Follow Slashdot blog updates by subscribing to our blog RSS feed

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:Homework Assignment For This Story (Score 1) 92

by fridaynightsmoke (#46196919) Attached to: Snowden Docs Show UK's Digital Spies Using Viruses, Honey Traps

The more people that repeatedly search on 'Ambassador's Reception', the more fun the security wonks will have trying to figure out why the spike and which ambassador :)

Of course they all want to watch this 'classic' tv ad... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

Maybe the 'honeytrap' involved bribing people with offers of aspirational confectionary?
United Kingdom

Surrey Hit With Catnado 95

Posted by samzenpus from the raining-cats-and-more-cats dept.
taikedz writes "A "mini-tornado" brought down trees, damaged property and even lifted cats in the air, an eyewitness has said. Shirley Blay, who keeps horses at the Jolly Blossom Stables on Station Road, Chobham, told BBC Surrey: 'It was a mini-tornado, I can't describe it as anything less. It started with very heavy rain, hailstones and very strong wind and all of a sudden, the wind was very, very strong, to the point of lifting roofs. We've got four feral cats in the yard and they were being lifted off the ground — about 6ft off the ground — they just went round like a big paper bag.' She said the people and animals who were caught up in the storm were uninjured. A spokesman from Valgrays Animal Rescue in Warlingham said: 'It was like something out of a Steven Spielberg film.'
AI

If I Had a Hammer 732

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the bender-replaces-the-team dept.
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Tom Friedman begins his latest op-ed in the NYT with an anecdote about Dutch chess grandmaster Jan Hein Donner who, when asked how he'd prepare for a chess match against a computer, replied: 'I would bring a hammer.' Donner isn't alone in fantasizing that he'd like to smash some recent advances in software and automation like self-driving cars, robotic factories, and artificially intelligent reservationists says Friedman because they are 'not only replacing blue-collar jobs at a faster rate, but now also white-collar skills, even grandmasters!' In the First Machine Age (The Industrial Revolution) each successive invention delivered more and more power but they all required humans to make decisions about them. ... Labor and machines were complementary. Friedman says that we are now entering the 'Second Machine Age' where we are beginning to automate cognitive tasks because in many cases today artificially intelligent machines can make better decisions than humans. 'We're having the automation and the job destruction,' says MIT's Erik Brynjolfsson. 'We're not having the creation at the same pace. There's no guarantee that we'll be able to find these new jobs. It may be that machines are better than that.' Put all the recent advances together says Friedman, and you can see that our generation will have more power to improve (or destroy) the world than any before, relying on fewer people and more technology. 'But it also means that we need to rethink deeply our social contracts, because labor is so important to a person's identity and dignity and to societal stability.' 'We've got a lot of rethinking to do,' concludes Friedman, 'because we're not only in a recession-induced employment slump. We're in technological hurricane reshaping the workplace.'"
Businesses

The Internet's Network Efficiencies Are Destroying the Middle Class 674

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the computers-don't-kill-executives-do dept.
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Joe Nocera writes in an op-ed piece in the NYT that the same network efficiencies that have given companies their great advantages are becoming the instrument of our ruin. In the financial services industry, it led to the financial crisis. In the case of a company like Wal-Mart, the adoption of technology to manage its supply chain at first reaped great benefits, but over time it cost competitors and suppliers hundreds of thousands of jobs, thus gradually impoverishing its own customer base. Jaron Lanier says that the digital economy has done as much as any single thing to hollow out the middle class. Take Kodak and Instagram. At its height, 'Kodak employed more than 140,000 people.' Kodak made plenty of mistakes, but look at what is replacing it: 'When Instagram was sold to Facebook for a billion dollars in 2012, it employed only 13 people.' Networks need a great number of people to participate in them to generate significant value says Lanier but when they have them, only a small number of people get paid. This has the net effect of centralizing wealth and limiting overall economic growth. It is Lanier's radical idea that people should get paid whenever their information is used. He envisions a different kind of digital economy, in which creators of content — whether a blog post or a Facebook photograph — would receive micropayments whenever that content was used. 'If Google and Facebook were smart,' says Lanier, 'they would want to enrich their own customers.' So far, he adds, Silicon Valley has made 'the stupid choice' — to grow their businesses at the expense of their own customers. Lanier's message is that it can't last. And it won't." The micropayments for content idea sounds familiar.
Medicine

Scientists Reverse Muscle Aging In Mice 34

Posted by Soulskill from the mighty-mouse-will-return dept.
retroworks sends word that a group of researchers has found a chemical that successfully rejuvenated muscle tissue in mice. The scientists "said it was the equivalent of transforming a 60-year-old's muscle to that of a 20-year-old — but muscle strength did not improve." The study (abstract) is being called an "exciting finding" but the researchers are quick to point out the chemical only reverses one aspect of aging. Damage to DNA and shortening of telomeres continues. Still, it's one piece of the puzzle, and the group is hoping to begin clinical trials in 2015.

Comment Re:Secret Nazi Weapon (Score 1) 272

by fridaynightsmoke (#44849807) Attached to: It Takes 2.99 Gigajoules To Vaporize a Human Body

Holocaust deniers keep prattling on about how hard it would be to incinerate 6 million Jews.

Having seen a couple of posts on here alluding to the same theory (that is, cremating 6 million Jews during the Holocaust is implausible) I decided to do a couple of calculations.

Approximately 70% of all deaths in the UK currently result in a cremation: http://www.salford.gov.uk/cremation.htm . In 2010 there were 493,000 deaths in England and Wales (UK minus Scotland): http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/vsob1/mortality-statistics--deaths-registered-in-england-and-wales--series-dr-/2010/stb-deaths-by-cause-2010.html . 493,000 x 70% = 345,000 cremations in the England and Wales, in 2010.

If you multiply 345,000 cremations per year by the 6 year duration of World War 2, that means in 6 years, as a matter of routine there are at least 2 million cremations in the UK. It stands to reason that a regime with control over the entire industrial output of a major country could manage to cremate 6 million people in a couple of years.

Comment Re:I liked it. (Score 1) 222

by fridaynightsmoke (#44811107) Attached to: British TV Show 'Blackout' Triggers Online LOLs

Capers, cous-cous and dog food.

It was difficult to follow the fight, as it was shot in 'extreme shakeycam' form from the mobile phone POV. I probably misinterpreted the outcome.

What happened to Generator Man's wife? She seemed to disappear, probably around the point I left the room to make a cup of national-grid-heated tea.

I would guess from her disappearance from the screen, the fact that he is with one child and the arguments leading up to that scene that she has gone elsewhere either temporarily or permanently. It's not made clear, although considering the only source of information we have is (according to the premise) footage shot by him, it wouldn't be.

Comment Re:hey stupid (Score 5, Insightful) 222

by fridaynightsmoke (#44809025) Attached to: British TV Show 'Blackout' Triggers Online LOLs

How do you suggest the control room communicate with all the various power stations and electricity consumers across the country then?

Perhaps, I don't know, they could piggyback a communication network onto the physical power network they own, airgapped from the internet? Maybe they could call each other on the phone like they did for the first ~80 years of the grid's existence?

Comment Re:I liked it. (Score 1) 222

by fridaynightsmoke (#44808973) Attached to: British TV Show 'Blackout' Triggers Online LOLs

The middle-class survivalist, "generator man" as many have been calling him was the man who went to politely loot the supermarket at the end. And it was him who did the killing, climaxing at the moment the power came back on, with the now recording CCTV being shown capturing him at that moment with blood on his hands. Some noted the irony of capers and cous-cous being the only foods left there. It was a nice touch.

Er, yeah, 'spoiler alert' I guess :)
The Internet

Time For X-No-Wiretap HTTP Header? 202

Posted by timothy from the tongue-boring-through-cheek dept.
Freshly Exhumed writes "A security blogger, acknowledging that the NSA methodically ranks communications on the basis of their 'foreignness' factor to determine candidacy for prolonged retention proposes, is proposing '...an opportunity for us on the civilian front to aid the NSA by voluntarily indicating citizenship on all our networked communications. Here, we define the syntax and semantics of X-No-Wiretap, a HTTP header-based mechanism for indicating and proving citizenship to well-intentioned man-in-the-middle parties. It is inspired by the enormously successful RFC 3514 IPv4 Security Flag and HTTP DNT header.'"

Submission + - The NSA's Secret Campaign to Crack, Undermine Internet Security (propublica.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Newly released documents show that the NSA has worked with American and foreign tech companies to introduce weaknesses into commercial encryption products, allowing backdoor access to data that users believe is secure. The agency has also deliberately weakened the international encryption standards adopted by developers around the globe, according to a new report from ProPublica.

Submission + - N.S.A. Foils Much Internet Encryption (nytimes.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The New York Times is reporting that the NSA has "has circumvented or cracked much of the encryption, or digital scrambling, that guards global commerce and banking systems, protects sensitive data like trade secrets and medical records, and automatically secures the e-mails, Web searches, Internet chats and phone calls of Americans and others around the world, the documents show."

"The agency, according to the documents and interviews with industry officials, deployed custom-built, superfast computers to break codes, and began collaborating with technology companies in the United States and abroad to build entry points into their products. The documents do not identify which companies have participated."
United States

New Snowden Revelation: Terrorists Attempting To Infiltrate CIA 250

Posted by samzenpus from the keep-your-friends-close-and-your-enemies-closer dept.
cold fjord writes "The Washington Post reports, 'The CIA found that among a subset of job seekers whose backgrounds raised questions, roughly one out of every five had "significant terrorist and/or hostile intelligence connections," according to the document, which was provided to The Washington Post by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden. The groups cited most often were Hamas, Hezbollah, and al-Qaeda and its affiliates, but the nature of the connections was not described in the document. So sharp is the fear of threats from within that last year the NSA planned to launch at least 4,000 probes of potentially suspicious or abnormal staff activity .... The anomalous behavior that sent up red flags could include staffers downloading multiple documents or accessing classified databases they do not normally use for their work, said two people familiar with the software used to monitor employee activity.'"
Earth

What's Stopping Us From Eating Insects? 655

Posted by timothy from the there-will-never-be-a-fast-food-place-called-thoraxes-etc. dept.
Lasrick writes "Scientific American has a really nice article explaining why insects should be considered a good food source, and how the encroachment of Western attitudes into societies that traditionally eat insects is affecting consumption of this important source of nutrients. Good stuff." Especially when they're so easy to grow.

Slashdot Top Deals

"When the going gets tough, the tough get empirical." -- Jon Carroll

Close