just so we don’t forget what the FBI is doing while we focus on the NSA….-egg]

The FBI develops some hacking tools internally and purchases others from the private sector. With such technology, the bureau can remotely activate the microphones in phones running Google Inc.’s Android software to record conversations, one former U.S. official said. It can do the same to microphones in laptops without the user knowing, the person said. Google declined to comment.

via FBI Taps Hacker Tactics to Spy on Suspects – WSJ.com.

[Excellent little sci fi short story by Warren Ellis. -egg]

The white room is bleeding to death.

A white vestibule, with white floors and white walls and a lit white ceiling. The only other color is red. A crack in one wall, exposing a raw fistula in the bioelectric packeting. Blood leaks from the hole, down three inches of slick white wall, to pool on the floor. A broken heart in the interstitial net of veins and wires that makes our houses live and breathe.

Somebody has murdered the house.

via Warren Ellis: “Lich-House,” a short story – Boing Boing.

[Fascinating. -egg]

Then one day in March, HackBB simply vanished, its databases destroyed. One user likened the events to burning a city—its library, market, bank, and entire community—to the ground. It wasn’t hard to guess who’d done it. A few days earlier, Boneless had disappeared—and with him, a serious chunk of the market’s sizable hoards of money.

via The Daily Dot – The blockbuster heist that rocked the Deep Web.

[Hey look, another MASSIVE NSA disclosure. This is arguably the most disturbing revelation to date. -egg]

A top secret National Security Agency program allows analysts to search with no prior authorization through vast databases containing emails, online chats and the browsing histories of millions of individuals, according to documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

via XKeyscore: NSA tool collects ‘nearly everything a user does on the internet’ | World news | theguardian.com.