patella.whack - Slashdot User

Submission + - Envisioning the Google future

Submitted by taz346 on Wednesday December 12, 2012 @11:55PM

taz346 writes: What might a Google future look like? Here's a creative take on it that starts with some things Google's already done and then posits how it could all turn out, complete with the decline and collapse of the banking industry and the nation state. Something else could be lost in the mix, too, by the way. The version linked above is in English. You can read it in French if you prefer.

Submission + - Google Adjusts Image Search To Avoid Accidental Porn Hits (itworld.com)

Submitted by

itwbennett

on Wednesday December 12, 2012 @09:17PM

itwbennett writes: "No more nudge, nudge, wink, wink for finding porn on Google. Now, you've got to be a lot more explicit about what you're looking for. The search giant this week took a turn for the conservative, changing the way it handles image searches such that 'ambiguous' search terms will now return a tamer set of results. 'We want to show users exactly what they are looking for — but we aim not to show sexually-explicit results unless a user is specifically searching for them,' Google said in a statement."

Submission + - Julian Assange Runs For Office in Australia (theage.com.au)

Submitted by

mpawlo

on Wednesday December 12, 2012 @08:25PM

mpawlo writes: "Mr Julian Assange of Wikileaks fame, has, according to The Age, confirmed his intention to run for the Australian Senate in 2013. He will also form a Wikileaks political party. I had to check, but yes, Mr Assange is still in political asylum at the embassy of Ecuador in London. I also had to the check the date, but it's not April Fools' Day, or perhaps it is according to the new Mayan Calendar..."

Submission + - North Korea's Satellite Is Out of Control (gizmodo.com)

Submitted by Koreantoast on Wednesday December 12, 2012 @08:09PM

Koreantoast writes: After failing miserably on numerous occasions, North Korea has finally put a satellite in orbit. But according to US officials, it is now "tumbling out of control." This is bad news, and more bad news, covered in a double layer of extra bad news.

According to US officials, it appears that North Korea's new satellite has failed to achieve a stable orbit and is now "tumbling out of control." The greatest danger is the threat of it colliding with another satellite, adding to the growing debris field around the earth. A separate Gizmodo article provides links for tracking the current location of the satellite.

Submission + - Jammie Thomas takes constitutional argument to SCOTUS (blogspot.com)

Submitted by

NewYorkCountryLawyer

on Wednesday December 12, 2012 @08:05PM

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes: "Jammie Thomas-Rasset, the Native American Minnesotan found by a jury to have downloaded 24 mp3 files of RIAA singles, has filed a petition for certioriari to the United States Supreme Court, arguing that the award of $220,000 in statutory damages is excessive, in violation of the Due Process Clause. Her petition (PDF) argued that the RIAA's litigation campaign was "extortion, not law", and pointed out that "[a]rbitrary statutory damages made the RIAA’s litigation campaign possible; in turn,that campaign has inspired copycats like the so-called Copyright Enforcement Group; the U.S. Copyright Group, which has already sued more than 20,000 individual movie downloaders; and Righthaven, which sued bloggers. This Court should grant certiorari to review this use of the federal courts as a scourge"."

Submission + - New mouth wash effectively combats tooth decay (ucla.edu)

Submitted by

thinkingintermsof

on Wednesday December 12, 2012 @04:56PM

thinkingintermsof writes: "For nearly a decade Wenyuan Shi, a researcher at UCLA School of Dentistry, has been developing a revolutionary new mouthwash aimed at effectively eliminating tooth decay. The technology is a partnership with Colgate-Palmolive and from C3-Jian Inc.

"The best analogy I've been using is a 'weeds vs. grass' with this technology that we call STAMPS (specifically targeted anti-microbial peptides). What it does is it acts like a smart bomb, it only kills the weeds not the grass." — Wenyuan Shi"

Submission + - Vector vengeance: British claim they can kill the pixel within five years (extremetech.com)

Submitted by

MrSeb

on Wednesday December 12, 2012 @01:55PM

MrSeb writes: "The humble pixel — the 2D picture element that has formed the foundation of just about every kind of digital media for the last 50 years — may soon meet its maker. Believe it or not, if a team of British are to be believed, the pixel, within five short years, will be replaced with vectors. If you know about computer graphics, or if you’ve ever edited or drawn an image on your computer, you know that there are two primary ways of storing image data: As a bitmap, or as vectors. A bitmap is quite simply a giant grid of pixels, with the arrangement and color of the pixels dictating what the image looks like. Vectors are an entirely different beast: In vector graphics, the image is described as a series of mathematical equations. To draw a bitmap shape you just color in a block of pixels; with vector graphics, you would describe the shape in terms of height, width, radius, and so on. At the moment, bitmaps are used almost exclusively in the realm of digital media — but that isn't to say they don't have their flaws. As display (and camera and cinema) resolution increases, so does the number of pixels. The obvious problem with this is that larger bitmaps are computationally more expensive to process, resulting in a slower (or more expensive) workflow. Pixel bitmaps don’t scale very gracefully; reduction is okay, but enlargement is a no-no. There is always the issue of a master format, too: With pixel bitmaps, conversions from one format to another, or changing frame rates, is messy, lossy business. Which finally leads us back to the innovation at hand: Philip Willis and John Patterson of the University of Bath in England have devised a video codec that replaces pixel bitmaps with vectors."

Submission + - Facebook Changes Privacy Policies, Scraps User Voting (net-security.org)

Submitted by

Orome1

on Wednesday December 12, 2012 @08:39AM

Orome1 writes: "The voting period for the proposed changes to Facebook's Statement of Rights and Responsibilities and Data Use Policy has ended on Monday, and despite the email sent out to the users asking them to review the changes and cast their vote, less than one percent of all users have done so. "An external auditor has reviewed and confirmed the final results. Of the 668,872 people who voted, 589,141 recommended we keep our existing SRR and Data Use Policy," stated Elliot Schrage, Facebook’s vice president of communications, public policy, and marketing. Still, that is not nearly enough to prevent the proposed changes — as required by Facebook, at least 30 percent of the users should have voted against them in order to keep the previous versions of the policies. Schrage pointed out that that the whole experience illustrated the clear value of Facebook's notice and comment process."

Submission + - Hacked review system leads to fake reviews and retraction of scientific papers (wordpress.com)

Submitted by dstates on Wednesday December 12, 2012 @08:15AM

dstates writes: Retraction Watch reports that fake reviewer information was placed in Elsevier's peer review database allowing unethical authors to review their own or colleagues manuscripts. As a result, 11 scientific publications have been retracted. The hack is particularly embarrassing for Elsevier because the commercial publisher has been arguing that the quality of its review process justifies its restrictive access policies and high costs of the journals it publishes.

Submission + - Google.com safesearch filter now mandatory (google.com) 3

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 12, 2012 @06:03AM

An anonymous reader writes: The US version of Google search no longer seems to feature the three options concerning safesearch (Off, Moderate and Strict) Instead, they've opted for what seems to be mandatory moderate search with the option of filtering explicit content (ie. strict filtering). There does not seem to be a lay-man quality way of turning safesearch off anymore. google.ca and possibly other country specific domains related to Google seem unaffected. Some complaints have already started appearing on Google's product forum: http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!category-topic/websearch/google-images/WIPzdBq6E4Y Answers so far, have been rather vague.

Submission + - DARPA foam fights internal bleeding (gizmag.com)

Submitted by cylonlover on Wednesday December 12, 2012 @03:35AM

cylonlover writes: The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is developing a foam that can be injected into the body cavities of battlefield wounded to protect them from internal abdominal bleeding. The agency hopes that when perfected, the foam will help the wounded to survive the critical minutes needed to transport them to proper surgical facilities for treatment. Developed by Arsenal Medical, Inc. as part of DARPA’s Wound Stasis program, the product is a polyurethane polymer foam designed to control internal hemorrhaging for at least an hour and is designed to be easy for doctors and surgeons to remove.

Submission + - Scientists Use Electrical Hum to Fight Crime

Submitted by

Hugh Pickens writes

on Wednesday December 12, 2012 @12:12AM

Hugh Pickens writes writes: "A suspected terrorist has been taped planning a deadly attack and the police want to use this evidence in court or someone has been captured on CCTV threatening an assault. Increasingly, recordings like these are playing a role in criminal investigations but how can the police be sure that the audio evidence is genuine and has not been tampered with or cleverly edited? Now Rebecca Morelle writes on BBC that a technique known as Electric Network Frequency (ENF) analysis is helping forensic scientists separate genuine, unedited recordings from those that have been tampered with and the technique has already been used in court. Any digital recording made anywhere near an electrical power source will pick up the noise from electricity supplied by the national grid and it will be embedded throughout the audio. This buzz is an annoyance for sound engineers trying to make the highest quality recordings but for forensic experts, it has turned out to be an invaluable tool in the fight against crime. Due to unbalances in production and consumption of electrical energy, the ENF is known to fluctuate slightly over time rather than being stuck to its exact set point so if you look at the frequency over time, you can see minute fluctuations and the pattern of these random changes in frequency is unique over time providing a digital watermark on every recording. Forensic Scientist Philip Harrison has been logging the hum on the national grid in the UK for several years. "Even if [the hum] is picked up at a very low level that you cannot hear, we can extract this information," says Dr. Harrison. "If we have we can extract [the hum] and compare it with the database, if it is a continuous recording, it will all match up nicely.""

Submission + - Artificial Tongue Tastes Bitter Compounds (acs.org)

Submitted by

MTorrice

on Wednesday December 05, 2012 @06:34PM

MTorrice writes: "By coating polymer nanotubes with proteins found in human taste buds, researchers have made an electronic tongue that can taste bitter compounds, including two chemicals found in veggies such as kale. The device senses two other chemicals at femtomolar levels, making it 100,000 times more sensitive at detecting flavor molecules than previous devices."

Submission + - MPAA: The Impact of Megaupload's Shutdown 'Was Massive'

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 05, 2012 @05:58PM

An anonymous reader writes: The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has declared that the Megaupload shutdown earlier this year has been a great success. In a filing to the Office of the US Trade Representative (USTR), the group representing major movie studios says the file hosting and sharing industry has been massively disrupted. Yet the MPAA says there is still work to be done, identifying sites that make available to downloaders “unauthorized copies of high-quality, recently-released content and in some cases, coordinate the actual upload and download of that content.” Here’s the list of sites, including where they are hosted: Extratorrent (Ukraine), IsoHunt (Canada), Kickass Torrents (Canada), Rutracker (Russia), The Pirate Bay (Sweden), Torrentz (Canada), and Kankan (China).

Submission + - Skype TOS Change Leaks New Video Messaging Feature (itworld.com)

Submitted by

itwbennett

on Wednesday December 05, 2012 @05:41PM

itwbennett writes: "If an update to Skype's terms of service is to be believed, the rumored video messaging service is about to become reality for Skype Premium subscribers: 'If you are a Skype Premium subscriber you can ... send and receive an unlimited number of Video Messages and any Video Messages you send and/or receive shall have no expiry date,' the terms of service read."

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